CHAPTER XXIII.—THE WIDOW OF GLENCOE.
Of the seven of us, Stewart was the only one with a notion of the lie of the country. He had bought cattle in the glen, and he had borrowed (as we may be putting it) in the same place, and a man with the gifts of observation and memory, who has had to guess his way at night among foreign clans and hills with a drove of unwilling and mourning cattle before him, has many a feature of the neighbourhood stamped upon his mind. Stewart’s idea was that to-night we might cross Glencoe, dive into one of the passes that run between the mountains called the Big and Little Herdsman, or between the Little Herd and Ben Fhada, into the foot of the forest of Dalness, then by the corries through the Black Mount of Bredalbane to Glen-urchy. Once on the Brig of Urchy, we were as safe, in a manner, as on the shores of Loch Finne. On Neill Bane’s map this looks a very simple journey, that a vigorous mountaineer could accomplish without fatigue in a couple of days if he knew the drove-roads; but it was a wicked season for such an enterprise, and if the Dame Dubh’s tale was right (as well enough it might be, for the news of Argile’s fall would be round the world in a rumour of wind), every clan among these valleys and hills would be on the hunting-road to cut down broken men seeking their way back to the country of MacCailein Mor. Above all was it a hard task for men who had been starving on a half-meal drammock for two or three days. I myself felt the hunger gnawing at my inside like a restless red-hot conscience. My muscles were like iron, and with a footman’s feeding, I could have walked to Inneraora without more than two or three hours’ sleep at a time; but my weakness for food was so great that the prospect before me was appalling.
It appalled, indeed, the whole of us. Fancy us on barren hills, unable to venture into the hamlets or townships where we had brought torch and pike a few days before; unable to borrow or to buy, hazarding no step of the foot without a look first to this side and then to yon, lest enemies should be up against us. Is it a wonder that very soon we had the slouch of the gangrel and the cunning aspect of the thief? But there’s something in gentle blood that always comes out on such an occasion. The baron-bailie and Neil Campbell, and even the minister, made no ado about their hunger, though they were suffering keenly from it; only the two tacksmen kept up a ceaseless grumbling.
M’Iver kept a hunter’s ear and eye alert at every step of our progress. He had a hope that the white hares, whose footprints sometimes showed among the snow, might run, as I have seen them do at night, within reach of a cudgel; he kept a constant search for badger-hamlets, for he would have dug from his sleep that gluttonous fat-haunched rascal who gorges himself in his own yellow moon-time of harvest. But hare nor badger fell in our way.
The moon was up, but a veil of grey cloud overspread the heavens and a frosty haze obscured the country. A clear cold hint at an odour of spring was already in the air, perhaps the first rumour the bush gets that the sap must rise. Out of the haze now and then, as we descended to the valley, there would come the peculiar cry of the red-deer, or the flaff of a wing, or the bleat of a goat It was maddening to be in the neighbourhood of the meal that roe, or bird, or goat would offer, and yet be unable to reach it.
Thus we were stumbling on, very weary, very hungry, the man with the want in a constant wail, and Sonachan lamenting for suppers he had been saucy over in days of rowth and plenty, when a light oozed out of the grey-dark ahead of us, in the last place in the world one would look for any such sign of humanity.
We stopped on the moment, and John Splendid went ahead to see what lay in the way. He was gone but a little when he came back with a hearty accent to tell us that luck for once was ours.
“There’s a house yonder,” said he, talking English for the benefit of the cleric; “it has a roaring fire and every sign of comfort, and it’s my belief there’s no one at home within but a woman and a few bairns. The odd thing is that as I get a look of the woman between the door-post and the wall, she sits with her back to the cruisie-light, patching clothes and crooning away at a dirge that’s broken by her tears. If it had been last week, and our little adventures in Glencoe had brought us so far up this side of the glen, I might have thought she had suffered something at our hands. But we were never near this tack-house before, so the housewife’s sorrow, whatever it is, can scarcely be at our door. Anyway,” he went on, “here are seven cold men, and weary men and hungry men too (and that’s the worst of it), and I’m going to have supper and a seat, if it’s the last in the world.”
