CHAPTER XXXI.—MISTRESS BETTY.
I dressed myself up in the morning with scrupulous care, put my hair in a queue, shaved cheek and chin, and put at my shoulder the old heirloom brooch of the house, which, with some other property, the invaders had not found below the bruach where we had hid it on the day we had left Elngmore to their mercy. I was all in a tremor of expectation, hot and cold by turns in hope and apprehension, but always with a singular uplifting at the heart, because for good or ill I was sure to meet in the next hour or two the one person whose presence in Inneraora made it the finest town in the world. Some men tell me they have felt the experience more than once; light o’ loves they, errant gallants, I’ll swear (my dear) the tingle of it came to me but at the thought of meeting one woman. Had she been absent from Inneraora that morning I would have avoided it like a leper-house because of its gloomy memorials; but the very reek of its repairing tenements as I saw them from the upper windows of my home floating in a haze against the blue over the shoulder of Dun Torvil seemed to call me on. I went about the empty chambers carolling like the bird. Aumrie and clothes-press were burst and vacant, the rooms in all details were bereft and cheerless because of the plenishing stolen, and my father sat among his losses and mourned, but I made light of our spoiling.
As if to heighten the rapture of my mood, the day was full of sunshine, and though the woods crowding the upper glen were leafless and slumbering, they were touched to something like autumn’s gold. Some people love the country but in the time of leafage! And laden with delights in every season of the year, and the end of winter as cheery a period as any, for I know that the buds are pressing at the bark, and that the boughs in rumours of wind stretch out like the arms of the sleeper who will soon be full awake.
Down I went stepping to a merry lilt, banishing every fear from my thoughts, and the first call I made was on the Provost. He was over in Akaig’s with his wife and family pending the repair of his own house, and Askaig was off to his estate. Master Brown sat on the balusters of the outer stair, dangling his squat legs and studying through horn specs the talc of thig and theft which the town officer had made up a report on. As I put my foot on the bottom step he looked up, and his welcome was most friendly.
“Colin! Colin!” he cried, hastening down to shake me by the hand, “come your ways in. I heard you got home yesterday, and I was sure you would give us a call in the by-going to-day. And you’re little the waur of your jaunt-hale and hearty. We ken all about your prisoning; M’Iver was in last night and kept the crack going till morning—a most humorous devil.”
He pinched rappee as he spoke, in rapid doses from a snuff-box, and spread the brown powder in extravagant carelessness over his vest. He might affect what light-heartedness he could; I saw that the past fortnight had made a difference for the worse on him. The pouches below the eyes had got heavier and darker, the lines had deepened on his brow, the ruddy polish had gone off his cheek, and it was dull and spotted; by ten o’clock at night-when he used to be very jovial over a glass—I could tell he would be haggard and yawning. At his years men begin to age in a few hours; a sudden wrench to the affections, or shock to a long-disciplined order of things in their lives, will send them staggering down off the braehead whereon they have been perched with a good balance so long that they themselves have forgot the natural course of human man is to be progressing somewhere.
“Ah, lad, lad! haven’t we the times?” he said, as he led me within to the parlour. “Inneraora in the stour in her reputation as well as in her tenements. I wish the one could be amended as readily as the other; but we mustn’t be saying a word against princes, ye ken,” he went on in the discreet whisper of the conspirator. “You were up and saw him last night, I’m hearing. To-day they tell me he’s himself again, and coming down to a session meeting at noon. I must put myself in his way to say a friendly word or two. Ah! you’re laughing at us. I understand, man, I understand. You travellers need not practise the art of civility; but we’re too close on the castle here to be out of favour with MacCailein Mor. Draw in your chair, and—Mary, Mary, goodwife! bring in the bottle with you and see young Elrigmore.”
In came the goodwife with even greater signs of trouble than her husband, but all in a flurry of good-humoured welcome. They sat, the pair of them, before me in a little room poorly lit by a narrow window but half-glazed, because a lower portion of it had been destroyed in the occupation of the Irish, and had to be timbered up to keep the wind outside. A douce pathetic pair; I let my thoughts stray a little even from their daughter as I looked on them, and pondered on the tragedy of age that is almost as cruel as war, but for the love that set Provost Brown with his chair haffit close against his wife’s, so that less noticeably he might take her hand in his below the table and renew the glow that first they learned, no doubt, when lad and lass awandering in summer days, oh long ago, in Eas-a-chosain glen.
