I dressed myself up in the morning with scrupulous care, put my hair in
a queue, shaved cheek and chin, and put at my shoulder the old heirloom
brooch of the house, which, with some other property, the invaders had
not found below the _bruach_ where we had hid it on the day we had left
Elngmore to their mercy. I was all in a tremor of expectation, hot
and cold by turns in hope and apprehension, but always with a singular
uplifting at the heart, because for good or ill I was sure to meet in
the next hour or two the one person whose presence in Inneraora made
it the finest town in the world. Some men tell me they have felt the
experience more than once; light o’ loves they, errant gallants, I’ll
swear (my dear) the tingle of it came to me but at the thought of
meeting one woman. Had she been absent from Inneraora that morning
I would have avoided it like a leper-house because of its gloomy
memorials; but the very reek of its repairing tenements as I saw them
from the upper windows of my home floating in a haze against the blue
over the shoulder of Dun Torvil seemed to call me on. I went about the
empty chambers carolling like the bird. Aumrie and clothes-press were
burst and vacant, the rooms in all details were bereft and cheerless
because of the plenishing stolen, and my father sat among his losses and
mourned, but I made light of our spoiling.
As if to heighten the rapture of my mood, the day was full of sunshine,
and though the woods crowding the upper glen were leafless and
slumbering, they were touched to something like autumn’s gold. Some
people love the country but in the time of leafage! And laden with
delights in every season of the year, and the end of winter as cheery
a period as any, for I know that the buds are pressing at the bark,
and that the boughs in rumours of wind stretch out like the arms of the
sleeper who will soon be full awake.
Down I went stepping to a merry lilt, banishing every fear from my
thoughts, and the first call I made was on the Provost. He was over in
Akaig’s with his wife and family pending the repair of his own house,
and Askaig was off to his estate. Master Brown sat on the balusters of
the outer stair, dangling his squat legs and studying through horn specs
the talc of thig and theft which the town officer had made up a report
on. As I put my foot on the bottom step he looked up, and his welcome
was most friendly.
“Colin! Colin!” he cried, hastening down to shake me by the hand, “come
your ways in. I heard you got home yesterday, and I was sure you would
give us a call in the by-going to-day. And you’re little the waur of
your jaunt-hale and hearty. We ken all about your prisoning; M’Iver
was in last night and kept the crack going till morning--a most humorous
devil.”
He pinched rappee as he spoke, in rapid doses from a snuff-box, and
spread the brown powder in extravagant carelessness over his vest.
He might affect what light-heartedness he could; I saw that the past
fortnight had made a difference for the worse on him. The pouches below
the eyes had got heavier and darker, the lines had deepened on his brow,
the ruddy polish had gone off his cheek, and it was dull and spotted;
by ten o’clock at night-when he used to be very jovial over a glass--I
could tell he would be haggard and yawning. At his years men begin to
age in a few hours; a sudden wrench to the affections, or shock to
a long-disciplined order of things in their lives, will send them
staggering down off the braehead whereon they have been perched with a
good balance so long that they themselves have forgot the natural course
of human man is to be progressing somewhere.
“Ah, lad, lad! haven’t we the times?” he said, as he led me within to
the parlour. “Inneraora in the stour in her reputation as well as in her
tenements. I wish the one could be amended as readily as the other; but
we mustn’t be saying a word against princes, ye ken,” he went on in
the discreet whisper of the conspirator. “You were up and saw him last
night, I’m hearing. To-day they tell me he’s himself again, and coming
down to a session meeting at noon. I must put myself in his way to say
a friendly word or two. Ah! you’re laughing at us. I understand, man,
I understand. You travellers need not practise the art of civility; but
we’re too close on the castle here to be out of favour with MacCailein
Mor. Draw in your chair, and--Mary, Mary, goodwife! bring in the bottle
with you and see young Elrigmore.”
In came the goodwife with even greater signs of trouble than her
husband, but all in a flurry of good-humoured welcome. They sat, the
pair of them, before me in a little room poorly lit by a narrow window
but half-glazed, because a lower portion of it had been destroyed in
the occupation of the Irish, and had to be timbered up to keep the wind
outside. A douce pathetic pair; I let my thoughts stray a little even
from their daughter as I looked on them, and pondered on the tragedy of
age that is almost as cruel as war, but for the love that set Provost
Brown with his chair haffit close against his wife’s, so that less
noticeably he might take her hand in his below the table and renew the
glow that first they learned, no doubt, when lad and lass awandering in
summer days, oh long ago, in Eas-a-chosain glen.
