So saying Wat divested himself of his arms and upper clothing. He rolled them up, and put them with the saddle and equipment of his dead horse in the safe shelter of a moss-hag. Then, with a last kiss to the gold heart, he dropped silently into the water and swam out towards the island on which the old block-house stood.
Five minutes later Walter Gordon, Lord of Lochinvar, white as death, dripping from head to foot as if the sea had indeed given up its dead, stood on the threshold of the house of his fathers. The master had come home.
The little gray keep on its lonely islet towering above him seemed not so high as of old. It was strangely shrunken. The isle, too, had grown smaller to his travelled eye—probably was so, indeed, for the water had for many years been encroaching on the narrow insulated policies of the tower of Lochinvar.
There to his right was the granite "snibbing-post," to which the boat was usually tied. The pillar had, he remembered, a hole bored through the head of it with a chip knocked out of the side—for making which with a hammer he had been soundly cuffed by his father. And there was the anchored household boat itself, nodding and rocking a little under the northern castle wall, where it descended abruptly into the deeps of the loch.
Wat stood under the carved archway and clattered on the door with a stone picked from the water-side. For the great brass knocker which he remembered had been torn off, no doubt during the troubles which had arisen after Wat himself had been attainted for the wounding of his Grace the Duke of Wellwood.
It was long indeed ere any one came to answer the summons, and meanwhile Wat stood, dripping and shaking, consumed with a deadly weakness, yet conscious of a still more deadly strength. If God would only help him ever so little, he thought—grant him but one night's quiet rest, he could yet do all that which he had come so fast and so far to accomplish.
At last he heard a stir in the tower above. A footstep came steadily and lightly along the stone passages. The thin gleam of a rushlight penetrated beneath the door, and shed a solid ray through the great worn key-hole. The bolts growled and screeched rustily, as if complaining at being so untimely disturbed. The door opened, and there before Wat stood a sweet, placid-browed old lady in the laced cap and stomacher of the ancient days.
"Jean!" he cried, "Jean Gordon, here is your laddie come hame." He spoke just as he had done more than twenty years ago, when many a time he had fallen out with his mother, and betaken himself to the sanctuary of Jean's Wa's by the side of the Garpel Glen.
For Jean Gordon it was, the recluse of the Holy Linn, his cousin Will's ancient nurse and kinswoman, and to them both the kindliest and most lovely old maid in the world.
"Wi' laddie, laddie, what has gotten ye? Ye are a' white and shakin', dripping wet, too; come ben and get a change and let me put ye to your bed."