While M’Iver and I and the gillie waited the woman’s coming, MacLachlan tossed in a fever, his mind absent and his tongue running on without stoppage, upon affairs of a hundred different hues, but all leading sooner or later to some babble about a child. It was ever “the dear child,” the “m’eudailgheal” “the white treasure,” “the orphan “; it was always an accent of the most fond and lingering character. I paid no great heed to this constant wail; but M’Iver pondered and studied, repeating at last the words to himself as MacLachlan uttered them.
“If that’s not the young one in Carlunnan he harps on,” he concluded at last, “I’m mistaken. He seems even more wrapt in the child than does the one we know who mothers it now, and you’ll notice, by the way, he has nothing to say of her.”
“Neither he has,” I confessed, well enough pleased with a fact he had no need to call my attention to.
“Do you know, I’m on the verge of a most particular deep secret?” said John, leaving me to guess what he was at, but I paid no heed to him.
The skilly dame came in with her clouts and washes. She dressed the lad’s wound and drugged him to a more cooling slumber, and he was to be left in bed till the next day.
“What’s all his cry about the child?” asked M’Iver, indifferently, as we stood at the door before leaving. “Is it only a fancy on his brain, or do you know the one he speaks of?”
She put on a little air of vanity, the vanity of a woman who knows a secret the rest of the world, and man particularly, is itching to hear. “Oh, I daresay he has some one in his mind,” she admitted; “and I daresay I know who it might be too, for I was the first to sweel the baby and the last to dress its mother—blessing with her!”
M’I ver turned round and looked her, with cunning humour, in the face. “I might well guess that,” he said; “you have the best name in the countryside for these offices, that many a fumbling dame botches. I suppose,” he added, when the pleasure in her face showed his words had found her vanity—“I suppose you mean the bairn up in Carlunnan?”
“That’s the very one,” she said with a start; “but who told you?”
“Tuts!” said he, slyly, “the thing’s well enough known about the Castle, and MacLachlan himself never denied he was the father. Do you think a secret like that could be kept in a clattering parish like Inneraora?”