John Splendid looked at me from the corner of an eye as we came out again and daundered slowly down the town.
“A queer one yon!” said he, as it were feeling his way with a rapier-point at my mind about his Marquis.
“Do you tell me?” I muttered, giving him parry of low quarte like a good swordsman, and he came to the recover with a laugh.
“Foil, Elrigmore!” he cried. “But we’re soldiers and lads of the world, and you need hardly be so canny. You see MacCailein’s points as well as I do. His one weakness is the old one--books, books,--the curse of the Highlands and every man of spirit, say I. He has the stuff in him by nature, for none can deny Clan Diarmaid courage and knightliness; but for four generations court, closet, and college have been taking the heart out of our chiefs. Had our lordship in-bye been sent a fostering in the old style, brought up to the chase and the sword and manly comportment, he would not have that wan cheek this day, and that swithering about what he must be at next!”
“You forget that I have had the same ill-training,” I said (in no bad humour, for I followed his mind). “I had a touch of Glascow College myself.”
“Yes, yes,” he answered quickly; “you had that, but by all accounts it did you no harm. You learned little of what they teach there.”
This annoyed me, I confess, and John Splendid was gleg enough to see it
“I mean,” he added, “you caught no fever for paper and ink, though you may have learned many a quirk I was the better of myself. I could never even write my name; and I’ve kept compt of wages at the mines with a pickle chuckie-stones.”
“That’s a pity,” says I, drily.
“Oh, never a bit,” says he, gaily, or at any rate with a way as if to carry it off vauntingly. “I can do many things as well as most, and a few others colleges never learned me. I know many winter tales, from ‘Minochag and Morag’ to ‘The Shifty Lad’; I can make passable poetry by word of mouth; I can speak the English and the French, and I have seen enough of courtiers to know that half their canons are to please and witch the eye of women in a way that I could undertake to do by my looks alone and some good-humour. Show me a beast on hill or in glen I have not the history of; and if dancing, singing, the sword, the gun, the pipes--ah, not the pipes,--it’s my one envy in the world to play the bagpipes with some show of art and delicacy, and I cannot. Queer is that, indeed, and I so keen on them! I would tramp right gaily a night and a day on end to hear a scholar fingering ‘The Glen is Mine.’”
There was a witless vanity about my friend that sat on him almost like a virtue. He made parade of his crafts less, I could see, because he thought much of them, than because he wanted to keep himself on an equality with me. In the same way, as I hinted before, he never, in all the time of our wanderings after, did a thing well before me but he bode to keep up my self-respect by maintaining that I could do better, or at least as good.
“Books, I say,” he went on, as we clinked heels on the causeway-stones, and between my little bit cracks with old friends in the by-going,-- “books, I say, have spoiled Mac-Cailein’s stomach. Ken ye what he told me once? That a man might readily show more valour in a conclusion come to in the privacy of his bed-closet than in a victory won on the field. That’s what they teach by way of manly doctrine down there in the new English church, under the pastorage of Maister Alexander Gordon, chaplain to his lordship and minister to his lordship’s people! It must be the old Cavalier in me, but somehow (in your lug) I have no broo of those Covenanting cattle from the low country--though Gordon’s a good soul, there’s no denying.”
“Are you Catholic?” I said, in a surprise.
“What are you yourself?” he asked, and then he flushed, for he saw a little smile in my face at the transparency of his endeavour to be always on the pleasing side.
“To tell the truth,” he said, “I’m depending on salvation by reason of a fairly good heart, and an eagerness to wrong no man, gentle or semple. I love my fellows, one and all, not offhand as the Catechism enjoins, but heartily, and I never saw the fellow, carl or king, who, if ordinary honest and cheerful, I could not lie heads and thraws with at a camp-fire. In matters of strict ritual, now,--ha--urn!”
“Out with it, man!” I cried, laughing.
