We went along the road two and two, M’Iver keeping company behind with
the valet, who would have stabbed me in the back in all likelihood ere
we had made half our journey, had there been no such caution. We walked
at a good pace, and fast as we walked it was not fast enough for my
eagerness, so that my long steps set the shorter ones of MacLachlan
pattering beside me in a most humorous way that annoyed him much, to
judge from the efforts he made to keep time and preserve his dignity.
Not a word, good or bad, was exchanged between us; he left the guidance
to me, and followed without a pause when, over the tip of the brae at
Tarra Dubh, I turned sharply to the left and plunged into the wood.
In this part of the wood there is a _larach_ or site of an ancient
church. No stone stands there to-day, no one lives who has known another
who has heard another say he has seen a single stone of this umquhile
house of God; but the sward lies flat and square as in a garden,
levelled, and in summer fringed with clusters of the nettle that grows
over the ruins of man with a haste that seems to mock the brevity of his
interests, and the husbandman and the forester for generations have put
no spade to its soil. A _cill_ or cell we call it in the language; and
the saying goes among the people of the neighbourhood that on the eve
of Saint Patrick bells ring in this glade in the forest, sweet, soft,
dreamy bells, muffled in a mist of years--bells whose sounds have come,
as one might fancy, at their stated interval, after pealing in a wave
about God’s universe from star to star, back to the place of their first
chiming. Ah! the monk is no longer there to hear them, only the mavis
calls and the bee in its period hums where matins rose. A queer thought
this, a thought out of all keeping with my bloody mission in the wood,
which was to punish this healthy youth beside me; yet to-day, looking
back on the occasion, I do not wonder that, going a-murdering, my mind
in that glade should soften by some magic of its atmosphere. For, ever
was I a dreamer, as this my portion of history may long since have
disclosed. Ever must I be fronting the great dumb sorrow of the
universe, thinking of loves undone, of the weakness of man, poor man,
a stumbler under the stars, the sickening lapse of time, the vast and
awesome voids left by people dead, laughter quelled, eyes shut for
evermore, and scenes evanished. And it was ever at the crisis of things
my mind took on this mood of thought and pity.
It was not of my own case I reflected there, but of the great swooning
silences that might be tenanted ere the sun dropped behind the firs by
the ghost of him I walked with. Not of my own father, but of an even
older man in a strath beyond the water hearing a rap at his chamber door
to-night and a voice of horror tell him he had no more a son. A fool,
a braggart, a liar the less, but still he must leave a vacancy at the
hearth! My glance could not keep off the shoulder of him as he walked
cockily beside me, a healthy brown upon his neck, and I shivered to
think of this hour as the end of him, and of his clay in a little
stretched upon the grass that grew where psalm had chanted and the feet
of holy men had passed. Kill him! The one thrust of fence I dare not
neglect was as sure as the arrow of fate; I knew myself in my innermost
his executioner.
It was a day, I have said, of exceeding calm, with no trace left almost
of the winter gone, and the afternoon came on with a crimson upon the
west, and numerous birds in flying companies settled upon the bushes.
The firs gave a perfume from their tassels and plumes, and a little
burn among the bushes gurgled so softly, so like a sound of liquor in a
goblet, that it mustered the memories of good companionship. No more my
mind was on the knave and liar, but on the numerous kindnesses of man.
We stepped in upon the bare _larach_ with the very breath checked upon
our lips. The trees stood round it and back, knowing it sanctuary; tall
trees, red, and rough at the hide, cracked and splintered in roaring
storms; savage trees, coarse and vehement, but respecting that patch
of blessed memory vacant quite but of ourselves and a little bird who
turned his crimson breast upon us for a moment then vanished with a
thrill of song. Crimson sky, crimson-vested bird, the colour of that
essence I must be releasing with the push of a weapon at that youth
beside me!
John Splendid was the first to break upon the silence.