“I hope there’s going to be no robbery about the affair,” said the minister, in an apparent dread of rough theft and maybe worse.
M’Iver’s voice had a sneer in every word of it when he answered in a very affected tongue of English he was used to assume when he wished to be at his best before a Saxon.
“Is it the logic of your school,” he asked, “that what’s the right conduct of war when we are in regiments is robbery when we are but seven broken men? I’m trying to mind that you found fault with us for helping ourselves in this same Glencoe last week, and refused to eat Corrycrick’s beef in Appin, and I cannot just recall the circumstance. Are we not, think ye, just as much at war with Glencoe now as then? And have seven starving men not an even better right, before God, to forage for themselves than has an army?”
“There’s a difference,” said the minister, stiffly. “We were then legitimate troops of war, fighting for the Solemn League and Covenant under a noble lord with Letters. It was the Almighty’s cause, and——”
“Was it indeed?” said John Splendid. “And was Himself on the other side of Loch Leven when His tulzie was on?”
“Scoffer!” cried Gordon, and M’Iver said no more, but led us through the dark to the house whose light so cheerfully smiled before us.
The house, when we came to it, proved a trig little edifice of far greater comfort than most of the common houses of the Highlands—not a dry-stone bigging but a rubble tenement, very snugly thacked and windowed, and having a piece of kail-plot at its rear. It was perched well up on the brae, and its light at evening must have gleamed like a friendly star far up the glen, that needs every touch of brightness to mitigate its gloom. As we crept close up to it in the snow, we could hear the crooning John Splendid had told us of, a most doleful sound in a land of darkness and strangers.
“Give a rap, and when she answers the door we can tell our needs peaceably,” said the minister.
“I’m not caring about rapping, and I’m not caring about entering at all now,” said M’I ver, turning about with some uneasiness. “I wish we had fallen on a more cheery dwelling, even if it were to be coerced with club and pistol. A prickle’s at my skin that tells me here is dool, and I can smell mort-cloth.”
Sonachan gave a grunt, and thumped loudly on the fir boards. A silence that was like a swound fell on the instant, and the light within went out at a puff. For a moment it seemed as if our notion of occupancy and light and lament had been a delusion, for now the grave itself was no more desolate and still.
“I think we might be going,” said I in a whisper, my heart thud-thudding at my vest, my mind sharing some of John Splendid’s apprehension that we were intruders on some profound grief. And yet my hunger was a furious thing that belched red-hot at my stomach.
“Royal’s my race!” said Stewart “I’ll be kept tirling at no door-pin in the Highlands,—let us drive in the bar.”
“What does he say?” asked the cleric, and I gave him the English of it.
“You’ll drive no doors in here,” said he firmly to Stewart “We can but give another knock and see what comes of it Knock you, M’Iver.”
“Barbreck.”
“Barbreck be it then.”
“I would sooner go to the glen foot, and risk all,” said John.
Sonachan grunted again; out he drew his dirk, and he rapped with the hilt of it loud and long at the door. A crying of children rose within, and, behold, I was a child again! I was a child again in Shira Glen, alone in a little chamber with a window uncurtained and unshuttered, yawning red-mouthed to the outer night My back was almost ever to the window, whose panes reflected a peat-fire and a face as long as a fiddle, and eyes that shone like coal; and though I looked little at the window yawning to the wood, I felt that it never wanted some curious spy outside, some one girning or smiling in at me and my book. I must look round, or I must put a hand on my shoulder to make sure no other hand was there,—then the Terror that drives the black blood from the heart through all the being, and a boy unbuckling his kilt with fevered fingers and leaping with frantic sobs to bed! One night when the black blood of the Terror still coursed through me, though I was dovering over to sleep, there came a knocking at the door, a knock commanding, a knock never explained. It brought me to my knees with a horror that almost choked me at the throat, a cold dew in the very palms of the hands. I dare not ask who rapped for fear I should have an answer that comes some day or other to every child of my race,—an answer no one told me of, an answer that then I guessed.
