John Splendid Part 29

"Are you thinking yourself----" he began, and what he would finish with may be easily guessed. But M'Iver fixed him with an eye that p.r.i.c.ked like a rapier.

"Sit ye down, Stewart," said he; "your race is royal, as ye must be aye telling us, but there's surely many a droll bye-blow in the breed."

"Are you not all from Appin?" asked the woman, with a new interest, taking a corner of M'Iver's plaiding in her hand and running a few checks through fine delicate fingers of a lady. Her face dyed crimson; she drew back her stool a little, and cried out--

"That's not off a Stewart web--it was never waulked in Appin. Whom have I here?"

John Splendid bent to her very kindly and laid a hand on hers.

"I'll tell you the G.o.d's truth, mother," said he; "we're broken men: we have one Stewart of a kind with us, but we belong to parts far off from here, and all we want is to get to them as speedily as may be. I'll put you in mind (but troth I'm sure it's not needed) of two obligations that lie on every Gaelic household. One of them is to give the shelter of the night and the supper of the night to the murderer himself, even if the corpse on the heather was your son; and the other is to ask no question off your guest till he has drunk the _deoch-an-doruis_."

"I'm grudging you nothing," said the woman; "but a blind widow is ent.i.tled to the truth and frankness."

M'Iver soothed her with great skill, and brought her back to her bairns.

"Ay," said he, "some day they'll be off your hands, and you the lady with sons and servants."

"Had you a wife and bairns of your own," said the woman, "you might learn some day that a parent's happiest time is when her children are young. They're all there, and they're all mine when they're under the blanket; but when they grow up and scatter, the nightfall never brings them all in, and one pair of blankets will not cover the cares of them.

I do not know that," she went on, "from what I have seen in my own house; but my mother told me, and she had plenty of chance to learn the truth of it, with sons who died among strangers, and sons who bruised her by their lives more than they could by their deaths."

"You have some very ruddy and handsome boys there," said M'Iver. And aye he would be winking and smiling at the young rogues in the corner.

"I think they are," said the woman. "I never saw but the eldest, and he was then at the breast, the dear, his father's image."

"Then the father of him must have been a well-fared and pretty man,"

said John, very promptly, not a bit abashed by the homeliness of the youth, who was the plainest of the nock, with a freckled skin, a low hang-dog brow, and a nose like the point of a dirk.

"He was that," said the woman, fondly--"the finest man in the parish.

He had a little lameness, but----"

"I have a bit of a halt myself," said M'I ver, with his usual folly; "and I'm sure I'm none the worse for it."

The oldest boy sat up in bed and gloomed at us very sullenly. He could scarcely be expected to understand the conceits of M'Iver's tale about his lameness, that any one with eyes could behold had no existence.

"But I never think of my man," the woman went on, "but as I saw him first before he met with his lameness. Eyes are a kind of doubtful blessing too in some ways. Mine have forgotten all the ugly things they knew, and in my recollection are but many bonny things: my man was always as young to me as when he came courting in a new blue bonnet and a short coat; my children will be changing to every one but to me."

Stewart, with his own appet.i.te satisfied, was acting lackey to the gentlemen in the byre--fetching out cogies of milk and whangs of bear-meal bannock, and the most crisp piquant white cheese ever I put tooth to. He was a man without a conscience, and so long as his own ends and the ends of his friends were served, he would never scruple to empty the woman's girnel or toom her last basin, and leave her no morsel of food or drink at the long-run. But M'Iver and I put an end to that, and so won, as we thought, to the confidence of the elder lad in the bed, who had glunched low-browed among his franker brethren.

We slept for some hours, the seven of us, among the bracken of the byre, wearied out and unable to go farther that night, even if the very dogs were at our heels. We slept sound, I'm sure, all but M'Iver, whom, waking twice in the chill of the night, I found sitting up and listening like any sentinel.

"What are you watching for there?" I asked him on the second time.

"Nothing at all, Colin, nothing at all. I was aye a poor sleeper at the best, and that snore of Rob Stewart is the very trump of the next world."

