Lochinvar: A Novel

Wat came nearer to her. She gave him her hand again.

"Nevertheless, for this time I must go with my father, since he bids me. But be brave, Wat, dear lad," she went on; "I believe in you always. The good days will come, and good day or bad day, remember that I shall be ready for you whenever you call me to come to you!"

In a moment they were in each other's arms.

"I will come!" whispered Wat Gordon in her ear; "if I be alive, as God sees me, I will come to you when and where you need me."

Roger McGhie had turned his back on them. My lady's eyes glittered with malice and jealousy, but only my Lord Barra found a word to say.

"Most touching!" he sneered, "much more so indeed than facts – but perhaps hardly so convincing."

* * * * *

Kate had gone below. The others still remained upon the deck. The Sea Unicorn was heading directly for the main-land.

Barra pointed to the blue hills which were slowly changing into gray olive on the lower slopes as the ship neared the land.

"We are honored," he said, "with the company of so brave a lover and one so successful. But we would not keep him from other conquests. So, since I, Murdo of Barra, do not use the daggers of harlots, nor yet the crumbling walls of towers, to crush those who hate me, I give you, sir, your liberty, which I hope you will use wisely, in order that you may retrieve a portion of that honor which by birth is yours. I will set your companion and yourself on shore at the nearest point of land without any conditions whatsoever."

Wat bowed. He did not pay much attention. He was thinking rather of Kate's last words. Barra went over to the captain and entered into earnest talk with him.

It was the turn of the lady of Balmaghie. She came over to where Wat was standing by the side of the ship.

"You thought me beautiful once, or at least you told me so, Lochinvar," she said, laying her hand on his.

"I think you as beautiful to-day as ever I thought you," answered Wat, with a certain weary diplomacy. If the Mammon of Unrighteousness must have the care of the Beloved, it might be as well to make a friend of Mammon.

"Yet you have sought other and younger loves" – she purred her words softly at him – "you have been unfaithful to the old days when it was not less than heaven for you to kiss my hand or to carry my fan."

"Unfaithful!" said Wat, laughing a little hard laugh; "yet your ladyship hath twice been wedded to men of your own choice, whilst I remain lonely, a wanderer, companionless."

"You will ever be welcome at the House of Balmaghie," she said, laying her hand on his.

Wat looked up eagerly. It was not an invitation he had looked for from the duchess on this side the grave.

"Ever most welcome," repeated my lady, looking tenderly at him. "Indeed, gladly would I endeavor to comfort you if ever you come to us in sore trouble."

Wat turned away disappointed. He would certainly look for his consolation from another source, if ever he came within reach of the House of Balmaghie.

"I thank you, my lady," said Wat. "At present my heart is too heavy to permit me more fully to express my gratitude."

He spoke the words mechanically, without setting a meaning to them. He listened to his own lips speaking as if they had been another's, and wondered what they found to say.

It was the afternoon when at last the boat was lowered to put Wat and Scarlett ashore. They were already stepping across the deck to the ship's side when Kate appeared at the top of the ladder which led up from the cabin. She walked straight to where Wat was standing and held out both her hands.

"I am yours; remember, I shall ever be ready," she said, quite clearly.

"And I," he said, more softly, "will come to you were it across the world. Only in your hour of need send me once again the heart of gold for a sign."

And he took her token from his neck, touched it with his lips, and gave it back to her.

"Till you need me, keep it!" he said, and so stooped and kissed her on the forehead before them all.

Then, without looking back, he followed Scarlett down the ladder into the boat.

CHAPTER XLII

THE FIERY CROSS

Wat and Scarlett found themselves landed in a country which to all intents was one both savage and hostile. It was not indeed Barra's country, but the danger was scarcely less on that account. They were strangers and Sassenach. Wat carried gold in his belt, more than many a Highland chief had ever seen at one time in his life – gold which at Perth or Inverness could be exchanged for a prince's wealth of swords and daggers, pistols and fighting-gear.

It was in a little land-locked bay that they were disembarked. Great slaty purple mountains stretched away to the north; a range of lower hills, cut down to the roots by the narrow cleft of a pass, warded the bay to the east; while to the south the comrades looked out on a wilderness of isles and islets, reefs and spouting skerries, which foamed and whitened as the black iron teeth of the rock showed themselves, and the slow swell of the Atlantic came lumbering and arching in.

Wat and Scarlett sat down on the shore, which stretched away lonely and barren for miles on either side of them. They watched the boat return to the ship, as she lay with her sails backed, and shivering in the wind, waiting only for the crew to come on board before sailing for the south.

A slight figure could be seen immediately above the bulwark on the land side. Wat rose to his feet and waved his hand. The white speck signalled a reply, and Kate McGhie, the maid of his love, carried the heart of gold away with her to the lands of the south, and the spaces of the sea widened every moment between the truest lovers the world held.