They plied me with a hundred questions, of my adventures, and of my father, and of affairs up in Shira Glen. I sat answering very often at hazard, with my mind fixed on the one question I had to ask, which was a simple one as to the whereabouts and condition of their daughter. But I leave to any lad of a shrinking and sensitive nature if this was not a task of exceeding difficulty. For you must remember that here were two very sharp-eyed parents, one of them with a gift of irony discomposing to a lover, and the other or both perhaps, with no reason, so far as I knew, to think I had any special feeling for the girl. But I knew as well as if I had gone over the thing a score of times before, how my manner of putting that simple question would reveal me at a flash to the irony of the father and the wonder of the mother. And in any case they gave me not the smallest chance of putting it As they plied me with affairs a thousand miles beyond the limits of my immediate interest, and I answered them with a brevity almost discourteous, I was practising two or three phrases in my mind.
“And how is your daughter, sir?” might seem simple enough, but it would be too cold for an inquirer to whom hitherto she had always been Betty; while to ask for Betty outright would—a startling new spring of delicacy in my nature told me—be to use a friendly warmth only the most cordial relations with the girl would warrant No matter how I mooted the lady, I knew something in my voice and the very flush in my face would reveal my secret My position grew more pitiful every moment, for to the charge of cowardice I levelled first at myself for my backwardness, there was the charge of discourtesy. What could they think of ray breeding that I had not mentioned their daughter? What could I think from their silence regarding her but that they were vexed at my indifference to her, and with the usual Highland pride were determined not even to mention her name till she was asked for. Upon my word, I was in a trouble more distressing than when I sat in the mist in the Moor of Rannoch and confessed myself lost! I thought for a little, in a momentary wave of courage, of leading the conversation in her direction by harking back to the day when the town was abandoned, and she took flight with the child into the woods. Still the Provost, now doing all the talking, while his wife knit hose, would ever turn a hundred by-ways from the main road I sought to lead him on.
By-and-by, when the crack had drifted hopelessly away from all connection with Mistress Betty, there was a woman’s step on the stair. My face became as hot as fire at the sound, and I leaned eagerly forward in my chair before I thought of the transparency of the movement.
The Provost’s eyes closed to little slits in his face; the corner of his mouth curled in amusement.
“Here’s Peggy back from Bailie Campbell’s,” he said to his wife, and I was convinced he did so to let me know the new-comer, who was now moving about in the kitchen across the lobby, was not the one I had expected. My disappointment must have shown in my face; I felt I was wasting moments the most precious, though it was something to be under the same roof as my lady’s relatives, under the same roof as she had slept below last night, and to see some of her actual self almost, in the smiles and eyes and turns of the voice of her mother. I stood up to go, slyly casting an eye about the chamber for the poor comfort of seeing so little as a ribbon or a shoe that was hers, but even that was denied me. The Provost, who, I’ll swear now, knew my trouble from the outset, though his wife was blind to it, felt at last constrained to relieve it.
“And you must be going,” he said; “I wish you could have waited to see Betty, who’s on a visit to Carlunnan and should be home by now.”
As he said it, he was tapping his snuff-mull and looking at me pawkily out of the corners of his eyes, that hovered between me and his wife, who stood with the wool in her hand, beaming mildly up in my face. I half turned on my heel and set a restless gaze on the corner of the room. For many considerations were in his simple words. That he should say them at all relieved the tension of my wonder; that he should say them in the way he did, was, in a manner, a manifestation that he guessed the real state of ray feelings to the lady whose very name I had not dared to mention to him, and that he was ready to favour any suit I pressed I was even inclined to push my reading of his remark further, and say to myself that if he had not known the lady herself favoured me, he would never have fanned my hope by even so little as an indifferent sentence.
“And how is she—how is Betty?” I asked, lamely.