It was in the dawn again he confessed to his real apprehension,--only to my private ear, for he wished no more to alarm the others by day than to mar my courts.h.i.+p of slumber by night.

"The fact is," said he, "I'm not very sure about our young gentleman yonder in the bed. He's far too sharp in the eye and black in the temper, and too much of Clan Donallachd generally, to be trusted with the lives and liberties of seven gentlemen of a tartan he must know unfriendly to Glencoe. I wish I saw his legs that I might guess the length of him, or had had the wit to ask his mother, his age, for either would be a clue to his chance of carrying the tale against us down the valley there. He seemed tremendous sharp and wicked lying yonder looking at us, and I was in a sweat all night for fear he would be out and tell on us. But so far he's under the same roof as ourselves."

Sonachan and the baron-bailie quarrelled away about some point of pedigree as they sat, a towsy, unkempt pair, in a dusty corner of the byre, with beards of a most scraggy nature grown upon their chins.

Their uncouthness gave a scruple of foppishness to M'I ver, and sent him seeking a razor in the widow's house. He found the late husband's, and shaved himself trimly, while Stewart played lackey again to the rest of us, taking out a breakfast the housewife was in the humour to force on us. He had completed his sc.r.a.ping, and was cracking away very freely with the woman, who was baking some bannocks on the stone, with sleeves rolled up from arms that were rounded and white. They talked of the husband (the one topic of new widowhood), a man, it appeared, of a thousand parts, a favourite with all, and yet, as she said, "When it came to the black end they left me to dress him for the grave, and a stranger had to bury him."

M'Iver, looking fresh and spruce after his cleansing, though his eyes were small for want of sleep, aroused at once to an interest in the cause of this unneighbourliness.

The woman stopped her occupation with a sudden start and flared crimson.

"I thought you knew," said she, stammering, turning a rolling-pin in her hand--"I thought you knew; and then how could you?... I maybe should have mentioned it,... but,... but could I turn you from my door in the night-time and hunger?"

M'Iver whistled softly to himself, and looked at me where I stood in the byre-door.

"Tuts," said he, at last turning with a smile to the woman, as if she could see him; "what does a bit difference with Lowland law make after all? I'll tell you this, mistress, between us,--I have a name myself for private foray, and it's perhaps not the first time I have earned the justification of the kind gallows of Crief by small diversions among cattle at night It's the least deserving that get the tow gravatte."

(Oh you liar! I thought.)

The woman's face looked puzzled. She thought a little, and said, "I think you must be taking me up wrong; my man was never at the trade of reiving, and----"

"I would never hint that he was, goodwife," cried John, quickly, puzzled-looking himself. "I said I had a name for the thing; but they were no friends of mine who gave me the credit, and I never stole stot or quey in all my life."

(I have my doubts, thinks I.)

"My man died of the plague," said the woman, blurting out her news, as if eager to get over an awkward business.

I have never seen such a sudden change in a person's aspect as came over John Splendid in every feature. The vain trim man of a minute ago, stroking his chin and showing a white hand (for the entertainment of the woman he must always be forgetting was without her sight), balancing and posturing on well-curved legs, and jauntily pinning his plaid on his shoulder, in a flash lost backbone. He stepped a pace back, as if some one had struck him a blow, his jaw fell, and his face grew ashen.

Then his eyes went darting about the chamber, and his nostrils sniffed as if disease was a presence to be seen and scented, a thing tangible in the air, maybe to be warded off by a sharp man's instruction in combat of arms.

"G.o.d of grace!" he cried, crossing himself most vigorously for a person of the Protestant religion, and muttering what I have no doubt was some charm of his native glen for the prevention of fevers. He shut his mouth thereafter very quickly on every phrase he uttered, breathing through his nose; at the same time he kept himself, in every part but the shoe-soles he tiptoed on, from touching anything. I could swear the open air of the most unfriendly glen in Christendom was a possession to be envious of for John M'Iver of Barbreck.

Stewart heard the woman's news that came to him as he was carrying in from the byre the vessels from which he had been serving his companions.