All this flashed through my mind when the children’s crying rose in the dark interior—that cry of children old and young as they go through the mysteries of life and the alley-ways of death.
The woman soothed her children audibly, then called out, asking what we wanted.
“I’m a man from Appin,” cried out Stewart with great promptness and cunning, “and I have a friend or two with me. I was looking for the house of Kilinchean, where a cousin of mine—a fine spinner and knitter, but thrawn in the temper—is married on the tenant, and we lost our way. We’re cold and we’re tired, and we’re hungry, and——”
“Step in,” said the woman, lifting back the door. “You are many miles from Kilinchean, and I know Appin Mary very well.”
But three of us entered, Stewart, M’Iver, and myself, the others on a sudden inspiration preferring not to alarm the woman by betraying the number of us, and concealing themselves in the byre that leaned against the gable of the dwelling.
“God save all here!” said M’Iver as we stepped in, and the woman lit the cruisie by sticking its nose in the peat-embers. “I’m afraid we come on you at a bad time.”
She turned with the cruisie in her hands and seemed to look over his head at vacancy, with large and melting eyes in a comely face.
“You come,” said she, “like grief, just when we are not expecting it, and in the dead of night But you are welcome at my door.”
We sat down on stools at her invitation, bathed in the yellow light of cruisie and peat. The reek of the fire rose in a faint breath among the pot-chains, and lingered among the rafters, loath, as it were, to emerge in the cold night In a cowering group beneath the blankets of a bed in a corner were four children, the bed-clothes hurriedly clutched up to their chins, their eyes staring out on the intruders. The woman put out some food before us, coarse enough in quality but plenty of it, and was searching in a press for platters when she turned to ask how many of us there were. We looked at each other a little ashamed, for it seemed as if she had guessed of our divided company and the four men in the byre. It is likely she would have been told the truth, but her next words set us on a different notion.
“You’ll notice,” said she, still lifting her eyes to a point over our heads, “that I have not my sight.”
“God! that’s a pity,” said M’Iver in genuine distress, with just that accent of fondling in it that a Highlander in his own tongue can use like a salve for distress.
“I am not complaining of it,” said the woman; “there are worse hardships in this world.”
“Mistress,” said John, “there are. I think I would willingly have been bl—— dim in the sight this morning if it could have happened.”
“Ay, ay!” said the woman in a sad abstraction, standing with plates in her hand listening (I could swear) for a footstep that would never come again.
We sat and warmed ourselves and ate heartily, the heat of that homely dwelling—the first we had sat in for days—an indulgence so rare and precious that it seemed a thing we could never again tear ourselves away from to encounter the unkindness of those Lorn mounts anew. The children watched us with an alarm and curiosity no way abated, beholding in us perhaps (for one at least was at an age to discern the difference our tartan and general aspect presented from those of Glencoe) that we were strangers from a great distance, maybe enemies, at least with some rigour of warfare about our visage and attire.
The mother, finding her way with the readiness of long familiarity about the house, got ease for her grief, whatever it was, in the duties thus suddenly thrust upon her: she spoke but seldom, and she never asked—in that she was true Gael—any more particulars about ourselves than Stewart had volunteered. And when we had been served with our simple viands, she sat composedly before us with her hands in her lap, and her eyes turned on us with an appearance of sedate scrutiny no whit the less perplexing because we knew her orbs were but fair clean window-panes shuttered and hasped within.
“You will excuse my dull welcome,” she said, with a wan smile, speaking a very pleasant accent of North Country Gaelic, that turned upon the palate like a sweet “A week or two ago you would have found a very cheerful house, not a widow’s sorrow, and, if my eyes were useless, my man (beannachd leis!) had a lover’s eyes, and these were the eyes for himself and me.”
“Was he at Inverlochy?” I asked softly; “was he out with Montrose?”
“He died a week come Thursday,” said the woman. “They’re telling me of wars—weary on them and God’s pity on the widow women they make, and the mothers they must leave lonely—but such a thing is sorrow that the world, from France to the Isles, might be in flames and I would still be thinking on my man that’s yonder in the cold clods of the yard.... Stretch your hands; it’s your welcome, gentlemen.”
