The young man covered his face with his hands, and his form heaved with suppressed emotion, and even the kindly-hearted Richards could but look on in silence. Not a word of consolation could he adduce that had the power to assuage grief so deep as this.
No one spoke for many minutes—sorrow is oftentimes too deep for words—but higher and higher in the calm, still gloaming rose the blackbird’s notes of love, sounding half hysterical in the very fulness of their happiness and joy.
General Mackenzie rose slowly from his chair, and approaching his son placed a kindly hand on his shoulder.
“Dear Jack,” he said slowly, “we each have something left us, a name that has never yet been tarnished; our clansmen have ever been found in the battle’s van, or
‘In death laid low,
Their backs to the field, their feet to the foe.’
We have that name, Jack boy; we have that fame. We have our unsullied swords. Jack lad, we shall forget.”
“Father, we shall try.”
And hand met hand as eye met eye. The two had signed a compact, and well they knew what that compact was.
Jack Mackenzie sat alone in his bedroom that night long after his father and every guest had retired. The casement window was wide open, so that the sweet breath of the June roses could steal in, and with it the weird tremolo of a nightingale singing its love-lay in an adjoining copse. The moonlight was everywhere, bathing the flower-beds, spiritualizing the trees, lying on the grass like snow, and casting deep shadows from the quaint figures of many a statue, and a deeper shadow still from the mossy dial-stone.