Lochinvar: A Novel

"It is a dream," she repeated, in a voice full of hushed awe, "I know it. And it is a very gracious God that hath sent it to me this first night of my loss. I saw my lad go down in the deep, hurrying waters – my love, my love, and now he will never know that I loved him!"

"Kate," whispered Wat, hoarsely, and with a voice which he knew not for his own – "Kate, it is indeed I – myself, in the flesh. I have come to save you. I did not die. I did not drown. It is I, Wat Gordon, your own lad, come to kiss your hand, to carry you safe through a world of enemies."

The girl leaned forward and looked towards him wistfully and intently. She was shaken from head to foot with strange tremors. Love, fear, and most delicious shame strove together within her maiden's heart.

"If indeed you be Walter Gordon in the flesh, I thank the Lord for your safety. But go, for here you are in terrible danger every moment. I have said, I know not what. I was asleep, and when I awoke I saw you, and thought that I yet dreamed a dream."

Wat reached over and took her hand. He bent his head to it reverently and kissed it.

"Sweet love," he whispered, "have no fear. In a little while I shall be away. I must go from you ere the dawn comes. But your friend and mine, your hostess of the isle, brought me to this dear and sacred place, thinking me not unworthy. She waits at the door. In a little space the light will come and the island men awake. Then I must take my life in my hand and be far away before the day. But rest assured, I am at all times near enough to watch over you, my beloved."

Wat looked steadfastly and adoringly at Kate, and lo! the tears were running silently down her face and falling on the pillow. He drew a little nearer to her.

"Love," he said, softly, "you have forgiven me. You forgave me long ago, did you not? I loved you over much. That was the reason. See," he whispered, pulling his gold heart from about his neck, "this is the token that you forgave me." And he bent and kissed it before putting it back again in his bosom.

She raised her eyes to his. They shone upon him with a strange light that had never been kindled in them before. The light of a great love shone out of the wonderful deeps of them, beaconing the way clear into the haven of her heart. It was the maiden's look of gladness he saw there – the joy that she had kept herself for the beloved – so that now at last she can give him all.

"Oh, Wat – dear, dear Wat," she whispered, "I love you; I cannot choose but love you. I cannot be proud with you any more. I am so tired of being proud. For my heart has cried out for you to come to me this weary, weary while. I have been so long alone – without any one – without you."

And she made a little virginal gesture of pain which sent Wat's arms about her in a moment. He could not answer her in words.

But he was wiser, for instead their lips drew together. He kept his eyes on hers as their faces closed each on the other. His head reeled with the imagined sweetness. He seemed to remember nothing but her eyes, and how they were ocean-deep and world-large. He felt that he could plunge into them as into the sea from an overhanging cliff.

But just ere their lips met Kate suddenly dropped her head against his breast.

"Wat!" she whispered, intensely, "tell me – you heard what I said when I thought you had come to me in a dream – that – that I loved you and wanted you to return to me? You will never think less of me, never love me less for my words, nor for letting you love me thus?"

Wat Gordon laughed a low, secure, satisfied laugh deep down in his throat. He had forgotten the watchful woman at the door, the waking enemies without, the coming dawn swiftly striding towards Suliscanna from the east, the long, dangerous passage of the sea-cavern, the perils innumerable that lay about them both. He loved, and he held his love all securely in his arms. She questioned of his love, and he felt that he could answer her.

"My love," he whispered, "I love you so that all things – life, death, eternity – are the same to me. Nothing weighs in the scale when set to balance you. I loved you, Kate, when I thought you must hate me for my folly and wickedness. How shall I love you now, when your sweetest words of this night are writ in fire on my heart? But all is one – I love you, and I love you, and I love you!"

The girl sighed the satisfied sigh of one who listens to that which she desires to hear and knows that she will hear, yet who for very love's sake must needs hear it again and yet again.

And her arms also went tremblingly about him, and they twain that had been sundered so long, kissed their first kiss – the kiss of surrender that comes but once, and then only to the pure and worthy. The dewy warmth and fragrance of her lips, the heady rapture of the unexpected meeting so thrilled his heart and dominated his senses that broad day might well have stolen upon them and found the lovers so, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot."

But the voice of Bess Landsborough from the doorway caused them to start suddenly apart with a shock of loss like the snapping of a limb. Yet it was a kindly voice, and one full of infinite sympathy for those who, like Wat and Kate, were ready to count all things well lost for love.

"My lad," she said, gently, "ye maun e'en be tramping. In an hour or so the sun will be keekin' ower the hills of the east, and gin ye tarry your lass will mourn a lover. There are more days than one, and nights longer than this short one of summer. Trust your love to me. Bess Landsborough chose a strange way of love hersel', but she keeps a kindly heart for young folk, and you twa silly bairnies shall not lippen to her in vain. Come your ways, lad."

