“It beats me to fathom,” I confessed. “Do I understand that you admitted to the lady that you were the father of the child?”
“I admitted nothing,” he said, cunningly, “if you’ll take the trouble to think again. I but let the lady have her own way, which most of her sex generally manage from me in the long-run.”
“But, man! you could leave her only one impression, that you are as black as she thinks you, and am I not sure you fall far short of that?”
“Thank you,” he said; “it is good of you to say it. I am for off whenever my affairs here are settled, and when I’m the breadth of seas afar from Inneraora, you’ll think as well as you can of John M’Iver, who’ll maybe not grudge having lost the lady’s affection if he kept his friend’s and comrade’s heart.”
He was vastly moved as he spoke. He took my hand and wrung it fiercely; he turned without another word, good or ill, and strode back on his way to the camp, leaving me to seek my way to the town alone.
CHAPTER XXXII.—A SCANDAL AND A QUARREL.
On some days I kept to Glen Shim as the tod keeps to the cairn when heather burns, afraid almost to let even my thoughts wander there lest they should fly back distressed, to say the hope I cherished was in vain. I worked in the wood among Use pines that now make rooftrees for my home, and at nights I went on ttilidh among some of the poorer houses of the Glen, and found a drug for a mind uneasy in the talcs our peasants told around the fire. A drug, and yet a drug sometimes with the very disease in itself I sought for it to kill. For the love of a man for a maid is the one story of all lands, of all ages, trick it as we may, and my good people, telling their old ancient histories round the lire, found, although they never knew it, a young man’s quivering heart a score of times a night.
Still at times, by day and night—ay! in the very midmost watches of the stars-I walked, in my musing, as I thought, upon the causeyed street, where perhaps I had been sooner in the actual fact if M’Iver’s departure had not been delayed. He was swaggering, they told me, about the town in his old regimentals, every pomp of the foreign soldier assumed again as if they had never been relaxed in all those yean of peace and commerce. I drank stoutly in the taverns, and ‘twas constantly, “Landlady, I’m the lawing,” for the fishermen, that they might love him. A tale went round, too, that one morning he went to a burial in Kilmalieu, and Argile was there seeing the last of an old retainer to his long home, and old Macnachtan came riding down past corpse and mourner with his only reverence a finger to his cap. “Come down off your horse when death or Argile goes bye,” cried M’Iver, hauling the laird off his saddle. But between Argile and him were no transactions; the pride of both would not allow it, though it was well known that their affections were stronger than ever they had been before, and that Gordon made more than one attempt at a plan to bring them together.
It is likely, too, I had been down—leaving M’Iver out of consideration altogether—had there not been the tales about MacLachlan, tales that came to my ears in the most miraculous way, with no ill intention on the part of the gossips—about his constant haunting of Inneraora and the company of his cousin. He had been seen there with her on the road to Carlunnan. That venue of all others! God! did the river sing for him too among its reeds and shallows; did the sun tip Dunchuach like a thimble and the wild beast dally on the way? That was the greatest blow of all! It left plain (I thought in ray foolishness) the lady’s coolness when last I met her; for rae henceforth (so said bitterness) the serious affairs of life, that in her notion set me more than courtship. I grew solemn, so gloomy in spirit that even my father observed the ceasing of my whistle and song, and the less readiness of my smile. And he, poor man, thought it the melancholy of Inverlochy and the influence of this ruined countryside.