“Biadh an diugh, cogadh a maireach—food to-day, war to-morrow,” said the son of kings. “Royal’s my race! A man should aye be laying in as he goes: if I had not had my wallet on Loch Leven-side, I ken some gentry who would have been as hungry as common herds, and with nothing to help it.”
John Splendid laughed again. “Wise man, Rob!” said he; “you learnt the first principles of campaigning in Appin as nicely as ever I did in the wars of the Invincible Lion (as they called him) of the North. Our reverend comrade here, by the wisdom of his books, never questions, it seems, that we have a lease of Dalness house as long as we like to stay in it, its pendicles and pertinents, lofts, crofts, gardens, mills, multures, and sequels, as the lawyers say in their damned sheep-skins, that have been the curse of the Highlands even more than books have been. Now I’ve had an adventure like this before. Once in Regenwalde, between Danzig and Stettin, where we lay for two months, I spent a night with a company of Hepburn’s blades in a castle abandoned by a cousin of the Duke of Pomerania. Roystering dogs! Stout hearts! Where are they now, those fine lads in corslet and morgensterne, who played havoc with the casks in the Regenwalde cellar? Some of them died of the pest in Schiefelbein, four of them fell under old Jock Hepburn at Frankfort, the lave went wandering about the world, kissing and drinking, no doubt, and lying and sorrowing and dying, and never again will we foregather in a vacant house in foreign parts! For that is the hardship of life, that it’s ever a flux and change. We are here to-day and away to-morrow, and the bigger the company and the more high-hearted the merriment, the less likely is the experience to be repeated. I’m sitting here in a miraculous dwelling in the land of Lorn, and I have but to shut my eyes and round about me are cavaliers of fortune at the board. I give you the old word, Elrigmore: ‘Claymore and the Gael ‘; for the rest—pardon me—you gentlemen are out of the ploy. I shut my eyes and I see Fowlis and Farquhar, Mackenzie, Obisdell, Ross, the two balbiren and stabknechten with their legs about the board; the wind’s howling up from Stettin road; to-morrow we may be carrion in the ditch at Guben’s Gate, or wounded to a death by slow degrees in night scaladoe. That was soldiering. You fought your equals with art and science; here’s—— Well, well, God’s grace for MacCailein Mor!”
“God’s grace for us all!” said the minister.
The man with the want fell fast asleep in his chair, with his limbs in gawky disposition. Stewart’s bullet-head, with the line of the oval unbroken by ears, bobbed with affected eagerness to keep up with the fast English utterance and the foreign names of M’Iver, while all the time he was fingering some metal spoons and wondering if money was in them and if they could be safely got to Inneraora. Sonachan and the baron-bailie dipped their beaks in the jugs, and with lifted heads, as fowls slocken their thirst, they let the wine slip slowly down their throats, glucking in a gluttonous ecstasy.
“God’s grace for us all!” said the minister again, as in a benediction.
M’Iver pushed back his chair without rising, and threw a leg across its arm with a complacent look at the shapely round of the calf, that his hose still fitted with wonderful neatness considering the stress they must have had from wind and rain.
“We had grace indeed,” said he, “in Pomerania. We came at night, just as now, upon this castle of its most noble and puissant lord. It was Palm Sunday, April the third, Old Style. I mind, because it was my birthday; the country all about was bursting out in a most rare green; the gardens and fields breathed sappy odours, and the birds were throng at the Digging of their homes in bush and eave; the day sparkled, and river and cloud too, till the spirit in a person jigged as to a fiddle; the nights allured to escapade.”
“What was the girl’s name?” I asked M’Iver, leaning forward, finding his story in some degree had parallel with my own.
“Her name, Colin—I did not mention the girl, did I? How did you guess there was a girl in it?” said John, perplexed.
I flushed at my own transparency, and was glad to see that none but the minister (and M’Iver a little later) had observed the confession of my query. The others were too busy on carnal appetites to feel the touch of a sentiment wrung from me by a moment’s illusion.