“I was never so much struck with the Sunday feeling of a place,” he
said; “I daresay we could find a less melancholy spot for our meeting if
we searched for it, but the day goes, and I must not be putting off an
interesting event both of you, I’m sure, are eager to begin.”
“Indeed we might have got a more suitable place in many ways,” I
confessed, my hands behind me, with every scrap of passion gone from my
heart.
MacLachlan showed no such dubiety. “What ails you at the place?” he
asked, throwing his plaid to his servant, and running his jacket off
its wooden buttons at one tug. “It seems to me a most particularly fine
place for our business. But of course,” he added with a sneer, “I have
not the experience of two soldiers by trade, who are so keen to force
the combat.”
He threw off his belt, released the sword from its scabbard--a clumsy
weapon of its kind, abrupt, heavy, and ill-balanced, I could tell by its
slow response to his wrist as he made a pass or two in the air to get
the feel of it. He was in a cold bravado, the lad, with his spirit
up, and utterly reckless of aught that might happen him, now saying
a jocular word to his man, and now gartering his hose a little more
tightly.
I let myself be made ready by John Splendid without so much as putting
a hand to a buckle, for I was sick sorry that we had set out upon this
adventure. Shall any one say fear? It was as far from fear as it was
from merriment. I have known fear in my time--the fear of the night, of
tumultuous sea, of shot-ploughed space to be traversed inactively and
slowly, so my assurance is no braggadocio, but the simple truth. The
very sword itself, when I had it in my hand, felt like something alive
and vengeful.
Quick as we were in preparing, the sun was quicker in descending, and
as we faced each other, without any of the parades of foreign fence, the
sky hung like a bloody curtain between the trees behind MacLachlan.
M’Iver and the servant now stood aside and the play began. MacLachlan
engaged with the left foot forward, the trick of a man who is used to
the targaid, and I saw my poor fool’s doom in the antiquity of his first
guard. In two minutes I had his whole budget of the art laid bare to
me; he had but four parries--quarte and tierce for the high lines, with
septime and second for the low ones--and had never seen a counter-parry
or lunge in the whole course of his misspent life.
“Little hero!” thought I, “thou art a spitted cockerel already, and yet
hope, the blind, the ignorant, has no suspicion of it!”
A faint chill breeze rose and sighed among the wood, breathed from the
west that faced me, a breeze bearing the odour of the tree more strong
than before, and of corrupt leafage in the heughs. Our weapons tinkled
and rasped, the true-points hissed and the pommels rang, and into the
midst of this song of murderous game there trespassed the innocent
love-lilt of a bird. I risked him the flash of an eye as he stood, a
becking black body on a bough, his yellow beak shaking out a flutey note
of passionate serenade. Thus the irony of nature; no heed for us, the
head and crown of things created: the bird would build its home and
hatch its young upon the sapling whose roots were soaked by young
MacLachlan’s blood.
His blood! That was now the last thing I desired. He fought with
suppleness and strength, if not with art; he fought, too, with venom in
his strokes, his hair tossed high upon his temples, his eyes the whitest
of his person, as he stood, to his own advantage, that I never grudged
him, with his back against the sunset I contented with defence till he
cursed with a baffled accent. His man called piteously and eagerly; but
M’Iver checked him, and the fight went on. Not the lunge, at least,
I determined, though the punishment of a trivial wound was scarce
commensurate with his sin. So I let him slash and sweat till I wearied
of the game, caught his weapon in the curved guard of my hilt, and broke
it in two.
He dropped the fragment in his hand with a cry of mingled anger and
despair, snatched a knife from his stocking, and rushed on me to stab.
Even then I had him at my mercy. As he inclosed, I made a complete volte
with the left foot, passed back my right in rear of his, changed my
sword into my left hand, holding it by the middle of the blade and
presenting the point at his throat, while my right hand, across his
body, seized his wrist.
For a moment I felt the anger at his treachery almost overmaster me. He
thought himself gone. He let his head fall helplessly on my breast, and
stood still as one waiting the stroke, with his eyes, as M’Iver told
me again, closed and his mouth parted. But a spasm of disgust at the
uncleanness of the task to be done made me retch and pause.
