“My man died of the plague,” said the woman, blurting out her news, as if eager to get over an awkward business.
I have never seen such a sudden change in a person’s aspect as came over John Splendid in every feature. The vain trim man of a minute ago, stroking his chin and showing a white hand (for the entertainment of the woman he must always be forgetting was without her sight), balancing and posturing on well-curved legs, and jauntily pinning his plaid on his shoulder, in a flash lost backbone. He stepped a pace back, as if some one had struck him a blow, his jaw fell, and his face grew ashen.
Then his eyes went darting about the chamber, and his nostrils sniffed as if disease was a presence to be seen and scented, a thing tangible in the air, maybe to be warded off by a sharp man’s instruction in combat of arms.
“God of grace!” he cried, crossing himself most vigorously for a person of the Protestant religion, and muttering what I have no doubt was some charm of his native glen for the prevention of fevers. He shut his mouth thereafter very quickly on every phrase he uttered, breathing through his nose; at the same time he kept himself, in every part but the shoe-soles he tiptoed on, from touching anything. I could swear the open air of the most unfriendly glen in Christendom was a possession to be envious of for John M’Iver of Barbreck.
Stewart heard the woman’s news that came to him as he was carrying in from the byre the vessels from which he had been serving his companions. He was in a stew more extraordinary than John Splendid; he blanched even to the scars of his half-head, as we say, spat vehemently out of his mouth a piece of bread he was chewing, turned round about in a flash, and into the byre past me as I stood (not altogether alarmed, but yet a little disturbed and uneasy) in the doorway. He emptied his clothing and knapsack of every scrap of food he had purloined, making a goodly heap upon the floor,—the very oaten flour he dusted off his finger-tips, with which he had handled cake that a little ago he was risking his soul’s salvation to secure. And—except the minister—the other occupants of the byre were in an equal terror.
For in this matter of smittal plagues we Highlanders are the most arrant cowards. A man whose life we would save on the field, or the rock-face, or the sea, at the risk of our own lives or the more abominable peril of wound and agony, will die in a ditch of the Spotted Death or a fever before the most valiant of us would put out a hand to cover him again with his blanket He will get no woman to sound his coronach, even if he were Lord of the Isles. I am not making defence or admitting blame, though I have walked in Hamburg when the pitch-barrels blazed in the street, fuming the putrid wind; but there is in the Gaelic character a dread of disfiguration more than of sudden and painful death. What we fear is the black mystery of such disorders: they come on cunning winds unheralded, in fair weather or bad, day or night, to the rich and to the poor, to the strong as to the weak. You may be robust to-day in a smiling country and to-morrow in a twist of agony, coal-black, writhing on the couch, every fine interest in life blotted out by a yellow film upon the eyes. A vital gash with a claymore confers a bloodier but a more comely and natural end. Thus the Gael abhors the very roads that lead to a plague-struck dwelling. If plagues do not kill, they will mar—yes, even against the three charms of Island! and that, too, makes heavier their terror, for a man mutilated even by so little as the loss of a hand is an object of pity to every hale member of his clan. He may have won his infirmity in a noble hour, but they will pity him, and pity to the proud is worse than the glove in the face.
Instantly there was a great to-do in getting away from this most unfortunate dwelling. The lads in the byre shook tartan and out to the fresh air, and rejoiced in the wind with deep-drawn gulping breaths, as if they might wash the smallest dust of disease from their bodily systems. So at last only M’Iver and I were left standing at the door.
“Well,” said John, with an effort, “we must be going. I never thought it was so late. And we must be on the other side of Dalness before very long. You have been very good to us, and my name’s John M’I ver of Barbreck—a kind of a Campbell with a great respect for the Mac-Donalds, of whom I kent a few perfect gentry in foreign wars I have been at the fighting of. And—good day, mistress, we must be going. My friends have the very small manners surely, for they’re off down the road. Well just let them go that way. What need ye expect off small men and gillies?”
He signed to me with a shake of his sporran to show it was empty, and, falling to his meaning, I took some silver from my own purse and offered it to the glum-faced lad in the blankets. Beetle-brow scowled, and refused to put a hand out for it, so I left it on a table without a clink to catch the woman’s ear.
“Would you not have a deoch-an-doruis?” asked the woman, making to a press and producing a bottle.