“You’re the first I ever heard get to the marrow of it,” confessed the Dame Dubh. “MacLachlan himself never thought I was in the woman’s confidence, and I’ve seen him in Carlunnan there since I came home, pretending more than a cousin’s regard for the Provost’s daughter so that he might share in the bairn’s fondling. He did it so well, too, that the lady herself would talk of its fatherless state with tears in her eyes.”
I stood by, stunned at the revelation that brought joy from the very last quarter where I would have sought it. But I must not let my rapture at the idea of MacLachlan’s being no suitor of the girl go too far till I confirmed this new intelligence.
“Perhaps,” I said in a little to the woman, “the two of them fondling the bairn were chief enough, though they did not share the secret of its fatherhood.”
“Chief!” she cried; “the girl has no more notion of MacLachlan than I have, if an old woman’s eyes that once were clear enough for such things still show me anything. I would have been the first to tell her how things stood if I had seen it otherwise. No, no; Mistress Brown has an eye in other quarters. What do you say to that, Barbreck?” she added, laughing slyly to my friend.
A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lain on it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or pretended to find, in my silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future. And then this rapture was followed by a gladness no less profound that Mac-Lachlan, bad as he had been, was not the villain quite I had fancied: if he had bragged of conquests, it had been with truth though not with decency.
Inneraora, as we returned to it that night, was a town enchanted; again its lights shone warm and happily. I lingered late in its street, white in the light of the stars, and looked upon the nine windows of Askaig’s house. There was no light in all the place; the lower windows of the tenement were shuttered, and slumber was within. It gave me an agreeable exercise to guess which of the unshuttered nine would let in the first of the morning light on a pillow with dark hair tossed upon it and a rounded cheek upon a hand like milk.
CHAPTER XXXIV.—LOVE IN THE WOODS.
Young Lachie did not bide long on our side of the water: a day or two and he was away back to his people, but not before he and I, in a way, patched up once more a friendship that had never been otherwise than distant, and was destined so to remain till the end, when he married my aunt, Nannie Ruadh of the Boshang Gate, whose money we had been led to look for as a help to our fallen fortunes. She might, for age, have been his mother, and she was more than a mother to the child he brought to her from Carlunnan without so much as by your leave, the day after they took up house together. “That’s my son,” said he, “young Lachie.” She looked at the sturdy little fellow beating with a knife upon the bark of an ashen sapling he was fashioning into a whistle, and there was no denying the resemblance. The accident was common enough in those days. “Who is the mother?” was all she said, with her plump hand on the little fellow’s head. “She was So-and-so,” answered her husband, looking into the fire; “we were very young, and I’ve paid the penalty by my rueing it ever since.”
Nannie Ruadh took the child to her heart that never knew the glamour of her own, and he grew up, as I could tell in a more interesting tale than this, to be a great and good soldier, who won battles for his country. So it will be seen that the Dame Dubh’s story to us in the cot by Aora had not travelled very far when it had not in six years reached the good woman of Boshang Gate, who knew everybody’s affairs between the two stones of the parish. M’Iver and I shared the secret with MacLachlan and the nurse of his dead lover; it went no farther, and it was all the more wonderful that John should keep his thumb on it, considering its relevancy to a blunder that made him seem a scoundrel in the eyes of Mistress Betty. Once I proposed to him that through her father she might have the true state of affairs revealed to her.