John glanced at her from the corners of his eyes with a new expression, and asked her if she was fond of bairns.
“Need you ask that of a woman?” she said. “But for the company of this one on my wanderings, my heart had failed me a hundred times a-day. It was seeing him so helpless that gave me my courage: the dark at night in the bothy and the cot and the moaning wind of this lone spot had sent me crazy if I had not this little one’s hand in mine, and his breath in my hair as we lay together.”
“To me,” said John, “they’re like flowers, and that’s the long and the short of it.”
“You’re like most men, I suppose,” said Betty, archly; “fond of them in the abstract, and with small patience for the individuals of them. This one now—you would not take half the trouble with him I found a delight in. But the nursing of bairns—even their own—is not a soldier’s business.”
“No, perhaps not,” said M’Iver, surveying her gravely; “and yet I’ve seen a soldier, a rough hired cavalier, take a wonderful degree of trouble about a duddy little bairn of the enemy in the enemy’s country. He was struck—as he told me after—by the look of it sitting in a scene of carnage, orphaned without the sense of it, and he carried it before him on the saddle for a many leagues’ march till he found a peaceful wayside cottage, where he gave it in the charge of as honest a woman, to all appearance, as these parts could boast He might even—for all I know to the contrary—have fairly bought her attention for it by a season’s paying of the kreutzers, and I know it cost him a duel with a fool who mocked the sentiment of the deed.”
“I hope so brave and good a man was none the worse for his duel in a cause so noble,” said the girl, softly.
“Neither greatly brave nor middling good,” said John, laughing, “at least to my way of thinking, and I know him well. But he was no poorer but by the kreutzers for his advocacy of an orphan bairn.”
“I think I know the man,” said I, innocently, “and his name would be John.”
“And John or George,” said the girl, “I could love him for his story.”
M’Iver lifted a tress of the sleeping child’s hair and toyed with it between his fingers.