We went along the road two and two, M’Iver keeping company behind with the valet, who would have stabbed me in the back in all likelihood ere we had made half our journey, had there been no such caution. We walked at a good pace, and fast as we walked it was not fast enough for my eagerness, so that my long steps set the shorter ones of MacLachlan pattering beside me in a most humorous way that annoyed him much, to judge from the efforts he made to keep time and preserve his dignity. Not a word, good or bad, was exchanged between us; he left the guidance to me, and followed without a pause when, over the tip of the brae at Tarra Dubh, I turned sharply to the left and plunged into the wood.
In this part of the wood there is a larach or site of an ancient church. No stone stands there to-day, no one lives who has known another who has heard another say he has seen a single stone of this umquhile house of God; but the sward lies flat and square as in a garden, levelled, and in summer fringed with clusters of the nettle that grows over the ruins of man with a haste that seems to mock the brevity of his interests, and the husbandman and the forester for generations have put no spade to its soil. A cill or cell we call it in the language; and the saying goes among the people of the neighbourhood that on the eve of Saint Patrick bells ring in this glade in the forest, sweet, soft, dreamy bells, muffled in a mist of years—bells whose sounds have come, as one might fancy, at their stated interval, after pealing in a wave about God’s universe from star to star, back to the place of their first chiming. Ah! the monk is no longer there to hear them, only the mavis calls and the bee in its period hums where matins rose. A queer thought this, a thought out of all keeping with my bloody mission in the wood, which was to punish this healthy youth beside me; yet to-day, looking back on the occasion, I do not wonder that, going a-murdering, my mind in that glade should soften by some magic of its atmosphere. For, ever was I a dreamer, as this my portion of history may long since have disclosed. Ever must I be fronting the great dumb sorrow of the universe, thinking of loves undone, of the weakness of man, poor man, a stumbler under the stars, the sickening lapse of time, the vast and awesome voids left by people dead, laughter quelled, eyes shut for evermore, and scenes evanished. And it was ever at the crisis of things my mind took on this mood of thought and pity.
It was not of my own case I reflected there, but of the great swooning silences that might be tenanted ere the sun dropped behind the firs by the ghost of him I walked with. Not of my own father, but of an even older man in a strath beyond the water hearing a rap at his chamber door to-night and a voice of horror tell him he had no more a son. A fool, a braggart, a liar the less, but still he must leave a vacancy at the hearth! My glance could not keep off the shoulder of him as he walked cockily beside me, a healthy brown upon his neck, and I shivered to think of this hour as the end of him, and of his clay in a little stretched upon the grass that grew where psalm had chanted and the feet of holy men had passed. Kill him! The one thrust of fence I dare not neglect was as sure as the arrow of fate; I knew myself in my innermost his executioner.
It was a day, I have said, of exceeding calm, with no trace left almost of the winter gone, and the afternoon came on with a crimson upon the west, and numerous birds in flying companies settled upon the bushes. The firs gave a perfume from their tassels and plumes, and a little burn among the bushes gurgled so softly, so like a sound of liquor in a goblet, that it mustered the memories of good companionship. No more my mind was on the knave and liar, but on the numerous kindnesses of man.
We stepped in upon the bare larach with the very breath checked upon our lips. The trees stood round it and back, knowing it sanctuary; tall trees, red, and rough at the hide, cracked and splintered in roaring storms; savage trees, coarse and vehement, but respecting that patch of blessed memory vacant quite but of ourselves and a little bird who turned his crimson breast upon us for a moment then vanished with a thrill of song. Crimson sky, crimson-vested bird, the colour of that essence I must be releasing with the push of a weapon at that youth beside me!
John Splendid was the first to break upon the silence.
“I was never so much struck with the Sunday feeling of a place,” he said; “I daresay we could find a less melancholy spot for our meeting if we searched for it, but the day goes, and I must not be putting off an interesting event both of you, I’m sure, are eager to begin.”
“Indeed we might have got a more suitable place in many ways,” I confessed, my hands behind me, with every scrap of passion gone from my heart.
MacLachlan showed no such dubiety. “What ails you at the place?” he asked, throwing his plaid to his servant, and running his jacket off its wooden buttons at one tug. “It seems to me a most particularly fine place for our business. But of course,” he added with a sneer, “I have not the experience of two soldiers by trade, who are so keen to force the combat.”
He threw off his belt, released the sword from its scabbard—a clumsy weapon of its kind, abrupt, heavy, and ill-balanced, I could tell by its slow response to his wrist as he made a pass or two in the air to get the feel of it. He was in a cold bravado, the lad, with his spirit up, and utterly reckless of aught that might happen him, now saying a jocular word to his man, and now gartering his hose a little more tightly.