“It could happen nowhere else,” said the cleric, “but in such a ferocious land. I confess it, my lord—I confess it with the bitter shame of surrender, that I behold generations of superstition and savagery still to beat down ere your people are so amenable to the Gospel as the folks of the Lowland shires. To them such a shrieking harridan would be an object of pity and stern measure; they would call her mad as an etter-cap, and keep her in bounds: here she is made something of a prophetess———”
“How?” asked Argile, shortly, and he was looking wistfully at the hills we were leaving—the hills that lay between him and his books.
“There’s not a Highlander in your corps but has bowed his head to her blessing; there’s not one but looks upon her curse of the MacDonalds as so much of a gain in this enterprise.”
“Oh,” said his lordship, “you are a little extravagant We have our foolish ways, Gordon, but we are not altogether heathen; and do you think that after all there might not be something in the portents of a witch like yon in her exaltation?”
“No more than’s in the howling of the wind in the chimney,” said Gordon, quickly.
“Perhaps not,” said Argile, after a little, “perhaps not; but even the piping of the vent has something of prophecy in it, though the wind bloweth where it listeth. I have only a scholar’s interest in these things, I give you my word, and——”
He laughed with a little restraint before he went on.
“Do you know, John,” he called out to M’Iver—“do you know what our cailleach friend says of our jaunt? She put a head in at my tent last night, and ‘Listen, MacCailein,’ said she, ‘and keep on high roads,’ said she, ‘and Inverlochy’s a perilous place,’ said she, ‘and I’d be wae to see the heather above the gall.’”
John Splendid’s back was to him as he sat at the prow of a boat coming close on our stern, but I saw the skin of his neck flame. He never turned: he made no answer for a moment, and when he spoke it was with a laughing allusion in English to the folly of portents.
This was so odd an attitude for a man usually superstitious to take up, that I engaged him on the point whenever we landed.