And Wat would have gone at her word. For the hope of the future had possession of him, and, besides, his head was dazed and moidered with the first taste of love's sweetness.

But the girl raised herself a little and held out her arms.

"Bid me good-night just this once," she said, "and tell me again that you love me."

So Wat took his sweetheart in his arms. There seemed no words that he could say which would express the thoughts of his heart at that moment.

"I love you – God knows how I love you!" was all that he found to say. And then, "God keep my little lass!"

There came a strange hush in his ears, and the next moment he found himself outside, breasting the cool airs of the night as if they had been the waves of the tide-race, and listening to the voice of Bess Landsborough, which carried no more meaning to his ears than if it had been the crying of a seagull rookery upon the rocks of Lianacraig.

"Come back to-night and I will meet you at the shore-side," was all that disentangled itself from the meaningless turmoil of his guide's words. For the fragrance of his love's lips was yet on his, and he was wondering how long the memory of it would stay with him.

Without even waiting to take off his clothes, Wat pushed out into the channel of the sea-passage. He swam as easily and unconsciously as though he had been floating in some world of dreams, in which he found himself finned like a fish. And when he came to himself he was lying under the shelter of his boat in the cove of his own green islet of Fiara, trying to recall the look that he had seen in his love's eyes in the gloom of Bess Landsborough's guest-chamber. But though he buried his head in his hands, and laid his hands on the sand to shut out the sky and the shining breakers, he could not recall the similitude of it. Only he knew that it had been most wonderful, and that his eyes had never seen anything like it before.

CHAPTER XXXIII

AN ANCIENT LOVE AFFAIR

When Wat awoke on the island and stirred his cramped limbs, on which the sun had already dried his wet clothes, in the warm and briskly stirring airs of the summer morning, he could hardly believe in the reality of his experiences of the night. One by one he remembered the passage of the cave, the Highland sentinel sleeping by his dying fire, his new and kindly protector, Bess Landsborough. Then last of all, and suddenly overflowing all his heart with mighty love (even as a volcano, Askja or Vatna, pours without warning its burning streams over icy provinces), the meeting with his love in the dusky undercloud of night rushed upon his memory and filled all his soul with a swift and desperate joy.

What wonder that the sweet, low voice he had heard call him "love" out of the darkness should in the broad common day scarce seem real to poor Wat Gordon of Lochinvar? He had passed through so many things to hear it. Also, ever since the death of Little Marie, he knew the accent of the voice that speaks not for the sake of "making love," but which unconsciously and inevitably reveals love in every syllable.

Wat had made love in his time, and ladies of beauty and repute not a few – my Lady Wellwood among the number – had made love to him. But he knew the difference now.

For love which must needs be "made" bears always the stamp of manufacture. True love, on the other hand, is a city set on a hill; it cannot be hid, and this is why the love-glance of a maiden's eye so eternally confutes the philosophers, and ofttimes lays the lives of the mighty, for making or marring, in the hollow of very little hands.

The day that succeeded this night adventure was a long one both for Wat and Kate. For the girl had been even less prepared for the astonishing event of the night than Wat himself. Providence, by the hand of Mistress Alister McAlister, had certainly worked strangely. Indeed, the only person wholly unmoved was that lady herself. She bustled about the flags of her kitchen, slapping them almost contemptuously with her broad bare feet, busy as a bee with her baking and brewing, like the tidy, thrifty, "eident"[3 - Diligent.] Ayrshire good-wife that she was. Not a glance at Kate revealed that she had been instrumental in opening a new chapter in two lives only the night before.

When, midway through the forenoon, Alister brought his bulky body to the door-step, his loving wife drove him off again to the gateway of the tower with an aphorism which is held of the highest repute in the parish of Colmonel:

"Na, na, come na here for your brose – e'en get your meal o' meat where ye work your wark!"

And the stoop-shouldered giant coolly retreated without a word of protest, merely helping himself as he went out to a double handful of oatmeal from his wife's bake-board, for all the world like a theftuous school-boy, who keeps the while one eye on the master. With this he took his way to the spring which trickled down by the castle wall. And there, very deliberately and philosophically, he proceeded to make himself a dish of cold "drammoch" on the smooth surface of a stone which the water had hollowed.

"And mony is the hungry mouth that would be glad of it," said he, by way of grace after meat. For Alister was of the excellent and approven opinion that a dinner of herbs by the dikeside is better than a banquet of Whitehall with the sauce of an angry woman's tongue for seasoning thereto.

But when Bess Landsborough brought the prisoner his farles of cake and cool buttermilk (for it was "kirning day"), she took out also a handful of crisp bannocks for her husband. These she thrust under his nose with the sufficient and comprehensive monosyllable, "Hae!" And Alister accepted the act as at once honorable amend and judicious apology.

