“You’ll be wanting a bite to eat,” said Mrs. Birnie. “It’s little I have to set for you. The wee bit of meat we had I cooked for him to take with him. It’s no much Jinny and I will be wanting while he’s awa from us. Ay, and it’s no much Jinny and I will get if he doesna come back to us.”
“Where has he gone?” said Neal.
“He’s gone to the turn-out,” she said, “to the turn-out that’s to be the morrow. It’s more goes to the like, I’m thinking, than comes back again. He’s taken the pike with him that lay in the thatch over our bed this year and more. But the will of the Lord be done.”
“May God bring him safe home to you,” said Neal.
“Ay, for God can do it, God can do it. I take no shame to tell you, young as you are, that I was just beseeching the Lord to do that very thing the now while you were standing at the door with Jinny. But the Lord’s ways are not our ways.”
She set a plate of oatcake and a jug of buttermilk on the table before Neal, and bade him eat. When he had finished, he sat and talked with her awhile, trying to cheer her. But she was not a woman to whom it was easy to speak comfortable platitudes. She knew the risks her husband ran—the risk of battle, and the worse risks which would follow defeat. Neal rose at last and bid her farewell.
“When you are saying a prayer for your husband,” he said, “say one for me; I’ll be along with him. I’m going to fight, too.”
“And will you be for the turn-out, then, with the rest of them? Ay, I’ll say a prayer for you, And—and, young man, will you mind this? When you’re killing with your pike and your gun, even if it’s a yeo that’s forninst you, gie a thought to the woman that’s waiting at home for him, and, maybe, praying. What would hinder her to pray for her husband even if he’s a yeoman itself?”
It was seven o’clock when Neal reached Aeneas Moylin’s house, after climbing the steep lane that led to Donegore Hill. He found six men seated in the kitchen—Donald Ward, Felix Matier, James Bigger, Moylin, and two others whom he did not know.
“It’s Neal Ward,” said Donald. “It’s my nephew. Sit you down, Neal.”