“I have one or two other friends out-bye there in the byre,” put in Stewart, who found the vigilance of the youths in the bed gave no opportunity for smuggling provand to the others of our party.
The woman’s face flamed up a little and took on the least of a look of alarm that Stewart—who was very cunning and quick in some matters—set about removing at once with some of those convenient lies that he seemed never out of the want of.
“Some of our lads,” said he, with a duck of apology at M’Iver and myself for taking liberties with the reputation of our friends. “They’re very well where they are among the bracken, if they had but the bite and sup, and if it’s your will I could take them that.”
“Could they not be coming in and sitting by the fire?” asked the woman, set at rest by Stewart’s story; but he told her he would never think of filling her room with a rabble of plain men, and in a little he was taking out the viands for our friends in the byre.
The woman sat anew upon her stool and her hands on her lap, listening with a sense so long at double exercise that now she could not readily relax the strain on it M’Iver was in a great fidget to be off. I could see it in every movement of him. He was a man who ever disliked to have his feelings vexed by contact with the everlasting sorrows of life, and this intercourse with new widowhood was sore against his mind. As for me, I took, in a way of speaking, the woman to my heart She stood to me for all the griefs I had known in life, and was yet the representative, the figure of love—revealing an element of nature, a human passion so different from those tumults and hatreds we had been encountering. I had been thinking as I marched among the wilds of Lochaber and Badenoch that vengeance and victory and dominion by the strong hand were the main spurs to action, and now, on a sudden, I found that affection was stronger than them all.
“Are you keeping the place on?” I asked the widow, “or do you go back to your folks, for I notice from your tongue that you are of the North?”
“I’m of the Grants,” she said; “but my heart’s in Glencoe, and I’ll never leave it I am not grieving at the future, I am but minding on the past, and I have my bairns.... More milk for the lads outside; stretch your hands.... Oh yes, I have my bairns.”
“Long may they prosper, mistress,” said M’Iver, drumming with a horn spoon on his knee, and winking and smiling very friendly to the little fellows in a row in the bed, who, all but the oldest, thawed to this humour of the stranger. “It must be a task getting a throng like yon bedded at evening. Some day they’ll be off your hand, and it’ll be no more the lullaby of Crodh Chailein, but them driving at the beasts for themselves.”
“Are you married?” asked the woman.
“No,” said John, with a low laugh, “not yet. I never had the fortune to fill the right woman’s eye. I’ve waited at the ferry for some one who’ll take a man over without the ferry fee, for I’m a poor gentleman though I’m of a good family, and had plenty, and the ones with the tocher won’t have me, and the tocherless girls I dare not betray.”
“You ken the old word,” said the woman; “the man who waits long at the ferry will get over some day.”
Stewart put down a cogie and loosened a button of his vest, and with an air of great joviality, that was marred curiously by the odd look his absence of lugs conferred, he winked cunningly at us and slapped the woman in a rough friendship on the shoulder.
“Are you thinking yourself——” he began, and what he would finish with may be easily guessed. But M’Iver fixed him with an eye that pricked like a rapier.
“Sit ye down, Stewart,” said he; “your race is royal, as ye must be aye telling us, but there’s surely many a droll bye-blow in the breed.”
“Are you not all from Appin?” asked the woman, with a new interest, taking a corner of M’Iver’s plaiding in her hand and running a few checks through fine delicate fingers of a lady. Her face dyed crimson; she drew back her stool a little, and cried out—
“That’s not off a Stewart web—it was never waulked in Appin. Whom have I here?”
John Splendid bent to her very kindly and laid a hand on hers.
“I’ll tell you the God’s truth, mother,” said he; “we’re broken men: we have one Stewart of a kind with us, but we belong to parts far off from here, and all we want is to get to them as speedily as may be. I’ll put you in mind (but troth I’m sure it’s not needed) of two obligations that lie on every Gaelic household. One of them is to give the shelter of the night and the supper of the night to the murderer himself, even if the corpse on the heather was your son; and the other is to ask no question off your guest till he has drunk the deoch-an-doruis.”
