“Barbreck be it then. A man in his position thus never learns the truth. He sees around him but plausible faces and the truth at a cowardly compromise. That’s the sorrow of your Highlands; it will be the black curse of your chiefs in the day to come. As for me, I’m for duty first and last—even if it demands me to put a rope at my brother’s neck or my hand in the fire.”
“Maybe you are, maybe you are,” said John, “and it’s very fine of you; and I’m not denying but I can fancy some admirable quality in the character. But if I’m no great hand at the duty, I can swear to the love.”
“It’s a word I hate to hear men using,” said I.
The minister relaxed to a smile at John’s amiability, and John smiled on me.
“It’s a woman’s word, I daresay, Colin,” said he; “but there’s no man, I’ll swear, turning it over more often in his mind than yourself.”
Where we lay, the Pap of Glencoe—Sgor-na-ciche, as they call it in the Gaelic—loomed across Loch Leven in wisps of wind-blown grey. Long-beaked birds came to the sand and piped a sharp and anxious note, or chattered like children. The sea-banks floated on the water, rising and dipping to every wave; it might well be a dream we were in on the borderland of sleep at morning.
“What about Argile?” I asked again.
The minister said never a word. John Splendid rose to his feet, shook the last of his annoyance from him, and cast an ardent glance to those remote hills of Lorn.
“God’s grandeur!” said he, turning to the Gaelic it was proper to use but sparingly before a Saxon. “Behold the unfriendliness of those terrible mountains and ravines! I am Gaelic to the core, but give me in this mood of mine the flat south soil and the dip of the sky round a bannock of country. Oh, I wish I were where Aora runs! I wish I saw the highway of Loch Firme that leads down the slope of the sea where the towns pack close together and fires are warm!” He went on and sang a song of the low country, its multitude of cattle, its friendly hearths, its frequented walks of lovers in the dusk and in the spring.
Sonachan and Ardkinglas and the tacksmen came over to listen, and the man with the want began to weep with a child’s surrender.