John Splendid Part 22

"There's no child ill that I know of," said she; "if there was, we have gold of our own."

She bustled about the house and put past her blankets, and out with a spinning-wheel and into a whirr of it, with a hummed song of the country at her lips--all in a mild temper, or to keep her confusion from showing itself undignified.

"Come away," I said to my comrade in English; "you'll make her bitterly angry if you persist in your purpose."

He paid no heed to me, but addressed the woman again with a most ingenious story, apparently contrived, with his usual wit, as he went on with it.

"Your pardon, goodwife," said he, "but I see you are too sharp for my small deceit I daresay I might have guessed there was no child ill; but for reasons of my own I'm anxious to leave a little money with you till I come back this road again. We trusted you with our lives for a couple of hours there, and surely, thinks I, we can trust you with a couple of yellow pieces."

The woman stopped her wheel and resumed her good-humour. "I thought,"

said she,--"I thought you meant payment for----"

"You're a bit hard on my manners, goodwife," said John. "Of course I have been a soldier, and might have done the trick of paying forage with a sergeant's blunt-ness, but I think I know a Gaelic woman's spirit better."

"But are you likely to be pa.s.sing here again at any time?" cried the woman, doubt again darkening her face, and by this time she had the money in her hand. "I thought you were going back by the Glen?"

"That was our notion," said my comrade, marvellously ready, "but to tell the truth we are curious to see this Keppoch bard, whose songs we know very well in real Argile, and we take a bit of the road to Kilc.u.min after him."

The weakness of this tale was not apparent to the woman, who I daresay had no practice of such trickery as my friend was the master of, and she put the money carefully in a napkin and in a recess beneath one of the roof-joists. Our thanks she took carelessly, no doubt, because we were Campbells.

I was starting on the way to Inverlochy when M'Iver protested we must certainly go a bit of the way to Kilc.u.min.

"I'm far from sure," said he, "that that very particular bit of MacDonald woman is quite confident of the truth of my story. At any rate, she's no woman if she's not turning it over in her mind by now, and she'll be out to look the road we take before very long or I'm mistaken."

We turned up the Kilc.u.min road, which soon led us out of sight of the hut, and, as my friend said, a glance behind us showed us the woman in our rear, looking after us.

"Well, there's no turning so long as she's there," said I. "I wish your generosity had shown itself in a manner more convenient for us. There's another example of the error of your polite and truthless tongue! When you knew the woman was not wanting the money, you should have put it in your sporran again, and----"

"Man, Elrigmore," he cried, "you have surely studied me poorly if you would think me the man to insult the woman--and show my own stupidity at the same time--by exposing my strategy when a bit fancy tale and a short daunder on a pleasant morning would save the feelings of both the lady and myself."

"You go through life on a zigzag," I protested, "aiming for some goal that another would cut straight across for, making deviations of an hour to save you a second's unpleasantness. I wish I could show you the diplomacy of straightforwardness: the honest word, though hard to say sometimes, is a man's duty as much as the honest deed of hand."

"Am I not as honest of my word as any in a matter of honour? I but gloze sometimes for the sake of the affection I have for all G.o.d's creatures."

I was losing patience of his att.i.tude and speaking perhaps with bitterness, for here were his foolish ideas of punctilio bringing us a mile or two off our road and into a part of the country where we were more certain of being observed by enemies than in the way behind us.

"You jink from ambuscade to ambuscade of phrase like a fox," I cried.

"Call it like a good soldier, and I'll never quarrel with your compliment," he said, good-humouredly. "I had the second excuse for the woman in my mind before the first one missed fire."

"Worse and worse!"

"Not a bit of it: it is but applying a rule of fortification to a peaceful palaver. Have bastion and ravelin as sure as may be, but safer still the sally-port of retreat."

I stood on the road and looked at him, smiling very smug and self-complacent before me, and though I loved the man I felt bound to p.r.i.c.k a hole in his conceit.