He laughed with a pleasing slyness, and gave me a dunt with his elbow on the side, a bit of the faun, a bit of the father, a bit of my father’s friend.
“You’re too blate, Colin,” he said, and then he put his arm through his wife’s and gave her a squeeze to take her into his joke. I would have laughed at the humour of it but for the surprise in the good woman’s face. It fair startled me, and yet it was no more than the look of a woman who leams that her man and she have been close company with a secret for months, and she had never made its acquaintance. There was perhaps a little more, a hesitancy in the utterance, a flush, a tone that seemed to show the subject was one to be passed bye as fast as possible.
She smiled feebly a little, picked up a row of dropped stitches, and “Oh, Betty,” said she, “Betty—is—is—she’ll be back in a little. Will you not wait?”
“No, I must be going,” I said; “I may have the happiness of meeting her before I go up the glen in the afternoon.”
They pressed me both to stay, but I seemed, in my mind, to have a new demand upon me for an immediate and private meeting with the girl; she must be seen alone, and not in presence of the old couple, who would give my natural shyness in her company far more gawkiness than it might have if I met her alone.
I went out and went down the stair, and along the front of the land, my being in a tumult, yet with my observation keen to everything, no matter how trivial, that happened around me. The sea-gulls, that make the town the playground of their stormy holidays, swept and curved among the pigeons in the gutter and quarrelled over the spoils; tossed in the air wind-blown, then dropped with feet outstretched upon the black joists and window-sills. Fowls of the midden, new brought from other parts to make up the place of those that had gone to the kail-pots of Antrim and Athole, stalked about with heads high, foreign to this causied and gravelled country, clucking eagerly for meat I made my way amid the bird of the sea and the bird of the wood and common bird of the yard with a divided mind, seeing them with the eye for future recollection, but seeing them not Peats were at every close-mouth, at every door almost that was half-habitable, and fuel cut from the wood, and all about the thoroughfare was embarrassed.
I had a different decision at every step, now to seek the girl, now to go home, now finding the most heartening hints in the agitation of the parents, anon troubled exceedingly with the reflection that there was something of an unfavourable nature in the demeanour of her mother, however much the father’s badinage might soothe my vanity.
I had made up my mind for the twentieth time to go the length of Carlunnan and face her plump and plain, when behold she came suddenly round the corner at the Maltland where the surviving Lowland troops were gathered! M’Iver was with her, and my resolution shrivelled and shook within me like an old nut kernel. I would have turned but for the stupidity and ill-breeding such a movement would evidence, yet as I held on my way at a slower pace and the pair approached, I felt every limb an encumbrance, I felt the country lout throbbing in every vein.
Betty almost ran to meet me as we came closer together, with an agreeableness that might have pleased me more had I not the certainty that she would have been as warm to either of the two men who had rescued her from her hiding in the wood of Strongara, and had just come back from her country’s battles with however small credit to themselves in the result. She was in a very happy mood, for, like all women, she could readily forget the large and general vexation of a reverse to her people in war if the immediate prospect was not unpleasant and things around were showing improvement Her eyes shone and sparkled, the ordinary sedate flow of her words was varied by little outbursts of gaiety. She had been visiting the child at Carlunnan, where it had been adopted by her kinswoman, who made a better guardian than its grandmother, who died on her way to Dunbarton.
“What sets you on this road?” she asked blandly.
“Oh, you have often seen me on this road before,” I said, boldly and with meaning. Ere I went wandering we had heard the rivers sing many a time, and sat upon its banks and little thought life and time were passing as quickly as the leaf or bubble on the surface. She flushed ever so little at the remembrance, and threw a stray curl back from her temples with an impatient toss of her fingers.
“And so much of the dandy too!” put in M’Iver, himself perjink enough about his apparel. “I’ll wager there’s a girl in the business.” He laughed low, looked from one to the other of us, yet his meaning escaped, or seemed to escape, the lady.
“Elrigmore is none of the kind,” she said, as if to protect a child. “He has too many serious affairs of life in hand to be in the humour for gallivanting.”
