"And you showed very little sense in bursting in on us the way you did! Could you not have bided quietly till Shalah gave the word? I had to be harsh with you, or they would have suspected something and cut your throat. Yon gentry are not to take liberties with. What made you do it, Andrew?"
"Just that I was black afraid. That made me more feared of being a coward, so I forced myself to yon folly."
"A very honourable reason," he said.
"Are you the leader of those men?" I asked. "They looked a scurvy lot.
Do you call that a proper occupation for the best blood in
Breadalbane?"
It was a silly speech, and I could have bitten my tongue out when I had uttered it. But I was in a vile temper, for the dregs of the negro's rum still hummed in my blood. His face grew dark, till he looked like the man I had seen the night before.
"I allow no man to slight my race," he said in a harsh voice.
"It's the truth whether you like it or not. And you that claimed to be a gentleman! What is it they say about the Highlands?" And I quoted a ribald Glasgow proverb.
What moved me to this insolence I cannot say, I was in the wrong, and I knew it, but I was too much of a child to let go my silly pride.
Ringan got up very quickly and walked three steps. The blackness had gone from his face, and it was puzzled and melancholy.
"There's a precious lot of the bairn in you, Mr. Garvald," he said, "and an ugly spice of the Whiggamore. I would have killed another man for half your words, and I've got to make you pay for them somehow." And he knit his brow and pondered.