I readily enough fell in with a plan that took us a bit off our way, for I was in a glow of eagerness and apprehension. My passion to come home was as great as on the night I rode up from Skipness after my seven years of war, even greater perhaps, for I was returning to a home now full of more problems than then. The restitution of my father's house was to be set about, six months of hard stint were perhaps to be faced by my people, and, above all, I had to find out how it stood between a certain lady and me.

Coming this way from Lochow, the traveller will get his first sight of the waters of Loch Finne by standing on a stone that lies upon a little knowe above his lordship's stables. It is a spot, they say, Argile himself had a keen relish for, and after a day of chasing the deer among the hills and woods, sometimes would he come and stand there and look with satisfaction on his country. For he could see the fat, rich fields of his policies there, and the tumultuous sea that swarms with fish, and to his left he could witness Glenaora and all the piled-up numerous mountains that are full of story if not of crop. To this little knowe M'Iver and I made our way. I would have rushed on it with a boy's impetuousness, but he stopped me with a hand on the sleeve.

"Canny, canny," said he, "let us get the very best of it There's a cloud on the sun that'll make Finne as cold, flat, and dead as lead; wait till it passes."

We waited but a second or two, and then the sun shot out above us, and we stepped on the hillock and we looked, with our bonnets in our hands.

Loch Finne stretched out before us, a spread of twinkling silver waves that searched into the curves of a myriad bays; it was dotted with skiffs. And the yellow light of the early year gilded the remotest hills of Ardno and Ben Ime, and the Old Man Mountain lifted his ancient rimy chin, still merrily defiant, to the sky. The parks had a greener hue than any we had seen to the north; the town revealed but its higher chimneys and the gable of the kirk, still its smoke told of occupation; the castle frowned as of old, and over all rose Dunchuach.

"O Dunchuach! Dunchuach!" cried M'Iver, in an ecstasy, spreading out his arms, and I thought of the old war-worn Greeks who came with weary marches to their native seas.

"Dunchuach! Dunchuach!" he said; "far have I wandered, and many a town I've seen, and many a prospect that was fine, and I have made songs to maids and mountains, and foreign castles too, but never a verse to Dunchuach. I do not know the words, but at my heart is lilting the very tune, and the spirit of it is here at my breast."

Then the apple rose in his throat, and he turned him round about that I might not guess the tear was at his eye.

"Tuts," said I, broken, "'tis at my own; I feel like a girl."

"Just a tickling at the pap o' the hass," he said in English; and then we both laughed.

It was the afternoon when we got into the town. The street was in the great confusion of a fair-day, crowded with burgesses and landward tenants, men and women from all parts of the countryside still on their way back from flight, or gathered for news of Inverlochy from the survivors, of whom we were the last to arrive. Tradesmen from the Lowlands were busy fitting shops and houses with doors and windows, or filling up the gaps made by fire in the long lands, for MacCailein's first thought on his return from Edinburgh had been the comfort of the common people. Seamen clamoured at the quay, loud-spoken mariners from the ports of Clyde and Leven and their busses tugged at anchor in the upper bay or sat shoulder to shoulder in a friendly congregation under the breast-wall, laden to the beams with merchandise and provender for this hungry country. If Inneraora had been keening for the lost of Inverlochy, it had got over it; at least we found no public lamentation such as made our traverse on Lochow-side so dreary. Rather was there something eager and rapt about the comportment of the people. They talked little of what was over and bye with, except to curse our Lowland troops, whose unacquaintance with native war had lost us Inverlochy. The women went about their business, red-eyed, wan, silent, for the most part; the men mortgaged the future, and drowned care in debauchery in the alehouses. A town all out of its ordinary, tapsilteerie. Walking in it, I was beat to imagine clearly what it had been like in its placid day of peace. I could never think of it as ever again to be free from this most tawdry aspect of war, a community in good order, with the day moving from dawn to dusk with douce steps, and no sharp agony at the public breast.

But we had no excuse for lingering long over our entrance upon its blue flagstone pavements; our first duty was to report ourselves in person to our commander, whose return to Inneraora Castle we had been apprised of at Cladich.



CHAPTER XXX.—ARGILE'S BEDROOM.

This need for waiting upon his lordship so soon after the great reverse was a sour bite to swallow, for M'Iver as well as myself. M'Iver, had he his own way of it, would have met his chief and cousin alone; and he gave a hint delicately of that kind, affecting to be interested only in sparing me the trouble and helping me home to Elrigmore, where my father and his men had returned three days before. But I knew an officer's duty too well for that, and insisted on accompanying him, certain (with some mischievous humour in spoiling his fair speeches) that he dared scarcely be so fair-faced and flattering to MacCailein before me as he would be alone with him.

The castle had the stillness of the grave. Every guest had fled as quickly as he could from this retreat of a naked and ashamed soul. Where pipers played as a custom, and laughter rang, there was the melancholy hush of a monastery. The servants went about a-tiptoe, speaking in whispers lest their master should be irritated in his fever; the very banner on the tower hung limp about its pole, hiding the black galley of its blazon, now a lymphad of disgrace. As we went over the bridge a little dog, his lordship's favourite, lying at the door, weary, no doubt, of sullen looks and silence, came leaping and barking about us at John's cheery invitation, in a joy, as it would appear, to meet any one with a spark of life and friendliness.

