THE MASTER COMES HOME
And what in all the annals of romantic adventure could be found more
utterly hopeless than Wat Gordon's quest? He was doubly outlawed.
For not only had James Stuart proclaimed him outlaw, but he had been
out with the enemies of the Prince of Orange, now King William the
Third of Great Britain and Ireland. He had fought at Killiekrankie
and Dunkeld. He had ridden through all the north country at Dundee's
bridle-rein. He was a fugitive from a military prison in the prince's
own province of the Netherlands. He possessed but ten golden guineas
in the world. His ancestral tower of Lochinvar was little better than
a dismantled fortalice. And then as to his quest, he went to seek his
love in her home, to rescue her from among her friends, and from the
midst of the retainers of her father's estate, and those more numerous
and reckless riders who had come with my lady the duchess from the
Grenoch. Doubtless, also, my Lord of Barra would bring with him a great
attendance of his friends. The chances against Lochinvar's success were
infinite. Another man would have given up in despair, but in the mind
of Wat Gordon there was only one thought: "She called me and I will go
to her. Though I am traitor and outlaw alike to the king-over-the-water
and the prince at Whitehall, proscribed alike by white rose and orange
lily, I am yet all true to Kate and to love."
The desperate, unutterable details of that great mad journey can never
be written down. For even Wat himself, in after-days, scarce remembered
how, when one horse was wearied, he managed to exchange it for another
and ride on--sometimes salving his conscience by leaving to the
owner one of his dwindling golden guineas; or how he was attacked by
footpads and escaped, having cut down one and frightened the other into
delivering over (in trust, as it were, for King James) every stiver of
his ill-gotten gains--poor crazed Wat meanwhile tossing his fevered
head and wavering a pistol before the knave's astonished eyes as he
bade him stand and deliver.
"'Tis a lesson to you," said Wat, didactically; "ye will thank me for
it one day when ye lie down to die a clean-straw death instead of
dancing your last on a gallows, with the lads crying your dying speech
beneath your very feet as ye dangle over the Grass-market."
How he won through with bare life Wat never knew; nor yet with what
decent householders he had negotiated exchange of horses without their
consent. For long years afterwards, whenever Wat was a little feverish,
scraps of conversations used to return to him, and forgotten incidents
flashed clear upon him, which he knew must have happened during these
terrible last days ere, with the homing instinct of a wounded animal
chased desperately by the hunters, he reached the little gray tower
of Lochinvar set lonely in the midst of its moorland loch. Sometimes
on the Edinburgh street in after-years he stumbled unexpectedly on a
face he recognized. A countryman newly come into market would set his
hands on his hips and stare earnestly up at him. Then Wat would say
to himself, "There goes a creditor of mine; I wonder if I gave him a
better horse than I took, or if he wants to claim the balance now."
But who in the great lord of Parliament could spy out the white-faced,
desperate lad--half-hero, half-highwayman--whose supple sword flashed
like the waving of a willow wand, and whose cocked pistol was in his
fingers at the faintest hint of opposition?
It was evening of a great, solemn, serene September day when Wat
reached the edges of the loch, upon the little island in the midst
of which stood the ancestral tower of his forebears. There was no
smoke going up from its chimneys. The water slept black from the very
margin, deeply stained with peat. The midges danced and balanced; the
moor-birds cried; the old owl hooted from the gables; the retired stars
twinkled reticently above, just as they had done in Wat's youth. A
strange fancy came over him. He had come home from market at Dumfries.
Presently his father would cry down to him from his chamber what was
the price of sheep on the Plainstones that day, and if that behindhand
rascal, Andrew Sim of Gordieston, had paid his rent yet. His mother--
Ah! but wait; he had no father! He had seen his father's head over the
port of Edinburgh, and something, he could not remember what, happened
after that. Had he not buried his mother in the green kirkyard of
Dalry? What, then, had he come home for? There was some one he loved in
danger--some one with eyes deep as the depths of the still and gloomy
waters that encircled Lochinvar.
Ah, now he remembered--the heart, Kate's heart of gold! It was safe
in his bosom. Ten days' grace when he left his cousin Will! But had
he ridden five days or fifty? Sometimes it seemed but one day, and
sometimes an eternity, since he rode away from Jack Scarlett at the
ford above Dunkeld.
What was that noise? An enemy? Wat clutched his sword instinctively.
No, nothing more than his poor horse, the last incarnation of his
cousin Will's charger, with which he had left the stables of Dunkeld.
The poor beast had tried to drink of the peaty brew of the loch, but
what with the fatigue and the rough riding, it had fallen forward,
with its nose in the shallows, and now lay breathing out its last in
rattling gasps.
Wat stooped and patted the flaccid neck as the spasms relaxed and it
rolled to the side.
"Poor thing--poor thing--ye are well away. Maybe there is a heaven for
horses also, where the spirit of the beast may find the green eternal
pastures, where the rein does not curb and the saddle leather never
galls."
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."
"What day of the month is this?" cried Wat, eagerly, even before he had
crossed the threshold.
"Laddie, what should auld Jean Gordon ken aboot times and seasons?
Nocht ava--ye couldna expect it. But there is a decent man in the
kitchen that mayhap can tell ye--Peter McCaskill, the Curate o'
Dalry, puir body. He was sorely in fear of being rabbled by the Hill
Folk, so he cam' his ways here, silly body. There's no' a man in the
country-side wad hae laid hand on him--if he would just say his prayer
withoot the book, gie his bit sermon, and stop havering aboot King
Jamie--at least, till he comes to his ain again."
Thus gossiping to keep up Wat Gordon's spirits, the ancient dame led
the way down the passages, with a foot that was yet light upon the
heather, though seventy years scarcely counted up all her mortal span.
"Clerk McCaskill," cried Jean, "ye'll mind Maister Walter? Rise up and
welcome him! For it is in his hoose that ye are sheltered, and, indeed,
his very ale that ye are drinkin' at this moment."
Peter McCaskill rose to his feet and held out his hand to Wat. He was
dressed apparently in the same ancient green surtout he had worn in the
year of Bothwell--a garment which seemed never to get any worse, nor
yet to drop piecemeal from his shoulders with age, but to renew itself
from decade to decade in a decrepit but evergreen youth.
"I am rejoiced to see you in your ain castle, my lord," said the
curate, ceremoniously. Then, catching sight of the pale, desperate
face, he exclaimed, in a different tone, "Preserve us, laddie, what has
ta'en ye? Hae ye slain a man to his wounding--a young man to his hurt?
Are the dead-runners on your track?"
For, indeed, Wat stood like a wild thing, hard beset by the hunters,
which at the last has turned to bay in its lair.
But Wat put aside all questionings with a wave of his hand, a movement
which had something of his old, swift recklessness in it, as of the
days when they named him the Wildcat of Lochinvar.
"Tell me the day of the month," he gasped, as he stood there in the
midst of the floor before the fire of logs which burned on the irons
of the house-place, swaying a little on his feet, and ever checking
himself like a man drunken with wine.
The curate took a little calendar from his pocket--a record of saints'
days and services, but interspersed with the reckonings of ale-houses
and the scores of cock-fightings.
"'Tis the eve of the eighth day of September," he said, moistening his
plump thumb to turn over the leaf that he might not be mistaken in the
month.
"Thank God, I have yet two days!" cried Wat, and fell forward upon the
shoulder of the curate.