“I’m like Parson Kilmalieu upbye. You’ve heard of him--easy-going soul, and God sain him! When it came to the bit, he turned the holy-water font of Kilcatrine blue-stone upside-down, scooped a hole in the bottom, and used the new hollow for Protestant baptism. ‘There’s such a throng about heaven’s gate,’ said he, ‘that it’s only a mercy to open two;’ and he was a good and humour-some Protestant-Papist till the day he went under the flagstones of his chapel upbye.”
Now here was not a philosophy to my mind. I fought in the German wars less for the kreutzers than for a belief (never much studied out, but fervent) that Protestantism was the one good faith, and that her ladyship of Babylon, that’s ever on the ran-don, cannot have her downfall one day too soon. You dare not be playing corners-change-corners with religion as you can with the sword of what the ill-bred have called a mercenary (when you come to ponder on’t, the swords of patriot or paid man are both for selfish ends unsheathed); and if I set down here word for word what John Splendid said, it must not be thought to be in homologation on my part of such latitudinarianism.
I let him run on in this key till we came to the change-house of a widow--one Fraser--and as she curtsied at the door, and asked if the braw gentlemen would favour her poor parlour, we went in and tossed a quaich or two of aqua, to which end she set before us a little brown bottle and two most cunningly contrived and carven cups made of the Coillebhraid silver.
The houses in Inneraora were, and are, built all very much alike, on a plan I thought somewhat cosy and genteel, ere ever I went abroad and learned better. I do not even now deny the cosiness of them, but of the genteelity it were well to say little. They were tall lands or tenements, three storeys high, with through-going closes, or what the English might nominate passages, running from front to back, and leading at their midst to stairs, whereby the occupants got to their domiciles in the flats above. Curved stairs they were, of the same blue-stone the castle is built of, and on their landings at each storey they branched right and left to give access to the single apartments or rooms and kitchens of the residenters. Throng tenements they are these, even yet, giving, as I write, clever children to the world. His Grace nowadays might be granting the poor people a little more room to grow in, some soil for their kail, and a better prospect from their windows than the whitewashed wall of the opposite land; but in the matter of air there was and is no complaint The sea in stormy days came bellowing to the very doors, salt and stinging, tremendous blue and cold. Staying in town of a night, I used to lie awake in my relative’s, listening to the spit of the waves on the window-panes and the grumble of the tide, that rocked the land I lay in till I could well fancy it was a ship. Through the closes the wind ever stalked like something fierce and blooded, rattling the iron snecks with an angry finger, breathing beastily at the hinge, and running back a bit once in a while to leap all the harder against groaning lintel and post.
The change-house of the widow was on the ground-flat, a but and ben, the ceilings arched with stone--a strange device in masonry you’ll seldom find elsewhere, Highland or Lowland. But she had a garret-room up two stairs where properly she abode, the close flat being reserved for trade of vending uisgebeatha and ale. I describe all this old place so fully because it bears on a little affair that happened therein on that day John Splendid and I went in to clink glasses.
The widow had seen that neither of us was very keen on her aqua, which, as it happened, was raw new stuff brewed over at Karnes, Lochow, and she asked would we prefer some of her brandy.
“After his lordship’s it might be something of a down-come,” said John Splendid, half to me and half to the woman.
She caught his meaning, though he spoke in the English; and in our own tongue, laughing toothlessly, she said--
“The same stilling, Barbreck, the same stilling I make no doubt MacCailein gets his brown brandy by my brother’s cart from French Foreland; it’s a rough road, and sometimes a bottle or two spills on the way. I’ve a flagon up in a cupboard in my little garret, and I’ll go fetch it.”
She was over-old a woman to climb three steep stairs for the sake of two young men’s drought, and I (having always some regard for the frail) took the key from her hand and went, as was common enough with her younger customers, seeking my own liquor up the stair.