This extraordinary reading of my character by the one woman who ought to have known it better, if only by an instinct, threw me into a blend of confusion and chagrin. I had no answer for her. I regretted now that my evil star had sent me up Glenaora, or that having met her with M’Iver, whose presence increased my diffidence, I had not pretended some errand or business up among the farmlands in the Salachry hills, where distant relatives of our house were often found But now I was on one side of the lady and M’Iver on the other, on our way towards the burgh, and the convoy must be concluded, even if I were dumb all the way. Dumb, indeed, I was inclined to be. M’Iver laughed uproariously at madame’s notion that I was too seriously engaged with life for the recreation of love-making; it was bound to please him, coming, as it did, so close on his own estimate of me as the Sobersides he christened me at almost our first acquaintance. But he had a generous enough notion to give me the chance of being alone with the girl he knew very well my feelings for.
“I’ve been up just now at the camp,” he said, “anent the purchase of a troop-horse, and I had not concluded my bargain when Mistress Brown passed. I’m your true cavalier in one respect, that I must be offering every handsome passenger an escort; but this time it’s an office for Elrigmore, who can undertake your company down the way bravely enough, I’ll swear, for all his blateness.”
Betty halted, as did the other two of us, and bantered my comrade.
“I ask your pardon a thousand times, Barbreck,” she said; “I thought you were hurrying on your way down behind me, and came upon me before you saw who I was.”
“That was the story,” said he, coolly; “I’m too old a hand at the business to be set back on the road I came by a lady who has no relish for my company.”
“I would not take you away from your marketing for the world,” she proceeded. “Perhaps Elrigmore may be inclined to go up to the camp too; he may help you to the pick of your horse—and we’ll believe you the soldier of fortune again when we see you one.”
She, at least, had no belief that the mine-manager was to be a mercenary again. She tapped with a tiny toe on the pebbles, affecting a choler the twinkle in her eyes did not homologate. It was enough for M’Iver, who gave a “Pshaw!” and concluded he might as well, as he said, “be in good company so long as he had the chance,” and down the way again we went. Somehow the check had put him on his mettle. He seemed to lose at once all regard for my interests in this. I became in truth, more frequently than was palatable, the butt of his little pleasantries; my mysterious saunter up that glen, my sobriety of demeanour, my now silence-all those things, whose meaning he knew very well, were made the text for his amusement for the lady. As for me, I took it all weakly, striving to meet his wit with careless smiles.
For the first time, I was seized with a jealousy of him. Here was I, your arrant rustic; he was as composed as could be, overflowing with happy thoughts, laughable incident, and ever ready with the compliment or the retort women love to hear from a smart fellow of even indifferent character. I ic had the policy to conceal the vanity that was for ordinary his most transparent feature, and his trick was to admire the valour and the humour of others. Our wanderings in Lorn and I-ochaber, our adventures with the MacDonalds, all the story of the expedition, he danced through, as it were, on the tip-toe of light phrase, as if it had Ixrcn a strong man’s scheme of recreation, scarcely once appealing to ma With a Mushed cheek and parted lips the lady hung upon his words, arched her dark eyebrows in fear, or bubbled into the merriest laughter as the occasion demanded. Worst of all, she teemed to share his amusement at my silence, and then I could have wished rather than a bag of gold I had the Mull witch’s invisible coat, or that the earth would swallow me up. The very country-people passing on the way were art and part in the conspiracy of circumstances to make me unhappy. Their salutes were rarely for Elrigmore, but for the lady and John Splendid, whose bold quarrel with MacCailein Mor was now the rumour of two parishes, and gave him a wide name for unflinching bravery of a kind he had been generally acknowledged as sadly want ing in before. And Mistress Betty could not but see that high or low, I was second to this fellow going off—or at least with the rumour of it—to Hebron’s cavaliers in France before the week-end.
M’Iver was just, perhaps, carrying his humour at my cost a little too far for my temper, which was never readily stirred, but flamed fast enough when set properly alowe, and Betty—here too your true woman wit—saw it sooner than he did himself, quick enough in the uptake though he was. He had returned again to his banter about the supposititious girl I was trysted with up the glen, and my face showed my annoyance.