Argile was in his bed-chamber and between blankets, in the hands of his physician, who had been bleeding him. He had a minister for mind and body, for Gordon was with him too, and stayed with him during our visit, though the chirurgeon left the room with a word of caution to his patient not to excite himself.

"Wise advice, is it not, gentlemen?" said the Marquis. "As if one stirred up his own passions like a dame waiting on a drunken husband. I am glad to see you back, more especially as Master Gordon was just telling me of the surprise at Dalness, and the chance that you had been cut down there by the MacDonalds, who, luckily for him and Sonachan and the others, all followed you in your flight, and gave them a chance of an easy escape."

He shook hands with us warmly enough, with fingers moist and nervous. A raised look was in his visage, his hair hung upon a brow of exceeding pallor. I realised at a half-glance the commotion that was within.

"A drop of wine?"

"Thank you," said I, "but I'm after a glass in the town." I was yet to learn sorrow for this unhappy nobleman whose conduct had bittered me all the way from Lom.

MacCailein scrutinised me sharply, and opened his lips as it were to say something, but changed his mind, and made a gesture towards the bottle, which John Splendid speedily availed himself of with a "Here's one who has no swither about it. Lord knows I have had few enough of life's comforts this past week!"

Gordon sat with a Bible in his hand, abstracted, his eyes staring on a window that looked on the branches of the highest tree about the castle. He had been reading or praying with his master before the physician had come in; he had been doing his duty (I could swear by his stern jaw), and making MacCailein Mor writhe to the flame of a conscience revived. There was a constraint on the company for some minutes, on no one more than Argile, who sat propped up on his bolsters, and, fiddling with long thin fingers with the fringes of his coverlet, looked every way but in the eyes of M'Iver or myself. I can swear John was glad enough to escape their glance. He was as little at ease as his master, made all the fuss he could with his bottle, and drank his wine with far too great a deliberation for a person generally pretty brisk with the beaker.

"It's a fine day," said he at last, breaking the silence. "The back of the winter's broken fairly." Then he started and looked at me, conscious that I might have some contempt for so frail an opening.

"Did you come here to speak about the weather?" asked MacCailein, with a sour wearied smile.

"No," said M'Iver, ruffling up at once; "I came to ask when you are going to take us back the road we came?"

"To—to—overbye?" asked MacCailein, baulking at the name.

"Just so; to Inverlochy," answered M'Iver. "I suppose we are to give them a call when we can muster enough men?"

"Hadn't we better consider where we are first?" said MacCailein. Then he put his fair hand through his ruddy locks and sighed. "Have you nothing to say (and be done with it) about my—my—my part in the affair? His reverence here has had his will of me on that score."

M'Iver darted a look of annoyance at the minister, who seemed to pay no heed, but still to have his thoughts far off.

"I have really nothing to say, your lordship, except that I'm glad to see you spared to us here instead of being left a corpse with our honest old kinsman Auchinbreac (beannachd leas!) and more gentry of your clan and house than the Blue Quarry will make tombs for in Kilmalieu. If the minister has been preaching, it's his trade; it's what you pay him for. I'm no homilist, thank God, and no man's conscience."

"No, no; God knows you are not," said Argile, in a tone of pity and vexation. "I think I said before that you were the poorest of consciences to a man in a hesitancy between duty and inclination.... And all my guests have left me, John; I'm a lonely man in my castle of Inneraora this day, except for the prayers of a wife—God bless and keep her!—who knows and comprehends my spirit And I have one more friend here in this room———"

"You can count on John M'Iver to the yetts of Hell," said my friend, "and I am the proud man that you should think it."

"I am obliged to you for that, kinsman," said his lordship in Gaelic, with a by-your-leave to the cleric. "But do not give your witless vanity a foolish airing before my chaplain." Then he added in the English, "When the fairy was at my cradle-side and gave my mother choice of my gifts, I wish she had chosen rowth of real friends. I could be doing with more about me of the quality I mention; better than horse and foot would they be, more trusty than the claymores of my clan. It might be the slogan 'Cruachan' whenever it wist, and Archibald of Argile would be more puissant than he of Homer's story. People have envied me when they have heard me called the King of the Highlands—fools that did not know I was the poorest, weakest man of his time, surrounded by flatterers instead of friends. Gordon, Gordon, I am the victim of the Highland liar, that smooth-tongued——"

"Call it the Campbell liar," I cried bitterly, thinking of my father. "Your clan has not the reputation of guile for nothing, and if you refused straightforward honest outside counsel sometimes, it was not for the want of its offering."

"I cry your pardon," said MacCailein, meekly; "I should have learned to discriminate by now. Blood's thicker than water, they say, but it's not so pure and transparent; I have found my blood drumly enough."

"And ready enough to run freely for you," said M'Iver, but half comprehending this perplexed mind. "Your lordship should be the last to echo any sentiment directed against the name and fame of Clan Campbell."

"Indeed they gave me their blood freely enough—a thousand of them lying yonder in the north—I wish they had been so lavish, those closest about me, with truth and honour. For that I must depend on an honest servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one man in my pay with the courage to confront me with no cloaked speech, but his naked thought, though it should lash me like whips. Oh, many a time my wife, who is none of our race, warned me against the softening influence, the blight and rot of this eternal air of flattery that's round about Castle Inneraora like a swamp vapour. She's in Stirling to-day—I ken it in my heart that to-night shell weep upon her pillow because she'll know fate has found the weak joint in her goodman's armour again."