In those windy flights in the fishing season there is often the close smell of herring-scale, of bow tar and the bark-tan of the fishing nets; but this stair I climbed for the wherewithal was unusually sweet-odoured and clean, because on the first floor was the house of Provost Brown--a Campbell and a Gael, but burdened by accident with a Lowland-sounding cognomen. He had the whole flat to himself--half-a-dozen snug apartments with windows facing the street or the sea as he wanted. I was just at the head of the first flight when out of a door came a girl, and I clean forgot all about the widow’s flask of French brandy.
Little more than twelve years syne the Provost’s daughter had been a child at the grammar-school, whose one annoyance in life was that the dominie called her Betsy instead of Betty, her real own name: here she was, in the flat of her father’s house in Inneraora town, a full-grown woman, who gave me check in my stride and set my face flaming. I took in her whole appearance at one glance--a way we have in foreign armies. Between my toe on the last step of the stair and the landing I read the picture: a well-bred woman, from her carriage, the neatness of her apparel, the composure of her pause to let me bye in the narrow passage to the next stair; not very tall (I have ever had a preference for such as come no higher than neck and oxter); very dark brown hair, eyes sparkling, a face rather pale than ruddy, soft skinned, full of a keen nervousness.
In this matter of a woman’s eyes--if I may quit the thread of my history--I am a trifle fastidious, and I make bold to say that the finest eyes in the world are those of the Highland girls of Argile--burgh or landward--the best bred and gentlest of them, I mean: There is in them a full and melting friendliness, a mixture to my sometimes notion of poetry and of calm--a memory, as I’ve thought before, of the deep misty glens and their sights and secrets. I have seen more of the warm heart and merriment in a simple Loch Finne girl’s eyes than in all the faces of all the grand dames ever I looked on, Lowland or foreign.
What pleased me first and foremost about this girl Betty, daughter of Provost Brown, were her eyes, then, that showed, even in yon dusky passage, a humoursome interest in young Elrigmore in a kilt coming up-stairs swinging on a finger the key of Lucky Fraser’s garret. She hung back doubtfully, though she knew me (I could see) for her old school-fellow and sometime boy-lover, but I saw something of a welcome in the blush at her face, and I gave her no time to chill to me.
“Betty lass, ‘tis you,” said I, putting out a hand and shaking her soft fingers. “What think you of my ceremony in calling at the earliest chance to pay my devoirs to the Provost of this burgh and his daughter?”
I put the key behind my back to give colour a little to my words; but my lady saw it and jumped at my real errand on the stair, with that quickness ever accompanying eyes of the kind I have mentioned.
“Ceremony here, devoir there!” said she, smiling, “there was surely no need for a key to our door, Elrigmore---”
“Colin, Mistress Brown, plain Colin, if you please.”
“Colin, if you will, though it seems daftlike to be so free with a soldier of twelve years’ fortune. You were for the widow’s garret Does some one wait on you below?”
“John Splendid.”
“My mother’s in-bye. She will be pleased to see you back again if you and your friend call. After you’ve paid the lawing,” she added, smiling like a rogue.
“That will we,” said I; but I hung on the stair-head, and she leaned on the inner sill of the stair window.
We got into a discourse upon old days, that brought a glow to my heart the brandy I forgot had never brought to my head. We talked of school, and the gay days in wood and field, of our childish wanderings on the shore, making sand-keps and stone houses, herding the crabs of God--so little that bairns dare not be killing them, of venturings to sea many ells out in the fishermen’s coracles, of journeys into the brave deep woods that lie far and wide round Inneraora, seeking the branch for the Beltane fire; of nutting in the hazels of the glens, and feasts upon the berry on the brae. Later, the harvest-home and the dance in green or barn when I was at almost my man’s height, with the pluck to put a bare lip to its apprenticeship on a woman’s cheek; the songs at ceilidh fires, the telling of sgeulachdan and fairy tales up on the mountain sheiling----
“Let me see,” said I; “when I went abroad, were not you and one of the Glenaora Campbells chief?”
I said it as if the recollection had but sprung to me, while the truth is I had thought on it often in camp and field, with a regret that the girl should throw herself off on so poor a partner.