He was in a stew more extraordinary than John Splendid; he blanched even to the scars of his half-head, as we say, spat vehemently out of his mouth a piece of bread he was chewing, turned round about in a flash, and into the byre past me as I stood (not altogether alarmed, but yet a little disturbed and uneasy) in the doorway. He emptied his clothing and knapsack of every sc.r.a.p of food he had purloined, making a goodly heap upon the floor,--the very oaten flour he dusted off his finger-tips, with which he had handled cake that a little ago he was risking his soul's salvation to secure. And--except the minister--the other occupants of the byre were in an equal terror.

For in this matter of smittal plagues we Highlanders are the most arrant cowards. A man whose life we would save on the field, or the rock-face, or the sea, at the risk of our own lives or the more abominable peril of wound and agony, will die in a ditch of the Spotted Death or a fever before the most valiant of us would put out a hand to cover him again with his blanket He will get no woman to sound his coronach, even if he were Lord of the Isles. I am not making defence or admitting blame, though I have walked in Hamburg when the pitch-barrels blazed in the street, fuming the putrid wind; but there is in the Gaelic character a dread of disfiguration more than of sudden and painful death. What we fear is the black mystery of such disorders: they come on cunning winds unheralded, in fair weather or bad, day or night, to the rich and to the poor, to the strong as to the weak. You may be robust to-day in a smiling country and to-morrow in a twist of agony, coal-black, writhing on the couch, every fine interest in life blotted out by a yellow film upon the eyes. A vital gash with a claymore confers a bloodier but a more comely and natural end. Thus the Gael abhors the very roads that lead to a plague-struck dwelling. If plagues do not kill, they will mar--yes, even against the three charms of Island! and that, too, makes heavier their terror, for a man mutilated even by so little as the loss of a hand is an object of pity to every hale member of his clan. He may have won his infirmity in a n.o.ble hour, but they will pity him, and pity to the proud is worse than the glove in the face.

Instantly there was a great to-do in getting away from this most unfortunate dwelling. The lads in the byre shook tartan and out to the fresh air, and rejoiced in the wind with deep-drawn gulping breaths, as if they might wash the smallest dust of disease from their bodily systems. So at last only M'Iver and I were left standing at the door.

"Well," said John, with an effort, "we must be going. I never thought it was so late. And we must be on the other side of Dalness before very long. You have been very good to us, and my name's John M'I ver of Barbreck--a kind of a Campbell with a great respect for the Mac-Donalds, of whom I kent a few perfect gentry in foreign wars I have been at the fighting of. And--good day, mistress, we must be going. My friends have the very small manners surely, for they're off down the road. Well just let them go that way. What need ye expect off small men and gillies?"

He signed to me with a shake of his sporran to show it was empty, and, falling to his meaning, I took some silver from my own purse and offered it to the glum-faced lad in the blankets. Beetle-brow scowled, and refused to put a hand out for it, so I left it on a table without a clink to catch the woman's ear.

"Would you not have a _deoch-an-doruis?_" asked the woman, making to a press and producing a bottle.

M'Iver started in a new alarm. "No, no. You're very good," said he; "but I never take it myself in the morning, and--good day, mistress--and my friend Elrigmore, who's left with me here, is perhaps too free with it sometimes; and indeed maybe I'm that way myself too--it's a thing that grows on you. Good-bye, mistress."

She put out her hand, facing us with uplifted eyes. I felt a push at my shoulder, and the minister, who had left the four others down the brae, stepped softly into the room. M'Iver was in a high perplexity. He dare not shake the woman's hand, and still he dare not hurt her feelings. "My thong's loose," said he, stooping to fumble with a brogue that needed no such attention. He rose with the minister at his shoulder.

"And good day to you again, mistress," said M'Iver, turning about to go, without heeding the outstretched hand.

Master Gordon saw the whole play at a glance. He took the woman's hand in his without a word, wrung it with great warmth, and, seized as it seemed by a sudden whim, lifted the fingers to his lips, softly kissed them, and turned away.

"O," cried the woman, with tears welling to her poor eyes--"O Clan Campbell, I'll never call ye down! Ye may have the guile they claim for ye, but ye have the way with a widow's heart!"