They plied me with a hundred questions, of my adventures, and of my
father, and of affairs up in Shira Glen. I sat answering very often at
hazard, with my mind fixed on the one question I had to ask, which was a
simple one as to the whereabouts and condition of their daughter. But I
leave to any lad of a shrinking and sensitive nature if this was not a
task of exceeding difficulty. For you must remember that here were two
very sharp-eyed parents, one of them with a gift of irony discomposing
to a lover, and the other or both perhaps, with no reason, so far as
I knew, to think I had any special feeling for the girl. But I knew as
well as if I had gone over the thing a score of times before, how my
manner of putting that simple question would reveal me at a flash to the
irony of the father and the wonder of the mother. And in any case they
gave me not the smallest chance of putting it As they plied me with
affairs a thousand miles beyond the limits of my immediate interest, and
I answered them with a brevity almost discourteous, I was practising two
or three phrases in my mind.
“And how is your daughter, sir?” might seem simple enough, but it would
be too cold for an inquirer to whom hitherto she had always been
Betty; while to ask for Betty outright would--a startling new spring of
delicacy in my nature told me--be to use a friendly warmth only the most
cordial relations with the girl would warrant No matter how I mooted the
lady, I knew something in my voice and the very flush in my face would
reveal my secret My position grew more pitiful every moment, for to
the charge of cowardice I levelled first at myself for my backwardness,
there was the charge of discourtesy. What could they think of ray
breeding that I had not mentioned their daughter? What could I think
from their silence regarding her but that they were vexed at my
indifference to her, and with the usual Highland pride were determined
not even to mention her name till she was asked for. Upon my word,
I was in a trouble more distressing than when I sat in the mist in the
Moor of Rannoch and confessed myself lost! I thought for a little, in a
momentary wave of courage, of leading the conversation in her direction
by harking back to the day when the town was abandoned, and she took
flight with the child into the woods. Still the Provost, now doing all
the talking, while his wife knit hose, would ever turn a hundred by-ways
from the main road I sought to lead him on.
By-and-by, when the crack had drifted hopelessly away from all
connection with Mistress Betty, there was a woman’s step on the stair.
My face became as hot as fire at the sound, and I leaned eagerly forward
in my chair before I thought of the transparency of the movement.
The Provost’s eyes closed to little slits in his face; the corner of his
mouth curled in amusement.
“Here’s Peggy back from Bailie Campbell’s,” he said to his wife, and I
was convinced he did so to let me know the new-comer, who was now moving
about in the kitchen across the lobby, was not the one I had expected.
My disappointment must have shown in my face; I felt I was wasting
moments the most precious, though it was something to be under the same
roof as my lady’s relatives, under the same roof as she had slept below
last night, and to see some of her actual self almost, in the smiles
and eyes and turns of the voice of her mother. I stood up to go, slyly
casting an eye about the chamber for the poor comfort of seeing so
little as a ribbon or a shoe that was hers, but even that was denied
me. The Provost, who, I’ll swear now, knew my trouble from the outset,
though his wife was blind to it, felt at last constrained to relieve it.
“And you must be going,” he said; “I wish you could have waited to see
Betty, who’s on a visit to Carlunnan and should be home by now.”
As he said it, he was tapping his snuff-mull and looking at me pawkily
out of the corners of his eyes, that hovered between me and his wife,
who stood with the wool in her hand, beaming mildly up in my face. I
half turned on my heel and set a restless gaze on the corner of the
room. For many considerations were in his simple words. That he should
say them at all relieved the tension of my wonder; that he should
say them in the way he did, was, in a manner, a manifestation that he
guessed the real state of ray feelings to the lady whose very name I had
not dared to mention to him, and that he was ready to favour any suit
I pressed I was even inclined to push my reading of his remark further,
and say to myself that if he had not known the lady herself favoured me,
he would never have fanned my hope by even so little as an indifferent
sentence.
“And how is she--how is Betty?” I asked, lamely.