Scarlett and Wat sat a long time watching the ship dwindling into a mere tower of whiteness in the distance, the seas closing bluer and bluer about her, and the whole universe growing lonely behind her, wanting the Beloved.

At last Scarlett spoke.

"Lad, have ye had enough of adventures," he said, more sadly than was his wont, "or are ye as keen after them as ever? It seems that we have now put ourselves in every man's ill graces, so far as I can see. Whether James or William bear the gree to us signifies not a jot; for if James, then the first king's man that comes across us holds you for the old outlawry in the matter of wounding my Lord Wellwood, and me for taking your side when I brought you the king's letter to Brederode; and if William wear the crown, lo, for prison-breaking and manslaughter – aye, and for desertion of his army, both you and poor silly John Scarlett are alien and outlaw in all the realms of the Dutchman. I tell you we are doomed at either end of the stick, Wat, my man."

"And faith, I care not much," quoth Wat, watching with wistful eyes the Sea Unicorn vanishing with the one thing that was dear to him on earth.

"Care or no care," said Scarlett, "it is time for us to be on our feet!"

So Wat, rising obediently, kissed his hand behind his companion's back to the white tower which was now sinking in the utmost south.

As soon almost as the two adventurers had left the sand and shingle of the shore, they found themselves upon the short heather of certain rough, moorish foothills. No house pleasantly reeking was to be discerned – not so much as a deer nor even a wandering sheep in that wide, wild place.

So Wat and Scarlett fared forth straight to the east, keeping mostly parallel with the shores of a fine loch, which stretched inward in the direction of the notch in the hills which they had seen from their landing-place.

It was towards evening when the two friends came to the summit of a little knoll and stood looking down upon a curious scene. Beneath them, scattered among the débris of some prehistoric landslip, lay a small Highland village – if village it could be called – of which each house or hut was built against the side of a great bowlder or rock fallen from the hill-side. The cottages were no better than rude shelters of turf and stone, roofed with blackened heather and scattered at every conceivable angle, as if they had been dredged forcibly out of the bottom of a reluctant pepper-pot and had taken root where they fell.

In the centre, however, was a kind of open space – not levelled nor cleared of turf and stones, but with all its primeval rocks sticking through the scanty turf, blackened and smoothed by the rubbing they had received from the fundamental parts of innumerable generations of goats and children.

In this space a dozen men in rude kilts and plaids of ancient faded tartan were collected, arguing and threatening with as much apparent fierceness as though some one of them was to be killed during the next five minutes. A small army of women hovered on the outskirts and made independent forays into the affray, catching hold of this and that other valiant discourser, and, if she got the right hold and purchase, swinging him forthwith out of the turmoil – only, however, to return to it again as soon as her grasp relaxed.

There was, therefore, a centre of disturbance of which the elements were entirely male – while contemporary, and on the whole concentric, with it revolved a number of smaller cyclones, of which the elements were about equally male and female. Fists were shaken here and there in all of them, and voices rose loud and shrill. But from the heart of the darker and more permanent quarrel in the centre there came at intervals the threatening gleam of steel, as this one and that other stooped and flashed the skein dhu, plucked out of his garter, defiantly in the face of his opponent.

In the very midst Wat could see a thick-set man who carried over his shoulder a couple of ash-plants rudely tied together. This contrivance was of small dimensions, and the sharpened ends were burned black and further stained with blood and what looked like red wax.

The man who carried it had no other weapon – if this could be called a weapon – which appeared as harmless as a boy's sword of lath. Yet as the little man thrust it towards this one and that, the strong men of the circle shrank back instantly with the greatest alarm, shaking their heads and girning their teeth, as Scarlett said, "like so many wull-cats on a dike."

There seemed to be no end to this bloodless but threatening quarrel, which blackened and scattered for all the world like a swarm of bees whirling abroad on a July day, when the good-wives run beneath with iron pots and clattering skellets to settle the swarm ere it has time to leave the farm-town. But suddenly out of one of the largest and most distinguished of the houses – one not much, if anything, inferior to a Galloway "swine ree" – there issued a tall, dark man, who walked with an air, swinging his tartans and rattling the gold tassel on the basket hilt of his claymore.

He made straight for the thickest of the quarrel, and so soon as he arrived there he knocked this disputant one way and hurled another that, like a schoolmaster unexpectedly descending upon unruly boys. And it was ludicrous to see these stalwart Highlandmen sprawling on the ground, holding their ears, which had been smitten so suddenly and with such a mighty buffeting; for the fierceness on their faces when first they felt the blow faded into instant desire to get out of the way – even culminating in a kind of satisfied good-humor so soon as they set eyes on their chastiser, as though it were not less than an honor to be smitten by such a hand.