“Not all I want, perhaps,” said I; “for do you know that fleeing thus from the disgrace of my countrymen, I could surrender every sorrow and every desire to one notion about—about—about——”
“A girl of the middle height,” said he, “and her name is——”
“Do not give it an utterance,” I cried. “I would be sorry to breathe her name in such a degradation. Degradation indeed, and yet if I had the certainty that I was a not altogether hopeless suitor yonder, I would feel a conqueror greater than Hector or Gilian-of-the-Axe.”
“Ay, ay,” said John. “I would not wonder. And I’ll swear that a man of your fate may have her if he wants her. I’ll give ye my notion of wooing; it’s that with the woman free and the man with some style and boldness, he may have whoever he will.”
“I would be sorry to think it,” said I; “for that might apply to suitors at home in Inneraora as well as me.”
M’Iver laughed at the sally, and “Well, well,” said he, “we are not going to be debating the chance of love on Leven-side, with days and nights of slinking in the heather and the fern between us and our home.”
Though this conversation of ours may seem singularly calm and out of all harmony with our circumstances, it is so only on paper, for in fact it took but a minute or two of our time as we walked down among those whins that inspired me with the peaceful premonition of the coming years. We were walking, the seven of us, not in a compact group, but scattered, and at the whins when we rested we sat in ones and twos behind the bushes, with eyes cast anxiously along the shore for sign of any craft that might take us over.
What might seem odd to any one who does not know the shrinking mood of men broken with a touch of disgrace in their breaking, was that for long we studiously said nothing of the horrors we had left behind us. Five men fleeing from a disastrous field and two new out of the clutches of a conquering foe, we were dumb or discoursed of affairs very far removed from the reflection that we were a clan at extremities.
But we could keep up this silence of shame no longer than our running: when we sat among the whins on Leven-side, and took a breath and scrutinised along the coast, for sign of food or ferry, we must be talking of what we had left behind.
Gordon told the story with a pained, constrained, and halting utterance: of the surprise of Auchinbrcac when he heard the point of war from Nevis Glen, and could not believe that Montrose was so near at hand; of the waver ing Lowland wings, the slaughter of the Campbell gentlemen.