“You’re far too soft, man!” he said. “You would have let him go scathless, and even now he has less than his deserts. You have a pretty style of fence, do you know, and I should like to see it paraded against a man more your equal.”
“You’ll never see it paraded by me,” I answered, sorrowfully. “Here’s my last duello, if I live a thousand years.” And I went up and looked at my fallen adversary. He was shivering with cold, though the sweat hung upon the young down of his white cheeks, for the night air was more bitter every passing moment The sun was all down behind the hills, the valley was going to rest, the wood was already in obscurity. If our butcher-work had seemed horrible in that sanctuary in the open light of day, now in the eve it seemed more than before a crime against Heaven. The lad weltering, with no word or moan from his lips; the servant stanching his wound, shaken the while by brotherly tears; M’Iver, the old man-at-arms, indifferent, practised to such sights, and with the heart no longer moved by man-inflicted injury; and over all a brooding silence; over all that place, consecrated once to God and prayer by men of peace, but now degraded to a den of beasts—over it shone of a sudden the new wan crescent moon! I turned me round, I turned and fell to weeping in my hands!
This abject surrender of mine patently more astounded the company than had the accident to MacLachlan. M’Iver stood dumfounded, to behold a cavalier of fortune’s tears, and MacLachlan’s face, for all his pain, gave up its hate and anger for surprise, as he looked at me over the shoulder of his kneeling clansman plying rude leech-craft on his wound.
“Are you vexed?” said he, with short breaths.
“And that bitterly!” I answered.
“Oh, there is nothing to grieve on,” said he, mistaking me most lamentably. “I’ll give you your chance again. I owe you no less; but my knife, if you’ll believe me, sprang out of itself, and I struck at you in a ruddy mist of the senses.”
“I seek no other chance,” I said; “our feuds are over: you were egged on by a subterfuge, deceit has met deceit, and the balance is equal.”
His mood softened, and we helped him to his feet, M’Iver a silent man because he failed to comprehend this turn of affairs. We took him to a cothouse down at the foot of the wood, where he lay while a boy was sent for a skilly woman.
In life, as often as in the stories of man’s invention, it is the one wanted who comes when the occasion needs, for God so arranges, and if it may seem odd that the skilly woman the messenger brought back with him for the dressing of MacLachlan’s wound was no other than our Dark Dame of Lorn, the dubiety must be at the Almighty’s capacity, and not at my chronicle of the circumstance. As it happened, she had come back from Dalness some days later than ourselves, none the worse for her experience among the folks of that unchristian neighbourhood, who had failed to comprehend that the crazy tumult of her mind might, like the sea, have calm in its depths, and that she was more than by accident the one who had alarmed us of their approach. She had come back with her frenzy reduced, and was now with a sister at Balantyre the Lower, whose fields slope on Aora’s finest bend.
For skill she had a name in three parishes; she had charms sure and certain for fevers and hoasts; the lives of children were in her hands while yet their mothers bore them; she knew manifold brews, decoctions, and clysters; at morning on the saints’ days she would be in the woods, or among the rocks by the rising of the sun, gathering mosses and herbs and roots that contain the very juices of health and the secret of age. I little thought that day when we waited for her, and my enemy lay bleeding on the fern, that she would bring me the cure for a sore heart, the worst of all diseases.