“The fifteenth of September,” she repeated dully; “we have not slept so sound this month back that we could miss a fortnight. Have you lost your reason?”
“I have seen a placard put up on the mercat cross,” said her husband, with his brow upon the horse’s back. “I read it in the light of the tolbooth windows, and it tells that the Government have decreed that, the day after September 2nd should be September 14th. Eleven days are dropped; it is called—it is called the Gregorian Calendar, and I have forgotten about the rope.”
The woman harshly laughed.
“Are you hearing me, Margaret?” he cried, putting up his arms to seize her, feeling some fresh terror.
“Gregorian here, Gregorian there!” she exclaimed. “Whose Calendar but the cursed Campbells’, who have bonnily diddled me of my son! Our times are in God’s hands, you said; you are witness now they are in the devil’s!”
“But it may be I was right, and that this is our Father’s miracle; John could not be—could not die but on the day appointed, and no such day, it seems, was on the Calendar. But I dared not ask, I dared not ask; I was dumfounded and ran to you, and here I am even without the rope.”
Again the woman harshly laughed.
“You need not fash about the rope, good-man,” said she; “at your very hand is plenty for your purpose, for there my son is, young John Clerk, and he hangs upon the tree.”
The woman would not put a hand upon the body. Without her aid her husband lowered the burden from the gibbet, laid it in the cart and covered it with his plaid; and when a girth for the horse had been improvised from a part of the shameful halter, the two of them turned for home, walking side by side through the dawn that now was coming, slow and ashen, to the east.
The man was dumb, and walked without volition, wrestling with satanic doubts of a Holy Purpose that had robbed him of his son with such unnecessary and ghastly mockery; the woman cuddled her cold secret in her bosom, stared glassily at the coming day, and for a time let fury and despair whirl through her brain like poison vapours.