“I’m grudging you nothing,” said the woman; “but a blind widow is entitled to the truth and frankness.”
M’Iver soothed her with great skill, and brought her back to her bairns.
“Ay,” said he, “some day they’ll be off your hands, and you the lady with sons and servants.”
“Had you a wife and bairns of your own,” said the woman, “you might learn some day that a parent’s happiest time is when her children are young. They’re all there, and they’re all mine when they’re under the blanket; but when they grow up and scatter, the nightfall never brings them all in, and one pair of blankets will not cover the cares of them. I do not know that,” she went on, “from what I have seen in my own house; but my mother told me, and she had plenty of chance to learn the truth of it, with sons who died among strangers, and sons who bruised her by their lives more than they could by their deaths.”
“You have some very ruddy and handsome boys there,” said M’Iver. And aye he would be winking and smiling at the young rogues in the corner.
“I think they are,” said the woman. “I never saw but the eldest, and he was then at the breast, the dear, his father’s image.”
“Then the father of him must have been a well-fared and pretty man,” said John, very promptly, not a bit abashed by the homeliness of the youth, who was the plainest of the nock, with a freckled skin, a low hang-dog brow, and a nose like the point of a dirk.
“He was that,” said the woman, fondly—“the finest man in the parish. He had a little lameness, but——”
“I have a bit of a halt myself,” said M’I ver, with his usual folly; “and I’m sure I’m none the worse for it.”
The oldest boy sat up in bed and gloomed at us very sullenly. He could scarcely be expected to understand the conceits of M’Iver’s tale about his lameness, that any one with eyes could behold had no existence.
“But I never think of my man,” the woman went on, “but as I saw him first before he met with his lameness. Eyes are a kind of doubtful blessing too in some ways. Mine have forgotten all the ugly things they knew, and in my recollection are but many bonny things: my man was always as young to me as when he came courting in a new blue bonnet and a short coat; my children will be changing to every one but to me.”
Stewart, with his own appetite satisfied, was acting lackey to the gentlemen in the byre—fetching out cogies of milk and whangs of bear-meal bannock, and the most crisp piquant white cheese ever I put tooth to. He was a man without a conscience, and so long as his own ends and the ends of his friends were served, he would never scruple to empty the woman’s girnel or toom her last basin, and leave her no morsel of food or drink at the long-run. But M’Iver and I put an end to that, and so won, as we thought, to the confidence of the elder lad in the bed, who had glunched low-browed among his franker brethren.
We slept for some hours, the seven of us, among the bracken of the byre, wearied out and unable to go farther that night, even if the very dogs were at our heels. We slept sound, I’m sure, all but M’Iver, whom, waking twice in the chill of the night, I found sitting up and listening like any sentinel.
“What are you watching for there?” I asked him on the second time.
“Nothing at all, Colin, nothing at all. I was aye a poor sleeper at the best, and that snore of Rob Stewart is the very trump of the next world.”
It was in the dawn again he confessed to his real apprehension,—only to my private ear, for he wished no more to alarm the others by day than to mar my courtship of slumber by night.
“The fact is,” said he, “I’m not very sure about our young gentleman yonder in the bed. He’s far too sharp in the eye and black in the temper, and too much of Clan Donallachd generally, to be trusted with the lives and liberties of seven gentlemen of a tartan he must know unfriendly to Glencoe. I wish I saw his legs that I might guess the length of him, or had had the wit to ask his mother, his age, for either would be a clue to his chance of carrying the tale against us down the valley there. He seemed tremendous sharp and wicked lying yonder looking at us, and I was in a sweat all night for fear he would be out and tell on us. But so far he’s under the same roof as ourselves.”