He laughed with a pleasing slyness, and gave me a dunt with his elbow on
the side, a bit of the faun, a bit of the father, a bit of my father’s
friend.
“You’re too blate, Colin,” he said, and then he put his arm through his
wife’s and gave her a squeeze to take her into his joke. I would have
laughed at the humour of it but for the surprise in the good woman’s
face. It fair startled me, and yet it was no more than the look of a
woman who leams that her man and she have been close company with a
secret for months, and she had never made its acquaintance. There was
perhaps a little more, a hesitancy in the utterance, a flush, a tone
that seemed to show the subject was one to be passed bye as fast as
possible.
She smiled feebly a little, picked up a row of dropped stitches, and
“Oh, Betty,” said she, “Betty--is--is--she’ll be back in a little. Will
you not wait?”
“No, I must be going,” I said; “I may have the happiness of meeting her
before I go up the glen in the afternoon.”
They pressed me both to stay, but I seemed, in my mind, to have a new
demand upon me for an immediate and private meeting with the girl; she
must be seen alone, and not in presence of the old couple, who would
give my natural shyness in her company far more gawkiness than it might
have if I met her alone.
I went out and went down the stair, and along the front of the land, my
being in a tumult, yet with my observation keen to everything, no matter
how trivial, that happened around me. The sea-gulls, that make the town
the playground of their stormy holidays, swept and curved among the
pigeons in the gutter and quarrelled over the spoils; tossed in the air
wind-blown, then dropped with feet outstretched upon the black joists
and window-sills. Fowls of the midden, new brought from other parts to
make up the place of those that had gone to the kail-pots of Antrim
and Athole, stalked about with heads high, foreign to this causied and
gravelled country, clucking eagerly for meat I made my way amid the bird
of the sea and the bird of the wood and common bird of the yard with
a divided mind, seeing them with the eye for future recollection, but
seeing them not Peats were at every close-mouth, at every door almost
that was half-habitable, and fuel cut from the wood, and all about the
thoroughfare was embarrassed.
I had a different decision at every step, now to seek the girl, now to
go home, now finding the most heartening hints in the agitation of the
parents, anon troubled exceedingly with the reflection that there was
something of an unfavourable nature in the demeanour of her mother,
however much the father’s badinage might soothe my vanity.
I had made up my mind for the twentieth time to go the length of
Carlunnan and face her plump and plain, when behold she came suddenly
round the corner at the Maltland where the surviving Lowland troops were
gathered! M’Iver was with her, and my resolution shrivelled and shook
within me like an old nut kernel. I would have turned but for the
stupidity and ill-breeding such a movement would evidence, yet as I held
on my way at a slower pace and the pair approached, I felt every limb an
encumbrance, I felt the country lout throbbing in every vein.
Betty almost ran to meet me as we came closer together, with an
agreeableness that might have pleased me more had I not the certainty
that she would have been as warm to either of the two men who had
rescued her from her hiding in the wood of Strongara, and had just come
back from her country’s battles with however small credit to themselves
in the result. She was in a very happy mood, for, like all women, she
could readily forget the large and general vexation of a reverse to her
people in war if the immediate prospect was not unpleasant and things
around were showing improvement Her eyes shone and sparkled, the
ordinary sedate flow of her words was varied by little outbursts of
gaiety. She had been visiting the child at Carlunnan, where it had
been adopted by her kinswoman, who made a better guardian than its
grandmother, who died on her way to Dunbarton.
“What sets you on this road?” she asked blandly.
“Oh, you have often seen me on this road before,” I said, boldly and
with meaning. Ere I went wandering we had heard the rivers sing many
a time, and sat upon its banks and little thought life and time were
passing as quickly as the leaf or bubble on the surface. She flushed
ever so little at the remembrance, and threw a stray curl back from her
temples with an impatient toss of her fingers.
“And so much of the dandy too!” put in M’Iver, himself perjink enough
about his apparel. “I’ll wager there’s a girl in the business.” He
laughed low, looked from one to the other of us, yet his meaning
escaped, or seemed to escape, the lady.
“Elrigmore is none of the kind,” she said, as if to protect a child.
“He has too many serious affairs of life in hand to be in the humour for
gallivanting.”
