“‘If ’tis well for the King, ’tis the less matter for me,’ said Dundee, but there was an awful look in his eyes and I think he thought of his wife and the boy he had never seen. He did not speak again; I think he would not; he turned his face away and died as the victory shout rose up the glen.
“Dunfermline covered him with my plaid. ‘The war is over,’ he said in a broken voice. ‘Dundee is dead.’
“I helped to carry him to his grave, and I took his spy-glass from his sash; ’twas broken with his fall, but I kept it for rememberance. I loved Dundee. Would I lay with him in his nameless grave in Blair Athol!”
His voice sank miserably into silence, and there was no sound.
The clouds drifted apart over a snowy moon; there was a sense of utter desolation abroad, the cold peace of loneliness.
Ronald rose and walked away from his brother toward the moonlight with the wind cool on his face; he shook with a stormy agony and cried out low and passionately:
“Would I had died with Dundee before I had been poisoned with love o’ thee, Margaret Campbell!”
CHAPTER VIII
MacCALLUM MORE
The Countess Peggy sat in the drawing-room of her lord’s handsome house in Edinburgh and measured out tea with a heavy rat-tailed spoon.
It was a fine chamber with smooth polished cream-colored walls and long French windows, hung with flowered curtains of a dull pink; the furniture, black and a little heavy, caught in its clear-cut Jacobean facets the light from the dozen candles in a silver stand that burnt over the tea-table. The Countess wore a purple gown with paniers and a fine lace kerchief fastened with diamonds on her bosom; a screen of drawn red silk stood between her and the fire and cast a glow over her face and neck, lay reflected, too, in the hollow of the shining white and pink cups.