Sonachan and the baron-bailie quarrelled away about some point of pedigree as they sat, a towsy, unkempt pair, in a dusty corner of the byre, with beards of a most scraggy nature grown upon their chins. Their uncouthness gave a scruple of foppishness to M’I ver, and sent him seeking a razor in the widow’s house. He found the late husband’s, and shaved himself trimly, while Stewart played lackey again to the rest of us, taking out a breakfast the housewife was in the humour to force on us. He had completed his scraping, and was cracking away very freely with the woman, who was baking some bannocks on the stone, with sleeves rolled up from arms that were rounded and white. They talked of the husband (the one topic of new widowhood), a man, it appeared, of a thousand parts, a favourite with all, and yet, as she said, “When it came to the black end they left me to dress him for the grave, and a stranger had to bury him.”
M’Iver, looking fresh and spruce after his cleansing, though his eyes were small for want of sleep, aroused at once to an interest in the cause of this unneighbourliness.
The woman stopped her occupation with a sudden start and flared crimson.
“I thought you knew,” said she, stammering, turning a rolling-pin in her hand—“I thought you knew; and then how could you?... I maybe should have mentioned it,... but,... but could I turn you from my door in the night-time and hunger?”
M’Iver whistled softly to himself, and looked at me where I stood in the byre-door.
“Tuts,” said he, at last turning with a smile to the woman, as if she could see him; “what does a bit difference with Lowland law make after all? I’ll tell you this, mistress, between us,—I have a name myself for private foray, and it’s perhaps not the first time I have earned the justification of the kind gallows of Crief by small diversions among cattle at night It’s the least deserving that get the tow gravatte.”
(Oh you liar! I thought.)
The woman’s face looked puzzled. She thought a little, and said, “I think you must be taking me up wrong; my man was never at the trade of reiving, and——”
“I would never hint that he was, goodwife,” cried John, quickly, puzzled-looking himself. “I said I had a name for the thing; but they were no friends of mine who gave me the credit, and I never stole stot or quey in all my life.”
(I have my doubts, thinks I.)
“My man died of the plague,” said the woman, blurting out her news, as if eager to get over an awkward business.
I have never seen such a sudden change in a person’s aspect as came over John Splendid in every feature. The vain trim man of a minute ago, stroking his chin and showing a white hand (for the entertainment of the woman he must always be forgetting was without her sight), balancing and posturing on well-curved legs, and jauntily pinning his plaid on his shoulder, in a flash lost backbone. He stepped a pace back, as if some one had struck him a blow, his jaw fell, and his face grew ashen.
Then his eyes went darting about the chamber, and his nostrils sniffed as if disease was a presence to be seen and scented, a thing tangible in the air, maybe to be warded off by a sharp man’s instruction in combat of arms.
“God of grace!” he cried, crossing himself most vigorously for a person of the Protestant religion, and muttering what I have no doubt was some charm of his native glen for the prevention of fevers. He shut his mouth thereafter very quickly on every phrase he uttered, breathing through his nose; at the same time he kept himself, in every part but the shoe-soles he tiptoed on, from touching anything. I could swear the open air of the most unfriendly glen in Christendom was a possession to be envious of for John M’Iver of Barbreck.
Stewart heard the woman’s news that came to him as he was carrying in from the byre the vessels from which he had been serving his companions. He was in a stew more extraordinary than John Splendid; he blanched even to the scars of his half-head, as we say, spat vehemently out of his mouth a piece of bread he was chewing, turned round about in a flash, and into the byre past me as I stood (not altogether alarmed, but yet a little disturbed and uneasy) in the doorway. He emptied his clothing and knapsack of every scrap of food he had purloined, making a goodly heap upon the floor,—the very oaten flour he dusted off his finger-tips, with which he had handled cake that a little ago he was risking his soul’s salvation to secure. And—except the minister—the other occupants of the byre were in an equal terror.
