“Then she’ll bide with me,” said the father, angrily.
“You dare not, as a Christian professor, keep an excommunicate in your house,” said Gordon; “but taking to consideration that excommunication precludes not any company of natural relations, we ordain you never to keep her in your house in this parish any more; but if you have a mind to do so with her, to follow her wherever she goes.”
And that sorry small family went out at the door, in tears.
Some curious trials followed, and the making of quaint bylaws; for now that his lordship, ever a restraining influence on his clans, was bound for new wars elsewhere, a firmer hand was wanted on the people he left behind, and Master Gordon pressed for stricter canons. Notification was made discharging the people of the burgh from holding lyke-wakes in the smaller houses, from unnecessary travel on the Sabbath, from public flyting and abusing, and from harbouring ne’er-do-weels from other parishes; and seeing it had become a practice of the women attending kirk to keep their plaids upon their heads and faces in time of sermon as occasion of sleeping, as also that they who slept could not be distinguished from those who slept not, that they might be wakened, it was ordained that such be not allowed hereafter, under pain of taking the plaids from them.
With these enactments too came evidence of the Kirk’s paternity. It settled the salary (200 pounds Scots) of a new master for the grammar-school, agreed to pay the fees of divers poor scholars, instructed the administering of the funds in the poor’s-box, fixed a levy on the town for the following week to help the poorer wives who would be left by their fencible husbands, and paid ten marks to an elderly widow woman who desired, like a good Gael, to have her burial clothes ready, but had not the wherewithal for linen.
“We are,” said Master Gordon, sharpening a pen in a pause ere the MacNicolls came forward, “the fathers and guardians of this parish people high and low. Too long has Loch Finne side been ruled childishly. I have no complaint about its civil rule—his lordship here might well be trusted to that; but its religion was a thing of rags. They tell me old Campbell in the Gaelic end of the church (peace with him!) used to come to the pulpit with a broadsword belted below his Geneva gown. Savagery, savagery, rank and stinking! I’ll say it to his face in another world, and a poor evangel and ensample truly for the quarrelsome landward folk of this parish, that even now, in the more unctuous times of God’s grace, doff steel weapons so reluctantly. I found a man with a dirk at his hip sitting before the Lord’s table last Lammas!”
“Please God,” said the Marquis, “the world shall come to its sight some day. My people are of an unruly race, I ken, good at the heart, hospitable, valorous, even with some Latin chivalry; but, my sorrow! they are sorely unamenable to policies of order and peace.”
“Deil the hair vexed am I,” said John Splendid in my ear; “I have a wonderful love for nature that’s raw and human, and this session-made morality is but a gloss. They’ll be taking the tartan off us next maybe! Some day the old dog at the heart of the Highlands will bark for all his sleek coat Man! I hate the very look of those Lowland cattle sitting here making kirk laws for their emperors, and their bad-bred Scots speech jars on my ear like an ill-tuned bagpipe.”
Master Gordon possibly guessed what was the topic of Splendid’s confidence,—in truth, few but knew my hero’s mind on these matters; and I have little doubt it was for John’s edification he went on to sermonise, still at the shaping of his pen.
“Your lordship will have the civil chastisement of these MacNicolls after this session is bye with them. We can but deal with their spiritual error. Nicol Beg and his relatives are on our kirk rolls as members or adherents, and all we can do is to fence the communion-table against them for a period, and bring them to the stool of repentance. Some here may think a night of squabbling and broken heads in a Highland burgh too trifling an affair for the interference of the kirk or the court of law: I am under no such delusion. There is a valour better than the valour of the beast unreasoning. Your lordship has seen it at its proper place in your younger wars; young Elrigmore, I am sure, has seen it on the Continent, where men live quiet burgh lives while left alone, and yet comport themselves chivalrously and gallantly on the stricken fields when their country or a cause calls for them so to do. In the heart of man is hell smouldering, always ready to leap out in flames of sharpened steel; it’s a poor philosophy that puffs folly in at the ear to stir the ember, saying, ‘Hiss, catch him, dog!’ I’m for keeping hell (even in a wild High-landman’s heart) for its own business of punishing the wicked.”