I did a daftlike thing then, for I put the saddle on the great horse—and he was a mettle beast, with many outlandish capers—and I rode through the hill to the kirk, and left word that the minister would be doing well to ceilidh at the house on the moor.
And indeed it was well on in the afternoon when that grave man dismounted a little stiffly from his pony, and I made bold to search for Dan and Belle, and tell my errand. It would maybe be a chancy business, but these two were like bairns then—and on the doorstep they were married. And when the minister's little pony was on its road home, and the sun still red to the west, and we three still standing at the door, Belle with with her two hands on Dan's arm, said he—
"I had clean forgot, my dear, but Hamish would always be remembering the due observances o' the sacraments."
A wedding, it seems to me, will be waking the devil of speech in all women, and old Betty would be havering like all that.
"What would I be telling ye?" she would say. "Has he not had the wale of all the weemen, and never the wan could be keeping him but you. And you a young thing yet—there will be time for a scroosch of weans; it is Betty that kens, and Bryde the lad will be daidlin' his brother on his knee.
"Ye could have been waiting," says she, "till the lad would be home, and standing under his mother's shawl before the minister, but ye would be that daft to be at the marrying—hoot, toot."
* * * * * *
Dan came back to his farming as a boy returns to his play, and it was droll whiles at the head-rig to see him straighten his back from the plough stilts, with also a quick far-seeing look to right and left of him, and an upward tilt to his chin that brought back the soldier in a moment; and then ye would hear the canny coaxing to get the horses into the furrow again, and the lost years were all forgotten.
My uncle took the news of the wedding finely.
"I'll not be denying Belle is a clever woman," says he, "a managing two-handed lass—imphm. There might have been more of a splore," says he, "and no harm done—a wheen hens and a keg would not have been out of place."