There was still a month to go before the day of execution, and the Clerks of Pennymore—the proud and bitter dame and her pious husband—scoured the shire in search of sympathetic gentlemen of influence, and forswore sleep itself in their efforts to secure reprieve. They seemed, poor souls! miraculous in their great endurance, singly or together tramping here and there on a quest no neighbour dared to share, tragic to see upon the highway, horrible to hear at midnight when their cart went rumbling through the sleeping clachans. Sympathy was plentiful, but influence was shy, and the hopes of Pennymore were narrowed at last to Campbell of Lochgair, a lawyer himself, with the ear of His Grace and the Crown authorities.
Lochgair, more, as it strangely seemed, for the sake of the peevish dame than for her husband’s, promised his active interest, and almost guaranteed release, and in the latter days of August went to Edinburgh to wait on the Lord Advocate, who was Prestongrange. It was the year of the stunted corn—1752—and never in the memory of man had been such inclement weather. The seas would seem to have forgotten the ways of peace; the glens were flooded, and the Highlands for a space were cut off from the Lowland world, and in a dreary privacy of storm. So the days passed—for most folk as if Time itself were bogged among the mire—for the man and wife in Pennymore as the flap of wings. They longed each evening for the morrow since it might bring welcome news, and yet they grudged the night and looked with terror on the dawn, since it brought the horrid hour a vigil closer.
And there were no tidings from Lochgair!
“I might have known! I might have known!—a traitor ever, like his clan!” cried the mother, all her patience drained to the bitter dregs, wringing her hands till the blood came to the knuckles. “Lochgair will see the laddie hanged, and never jee his beaver. Too well I know his promises! We’re here forgot, the pair of us, and all the world sleeping sound, no way put about at the thought of young John Clerk. Deserted of men! deserted of men!” and her cry rose like a dirge in their lonely dwelling.
“But not of God and His grace,” said her husband, shrinking before the fury of her eye. “I have trusted Lochgair in this with all my heart, and he cannot betray us. He knows that his breath is all that lies between our laddie and eternity.”
“Oh, trust!” she hissed. “I ken the man; but I have trusted too, this fortnight, till my very heart is rent, yet God Himself cannot put off the 5th September.”
“Yea, even that, if it be His will; our times are in His hands,” said the pious husband, and turned him again to his Bible. But the woman’s doubts were justified, and on the morning of the day before their son should perish, they yoked the horse and drove in the cart to the burgh town to see him for the first time in the cell he had shared with some doomed sheep-stealers.
Six miles lay between their home and the tolbooth gates, and yet it was in pitch-black night they came to the confines of the burgh, for they dreaded the pitying eyes of men and women. And all the way the woman fondled something in her plaid. They saw, afar, and few, and melancholy, wan lights in the burgh lands, blurred by the weeping rain; and at this spectacle—which told them the world went on its ordinary way and thought of breakfast, while their lad sat counting the hours, and they were engaged with misery—the man put his hand on the woman’s shoulder with a grip of steel, and she gave the last sob that was ever heard from her. For ever after she was a woman made of stone. The horse, as if it shared their feeling, stopped on the highway, reared itself in terror of something unseen, and snapped its belly-band, and the cart stood still under heaving beeches whose windy branches filled the dark with noise and cried down the very waves which roared on Creag-nan-caoraich.
The man jumped from the cart and fumbled with the harness, to find that further progress, wanting a girth, was not to be contemplated.
“I will walk into the town,” he said, “and get a rope, if you sit here till I return. You will not mind my leaving you, Margaret?”