“Home, dog!” I gasped, and I threw him from me sprawling on the sod.
He fell, in his weariness, in an awkward and helpless mass; the knife,
still in his hand, pierced him on the shoulder, and thus the injury I
could not give him by my will was given him by Providence. Over on his
back he turned with a plash of blood oozing at his shirt, and he grasped
with clawing fingers to stanch it, yet never relinquishing his look of
bitter anger at me. With cries, with tears, with names of affection, the
gillie ran to his master, who I saw was not very seriously injured.
M’Iver helped me on with my coat.
“You’re far too soft, man!” he said. “You would have let him go
scathless, and even now he has less than his deserts. You have a pretty
style of fence, do you know, and I should like to see it paraded against
a man more your equal.”
“You’ll never see it paraded by me,” I answered, sorrowfully. “Here’s my
last duello, if I live a thousand years.” And I went up and looked at my
fallen adversary. He was shivering with cold, though the sweat hung upon
the young down of his white cheeks, for the night air was more bitter
every passing moment The sun was all down behind the hills, the
valley was going to rest, the wood was already in obscurity. If our
butcher-work had seemed horrible in that sanctuary in the open light of
day, now in the eve it seemed more than before a crime against Heaven.
The lad weltering, with no word or moan from his lips; the servant
stanching his wound, shaken the while by brotherly tears; M’Iver, the
old man-at-arms, indifferent, practised to such sights, and with the
heart no longer moved by man-inflicted injury; and over all a brooding
silence; over all that place, consecrated once to God and prayer by men
of peace, but now degraded to a den of beasts--over it shone of a sudden
the new wan crescent moon! I turned me round, I turned and fell to
weeping in my hands!
This abject surrender of mine patently more astounded the company than
had the accident to MacLachlan. M’Iver stood dumfounded, to behold a
cavalier of fortune’s tears, and MacLachlan’s face, for all his pain,
gave up its hate and anger for surprise, as he looked at me over the
shoulder of his kneeling clansman plying rude leech-craft on his wound.
“Are you vexed?” said he, with short breaths.
“And that bitterly!” I answered.
“Oh, there is nothing to grieve on,” said he, mistaking me most
lamentably. “I’ll give you your chance again. I owe you no less; but my
knife, if you’ll believe me, sprang out of itself, and I struck at you
in a ruddy mist of the senses.”
“I seek no other chance,” I said; “our feuds are over: you were egged on
by a subterfuge, deceit has met deceit, and the balance is equal.”
His mood softened, and we helped him to his feet, M’Iver a silent man
because he failed to comprehend this turn of affairs. We took him to a
cothouse down at the foot of the wood, where he lay while a boy was sent
for a skilly woman.
In life, as often as in the stories of man’s invention, it is the one
wanted who comes when the occasion needs, for God so arranges, and if it
may seem odd that the skilly woman the messenger brought back with him
for the dressing of MacLachlan’s wound was no other than our Dark Dame
of Lorn, the dubiety must be at the Almighty’s capacity, and not at my
chronicle of the circumstance. As it happened, she had come back
from Dalness some days later than ourselves, none the worse for her
experience among the folks of that unchristian neighbourhood, who had
failed to comprehend that the crazy tumult of her mind might, like the
sea, have calm in its depths, and that she was more than by accident
the one who had alarmed us of their approach. She had come back with her
frenzy reduced, and was now with a sister at Balantyre the Lower, whose
fields slope on Aora’s finest bend.
For skill she had a name in three parishes; she had charms sure and
certain for fevers and hoasts; the lives of children were in her hands
while yet their mothers bore them; she knew manifold brews, decoctions,
and clysters; at morning on the saints’ days she would be in the woods,
or among the rocks by the rising of the sun, gathering mosses and herbs
and roots that contain the very juices of health and the secret of
age. I little thought that day when we waited for her, and my enemy lay
bleeding on the fern, that she would bring me the cure for a sore heart,
the worst of all diseases.