She laughed merrily with her whole soul in the business, and her face without art or pretence--a fashion most wholesome to behold.
“He married some one nearer him in years long syne,” said she. “You forget I was but a bairn when we romped in the hay-dash.” And we buckled to the crack again, I more keen on it than ever. She was a most marvellous fine girl, and I thought her (well I mind me now) like the blue harebell that nods upon our heather hills.
We might, for all I dreamt of the widow’s brandy, have been conversing on the stair-head yet, and my story had a different conclusion, had not a step sounded on the stair, and up banged John Splendid, his sword-scabbard clinking against the wall of the stair with the haste of him.
“Set a cavalier at the side of an anker of brandy,” he cried, “an----”
Then he saw he was in company. He took off his bonnet with a sweep I’ll warrant he never learned anywhere out of France, and plunged into the thick of our discourse with a query.
“At your service, Mistress Brown,” said he. “Half my errand to town to-day was to find if young MacLach-lan, your relative, is to be at the market here to-morrow. If so----”
“He is,” said Betty.
“Will he be intending to put up here all night, then?”
“He comes to supper at least,” said she, “and his biding overnight is yet to be settled.”
John Splendid toyed with the switch in his hand in seeming abstraction, and yet as who was pondering on how to put an unwelcome message in plausible language.
“Do you know,” said he at last to the girl, in a low voice, for fear his words should reach the ears of her mother in-bye, “I would as well see MacLachlan out of town the morn’s night. There’s a waft of cold airs about this place not particularly wholesome for any of his clan or name. So much I would hardly care to say to himself; but he might take it from you, madam, that the other side of the loch is the safest place for sound sleep for some time to come.”
“Is it the MacNicolls you’re thinking of?” asked the girl.
“That same, my dear.”
“You ken,” he went on, turning fuller round to me, to tell a story he guessed a new-comer was unlikely to know the ins and outs of--“you ken that one of the MacLachlans, a cousin-german of old Lachie the chief, came over in a boat to Braleckan a few weeks syne on an old feud, and put a bullet into a Mac Nicoll, a peaceable lad who was at work in a field. Gay times, gay times, aren’t they? From behind a dyke wall too--a far from gentlemanly escapade even in a MacLa---- Pardon, mistress; I forgot your relationship, but this was surely a very low dog of his kind. Now from that day to this the murtherer is to find; there are some to say old Lachie could put his hand on him at an hour’s notice if he had the notion. But his lordship, Justiciar-General, upbye, has sent his provost-marshal with letters of arrest to the place in vain. Now here’s my story. The MacNicolls of Elrig have joined cause with their cousins and namesakes of Braleckan; there’s a wheen of both to be in the town at the market to-morrow, and if young Mac-Lachlan bides in this house of yours overnight, Mistress Betty Brown, you’ll maybe have broken delf and worse ere the day daw.”
Mistress Brown took it very coolly; and as for me, I was thinking of a tiny brown mole-spot she used to have low on the white of her neck when I put daisy-links on her on the summers we played on the green, and wondering if it was still to the fore and hid below her collar. In by the window came the saucy breeze and kissed her on a curl that danced above her ear.
“I hope there will be no lawlessness here,” said she: “whether he goes or bides, surely the burghers of Inner-aora will not quietly see their Provost’s domicile invaded by brawlers.”
“Exactly so,” said John Splendid, drily. “Nothing may come of it, but you might mention the affair to MacLachlan if you have the chance. For me to tell him would be to put him in the humour for staying--dour fool that he is--out of pure bravado and defiance. To tell the truth, I would bide myself in such a case. ‘Thole feud’ is my motto. My granddad writ it on his sword-blade in clear round print letters I’ve often marvelled at the skill of. If it’s your will, Elrigmore, we may be doing without the brandy, and give the house-dame a call now.”
We went in and paid our duties to the goodwife--a silver-haired dame with a look of Betty in every smile.