This extraordinary reading of my character by the one woman who ought to
have known it better, if only by an instinct, threw me into a blend of
confusion and chagrin. I had no answer for her. I regretted now that my
evil star had sent me up Glenaora, or that having met her with M’Iver,
whose presence increased my diffidence, I had not pretended some errand
or business up among the farmlands in the Salachry hills, where distant
relatives of our house were often found But now I was on one side of
the lady and M’Iver on the other, on our way towards the burgh, and the
convoy must be concluded, even if I were dumb all the way. Dumb, indeed,
I was inclined to be. M’Iver laughed uproariously at madame’s notion
that I was too seriously engaged with life for the recreation of
love-making; it was bound to please him, coming, as it did, so close on
his own estimate of me as the Sobersides he christened me at almost our
first acquaintance. But he had a generous enough notion to give me the
chance of being alone with the girl he knew very well my feelings for.
“I’ve been up just now at the camp,” he said, “anent the purchase of
a troop-horse, and I had not concluded my bargain when Mistress Brown
passed. I’m your true cavalier in one respect, that I must be offering
every handsome passenger an escort; but this time it’s an office for
Elrigmore, who can undertake your company down the way bravely enough,
I’ll swear, for all his blateness.”
Betty halted, as did the other two of us, and bantered my comrade.
“I ask your pardon a thousand times, Barbreck,” she said; “I thought you
were hurrying on your way down behind me, and came upon me before you
saw who I was.”
“That was the story,” said he, coolly; “I’m too old a hand at the
business to be set back on the road I came by a lady who has no relish
for my company.”
“I would not take you away from your marketing for the world,” she
proceeded. “Perhaps Elrigmore may be inclined to go up to the camp too;
he may help you to the pick of your horse--and we’ll believe you the
soldier of fortune again when we see you one.”
She, at least, had no belief that the mine-manager was to be a mercenary
again. She tapped with a tiny toe on the pebbles, affecting a choler the
twinkle in her eyes did not homologate. It was enough for M’Iver, who
gave a “Pshaw!” and concluded he might as well, as he said, “be in good
company so long as he had the chance,” and down the way again we went.
Somehow the check had put him on his mettle. He seemed to lose at once
all regard for my interests in this. I became in truth, more frequently
than was palatable, the butt of his little pleasantries; my mysterious
saunter up that glen, my sobriety of demeanour, my now silence-all those
things, whose meaning he knew very well, were made the text for his
amusement for the lady. As for me, I took it all weakly, striving to
meet his wit with careless smiles.
For the first time, I was seized with a jealousy of him. Here was I,
your arrant rustic; he was as composed as could be, overflowing with
happy thoughts, laughable incident, and ever ready with the compliment
or the retort women love to hear from a smart fellow of even indifferent
character. I ic had the policy to conceal the vanity that was for
ordinary his most transparent feature, and his trick was to admire the
valour and the humour of others. Our wanderings in Lorn and I-ochaber,
our adventures with the MacDonalds, all the story of the expedition, he
danced through, as it were, on the tip-toe of light phrase, as if it had
Ixrcn a strong man’s scheme of recreation, scarcely once appealing to ma
With a Mushed cheek and parted lips the lady hung upon his words, arched
her dark eyebrows in fear, or bubbled into the merriest laughter as the
occasion demanded. Worst of all, she teemed to share his amusement at
my silence, and then I could have wished rather than a bag of gold I had
the Mull witch’s invisible coat, or that the earth would swallow me
up. The very country-people passing on the way were art and part in
the conspiracy of circumstances to make me unhappy. Their salutes were
rarely for Elrigmore, but for the lady and John Splendid, whose bold
quarrel with MacCailein Mor was now the rumour of two parishes, and gave
him a wide name for unflinching bravery of a kind he had been generally
acknowledged as sadly want ing in before. And Mistress Betty could not
but see that high or low, I was second to this fellow going off--or at
least with the rumour of it--to Hebron’s cavaliers in France before the
week-end.
M’Iver was just, perhaps, carrying his humour at my cost a little too
far for my temper, which was never readily stirred, but flamed fast
enough when set properly alowe, and Betty--here too your true woman
wit--saw it sooner than he did himself, quick enough in the uptake
though he was. He had returned again to his banter about the
supposititious girl I was trysted with up the glen, and my face showed
my annoyance.