While M’Iver and I and the gillie waited the woman’s coming, MacLachlan
tossed in a fever, his mind absent and his tongue running on without
stoppage, upon affairs of a hundred different hues, but all leading
sooner or later to some babble about a child. It was ever “the dear
child,” the “_m’eudailgheal_” “the white treasure,” “the orphan “; it
was always an accent of the most fond and lingering character. I paid
no great heed to this constant wail; but M’Iver pondered and studied,
repeating at last the words to himself as MacLachlan uttered them.
“If that’s not the young one in Carlunnan he harps on,” he concluded at
last, “I’m mistaken. He seems even more wrapt in the child than does the
one we know who mothers it now, and you’ll notice, by the way, he has
nothing to say of her.”
“Neither he has,” I confessed, well enough pleased with a fact he had no
need to call my attention to.
“Do you know, I’m on the verge of a most particular deep secret?” said
John, leaving me to guess what he was at, but I paid no heed to him.
The skilly dame came in with her clouts and washes. She dressed the
lad’s wound and drugged him to a more cooling slumber, and he was to be
left in bed till the next day.
“What’s all his cry about the child?” asked M’Iver, indifferently, as we
stood at the door before leaving. “Is it only a fancy on his brain, or
do you know the one he speaks of?”
She put on a little air of vanity, the vanity of a woman who knows a
secret the rest of the world, and man particularly, is itching to
hear. “Oh, I daresay he has some one in his mind,” she admitted; “and
I daresay I know who it might be too, for I was the first to sweel the
baby and the last to dress its mother--blessing with her!”
M’I ver turned round and looked her, with cunning humour, in the face.
“I might well guess that,” he said; “you have the best name in the
countryside for these offices, that many a fumbling dame botches. I
suppose,” he added, when the pleasure in her face showed his words had
found her vanity--“I suppose you mean the bairn up in Carlunnan?”
“That’s the very one,” she said with a start; “but who told you?”
“Tuts!” said he, slyly, “the thing’s well enough known about the Castle,
and MacLachlan himself never denied he was the father. Do you think a
secret like that could be kept in a clattering parish like Inneraora?”
“You’re the first I ever heard get to the marrow of it,” confessed
the Dame Dubh. “MacLachlan himself never thought I was in the woman’s
confidence, and I’ve seen him in Carlunnan there since I came home,
pretending more than a cousin’s regard for the Provost’s daughter so
that he might share in the bairn’s fondling. He did it so well, too,
that the lady herself would talk of its fatherless state with tears in
her eyes.”
I stood by, stunned at the revelation that brought joy from the very
last quarter where I would have sought it. But I must not let my rapture
at the idea of MacLachlan’s being no suitor of the girl go too far till
I confirmed this new intelligence.
“Perhaps,” I said in a little to the woman, “the two of them fondling
the bairn were chief enough, though they did not share the secret of its
fatherhood.”
“Chief!” she cried; “the girl has no more notion of MacLachlan than I
have, if an old woman’s eyes that once were clear enough for such things
still show me anything. I would have been the first to tell her how
things stood if I had seen it otherwise. No, no; Mistress Brown has an
eye in other quarters. What do you say to that, Barbreck?” she added,
laughing slyly to my friend.
A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lain
on it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or pretended to find, in
my silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future. And then this
rapture was followed by a gladness no less profound that Mac-Lachlan,
bad as he had been, was not the villain quite I had fancied: if he had
bragged of conquests, it had been with truth though not with decency.
Inneraora, as we returned to it that night, was a town enchanted; again
its lights shone warm and happily. I lingered late in its street, white
in the light of the stars, and looked upon the nine windows of Askaig’s
house. There was no light in all the place; the lower windows of the
tenement were shuttered, and slumber was within. It gave me an agreeable
exercise to guess which of the unshuttered nine would let in the first
of the morning light on a pillow with dark hair tossed upon it and a
rounded cheek upon a hand like milk.