John Splendid's brow came down upon a most perplexed face; this seemed all beyond him, but he knew his master was somehow blaming the world at large for his own error.

"Come now, John," said his lordship, turning and leaning on his arm and looking curiously at his kinsman. "Come now, what do you think of me here without a wound but at the heart, with Auchinbreac and all my gallant fellows yonder?"

"Auchinbreac was a soldier by trade and a good one too," answered M'Iver, at his usual trick of prevarication.

"And a flatterer like yourself, you mean," said his lordship. "He and you learned the lesson in the same school, I'm thinking. And as ill-luck had it, his ill counsel found me on the swither, as yours did when Colkitto came down the glens there to rape and burn. That's the Devil for you; he's aye planning to have the minute and the man together. Come, sir, come, sir, what do you think, what do you think?"

He rose as he spoke and put his knees below him, and leaned across the bed with hands upon the blankets, staring his kinsman in the face as if he would pluck the truth from him out at the very eyes. His voice rose to an animal cry with an agony in it; the sinister look that did him such injustice breathed across his visage. His knuckle and collar-bones shone blae through the tight skin.

"What do I think?" echoed M'Iver. "Well, now——"

"On your honour now," cried Argile, clutching him by the shoulder.

At that M'Iver's countenance changed: he threw off his soft complacence, and cruelty and temper stiffened his jaw.

"I'll soon give you that, my Lord of Argile," said he. "I can lie like a Dutch major for convenience sake, but put me on honour and you'll get the truth if it cost me my life. Purgatory's your portion, Argile, for a Sunday's work that makes our name a mock to-day across the envious world. Take to your books and your preachers, sir—you're for the cloister and not for the field; and if I live a hundred years, I'll deny I went with you to Inverlochy. I left my sword in Badenoch, but here's my dagger" (and he threw it with a clatter on the floor); "it's the last tool I'll handle in the service of a scholar. To-morrow the old big wars for me; Hebron's troopers will welcome an umquhile comrade, and I'll find no swithering captains among the cavaliers in France."

Back sat my lord in bed, and laughed with a surrender shrill and distraught, until Master Gordon and I calmed him, and there was his cousin still before him in a passion, standing in the middle of the floor.

"Stop, stop, John," he cried; "now that for once I've got the truth from you, let us be better friends than ever before."

"Never the same again," said M'I ver, firmly, "never the same again, for you ken my estimate of you now; and what avails my courtesy?"

"Your flatteries, you mean," said Argile, good-natured. "And, besides, you speak only of my two blunders; you know my other parts,—you know that by nature I am no poltroon."

"That's no credit to you, sir—it's the strong blood of Diarmaid; there was no poltroon in the race but what came in on the wrong side of the blanket I've said it first, and I'll say it to the last, your spirit is smoored among the books. Paper and ink will be the Gael's undoing; my mother taught me, and my mother knew. So long as we lived by our hands we were the world's invincibles. Rome met us and Rome tried us, and her corps might come in winter torrents, but they never tore us from our hills and keeps. What Rome may never do, that may paper and sheepskin; you, yourself, MacCailein, have the name of plying pen and ink very well to your own purpose in the fingers of old lairds who have small skill of that contrivance."

He would have passed on in this outrageous strain without remission, had not Gordon checked him with a determined and unabashed voice. He told him to sit down in silence or leave the room, and asked him to look upon his master and see if that high fever was a condition to inflame in a fit of temper. John Splendid cooled a little, and went to the window, looking down with eyes of far surmise upon the pleasance and the town below, chewing his temper between his teeth.

"You see, Elrigmore, what a happy King of the Highlands I am," said the Marquis, despondently. "Fortunate Auchinbreac, to be all bye with it after a moment's agony!"

"He died like a good soldier, sir," I said; "he was by all accounts a man of some vices, but he wiped them out in his own blood."

"Are you sure of that? Is it not the old folly of the code of honour, the mad exaltation of mere valour in arms, that makes you think so? What if he was spilling his drops on the wrong side? He was against his king at least, and—oh, my wits, my wits, what am I saying?... I saw you did not drink my wine, Elrigmore; am I so low as that?"

"There is no man so low, my lord," said I, "but he may be yet exalted. We are, the best of us, the instruments of a whimsical providence" ("What a rank doctrine," muttered the minister), "and Caesar himself was sometimes craven before his portents. You, my lord, have the one consolation left, that all's not bye yet with the cause you champion, and you may yet lead it to the highest victory."

Argile took a grateful glance at me. "You know what I am," he said, "not a man of the happy, single mood like our friend Barbreck here, but tossed between philosophies. I am paying bitterly for my pliability, for who so much the sport of life as the man who knows right well the gait he should gang, and prays fervently to be permitted to follow it, but sometimes stumbles in the ditch? Monday, oh Monday; I must be at Edinburgh and face them all! Tis that dauntons me." His eyes seemed to swim in blood, as he looked at me, or through me, aghast at the horror of his situation, and sweat stood in blobs upon his brow. "That," he went on, "weighs me down like lead. Here about me my people know me, and may palliate the mistake of a day by the recollection of a lifetime's honour. I blame Auchinbreac; I blame the chieftains,—they said I must take to the galley; I blame——"

"Blame no one, Argile," said Master Gordon, standing up before him, not a second too soon, for his lordship had his hand on the dirk M'Iver had thrown down. Then he turned to us with ejecting arms. "Out you go," he cried sternly, "out you go; what delight have you in seeing a nobleman on the rack?"