“You think all men like yourself,” said the girl to him, “and all women
the same--like the common soldier you are.”
“I think them all darlings,” he confessed, laughing; “God bless them,
kind and foolish----”
“As you’ve known them oftenest,” she supplied, coldly.
“Or sedate and sensible,” he went on. “None of them but found John
M’Iver of Barbeck their very true cavalier.”
“Indeed,” said Mistress Betty, colder than ever, some new thought
working within her, judging from the tone. “And yet you leave to-morrow,
and have never been to Carlunnan.” She said the last words with a
hesitancy, blushing most warmly. To me they were a dark mystery, unless
I was to assume, what I did wildly for a moment, only to relinquish the
notion immediately, that she had been in the humour to go visiting
her friends with him. Mover’s face showed some curious emotion that it
baffled me to read, and all that was plain to me was that here were two
people with a very strong thought of a distressing kind between them.
“It would be idle for me,” he said in a little, “to deny that I know
what you mean. But do you not believe you might be doing me poor justice
in your suspicions?”
“It is a topic I cannot come closer upon,” she answered; “I am a woman.
That forbids me and that same compels me. If nature does not demand your
attendance up there, then you are a man wronged by rumour or a man dead
to every sense of the human spirit I have listened to your humour and
laughed at your banter, for you have an art to make people forget; but
all the way I have been finding my lightness broken in on by the feeble
cry of a child without a mother--it seems, too, without a father.”
“If that is the trouble,” he said, turning away with a smile he did not
succeed in concealing either from the lady or me, “you may set your mind
at rest The child you mention has, from this day, what we may be calling
a godfather.”
“Then the tale’s true?” she said, stopping on the road, turning and
gazing with neither mirth nor warmth in her countenance.
M’Iver hesitated, and looked upon the woman to me as if I could help him
in the difficulty; but I must have seemed a clown in the very abjection
of my ignorance of what all this mystery was about He searched my face
and I searched my memory, and then I recollected that he had told me
before of Mistress Brown’s suspicions of the paternity of the child.
“I could well wish your answer came more readily,” said she again,
somewhat bitterly, “for then I know it would be denial.”
“And perhaps untruth, too,” said John, oddly. “This time it’s a question
of honour, a far more complicated turn of circumstances than you can
fancy, and my answer takes time.”
“Guilty!” she cried, “and you go like this. You know what the story is,
and your whole conduct in front of my charges shows you take the very
lightest view of the whole horrible crime.”
“Say away, madame,” said M’Iver, assuming an indifference his every
feature gave the lie to. “I’m no better nor no worse than the rest of
the world. That’s all I’ll say.”
“You have said enough for me, then,” said the girl.
“I think, Elrigmore, if you please, I’ll not trouble you and your friend
to come farther with me now. I am obliged for your society so far.”
She was gone before either of us could answer, leaving us like a pair of
culprits standing in the middle of the road. A little breeze fanned
her clothing, and they shook behind her as to be free from some
contamination. She had overtaken and joined a woman in front of her
before I had recovered from my astonishment M’Iver turned from
surveying her departure with lowered eyebrows, and gave me a look with
half-a-dozen contending thoughts in it.
“That’s the end of it,” said he, as much to himself as for my ear, “and
the odd thing of it again is that she never seemed so precious fine a
woman as when it was ‘a bye wi’ auld days and you,’ as the Scots song
says.”
“It beats me to fathom,” I confessed. “Do I understand that you admitted
to the lady that you were the father of the child?”
“I admitted nothing,” he said, cunningly, “if you’ll take the trouble to
think again. I but let the lady have her own way, which most of her sex
generally manage from me in the long-run.”
“But, man! you could leave her only one impression, that you are as
black as she thinks you, and am I not sure you fall far short of that?”
“Thank you,” he said; “it is good of you to say it. I am for off
whenever my affairs here are settled, and when I’m the breadth of seas
afar from Inneraora, you’ll think as well as you can of John M’Iver,
who’ll maybe not grudge having lost the lady’s affection if he kept his
friend’s and comrade’s heart.”
He was vastly moved as he spoke. He took my hand and wrung it fiercely;
he turned without another word, good or ill, and strode back on his way
to the camp, leaving me to seek my way to the town alone.