The Yeoman Adventurer Part 52

Maclachlan's body lay on the floor of the hut. The eyes were wide open, but on his fine composed face there was no trace of the agony and pa.s.sion in which he had gone before his G.o.d. It was as if, in that last terrible second, some vision of beauty had swept his soul clean. I knelt down and reverently closed the staring eyes.

"Donald," said I, when I arose, "I would to G.o.d that you had killed me instead."

"It's weird," said he solemnly, "and weird mun hae way."

I looked at him closely. That he was struck to the heart was plain to see, but, the first uprush of grief over, he had become sober, steadfast, almost business-like, as if he had something great in hand to do, and would be doing it.

He took the candle, now only the length of my ring-finger, and stuck it on the narrow window-ledge. Again he spoke to the men in Gaelic, and they moved out of the hut. Turning to me, he said, "Com in when ta licht gaes oot!"

He had the right to be alone with his dead. I wrung his hand and left him. When I looked back from the doorway, he was filling his bag with wind, but stopped to say, "Weird mun hae way." And as he said it he smiled.

I crossed the road to the edge of the dip. More wood had been piled on the fire, which now blazed cheerfully. Most of the men lay asleep in their plaids, but a few stood guard over the horses, and the men who had carried the body into the hut were squatting on the gra.s.s by the roadside. I took my stand near them, and looked and listened.

The terrible similarity of Donald's case to mine appalled me. Each of us, in saving another, had struck down in the darkness a man near and dear to him. Two good men and true had gone when the l.u.s.t of life is sweetest and the will to live strongest. I, who three weeks ago had never seen human life taken, had taken it, and seen it taken, as if men were of no more account than cattle. Between the house-place of the Hanyards and the top of Shap, Death had become my familiar.

For Maclachlan I had nothing but pity. He had thought that I stood between him and Margaret. Clearly he had learned of her coming back to me, and the thought had maddened him. He had disguised himself as an Englishman and come after me, and this was the end of it.

These were my thoughts as I watched the flickering flame dropping nearer and nearer to the window-ledge, and listened to the pipes. Donald was inspired. He and the pipes were one. In his hands they became a living thing. What he felt, they felt. They wept as he wept, they gloried as he gloried, they triumphed as he triumphed.

He began with a murmur of grief that grew into a wail, became a pa.s.sionate tempest, and died into a prolonged sob. Then he changed his note as memory wandered backward. The music became tenderly reminiscent, subduedly cheerful. They were again boys together at their play, youthful hunters swinging over the mountains after the red deer; young men with the maidens; warriors on their first foray. The threads of life ran in and out through the pattern of sounds he was weaving, and the older days of fighting and victories followed as I listened. There was hurrying, marching, charging; the groan of defeat; the mad slogan of final victory.

"He's fechtin' the Macleans noo," cried out one of the men, who had some English, and the others chattered vigorously for a minute in their own Gaelic.

The candle was now guttering on the window-ledge. These glories over, Donald came hard up against the end of them all--the Chief dead at his feet, slain by his own hand. For a time he faltered, playing only in little, melancholy s.n.a.t.c.hes. Then he got surer, and the music began to come in blasts. He was seeing his way, learning what it all meant to him and the Maclachlans. Weird mun hae way. Destiny must work itself out. We children of a day are helpless before it.

The flame fell to a golden bead as the music grew in strength and purpose. There was a burst of light, a peal of triumph, and the music and the flame went out together.

Across the road I raced, threw open the door, and rushed in. Everything was dark and still.

"Donald!" I called pa.s.sionately.

There was no reply. I crept on tip-toe to the fire and kicked the embers into a flame.

Donald was lying dead across the dead body of his Chief, his dirk buried to the hilt in his own heart.

At daybreak we buried them side by side in one grave on the top of Shap, their feet pointing northward to their own mountains. When the last clod had been replaced, and a great boulder reverently carried up to mark the spot, I turned, covered my head, and prepared to go, but the men stood on.

I looked back. They were loath to go. Something that should be done, had been left undone.

I divined what they had in mind, turned back, bared my head as they uncovered, and repeated the Lord's Prayer aloud.

I am thankful to this day to those men whom fools and bigots call savages. They taught me to pray again.

"Man Captain," said the one who had English, as we walked away in a body, "ye wad mak' a gran' meenister."

I could not withhold a smile, but before I could reply there was a scattered rattle of shots from the dip. Looking around, I saw a body of enemy horse on the lower hill across the valley to my left.

We were overtaken. We should have to fight.

CHAPTER XXIV

MY LORD BROCTON PILES UP HIS ACCOUNT

On the tenth day of my captivity, hope glimmered for the first time. When a man has been penned up in a dull room for ten days, with half-a-hundred-weight of rusty iron shackling his wrists and ankles, with poor food, and little of it at that, to eat, he can extract comfort out of a trifle.

In my case the trifle was a smile, her first smile in ten days. So far she had been as sulky as she was shapeless, bringing me my poor meals either without saying a word or, at best, snapping me up and saying that I got far better treatment than a rebel deserved.