As the door closed behind us we could hear Argile sob.

Seventeen years later, if I may quit the thread of my history and take in a piece that more properly belongs to the later adventures of John Splendid, I saw my lord die by the maiden. Being then in his tail, I dined with him and his friends the day before he died, and he spoke with exceeding cheerfulness of that hour M'Iver and I found him in bed in Inneraora. "You saw me at my worst," said he, "on two occasions; bide till to-morrow and you'll see me at my best I never unmasked to mortal man till that day Gordon put you out of my room." I stayed and saw him die; I saw his head up and his chin in the air as behoved his quality, that day he went through that noisy, crowded, causied Edinburgh—Edinburgh of the doleful memories, Edinburgh whose ports I never enter till this day but I feel a tickling at the nape of my neck, as where a wooden collar should lie before the shear fall.

"A cool enough reception this," said M'Iver, as we left the gate. "It was different last year, when we went up together on your return from Low Germanie. Then MacCailein was in the need of soldiers, now he's in the need of priests, who gloze over his weakness with their prayers."

"You are hardly fair either to the one or the other," I said. "Argile, whom I went in to meet to-day with a poor regard for him, turns out a better man than I gave him credit for being; he has at least the grace to grieve about a great error of judgment, or weakness of the spirit, whichever it may be. And as for Master Gordon, I'll take off my hat to him. Yon's no type of the sour, dour, anti-prelatics; he comes closer on the perfect man and soldier than any man I ever met."

M'Iver looked at me with a sign of injured vanity.

"You're not very fastidious in your choice of comparisons," said he. "As for myself, I cannot see much more in Gordon than what he is paid for—a habit of even temper, more truthfulness than I have myself, and that's a dubious virtue, for see the impoliteness that's always in its train! Add to that a lack of any clannish regard for MacCailein Mor, whom he treats just like a common merchant, and that's all. Just a plain, stout, fozy, sappy burrow-man, keeping a gospel shop, with scarcely so much of a man's parts as will let him fend a blow in the face. I could march four miles for his one, and learn him the A B ab of every manly art."

"I like you fine, man," I cried; "I would sooner go tramping the glens with you any day than Master Gordon; but that's a weakness of the imperfect and carnal man, that cares not to have a conscience at his coat-tail every hour of the day: you have your own parts and he his, and his parts are those that are not very common on our side of the country—more's the pity."

M'Iver was too busy for a time upon the sudden rupture with Argile to pay very much heed to my defence of Master Gordon. The quarrel—to call that a quarrel in which one man had all the bad temper and the other nothing but self-reproach—had soured him of a sudden as thunder turns the morning's cream to curd before noon. And his whole demeanour revealed a totally new man. In his ordinary John was very pernicketty about his clothing, always with the most shining of buckles and buttons, always trim in plaiding, snod and spruce about his hair and his hosen, a real dandy who never overdid the part, but just contrived to be pleasant to the eye of women, who, in my observation, have, the most sensible of them, as great a contempt for the mere fop as they have for the sloven. It took, indeed, trimness of apparel to make up for the plainness of his face. Not that he was ugly or harsh-favoured,—he was too genial for either; he was simply well-favoured enough to pass in a fair, as the saying goes, which is a midway between Apollo and plain Donald But what with a jacket and vest all creased for the most apparent reasons, a plaid frayed to ribbons in dashing through the wood of Dalness, brogues burst at the toes, and a bonnet soaked all out of semblance to itself by rains, he appeared more common. The black temper of him transformed his face too: it lost the geniality that was its main charm, and out of his eyes flamed a most wicked, cunning, cruel fellow.

He went down the way from the castle brig to the "arches cursing with great eloquence. A soldier picks up many tricks of blasphemy in a career about the world with foreign legions, and John had the reddings of three or four languages at his command, so that he had no need to repeat himself much in his choice of terms aboat his chief. To do him justice he had plenty of condemnation for himself too.

"Well," said I, "you were inclined to be calm enough with MacCailein when first we entered his room. I suppose all this uproar is over his charge of flattery, not against yourself alone but against all the people about."

"That's just the thing," he cried, turning round and throwing his arms furiously about "Could he not have charged the clan generally, and let who would put the cap on? If yon's the policy of Courts, heaven help princes!"

"And yet you were very humble when you entered," I protested.

"Was I that?" he retorted. "That's easy to account for. Did you ever feel like arguing with a gentleman when you had on your second-best clothes and no ruffle? The man was in his bed, and his position as he cocked up there on his knees was not the most dignified I have seen; but even then he had the best of it, for I felt like a beggar before him in my shabby duds. Oh, he had the best of us all there! You saw Gordon had the sense to put on a new surtout and clean linen and a freshly dressed peruke before he saw him; I think he would scarcely have been so bold before Argile if he had his breek-bands a finger-length below his belt, and his wig on the nape of his neck as we saw him in Glencoe."

"Anyhow," said I, "you have severed from his lordship; are you really going abroad?"

He paused a second in thought, smiled a little, and then laughed as if he had seen something humorous.

