The Yeoman Adventurer
first time, brought clearly home to me when I saw a fearsome Highlander,
with claymore, dirk, and loaded musket, posted at each end of the village.
A touch of ordinary human nature was, however, added, when the children,
fearless and happy in their ignorance, sidled up to the sentries and
stared at them as eagerly as if they had been war-painted Indians in a
travelling show.
At first, we, the gentry for short, intended to seek accommodation in the
inn, poor and shabby though it looked, and Donald was ordered thither to
give instructions. The Colonel and the chieftain rode along the village to
observe how things were going, and this left Margaret and me together, and
spectators of a delightful little passage. For as Donald approached the
inn-door, the hostess, a sharp-nosed, vixenish woman, charged at him with
a very dirty besom and routed him completely. Truth to tell, Donald, who
had the sound, sweet nature of a child, had all the natural child's
indifference to dirt, but even he, long-suffering in such matters as he
was, had to stop to scrape the filth out of his eyes. This gave me the
chance of making peace, and I went up and explained that we should pay for
everything like ordinary travellers, good money for good fare.
"Oh aye!" she said.
"Jonnock!" said I.
"You're a Stafford chap," she asserted.
"I am," I agreed, "and I'll see you done well by."
That settled her, and Donald was settled too, for his immediate wants
were satisfied by a large glass of brandy, and those more remote by a
bucket of water and a towel.
"Gom!" said the virile little woman to me, "a wesh'll do him no harm.
I've got the biggest gorby of a mon," she went on, "between Mow Cop and
the Cocklow o' Leek. He's gone trapesing off, with our young Ted on his
shoulders, to see yow chaps march into Leek. There's about a dozen on 'em
gone, as brisk as if they were goin' to Stoke wakes. Fine fools they'll
lukken when they comes whom to-nate."
As it happened, the "Dun Cow" was after all left to Donald and the
pipers. When I rejoined Margaret, she said, "Pray help me down, Oliver,
and we'll find the doctor, and have him dress your head. And, once out of
Donald's sight, I'll have the laugh that's nearly killing me to keep
under."
I helped her down, and said, "Never mind doctor! That fine old church
yonder must be well worth looking into."
"You will mind, sir," she flashed. She beckoned to Donald to take charge
of her mare, and then waylaid a passing girl, running from one sentry to
the other, and got her to show us the doctor's.
So we started thither, and as we went she said, "Really, Oliver, you are
inconsiderate at times."
"Nonsense," said I. "It's my head."
I was angry, not at her words, for I knew she did not mean them, but at
my inability to see what the fascinating jade was driving at.
"Inconsiderate," she repeated firmly. "You'd be content to be introduced
to the Prince with a great swathe of dirty, blood-stained linen round your
head, regardless of how it reflected on me."
"Reflected on you?" I echoed blankly.
"Yes. We shouldn't match. I suppose dear old Bloggs was a bachelor?"
"He was," said I, resigning the contest in despair.
The doctor lived in a fair-sized stick-and-wattle house. He was a dapper
little man, with a cleverish, weakling cast of face, and was all on the
jump with the turn things had taken. He had just opened the door to us,
and was eyeing us uncertainly, when the Colonel and the Chief, returning
on foot from their inspection, having left their horses to be baited under
the watchful eye of a Highlander, stopped beside us.
"Are you the doctor?" asked Margaret promptly, as if to forestall any
backing out on my part. If I could have joyed at anything, I should have
been overjoyed at her keenness in having me seen to.
"Yes," he said, but very softly.
"Then please attend to this gentleman's wound," she said.
"Is he a rebel?" he asked, so loudly that he might have been talking to
some one across the street, and instinctively I turned round There, sure
enough, was the parson, a pasty, pursy, mean-looking rogue, coming across
to see what was doing.
"It's his head I want you to attend to," retorted Margaret, "not his
politics."
"I doctor no rebels," said he, louder than ever.
"Man," intervened Maclachlan, taking a pistol from his belt, and
emphasizing his words by gently tapping its barrel on the palm of his
hand, "if in ten minutes yon head isn't doctored to pairfection, it's your
own sel' will be beyond all the doctoring in England."
"It's against all law," said the doctor.
"I'm the law in this clachan to-day," said Maclachlan simply, still
tapping away with his pistol. Hearing the parson behind, he turned round
and added drily, "And the gospel." Hereupon the parson's face took on the
appearance of ill-made, ill-risen dough, and he turned and slipped off
with creeping, noiseless steps, like a cat.
"Come in," whispered the doctor.
"Ye're a man o' sense," said Maclachlan, and pushed his pistol back into
his belt.
We all passed into the hall, and the doctor made the door carefully.
"That damned pudding-face is a Whig," said he, "and so, of course, he's a
Justice. The Squire's a Whig, and he's a Justice. Here am I, well-reputed
in the faculty, and my wife coming of the Parker Putwells, one of the rare
old county stocks--none of your newfangled button-men and turnip-growers--and
I'm no Justice, because I'm a Church-and-King man of the old
school."
"They went out of fashion with flaxen bobs," said I.
"Come on, my tousled macaroni!" said he. "There's nothing the matter with
the inside of your head at any rate, though the outside looks as if you'd
been arguing with the parish bull."
"This is a verra fine house," said Maclachlan slowly and slily.
"A mere dog-kennel," said the doctor, "considering she's a Parker Putwell."