For in this matter of smittal plagues we Highlanders are the most arrant cowards. A man whose life we would save on the field, or the rock-face, or the sea, at the risk of our own lives or the more abominable peril of wound and agony, will die in a ditch of the Spotted Death or a fever before the most valiant of us would put out a hand to cover him again with his blanket He will get no woman to sound his coronach, even if he were Lord of the Isles. I am not making defence or admitting blame, though I have walked in Hamburg when the pitch-barrels blazed in the street, fuming the putrid wind; but there is in the Gaelic character a dread of disfiguration more than of sudden and painful death. What we fear is the black mystery of such disorders: they come on cunning winds unheralded, in fair weather or bad, day or night, to the rich and to the poor, to the strong as to the weak. You may be robust to-day in a smiling country and to-morrow in a twist of agony, coal-black, writhing on the couch, every fine interest in life blotted out by a yellow film upon the eyes. A vital gash with a claymore confers a bloodier but a more comely and natural end. Thus the Gael abhors the very roads that lead to a plague-struck dwelling. If plagues do not kill, they will mar—yes, even against the three charms of Island! and that, too, makes heavier their terror, for a man mutilated even by so little as the loss of a hand is an object of pity to every hale member of his clan. He may have won his infirmity in a noble hour, but they will pity him, and pity to the proud is worse than the glove in the face.
Instantly there was a great to-do in getting away from this most unfortunate dwelling. The lads in the byre shook tartan and out to the fresh air, and rejoiced in the wind with deep-drawn gulping breaths, as if they might wash the smallest dust of disease from their bodily systems. So at last only M’Iver and I were left standing at the door.
“Well,” said John, with an effort, “we must be going. I never thought it was so late. And we must be on the other side of Dalness before very long. You have been very good to us, and my name’s John M’I ver of Barbreck—a kind of a Campbell with a great respect for the Mac-Donalds, of whom I kent a few perfect gentry in foreign wars I have been at the fighting of. And—good day, mistress, we must be going. My friends have the very small manners surely, for they’re off down the road. Well just let them go that way. What need ye expect off small men and gillies?”
He signed to me with a shake of his sporran to show it was empty, and, falling to his meaning, I took some silver from my own purse and offered it to the glum-faced lad in the blankets. Beetle-brow scowled, and refused to put a hand out for it, so I left it on a table without a clink to catch the woman’s ear.
“Would you not have a deoch-an-doruis?” asked the woman, making to a press and producing a bottle.
M’Iver started in a new alarm. “No, no. You’re very good,” said he; “but I never take it myself in the morning, and—good day, mistress—and my friend Elrigmore, who’s left with me here, is perhaps too free with it sometimes; and indeed maybe I’m that way myself too—it’s a thing that grows on you. Good-bye, mistress.”
She put out her hand, facing us with uplifted eyes. I felt a push at my shoulder, and the minister, who had left the four others down the brae, stepped softly into the room. M’Iver was in a high perplexity. He dare not shake the woman’s hand, and still he dare not hurt her feelings. “My thong’s loose,” said he, stooping to fumble with a brogue that needed no such attention. He rose with the minister at his shoulder.
“And good day to you again, mistress,” said M’Iver, turning about to go, without heeding the outstretched hand.
Master Gordon saw the whole play at a glance. He took the woman’s hand in his without a word, wrung it with great warmth, and, seized as it seemed by a sudden whim, lifted the fingers to his lips, softly kissed them, and turned away.
“O,” cried the woman, with tears welling to her poor eyes—“O Clan Campbell, I’ll never call ye down! Ye may have the guile they claim for ye, but ye have the way with a widow’s heart!”
I did it with some repugnance, let me own; but I, too, shook her hand, and followed the minister out at the door. M’Iver was hot with annoyance and shame, and ready to find fault with us for what we had done; but the cleric carded him like wool in his feelings.
“Oh, valour, valour!” he said in the midst of his sermon, “did I not say you knew your duty in hate better than in affection?”
John Splendid kept a dour-set jaw, said never a word, and the seven of us proceeded on our way.
It was well on in the morning, the land sounding with a new key of troubled and loosening waters. Mists clogged the mountain-tops, and Glencoe far off to its westward streamed with a dun vapour pricked with the tip of fir and ash. A moist feel was in the air; it relapsed anon to a smirr of rain.
“This is a shade better than clear airs and frost and level snow for quarries on a hunting,” said I.
“I’m glad it suits you,” said M’Iver. “I’ve seen the like before, and I’m not so sure about the advantage of it.”