"Man," said he, "didn't I do the dirk trick with a fine touch of nobility? Maybe you thought it was done on the impulse and without any calculation. The truth was, I played the whole thing over in my mind while he was in the preliminaries of his discourse. I saw he was working up to an attack, and I knew I could surprise him. But I must confess I said more than I intended. When I spoke of the big wars and Hebron's troopers—well, Argile's a very nice shire to be living in."

"What, was it all play-acting then?"

He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

"You must be a singularly simple man, Elrigmore," he said, "to ask that of any one. Are we not play-acting half our lives once we get a little beyond the stage of the ploughman and the herd? Half our tears and half our laughter and the great bulk of our virtues are like your way of cocking your bonnet over your right ear; it does not come by nature, and it is done to pleasure the world in general Play-acting! I'll tell you this, Colin, I could scarcely say myself when a passion of mine is real or fancied now. But I can tell you this too; if I began in play to revile the Marquis, I ended in earnest I'm afraid it's all bye with me yonder. No more mine-managing for me; I struck too close on the marrow for him to forget it."

"He has forgotten and forgiven it already," I cried "At least, let us hope he has not forgotten it (for you said no more than was perhaps deserved), but at least it's forgiven. If you said to-morrow that you were sorry for your temper——"

"Said ten thousand fiends in Hell!" cried M'Iver. "I may be vexed I angered the man; but I'll never let him know it by my words, if he cannot make it out from my acts."



CHAPTER XXXI.—MISTRESS BETTY.

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.



CHAPTER XXXII.—A SCANDAL AND A QUARREL.

On some days I kept to Glen Shim as the tod keeps to the cairn when heather burns, afraid almost to let even my thoughts wander there lest they should fly back distressed, to say the hope I cherished was in vain. I worked in the wood among Use pines that now make rooftrees for my home, and at nights I went on ttilidh among some of the poorer houses of the Glen, and found a drug for a mind uneasy in the talcs our peasants told around the fire. A drug, and yet a drug sometimes with the very disease in itself I sought for it to kill. For the love of a man for a maid is the one story of all lands, of all ages, trick it as we may, and my good people, telling their old ancient histories round the lire, found, although they never knew it, a young man's quivering heart a score of times a night.

Still at times, by day and night—ay! in the very midmost watches of the stars-I walked, in my musing, as I thought, upon the causeyed street, where perhaps I had been sooner in the actual fact if M'Iver's departure had not been delayed. He was swaggering, they told me, about the town in his old regimentals, every pomp of the foreign soldier assumed again as if they had never been relaxed in all those yean of peace and commerce. I drank stoutly in the taverns, and 'twas constantly, "Landlady, I'm the lawing," for the fishermen, that they might love him. A tale went round, too, that one morning he went to a burial in Kilmalieu, and Argile was there seeing the last of an old retainer to his long home, and old Macnachtan came riding down past corpse and mourner with his only reverence a finger to his cap. "Come down off your horse when death or Argile goes bye," cried M'Iver, hauling the laird off his saddle. But between Argile and him were no transactions; the pride of both would not allow it, though it was well known that their affections were stronger than ever they had been before, and that Gordon made more than one attempt at a plan to bring them together.

It is likely, too, I had been down—leaving M'Iver out of consideration altogether—had there not been the tales about MacLachlan, tales that came to my ears in the most miraculous way, with no ill intention on the part of the gossips—about his constant haunting of Inneraora and the company of his cousin. He had been seen there with her on the road to Carlunnan. That venue of all others! God! did the river sing for him too among its reeds and shallows; did the sun tip Dunchuach like a thimble and the wild beast dally on the way? That was the greatest blow of all! It left plain (I thought in ray foolishness) the lady's coolness when last I met her; for rae henceforth (so said bitterness) the serious affairs of life, that in her notion set me more than courtship. I grew solemn, so gloomy in spirit that even my father observed the ceasing of my whistle and song, and the less readiness of my smile. And he, poor man, thought it the melancholy of Inverlochy and the influence of this ruined countryside.

When I went down to the town again the very house-fronts seemed inhospitable, so that I must pass the time upon the quay. There are days at that season when Loch Finne, so calm, so crystal, so duplicate of the sky, seems like water sunk and lost for ever to wind and wave, when the sea-birds doze upon its kindly bosom like bees upon the flower, and a silence hangs that only breaks in distant innuendo of the rivers or the low of cattle on the Cowal shore. The great bays lapse into hills that float upon a purple haze, forest nor lea has any sign of spring's extravagance or the flame of the autumn that fires Dunchuach till it blazes like a torch. All is in the light sleep of the year's morning, and what, I have thought, if God in His pious whim should never awake it any more?

It was such a day when I went up and down the rough cobble of the quay, and to behold men working there at their noisy and secular occupations seemed, at first, a Sabbath desecration. But even they seemed affected by this marvellous peace of sea and sky, as they lifted from the net or rested on the tackle to look across greasy gunnels with some vague unquiet of the spirit at the marvellous restfulness of the world. Their very voices learned a softer note from that lulled hour of the enchanted season, and the faint blue smoke of their den fires rose and mingled in the clustered masts or nestled wooing in the drying sails. Then a man in drink came roaring down the quay, an outrage on the scene, and the magic of the day was gone! The boats bobbed and nudged each other or strained at the twanging cord as seamen and fishers spanged from deck to deck; rose cries in loud and southward Gaelic or the lowlands of Air. The world was no longer dreaming but stark awake, all but the sea and the lapsing bays and the brown floating hills. Town Inneraora bustled to its marge. Here was merchandise, here the pack and the bale; snuffy men in perukes, knee-breeched and portly, came and piped in high English, managing the transport of their munitions ashore.

