Argile took a grateful glance at me. “You know what I am,” he said, “not a man of the happy, single mood like our friend Barbreck here, but tossed between philosophies. I am paying bitterly for my pliability, for who so much the sport of life as the man who knows right well the gait he should gang, and prays fervently to be permitted to follow it, but sometimes stumbles in the ditch? Monday, oh Monday; I must be at Edinburgh and face them all! Tis that dauntons me.” His eyes seemed to swim in blood, as he looked at me, or through me, aghast at the horror of his situation, and sweat stood in blobs upon his brow. “That,” he went on, “weighs me down like lead. Here about me my people know me, and may palliate the mistake of a day by the recollection of a lifetime’s honour. I blame Auchinbreac; I blame the chieftains,—they said I must take to the galley; I blame——”
“Blame no one, Argile,” said Master Gordon, standing up before him, not a second too soon, for his lordship had his hand on the dirk M’Iver had thrown down. Then he turned to us with ejecting arms. “Out you go,” he cried sternly, “out you go; what delight have you in seeing a nobleman on the rack?”
As the door closed behind us we could hear Argile sob.
Seventeen years later, if I may quit the thread of my history and take in a piece that more properly belongs to the later adventures of John Splendid, I saw my lord die by the maiden. Being then in his tail, I dined with him and his friends the day before he died, and he spoke with exceeding cheerfulness of that hour M’Iver and I found him in bed in Inneraora. “You saw me at my worst,” said he, “on two occasions; bide till to-morrow and you’ll see me at my best I never unmasked to mortal man till that day Gordon put you out of my room.” I stayed and saw him die; I saw his head up and his chin in the air as behoved his quality, that day he went through that noisy, crowded, causied Edinburgh—Edinburgh of the doleful memories, Edinburgh whose ports I never enter till this day but I feel a tickling at the nape of my neck, as where a wooden collar should lie before the shear fall.
“A cool enough reception this,” said M’Iver, as we left the gate. “It was different last year, when we went up together on your return from Low Germanie. Then MacCailein was in the need of soldiers, now he’s in the need of priests, who gloze over his weakness with their prayers.”
“You are hardly fair either to the one or the other,” I said. “Argile, whom I went in to meet to-day with a poor regard for him, turns out a better man than I gave him credit for being; he has at least the grace to grieve about a great error of judgment, or weakness of the spirit, whichever it may be. And as for Master Gordon, I’ll take off my hat to him. Yon’s no type of the sour, dour, anti-prelatics; he comes closer on the perfect man and soldier than any man I ever met.”
M’Iver looked at me with a sign of injured vanity.
“You’re not very fastidious in your choice of comparisons,” said he. “As for myself, I cannot see much more in Gordon than what he is paid for—a habit of even temper, more truthfulness than I have myself, and that’s a dubious virtue, for see the impoliteness that’s always in its train! Add to that a lack of any clannish regard for MacCailein Mor, whom he treats just like a common merchant, and that’s all. Just a plain, stout, fozy, sappy burrow-man, keeping a gospel shop, with scarcely so much of a man’s parts as will let him fend a blow in the face. I could march four miles for his one, and learn him the A B ab of every manly art.”
“I like you fine, man,” I cried; “I would sooner go tramping the glens with you any day than Master Gordon; but that’s a weakness of the imperfect and carnal man, that cares not to have a conscience at his coat-tail every hour of the day: you have your own parts and he his, and his parts are those that are not very common on our side of the country—more’s the pity.”
M’Iver was too busy for a time upon the sudden rupture with Argile to pay very much heed to my defence of Master Gordon. The quarrel—to call that a quarrel in which one man had all the bad temper and the other nothing but self-reproach—had soured him of a sudden as thunder turns the morning’s cream to curd before noon. And his whole demeanour revealed a totally new man. In his ordinary John was very pernicketty about his clothing, always with the most shining of buckles and buttons, always trim in plaiding, snod and spruce about his hair and his hosen, a real dandy who never overdid the part, but just contrived to be pleasant to the eye of women, who, in my observation, have, the most sensible of them, as great a contempt for the mere fop as they have for the sloven. It took, indeed, trimness of apparel to make up for the plainness of his face. Not that he was ugly or harsh-favoured,—he was too genial for either; he was simply well-favoured enough to pass in a fair, as the saying goes, which is a midway between Apollo and plain Donald But what with a jacket and vest all creased for the most apparent reasons, a plaid frayed to ribbons in dashing through the wood of Dalness, brogues burst at the toes, and a bonnet soaked all out of semblance to itself by rains, he appeared more common. The black temper of him transformed his face too: it lost the geniality that was its main charm, and out of his eyes flamed a most wicked, cunning, cruel fellow.