Nor was Alister behindhand in courtesy. For though the silent jailer did not utter a single word either to his wife or his prisoner, he drew his skean dhu and cut a whang from the sweet-milk cheese which he kept by him. To this he added a horn of strong island spirit, which of a surety proved very much to the taste of the late master-at-arms to their several Highnesses Louis, King of France, and William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands.

Thereafter, with consideration particularly delicate, he withdrew out of earshot and sat on a knoll before the castle, leaving his wife to talk at leisure to her ancient sweetheart. For Alister McAlister was a man without jealousy. He knew that he could keep his wife, even as he kept his head in battle, with the little wee point of his knife and the broad, broad blade of his claymore. And as for ancient sweethearts, what cared he for a peck of them? Bess Landsborough might have had a score of lovers in the 'Lowlands low'; yet had she not chosen to leave them all and follow him up the braes – aye, and over the sea straits, threading the ultimate islands till at last she had come to this barren holding of rock, scantily felted down with heather and peat, on the isle of Suliscanna?

But, on the other hand, Scarlett was not the man to lose his time, in spite of bonds and imprisonments.

"Ye are as weel-faured as ever, Bess. Ye were aye a bonny blithesome lass a' the days o' ye!" said he, complacently, as he munched his farles of cake and took sup about of usquebaugh from the horn and buttermilk from the pail.

"Havers!" said Mistress McAlister, "ye are an auld eneuch man to ken that ye canna blaw twice in my lug wi' the same flairdies. Ye forget I hae heard ye at that job before. And it lasted – hoo lang? Just e'en till your company rade awa' frae Girvan to Kirkcudbright, and then ye took up with Maggie Nicholson, the byre-lass o' Bombie, the very second week that ever ye were there! And telled her, I dare say, that she was weel-faured, blithe, and a bonny woman!"

"I see ye haena forgotten how to belie them that ye tried to break the hearts o', Bess Landsborough," said Scarlett, without, however, letting his broken heart interfere with a very excellent appetite. "Ye weel ken that ye sent me frae the door o' the Laggan wi' my tail atween my legs like a weel-lickit messan, and twa o' your ill-set cronies lookin' on at my shaming, too."

"I'm thinkin', my man John," retorted Bess Landsborough, "that ye had better say as little as ye can aboot that ploy. For the lasses were Mirren Semple o' the Auld Wa's and Meg Kennedy o' Kirriemore, that had come in the afternoon to keep me company. And as we sat talking ower ae thing after anither, we spak' amang ithers o' you, my braw trooper – Sergeant John Scarlett, no less, that rode so gallantly with the colors in his hand. And by this and that we had it made clear that ye had been for making up to a' the three o' us at once! An' so we compared your tricks. How ye had gotten doon on your knees and telled us that ye loved us best o' a' the world. Ye had kissed oor hands – at least, mine and Meg Kennedy's. But your favorite fashion was to take the skirts o' oor gouns and kiss the hem o' them, swearin' that ye wad raither kiss the border o' oor cloaks than the mouth o' the grandest woman in Scotland. (A' the three o' us!) Then ye asked for a curl cut off aboon our brows – at least, frae mine and Mirren Semple's. For Meg Kennedy never had sic a thing in her life, but had aye flat, greasy hair, sleekit like a mowdiewart[4 - Mole.] hingin' by the neck in a trap on a wat day. And her ye telled that ye couldna bide hair that wadna keep smooth, but was aye a'kinked and thrawn into devalls and curliewigs. Oh, sic a bonny, true-speakin', decent, mensefu' callant as the three o' us made ye oot to be! So when we had ye gye-and-weel through-hands, wha should ride up to the door but my gay lad himsel', this same braw cavalier. So Mirren and Meg and me, we gaed oot ontil the step and telled ye what we thocht o' ye. Ow aye, ye were a puir disjaskit cuif that day, Sergeant John Scarlett, for a' your silver spurs and your red sodjer's coat!"

John Scarlett laughed loud and long at the record of his iniquities, but his abasement, if at the time as profound as Bess Landsborough made it out to be, had certainly completely passed away. For he cried out: "What a grand memory ye hae for the auld times, Bess! I warrant ye, ye couldna gang ower the points o' Effectual Calling as briskly, nor yet the kings o' Judah and Israel that ye learned on the Sabbath forenichts by the lowe o' the Colmonel peats!"

"But eneuch o' havers," said Bess; "ken ye that yon braw lad o' yours is safe and hearty? Mair than that, he met wi' his bonny lass yestreen. Baith o' them kens what love is – a thing that ye never kenned, no, nor will ken to your dying day, John Scarlett."

"Aweel, aweel," replied Scarlett, placably, "at ony rate I am desperate glad that Wat's won oot o' the brash o' the mony waters safe and sound; and as for love, if I kenned nocht aboot it, at least I hae had experience o' some gye fair imitations in my time, that did well eneuch for a puir perishing mortal like me."