I was standing in the midst of the throng of the quay-head, with my troubled mind rinding ease in the industry and interest of those people without loves or jealousies, and only their poor merchandise to exercise them, when I started at the sound of a foot coming up the stone slip from the wateredge. I turned, and who was there but MacLachlan? He was all alone but for a haunch-man, a gillie-wet-foot as we call him, and he had been set on the slip by a wherry that had approached from Cowal side unnoticed by me as I stood in meditation. As he came up the sloping way, picking his footsteps upon the slimy stones, he gave no heed to the identity of the person before him; and with my mood in no way favourable to polite discourse with the fellow, I gave a pace or two round the elbow of the quay, letting him pass on his way up among the clanking rings and chains of the moored gaberts, the bales of the luggers, and the brawny and crying mariners. He was not a favourite among the quay-folk, this pompous little gentleman, with his nose in the air and his clothing so very gaudy. The Lowlands men might salute his gentility if they cared; no residenters of the place did so, but turned their shoulders on him and were very busy with their affairs as he passed. He went bye with a waff of wind in his plaiding, and his haunch-man as he passed at a discreet distance got the double share of jibe and glunch from the mariners.

At first I thought of going home; a dread came on me that if I waited longer in the town I might come upon this intruder and his cousin, when it would sore discomfort me to do so. Thus I went slowly up the quay, and what I heard in the bye-going put a new thought in my head.

Two or three seamen were talking together as I passed, with nudges and winks and sly laughs, not natives of the place but from farther up the loch, yet old frequenters with every chance to know the full ins and outs of what they discoursed upon. I heard but three sentences as I passed; they revealed that MacLachlan at Kilmichael market had once bragged of an amour in Inneraora. That was all! But it was enough to set every drop of blood in my body boiling. I had given the dog credit for a decent affection, and here he was narrating a filthy and impossible story. Liar! liar! liar! At first the word rose to my mouth, and I had to choke it at my teeth for fear it should reveal my passion to the people as I passed through among them with a face inflamed; then doubt arose, a contention of recollections, numb fears—but the girl's eyes triumphed: I swore to myself she at least should never know the villany of this vulgar and lying rumour set about the country by a rogue.

Now all fear of facing the street deserted me. I felt a man upright, imbued with a strong sense of justice; I felt I must seek out John Splendid and get his mind, of all others, upon a villany he eould teach me to avenge. I found him at Aakaig's comer, a flushed man with perhaps (as I thought at first) too much spirits in him to be the most sensible of advisers in a matter of such delicacy.

"Elrigmore!" he cried; "sir, I give you welcome to Inneraora! You will not know the place, it has grown so much since you last visited its humble street."

"I'm glad to see you now, John," I said, hurriedly. "I would sooner see you than any other living person here."

He held up a finger and eyed me pawkily. "Come, man, cornel" he said, laughing, "On your oath now, is there not a lady? And that minds me; you have no more knowledge of the creatures, no more pluck in their presence, than a child. Heavens, what a soldier of fortune is this? Seven years among the army; town to town, camp to camp, here to-day and away to-morrow, with a soldier's pass to love upon your back and haunch, and yet you have not learned to lift the sneck of a door, but must be tap-tapping with your finger-nails."

"I do not know what you mean," said I.

"Lorf! lord!" he cried, pretending amazement, "and here's schooling! Just think it over for yourself. You are not an ill-looking fellow (though I think I swing a kilt better myself), you are the proper age (though it's wonderful what a youngish-looking man of not much over forty may do), you have a name for sobriety, and Elrigmore carries a good many head of cattle and commands a hundred swords,—would a girl with any wisdom and no other sweetheart in her mind turn her back on such a list of virtues and graces? If I had your reputation and your estate, I could have the pick of the finest women in Argile—ay, and far beyond it."

"Never mind about that just now," I demanded, gripping my preacher by the hand and forcing him with me out of the way of the passers-by, whose glance upon us would have seemed an indelicacy when we were discussing so precious a thing as my lady's honour.

"But I shall mind it," insisted M'Iver, pursing his lips as much to check a hiccough as to express his determination. "It seems I am the only man dare take the liberty. Fie on ye! man, fie! you have not once gone to see the Provost or his daughter since I saw you last I dare not go myself for the sake of a very stupid blunder; but I met the old man coming up the way an hour ago, and he was asking what ailed you at them. Will I tell you something, Colin? The Provost's a gleg man, but he's not so gleg as his wife. The dame for me! say I, in every household, if it's her daughter's love-affairs she's to keep an eye on."

"You know so much of the lady and her people," said I, almost losing patience, "that it's a wonder you never sought her for yourself."

He laughed. "Do you think so?" he said. "I have no doubt of the result; at least I would have had no doubt of it a week or two ago, if I had taken advantage of my chances." Then he laughed anew. "I said the good-wife was gleg; I'm just as gleg myself."

This tipsy nonsense began to annoy me; but it was useless to try to check it, for every sentence uttered seemed a spark to his vanity.

"It's about Betty I want to speak," I said.

"And it's very likely too; I would not need to be very gleg to see that She does not want to speak to me, however, or of me, as you'll find out when once you see her. I am in her black books sure enough, for I saw her turn on the street not an hour ago to avoid me."

