'Twas a summer's end when he went on the next jaunt, a hot night and hung with dripping stars. The loch crawled in from a black waste of sorrow and strange hills, and swished on the shore, trailing among the wreck with the hiss of fingers through ribbons of silk. My dears, my dears! the gloom of hidden seas in night and lonely places! 'Tis that dauntens me. I will be standing sometimes at the night's down-fall over above the bay, and hearkening to the grinding of the salt wash on rock and gravel, and never a sound of hope or merriment in all that weary song. You that have seeing may ken the meaning of it; never for Paruig Dali but wonder and the heavy heart!
“'Tis our thought a thousand times, just man; we are the stour that wind and water make the clod of! You spoke of a second jaunt?”
As ye say. It was in winter; and the morning—
“Winter, said ye, Paruig Dali? 'Twas summer and night before.”
Winter I said, and winter it was, before faoilteach, and the edge of the morning. The fellow of my sgeul, more than a twelvemonth older, went to the breast wall and cried on Barge Blue that's ever waiting for the sailor who's for sailing on fairy seas.
In she came, with her twelve red-shirts tugging bravely at the oars, and the nose of her ripping the salt bree. Out, too, the carved plank, made, I'll warrant, by the Norwegian fellow who fashioned the Black Bed of MacArtair, and over it to the cushioned seat Adventurer!
The little waves blobbed and bubbled at the boat's shoulders; she put under the arch and up the cold river to the white stairs.
It was the middle and bloodiest time of all our wars. The glens behind were harried, and their cattle were bellowing in strange fields. Widows grat on the brae-sides and starved with their bairns for the bere and oat that were burned. But Adventurer found a castle full of company, the rich scum of water-side lairds and Lowland gentry, dicing and drinking in the best hall of Castle Dark. Their lands were black, their homes levelled, or their way out of the country—if they were Lowland—was barred by jealous clans. So there they were, drinking the reddest and eating the fattest—a wanton crew, among them George Mor, namely for women and wine and gentlemanly sword-play.
They had been at the cartes after supper. Wine lay on the table in rings and rivers. The curtains were across the window, and the candles guttered in the sconces. Debauched airs flaffed abroad in the room. At the head of the board, with her hair falling out of the knot, the lady of the house dovered in her chair, her head against George Mor's shoulder, and him sleeping fast with his chin on his vest. Two company girls from the house in the forest slept forward on the table, their heads on the thick of their arms, and on either hand of them the lairds and foreigners. Of the company but two were awake, playing at bord-dubh, small eyed, oozing with drink. But they slept by-and-by like the lave, and sleep had a hold of Castle Dark through and through.
Adventurer heard the cock crow away at the gean-tree park.