“You’re in some ways a lucky man,” said the Marquis, still in the most sad and tolerant humour. “Did you never have a second’s doubt about the right of your side in battle?”
“Here’s to the doubt, sir!” said M’Iver. “I’m like yourself and every other man in a quandary of that kind, that thinking on it rarely brought me a better answer to the guess than I got from my instinct to start with.”
Argile put his fingers through his hair, clearing the temples, and shutting wearied eyes on a perplexing world.
“I have a good deal of sympathy with John’s philosophy,” I said, modestly. “I hold with my father that the sword is as much God’s scheme as the cassock. What are we in this expedition about to start but the instruments of Heaven’s vengeance on murtherers and unbelievers?”
“I could scarcely put it more to the point myself,” cried M’Iver. “A soldier’s singular and essential duty is to do the task set him with such art and accomplishment as he can—in approach, siege, trench, or stronghold.”
“Ay, ay! here we are into our dialectics again,” said his lordship, laughing, with no particular surrender in his merriment. “You gentlemen make no allowance for the likelihood that James Grahame, too, may be swearing himself Heaven’s chosen weapon. ‘Who gave Jacob to the spoil and Israel to the robbers—did not I, the Lord?’ Oh, it’s a confusing world!”
“Even so, MacCailein; I’m a plain man,” said M’Iver, “though of a good family, brought up roughly among men, with more regard to my strength and skill of arm than to book-learning; but I think I can say that here and in this crisis I am a man more fit, express, and appropriate than yourself. In the common passions of life, in hate, in love, it is the simple and confident act that quicker achieves its purpose than the cunning ingenuity. A man in a swither is a man half absent, as poor a fighter as he is indifferent a lover; the enemy and the girl will escape him ere he has throttled the doubt at his heart There’s one test to my mind for all the enterprises of man—are they well contrived and carried to a good conclusion? There may be some unco quirks to be performed, and some sore hearts to confer at the doing of them, but Heaven itself, for all its puissance, must shorten the pigeon’s wing that the gled of the wood may have food to live on.”
“Upon my word, M’Iver,” said Argile, “you beat me at my own trade of debate, and—have you ever heard of a fellow Machiavelli?”
“I kent a man of that name in a corps we forgathered with at Mentz—a ‘provient schriever,’ as they called him. A rogue, with a hand in the sporran of every soldier he helped pay wage to.”
“This was a different person; but no matter. Let us back to the beginning of our argument—why did you favour my leaving for Dunbarton when Montrose came down the Glen?”