"She'll not do that to MacLachlan," I put in, glad of the opening, "unless she hears—and God forbid it—that the scamp lightlies her name at common fairs."

M'Iver drew himself up, stopped, and seemed to sober.

"What's this you're telling me?" he asked, and I went over the incident on the quay. It was enough. It left him as hot as myself. He fingered at his coat-buttons and his cuffs, fastening and unfastening them; he played nervously with the hilt of his dirk; up would go his brows and down again like a bird upon his prey; his lips would tighten on his teeth, and all the time he was muttering in his pick of languages sentiments natural to the occasion. Gaelic is the poorest of tongues to swear in: it has only a hash of borrowed terms from Lowland Scots; but my cavalier was well able to make up the deficiency.

"Quite so; very true and very comforting," I said at last; "but what's to be done?"

"What's to be done?" said he, with a start "Surely to God there's no doubt about that!"

"No, sir; I hope you know me better. But how's it to be done? I thought of going up in front of the whole quay and making him chew his lie at the point of my dagger. Then I thought more formality was needed—a friend or two, a select venue, and careful leisure time for so important a meeting."

"But what's the issue upon which the rencontre shall take place?" asked M'Iver, it seemed to me with ridiculous scrupulosity.

"Why need you ask?" said I. "You do not expect me to invite him to repeat the insult or exaggerate the same."

M'Iver turned on me almost roughly and shook me by the shoulder. "Man!" said he, "wake up, and do not let your wits hide in the heels of your boots. Are you clown enough to think of sending a lady's name around the country tacked on to a sculduddry tale like this? You must make the issue somewhat more politic than that."

"I agree with you," I confessed; "it was stupid of me not to think of it, but what can I do? I have no other quarrel with the man."

"Make one, then," said M'Iver. "I cannot comprehend where you learned your trade as cavalier, or what sort of company you kept in Mackay's, if you did not pick up and practise the art of forcing a quarrel with a man on any issue you cared to choose. In ten minutes I could make this young fellow put down his gage in a dispute about the lacing of boots."

"But in that way at least I'm the poorest of soldiers; I never picked a quarrel, and yet here's one that sets my gorge to my palate, but cannot be fought on."

"Tuts, tuts! man," he cried, "it seems that, after all, you must leave the opening of this little play to John M'Iver. Come with me a bit yont the Cross here and take a lesson."

He led me up the wide pend close and round the back of old Stonefield's dwelling, and into a corner of a lane that gave upon the fields, yet at the same time kept a plain view of the door of Askaig's house, where we guessed MacLachlan was now on his visit to the Provost's family.

"Let us stand here," said he, "and I'll swear I'm not very well acquainted with our friend's habits if he's not passing this way to Carlunnan sometime in the next ten minutes, for I saw Mistress Betty going up there, as I said, not so very long ago."

This hint at MacLachlan's persistency exasperated me the more. I felt that to have him by the throat would be a joy second only to one other in the world.

M'Iver saw my passion—it was ill to miss seeing it—and seemed struck for the first time by the import of what we were engaged upon.

"We were not given to consider the end of a duello from the opening when abroad," he said; "but that was because we were abroad, and had no remonstrance and reminder in the face of familiar fields and houses and trees, and the passing footsteps of our own people. Here, however, the end's to be considered from the beginning—have you weighed the risks in your mind?"

"I've weighed nothing," said I, shortly, "except that I feel in me here I shall have his blood before nightfall."

"He's a fairly good hand with his weapon, they tell me."

"If he was a wizard, with the sword of Great Donald, I would touch him to the vitals. Have I not learned a little, if you'll give me the credit, from Alasdair Mor?"

"I forgot that," said M'lver; "you'll come through it all right And here's our man coming up the lane. No anger now; nothing to be said on your side till I give you a sign, and then I can leave the rest to your wisdom."

MacLachlan came staving up the cobbles in a great hurry, flailing the air, as he went, with a short rattan, for he affected some of the foppish customs the old officers brought back from the Continent. He was for passing us with no more than a jerk of the head, but M'Iver and I between us took up the mouth of the lane, and as John seemed to smile on him like one with gossip to exchange, he was bound to stop.

"Always on the going foot, MacLachlan," said John, airily. "I never see a young gentleman of your age and mettle but I wish he could see the wisdom of putting both to the best purpose on the field."

"With your cursed foreigners, I suppose you mean," said the young fellow. "I could scarcely go as a private pikeman like yourself."

"I daresay not, I daresay not," answered M'Iver, pricked at his heart (I could tell by his eye) by this reflection upon his humble office, but keeping a marvellously cool front to his cockerel. "And now when I think of it, I am afraid you have neither the height nor width for even so ornamental a post as an ensign's."

MacLachlan restrained himself too, unwilling, no doubt, as I thought, to postpone his chase of the lady by so much time as a wrangle with John M'Iver would take up. He affected to laugh at Splendid's rejoinder, turned the conversation upon the disjasket condition of the town, and edged round to get as polite a passage as possible between us, without betraying any haste to sever himself from our company. But both John Splendid and I had our knees pretty close together, and the very topic he started seemed to be the short cut to the quarrel we sought.

"A poor town indeed," admitted M'Iver, readily, "but it might be worse. It can be built anew. There's nothing in nature, from a pigsty to a name for valour and honour, that a wise man may not patch up somehow."