She never told me her name, and I never learned it from any other source, so 'she' she must remain for me and my tale. She was perhaps thirty, perhaps five feet high, the shape of a black pudding, with stony, rather than ugly, features, and cruel, cat-like eyes. I hated her handsomely till she smiled at me.

She was, I suppose, my jailer's daughter, or servant, or something of the sort. I never knew, and my ignorance does not matter. She brought me my food, spake or spake not, according to the degree of vileness in her prevailing humour, and went off, leaving me to my thoughts and my painful shamblings round my prison-chamber.

My ignorance was limitless. I was a prisoner, and my prison was a room in a sizable farm-house with thick stone walls. Where the house was I had no idea other than that it could not be far from the place where I was taken, which, again, could not be far from the town of Penrith. There was one window in my cell, the sill of which was as high from the ground as my chin when standing upright. But I never stood upright, being jammed into a cross made of good, solid iron, foul with rust, and having bracelets at the tips for my ankles and wrists. It kept me a foot short of my full stretch. I could get my eye to the edge of the window and no farther, and then I saw much sky and a little desolate moorland running up into a gauntly-wooded hill country.

I spent my waking hours thinking of Margaret and the others dreaming of her. Now was my chance to learn to do without her altogether. It would not be for long. I was in the Duke's clutches, and he would not let me go till my head rolled off my shoulders. Had I been free and with her, we should have been farther apart than before--by the width of Donald's grave. But here, parted for ever, with the block or the gallows just ahead of me, there was no bar to my lonely love. Time and time again she was so near to me, so vividly present to my imagination, that I stretched out my arms to grasp her. The shackles clanked, and I cursed myself for a fool, but I never cured myself of the habit.

Because this is the dreariest time of my life, I have plumped right into the middle of it to get it over. And, indeed, there is little worth the telling between the top of Shap and her smile. I was in jail because I was no soldier. That, apparently, should go without saying, and if I had come to grief over some piece of important soldier-craft, no one would have been surprised and I should not have been to blame. It galls me, however, to have to confess that I was very properly caught, jailed, and ironed for not knowing what a dragoon was. A man ought to know that after being captain of a troop of the best for a fortnight, but I didn't. Being all for logic, the least useful thing in life, I had arrived at the conclusion that a soldier on horseback is a horse-soldier. So he is, except when he's a dragoon, as I found to my cost. If the bold Turnus or Mr.

Pink-of-Propriety Aeneas had hit upon the dragoon idea, I should have known all about it, because it would have been in Virgil. Even the Master has his deficiencies.

My Lord George Murray elected to fight at Clifton, a defendable place between Shap and Penrith. Just south of the bridge the road ran off the moor into the outskirts of the village, with a stone wall on one side and a high edge on the other. The enclosures on either side were packed with clansmen, and our wings stretched beyond on to the moor, here dissected into poor fields by straggling hedges.

The Colonel, the happiest man in England that day, had posted me across the road, right out on the moor, ready to gallop back at once with news of the enemy's approach. It was now quite dark, except when the moon rode free of the dense blotches of clouds that filled the sky. In one such glimpse of light, I caught sight of several bodies of horse on the moor to the east of the road. The regiment nearest to me wheeled to the left, and trotted obliquely across the road. Its direction made its purpose clear.

It was feeling its way across our front to our flank on the west of the village. I rode back at once to report.

"Good lad!" said the Colonel, offering me his snuff-box. "It's just what we want 'em to do. Go where there's a bellyful for you! Fine soldiering that! The fool duke ought to pound us out into the open with his guns.

Hope you'll enjoy your first fight, Oliver! It's a glorious game. Pity of it is the counters are so costly. Good luck, my dear lad!"

I went back to my men whom I had left in the covered way between the wall and the hedge. It being clear that the exact whereabouts of the regiment I had particularly observed was of great consequence, I rode out again with a couple of men, at the request of one of the chiefs, to see if I could make out what was happening. There was no trace of it. It should by now have been visible on my right, the moon being out again, but there was not a single trace of it. I could see the line of one hedge and beyond that another. The other regiments had not advanced and this one had disappeared.

Perplexed, I halted my men, pulled the sorrel's head round and cantered slowly towards the nearer hedge. Then I learned that dragoons are horse-soldiers who fight on foot, behind hedges for choice. Half a dozen carbines rang out, the sorrel rolled over, and though I escaped the bullets and jumped clear of my horse, I was pounced on by a body of men and pulled ign.o.bly through the hedge. I did everything doable, but they swarmed over me like ants, bore me down by weight of numbers, and sat on me.

"It's him right enough," I heard one of them say. "Fetch the sergeant!

There's a bit of fat in this, lads!"

A minute later, I was hauled on to my feet. A seared face, with a dab-of-putty nose on it, leered delightedly into mine.

"Got you, by G--!" he said.

I had been captured by Brocton's dragoons. Now we should come to points.

Without another word to me, and after a savage injunction to the men to see I did not escape on peril of their lives, he went off and fetched his lordship. They came running back together as if the greatest event imaginable had happened.

"Ha! Master Wheatman," cried my lord very happily, "this is indeed a sight for sore eyes."

"To be sure," said I, "your lordship's were pretty bad the last time I saw them."