“Willie’s ga’en to Melville Castle,
Boots an’ spurs an’ a’—!”
As for me, I was ready to sink deep into the ground with despondency, wishful to rise never more. But I stopped, and though Uncle Eben was almost opposite to me, and within thirty yards, I called after her, “The day will come, Irma Maitland, when you will be sorry for the injustice you are doing!”
For I thought of how she would feel when Charlotte told about her cousin Tam Gallaberry and all that I had done for them—though, indeed, it was mostly by accident. Only I could trust Charlotte to keep her thumb upon that part of it.
I did not know what she felt then, nor, perhaps, do I quite know yet; but she caught a tangle of wild cut-leafed ivy from a tree on which I had long watched it grow, and with a spray of small green leaves she crowned herself, and so departed as she had come, singing as if she had not a care in the world, or as if I, Duncan MacAlpine, were the last and least of all.
And yet I judged that there might be a message for me in that very act. She had escaped me, and yet there was something warm in her heart in spite of all. Perhaps, who knows, an angel had gone down and troubled the waters; nor did I think, somehow, that any other would step in there before me.
After that I went down to see Fred Esquillant, who listened with sad yet brilliant eyes to my tangled tale.
“You are the lucky one,” I said, “to have nothing to do with the lasses. See what trouble they lead you into.”
He broke out suddenly.
“Be honest, Duncan,” he said, “if you must boast! If you are bound to lie, let it not be to me. You would not have it otherwise. You would not be as I am, not for all the gold of earth. No”—he held his breath a long while—“no, and I, if I had the choice, would I not give all that I have, or am ever likely to have, for—but no, I’m a silent Scot, and I canna speak the word——”
“I’m the other sort of Scot,” I cried, “and I’ll speak it for you. Man, it’s the first decent human thing I have ever heard come out o’ your mouth. You would give all for LOVE!”