“You think all men like yourself,” said the girl to him, “and all women the same—like the common soldier you are.”
“I think them all darlings,” he confessed, laughing; “God bless them, kind and foolish——”
“As you’ve known them oftenest,” she supplied, coldly.
“Or sedate and sensible,” he went on. “None of them but found John M’Iver of Barbeck their very true cavalier.”
“Indeed,” said Mistress Betty, colder than ever, some new thought working within her, judging from the tone. “And yet you leave to-morrow, and have never been to Carlunnan.” She said the last words with a hesitancy, blushing most warmly. To me they were a dark mystery, unless I was to assume, what I did wildly for a moment, only to relinquish the notion immediately, that she had been in the humour to go visiting her friends with him. Mover’s face showed some curious emotion that it baffled me to read, and all that was plain to me was that here were two people with a very strong thought of a distressing kind between them.
“It would be idle for me,” he said in a little, “to deny that I know what you mean. But do you not believe you might be doing me poor justice in your suspicions?”
“It is a topic I cannot come closer upon,” she answered; “I am a woman. That forbids me and that same compels me. If nature does not demand your attendance up there, then you are a man wronged by rumour or a man dead to every sense of the human spirit I have listened to your humour and laughed at your banter, for you have an art to make people forget; but all the way I have been finding my lightness broken in on by the feeble cry of a child without a mother—it seems, too, without a father.”
“If that is the trouble,” he said, turning away with a smile he did not succeed in concealing either from the lady or me, “you may set your mind at rest The child you mention has, from this day, what we may be calling a godfather.”
“Then the tale’s true?” she said, stopping on the road, turning and gazing with neither mirth nor warmth in her countenance.
M’Iver hesitated, and looked upon the woman to me as if I could help him in the difficulty; but I must have seemed a clown in the very abjection of my ignorance of what all this mystery was about He searched my face and I searched my memory, and then I recollected that he had told me before of Mistress Brown’s suspicions of the paternity of the child.
“I could well wish your answer came more readily,” said she again, somewhat bitterly, “for then I know it would be denial.”
“And perhaps untruth, too,” said John, oddly. “This time it’s a question of honour, a far more complicated turn of circumstances than you can fancy, and my answer takes time.”
“Guilty!” she cried, “and you go like this. You know what the story is, and your whole conduct in front of my charges shows you take the very lightest view of the whole horrible crime.”
“Say away, madame,” said M’Iver, assuming an indifference his every feature gave the lie to. “I’m no better nor no worse than the rest of the world. That’s all I’ll say.”
“You have said enough for me, then,” said the girl.
“I think, Elrigmore, if you please, I’ll not trouble you and your friend to come farther with me now. I am obliged for your society so far.”
She was gone before either of us could answer, leaving us like a pair of culprits standing in the middle of the road. A little breeze fanned her clothing, and they shook behind her as to be free from some contamination. She had overtaken and joined a woman in front of her before I had recovered from my astonishment M’Iver turned from surveying her departure with lowered eyebrows, and gave me a look with half-a-dozen contending thoughts in it.
“That’s the end of it,” said he, as much to himself as for my ear, “and the odd thing of it again is that she never seemed so precious fine a woman as when it was ‘a bye wi’ auld days and you,’ as the Scots song says.”
“It beats me to fathom,” I confessed. “Do I understand that you admitted to the lady that you were the father of the child?”
“I admitted nothing,” he said, cunningly, “if you’ll take the trouble to think again. I but let the lady have her own way, which most of her sex generally manage from me in the long-run.”
“But, man! you could leave her only one impression, that you are as black as she thinks you, and am I not sure you fall far short of that?”
“Thank you,” he said; “it is good of you to say it. I am for off whenever my affairs here are settled, and when I’m the breadth of seas afar from Inneraora, you’ll think as well as you can of John M’Iver, who’ll maybe not grudge having lost the lady’s affection if he kept his friend’s and comrade’s heart.”
He was vastly moved as he spoke. He took my hand and wrung it fiercely; he turned without another word, good or ill, and strode back on his way to the camp, leaving me to seek my way to the town alone.