“Wait! Wait! She could wait to shame me and mine! No, no, no, Allan Stewart, you go back to Lord Greycourt’s son and his leannan, and say that neither Gorromalt nor any o’ Gorromalt’s kith or kin will have aught to do with that wastrel-lass. Let her death be on her! But it’s a soon easy death it is!… she that slept here this very last night, and away this morning across the moor like a louping doe, before sunburst and an hour to that!”
“She is at the ‘Argyll Arms’ in Kilbrennan. She met the man there. An hour after he had gone, they found her, lying on the deerskin on the hearth, and she with the death-sickness on her, and grave-white, because of the poison there beside her. And now, Archibald Campbell, it is not refusing you will be to come to your own daughter, and she with death upon her, and at the edge o’ the silence!”
But with that Gorromalt uttered wild, savage words, and thrust the old man before him, and bade him begone, and cursed Muireall, and the child she bore within her, and the man who had done this thing, and the father that had brought him into the world, latest adder of an evil brood!
Scarce, however, was the minister gone, and he muttering sore, and frowning darkly at that, than Gorromalt reeled and fell.
The blood had risen to his brain, and he had had a stroke. Sure, the sudden hand of God is a terrifying thing. It was all we could do, with the help of Maisie and Kirsteen, to lift and drag him to his bed.
But an hour after that, when the danger was over, I went to seek Morag. I could find her nowhere. Maisie had seen her last. I thought that she had taken one of the horses from the stable, and ridden towards Kilbrennan: but there was no sign of this. On the long weary moor-road that led across Strathglas to Strathgorm, she could not have walked without being seen by some one at Teenabrae. And everyone there was now going to and fro, with whispers and a dreadful awe.
So I turned and went down by the linn. From there I could see three places where Morag loved to lie and dream: and at one of these I hoped to descry her.
And, sure, so it was. A glimpse I caught of her, across the spray of the linn. She was far up the brown Gorromalt Water, and crouched under a rowan-tree.