“Oh, Margaret!” he cried, “you terrify me. Throw that dreadful weapon in the sea,” and he made to take it from her, but she restored it to her plaid.
“No, no,” she cried, “there may be use for it—”
“Use for it!” he repeated, and she poured into his ear the torrent of her hatred of Lochgair. “He could have won my laddie off,” she said; “we had his own assurance. And if we had not put our trust in him, we would have gone to others—Asknish or Stonefield, or the Duke himself—the Duke would have had some pity on a mother.”
“Lochgair may have sore deceived us,” said her husband, “yet he was but an instrument; our laddie’s doom was a thing appointed from the start of Time.”
“Then from the start of Time you were doomed to slay Lochgair.”
“What! I?” quo’ he,
“One or other of us. We are, it seems by your religion, all in the hands of fate and cannot help ourselves. Stand up like a man to this filthy Campbell, and give him the bullet that was meant for a better man.”
“You are mad, goodwife,” said her husband; “I would shed no man’s blood.”
“I speak not of men,” said she, “but of that false fiend Lochgair who has kept us on the rack, and robbed Time itself of a fortnight to make his clan diversion. Oh, man! man! are you a coward? Challenge him to the moor; remember that at the worst my son who lies in the cart there could have died in decency and not at the doomster’s hand if Lochgair had not misled us—”
“Woman!” cried her husband, “get behind me!” and took refuge in a gust of mumbled prayer.