MacLachlan's retort to this opening was on the tip of his tongue; but his haste made him surrender a taunt as likely to cause trouble. "You're very much in the proverb way to-day," was all he said. "I'm sure I wish I saw Inneraora as hale and complete as ever it was: it never had a more honest friend than myself."

"That one has missed," thought I, standing by in a silent part of this three-cornered convention. M'Iver smiled mildly, half, I should think, at the manner in which his thrust had been foiled, half to keep MacLachlan still with us. His next attack was more adroit though roundabout, and it effected its purpose.

"I see you are on your way up to the camp," said he, with an appearance of indifference. "We were just thinking of a daunder there ourselves."

"No," said MacLachlan, shortly; "I'm for farther up the Glen."

"Then at least we'll have your company part of the way," said John, and the three of us walked slowly off, the young gentleman with no great warmth at the idea, which was likely to spoil his excursion to some degree. M'Iver took the place between us, and in the rear, twenty paces, came the gille cas-fleuch.

"I have been bargaining for a horse up here," said John in a while, "and I'm anxious that Elrigmore should see it. You'll have heard I'm off again on the old road."

"There's a rumour of it," said MacLachlan, cogitating on his own affairs, or perhaps wondering what our new interest in his company was due to.

"Ah! it's in my blood," said John, "in my blood and bones! Argile was a fairly good master—so to call him—but—well, you understand yourself: a man of my kind at a time like this feels more comfortable anywhere else than in the neighbourhood of his chief."

"I daresay," replied MacLachlan, refusing the hook, and yet with a sneer in his accent.

"Have you heard that his lordship and I are at variance since our return from the North?"

"Oh! there's plenty of gossip in the town," said MacLachlan. "It's common talk that you threw your dagger in his face. My father, who's a small chief enough so far as wealth of men and acres goes, would have used the weapon to let out the hot blood of his insulter there and then."

"I daresay," said M'Iver. "You're a hot-headed clan. And MacCailein has his own ways."

"He's welcome to keep them too," answered the young fellow, his sneer in no ways abated I became afraid that his carefully curbed tongue would not give us our opening before we parted, and was inclined to force his hand; but M'Iver came in quickly and more astutely.

"How?" said he; "what's your meaning? Are you in the notions that he has anything to learn of courtesy and gallantry on the other side of the loch at Strath-lachlan?"

MacLachlan's eyes faltered a little under his pent brows. Perhaps he had a suspicion of the slightest that he was being goaded on for some purpose, but if he had, his temper was too raw to let him qualify his retort with calmness.

"Do you know, Barbreck," said he, "I would not care to say much about what your nobleman has to learn or unlearn? As for the gallantry—good Lord, now!—did you ever hear of one of my house leaving his men to shift for themselves when blows were going?"

M'Iver with an utterance the least thought choked by an anger due to the insult he had wrought for, shrugged his shoulders, and at the same time gave me his elbow in the side for his sign.

"I'm sorry to hear you say that about Gillesbeg Gruamach," said he. "Some days ago, half as much from you would have called for my correction; but I'm out of his lordship's service, as the rumour rightly goes, and seeing the manner of my leaving it was as it was, I have no right to be his advocate now."

"But I have!" said I, hotly, stopping and facing MacLachlan, with my excuse for the quarrel now ready. "Do you dare come here and call down the credit of MacCailein Mor?" I demanded in the English, with an idea of putting him at once in a fury at having to reply in a language he spoke but indifferently.

His face blanched; he knew I was doubling my insult for him. The skin of his jaw twitched and his nostrils expanded; a hand went to his dirk hilt on the moment.

"And is it that you are the advocate?" he cried to me in a laughable kind of Scots. I was bitter enough to mock his words and accent with the airs of one who has travelled far and knows other languages than his own.

"Keep to your Gaelic," he cried in that language; "the other may be good enough to be insolent in; let us have our own for courtesies."

"Any language," said I, "is good enough to throw the lie in your face when you call MacCailein a coward."

"Grace of God!" said he; "I called him nothing of the kind; but it's what he is all the same."

Up came his valet and stood at his arm, his blade out, and his whole body ready to spring at a signal from his master.

I kept my anger out of my head, and sunk to the pit of my stomach while I spoke to him. "You have said too much about Archibald, Marquis of Argile," I said. "A week or two ago, the quarrel was more properly M'Iver's; now that he's severed by his own act from the clan, I'm ready to take his place and chastise you for your insolence. Are you willing, John?" I asked, turning to my friend.

"If I cannot draw a sword for my cousin I can at least second his defender," he answered quickly. MacLachlan's colour came back; he looked from one to the other of us, and made an effort to laugh with cunning.

"There's more here than I can fathom, gentlemen." said he. "I'll swear this is a forced quarrel; but in any case I fear none of you. Alasdair," he said, turning to his man, who it seemed was his dalta or foster-brother, "we'll accommodate those two friends of ours when and where they like."

"Master," cried the gillie, "I would like well to have this on my own hands," and he looked at me with great venom as he spoke.

MacLachlan laughed. "They may do their dangerous work by proxy in this part of the shire," said he; "but I think our own Cowal ways are better; every man his own quarrel."

"And now is the time to settle it," said I; "the very place for our purpose is less than a twenty minutes' walk off."

Not a word more was said; the four of us stepped out again.



CHAPTER XXXIII.—THE BROKEN SWORD.

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.