But at that moment a dead branch snapped in a little plantation that lay by the way, and we turned quickly to see come to us a tall lean man in MacDonald clothing.

CHAPTER XVIII.--BARD OF KEPPOCH.

He was a lantern-jawed, sallow-faced, high-browed fellow in his prime, with the merest hint of a hirple or halt in his walk, very shabby in his dress, wearing no sporran, but with a dagger bobbing about at his groin.

I have never seen a man with surprise more sharply stamped on his visage than was betrayed by this one when he got close upon us and found two of a clan so unlikely to have stray members out for a careless airing on a forenoon in Badenoch.

"You're taking your walk?" he said, with a bantering tone, after a moment's pause.

"You couldn't have guessed better," said John. "We are taking all we're likely to get in so barren a country."

The stranger chuckled sourly as the three of us stood in a group surveying each other. "My name," said he, in his odd north Gaelic, and throwing out his narrow chest, "is John MacDonad I'm Keppoch's bard, and I've no doubt you have heard many of my songs. I'm namely in the world for the best songs wit ever strung together. Are you for war? I can stir you with a stave to set your sinews straining. Are you for the music of the wood? The thrush itself would be jealous of my note. Are you for the ditty of the lover? Here's the songster to break hearts. Since the start of time there have been 'prentices at my trade: I have challenged North and East, South and the isle-flecked sea, and they cry me back their master."

M'Iver put a toe on one of mine, and said he, "Amn't I the unlucky man, for I never heard of you?"

"Tut, tut," cried the bard in a fret, "perhaps you think so much in Argile of your hedge-chanters that you give the lark of the air no ear."

"We have so many poets between Knapdale and Cruachan," said John, "that the business is fallen out of repute, and men brag when they can make an honest living at prose."

"Honest living," said the bard, "would be the last thing I would expect Clan Campbell to brag of."

He was still in an annoyance at the set-back to his vanity, shuffling his feet restlessly on the ground, and ill at ease about the mouth, that I've noticed is the first feature to show a wound to the conceit.

"Come, come," he went on, "will you dare tell me that the sheiling singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my 'Harp of the Trees'? If there's a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I've yet to learn it."

"If I heard it," said John, "I've forgotten it."

"Name of G.o.d!" cried the bard in amaze, "you couldn't; it goes so"--and he hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had been singing some years before.

We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain of it, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of his budget--some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knew by fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh--but to each and all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance.

"No doubt," said he, "they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, but Argile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for a living but string rhymes?"

The bard was in a sweat of vexation. "I've wandered far," said he, "and you beat all I met in a mult.i.tude of people. Do you think the stringing of rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the field and the wood between his _duans_?"

"I think," said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestness was in his utterance)--"I think his songs would be all the better for some such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt the blood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at the pit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of a desolate home? Love,--sir, you are young, young------"

"Thanks be with you," said the bard; "your last word gives me the clue to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made in my country could confer."

I'm afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.

"John Lorn, John Lom!" I cried, "I heard a soldier sing your songs in the s.h.i.+p Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore."

He turned with a grateful eye from M'Iver to me, and I felt that I had one friend now in Badenoch.

"Do you tell me?" he asked, a very child in his pleasure, that John Splendid told me after he had not the heart to mar. "Which one did they sing--'The Harp of the Trees' or 'Macrannul Og's Lament'? I am sure it would be the Lament: it is touched with the sorrow of the starless night on a rain-drummed, wailing sea. Or perhaps they knew--the gentle hearts--my 'Farewell to the Fisher.' I made it with yon tremor of joy, and it is telling of the far isles beyond Uist and Barra, and the Seven Hunters, and the white sands of Colomkill."

M'Iver sat down on the wayside and whittled a stick with a pretence at patience I knew he could scarcely feel, for we were fools to be dallying thus on the way in broad morning when we should be harking back to our friends as secretly as the fox.

"Were you on the ocean?" he asked the bard, whose rapture was not abated.