"And I'm thinking," said Maclachlan, very thoughtfully "that there'll be
some guid victuals in the pantry and, mayhap, a gay wheen bottles of right
liquor in the cellar."
"Oh aye!" said he, taken aback.
"Then I'm thinking we'll e'en have breakfast here and try their merits.
And if it's a guid ane, I'll see you a Justice, whatever that may be, when
the King enjoys his own again. A Maclachlan has spoken it."
The doctor went to an inner door and bawled, "Euphemia," and a
discontented wisp of a woman answered his call.
"Madam and gentlemen, my wife, Mistress Snooks, born a Parker Putwell.
Mistress Snooks, like me, will bow to your will with pleasure, nor will
you mislike her table, I assure you. Now, my buck, let's see to this crack
in your head."
He took me into his druggery, unwrapped the bandage, and examined my wound.
"So ho!" said he, "a right good sock on the head. How did it happen?"
I told him.
"It's lucky for you, my buck," he said, "that you've got a baby's flesh
and a tup's skull, and some one had the sense to wash the cut clean as
soon as it was done."
He set to work and made a good job of it, with a pledget of lint and
strips of plaister, and meanwhile I speculated as to why, in all these
bottles and jars and gallipots, neither nature nor art could contrive to
store a drug magistral for the blow that had riven my heart asunder.
"That's better than two yards stripped off a wench's smock," he said at
last. "And a damnably fine smock too, you lucky rascal."
He twittered a snatch of ribaldry that made my foot twitch in my boot.
Behind his back, I pocketed the priceless relic, dank and red with my
unworthy blood, and followed him back to the company.
We made a longish stay, and fared well at his table. The doctor was a
good enough fellow in himself, but his wife, a salt, domineering woman,
lived in the light of the Parker Putwells, and he, poor devil, in the
shadow they cast. He was playing a double game too, for whenever the
red-elbowed serving-wench came into the room, he roared his dissent from
our lawlessness, and drank to the King with his glass over the
water-bottle as soon as she went out. Once when she brought us a rare dish
of calvered roach and, with wenchlike curiosity, lingered to pick up a
crumb or two of gossip, we had a snap of comedy, for, in his play-acting,
he would take none till Maclachlan, to keep up the farce, thrust a pistol
at his head and forced him. Whereupon the maid, in plucky fashion, threw a
cottage loaf at Maclachlan and took him fairly in the chest. The doctor, to
his credit, rose to protect her, but she braved it out. She would, she
averred, lend the thingamyjig a better petticoat than the one he'd got on.
"If he mun wear 'em," she added, "he mought wear 'em long enough to be
dacent." The doctor bustled her out at last, palpitating but triumphant.
Maclachlan had sprung up like a wild cat when the missile hit him.
Luckily he was flustered by the bouncing of the loaf on the table and off
again clean into Margaret's lap, or the ready trigger would surely have
been drawn in earnest. Then Margaret promptly took the edge off his anger
by saying with menacing sweetness, "I'm sorry the fun has gone further
than was desirable, but I will not have the girl blamed for what was in
her a brave deed, nor suffer any unpleasantness here on account of it.
Pray be seated."
This ended the matter, and Maclachlan, with a wry smile, settled down
again to his fish.
"It was a verra guid thing after a' said," he explained, "that it wasna
my mouth, for it was an unco' ding. I'm half hungry yet, and, to be sure,
breakfast and broillerie gang ill together."
It was well said, and Margaret rewarded him with a smile and engaged him
in merry conversation. The Colonel, who had kept silent during the
trouble, now plied the doctor with questions about the surrounding country.
"It's a poor biding-place for a Parker Putwell," he replied. "If there's
a drearier or lonelier stretch in England than the moorlands of Leek, I
would not care to see it. I go miles on end about it to visit my sick
folk, and mostly in a day's riding I see nobody but a stray shepherd, a
flash pedlar twanning his way across country with his gewgaws, and now and
then a weaver scouring the outlying cottages for yarn."
When the meal was over Maclachlan insisted on paying for it, and bestowed
a shilling on the loaf-thrower. In theory, I found, the clansmen paid for
what they had, and Donald, being quartermaster to the party, was very busy
discharging his obligations up and down the village. The only cause of
dissatisfaction, but that not a slight one, was his Scots mode of
reckoning, in which a pint was near on half a gallon, while his shilling
was a beggarly penny. It always took a whirl of his dirk and a storm of
Gaelic to convince a cottager of his accuracy, but he got through at last,
and we reformed our order of march and started for Leek.
This time I took the sorrel and Maclachlan marched beside Margaret on her
mare, for the Colonel wanted to give me an account, derived from the young
Chief, of the Prince's marchings and victories. The Highlanders being
astonishing foot-folk, and the Colonel being full of analogies and
digressions, the tower of Leek church came in sight before we had got the
Prince out of Edinburgh.
A halt was called to discuss what was to be done. The Colonel dismounted,
and we followed his example. Margaret, I noticed, coloured slightly as
Maclachlan lifted her down. She had been as cool and unfluttered as a
marble image when she lay in my arms. Maclachlan was for marching on into
the town, and the doubt on the Colonel's face rather nettled him.
"The considerable town of Manchester," he said, "was entered, and in part
seized, by one Scots sergeant and his drummer. Of a certainty near a score
of Maclachlans can intake yon little clachan."