The Yeoman Adventurer
camp-fire still blazed; near it a bagpipe crooned; now and again a horse
shook in its harness. The moon whipped out for a moment, and then it was
pitch dark again.
As I stepped it out there was a rush at me from the grass, behind and to
my left. Down I dropped full length, and a man shot over me and sprawled
in the road, but he was quick and lithe as a cat, and was up before me,
for my slung arm disadvantaged me. I could just see his sword poised for a
cut as he fairly pounced on me. I dived outward as he jumped, and he
missed me, but before I could get behind him he was round and at me again
like a fury. I was weaponless and crippled, but if I could once get past
his sword, it would be all over with him. The pace was so hot, and my mind
was so bent on the work, that I did not call for aid. At last I tricked
him, for in jumping aside I flung my hat hard in his face, and in a flash
had my right hand at his throat. He jabbed at me with his left, and I
twisted round to his right side, pressing his sword-arm against his body,
and digging my fingers into his windpipe. I heard his sword drop, and felt
him feeling for a pistol. He was as hard as a nail, and I began to dream
that he would get me before I had choked him.
Donald ended the matter. He, doglike in his fidelity, came striding down
the road after me. The moon outpaced the clouds again. He saw us at our
death-grips, and came on with a rush and a yell. He drove his dirk into
the nape of the man's neck and twisted the blade in its ghastly socket. A
sharp, sickening click--and the man dropped out of my fingers like a
stone. The moon went in again, and hid the evil thing from us.
"Pe she hurtit?" asked Donald anxiously.
"Not a scratch!" I replied.
"Tat's goot! Carry 'er up to the fire," he added to three or four men who
had run up on hearing his yell. "She's English and, maybe, she sall hae
fine pickins on 'er."
He stooped down, careless of a dead man as of a dead buck, and stropped
his dirk clean and dry on the man's breeches. Then the men, equally
indifferent, picked up the body and started off.
"D'ye ken wha the chiel is?" asked Donald, as we walked after them.
"A certain sergeant of dragoons, or one of his men," I answered.
"He winna fash ye ony more," said he. "Tat's a fine way of mine, when I
can get behint a mon. I've killt mony a stot like it, shoost t' keep in
the way of it." And he stabbed the air, twisted his wrist, and clicked
delightedly.
The men dumped the body near the fire. One of them stooped down and was
for putting his hand in the man's pocket, but drew it back as if he had
thrust it by mischance into the flames.
Then I knew.
I have heard a mare squeal in a burning stable, but I have never heard
agony in sound as I heard it there, on the top of Shap, when Donald flung
himself across the dead body of his chief and foster-brother.
There is one tender memory of this distressing scene. Neither by look,
word, nor tone did Donald attach blame or responsibility to me. He
recovered himself in a few minutes, and then stood up, and gave a brief
command in Gaelic. Four awe-struck men spread a plaid on the ground,
placed the dead body on it, and carried it into the hut. Donald, gravely
silent, took the pipes from the man who had been playing, and followed
them. I bared my head and went after him miserably.
Maclachlan's body lay on the floor of the hut. The eyes were wide open,
but on his fine composed face there was no trace of the agony and passion
in which he had gone before his God. It was as if, in that last terrible
second, some vision of beauty had swept his soul clean. I knelt down and
reverently closed the staring eyes.
"Donald," said I, when I arose, "I would to God that you had killed me
instead."
"It's weird," said he solemnly, "and weird mun hae way."
I looked at him closely. That he was struck to the heart was plain to
see, but, the first uprush of grief over, he had become sober, steadfast,
almost business-like, as if he had something great in hand to do, and
would be doing it.
He took the candle, now only the length of my ring-finger, and stuck it
on the narrow window-ledge. Again he spoke to the men in Gaelic, and they
moved out of the hut. Turning to me, he said, "Com in when ta licht gaes
oot!"
He had the right to be alone with his dead. I wrung his hand and left
him. When I looked back from the doorway, he was filling his bag with
wind, but stopped to say, "Weird mun hae way." And as he said it he smiled.
I crossed the road to the edge of the dip. More wood had been piled on
the fire, which now blazed cheerfully. Most of the men lay asleep in their
plaids, but a few stood guard over the horses, and the men who had carried
the body into the hut were squatting on the grass by the roadside. I took
my stand near them, and looked and listened.
The terrible similarity of Donald's case to mine appalled me. Each of us,
in saving another, had struck down in the darkness a man near and dear to
him. Two good men and true had gone when the lust of life is sweetest and
the will to live strongest. I, who three weeks ago had never seen human
life taken, had taken it, and seen it taken, as if men were of no more
account than cattle. Between the house-place of the Hanyards and the top
of Shap, Death had become my familiar.
For Maclachlan I had nothing but pity. He had thought that I stood
between him and Margaret. Clearly he had learned of her coming back to me,
and the thought had maddened him. He had disguised himself as an
Englishman and come after me, and this was the end of it.
These were my thoughts as I watched the flickering flame dropping nearer
and nearer to the window-ledge, and listened to the pipes. Donald was
inspired. He and the pipes were one. In his hands they became a living
thing. What he felt, they felt. They wept as he wept, they gloried as he
gloried, they triumphed as he triumphed.
He began with a murmur of grief that grew into a wail, became a
passionate tempest, and died into a prolonged sob. Then he changed his
note as memory wandered backward. The music became tenderly reminiscent,
subduedly cheerful. They were again boys together at their play, youthful
hunters swinging over the mountains after the red deer; young men with the
maidens; warriors on their first foray. The threads of life ran in and out
through the pattern of sounds he was weaving, and the older days of
fighting and victories followed as I listened. There was hurrying,
marching, charging; the groan of defeat; the mad slogan of final victory.
"He's fechtin' the Macleans noo," cried out one of the men, who had some
English, and the others chattered vigorously for a minute in their own
Gaelic.
The candle was now guttering on the window-ledge. These glories over,
Donald came hard up against the end of them all--the Chief dead at his
feet, slain by his own hand. For a time he faltered, playing only in
little, melancholy snatches. Then he got surer, and the music began to
come in blasts. He was seeing his way, learning what it all meant to him
and the Maclachlans. Weird mun hae way. Destiny must work itself out. We
children of a day are helpless before it.
The flame fell to a golden bead as the music grew in strength and
purpose. There was a burst of light, a peal of triumph, and the music and
the flame went out together.
Across the road I raced, threw open the door, and rushed in. Everything
was dark and still.
"Donald!" I called passionately.
There was no reply. I crept on tip-toe to the fire and kicked the embers
into a flame.
Donald was lying dead across the dead body of his Chief, his dirk buried
to the hilt in his own heart.
* * * * *
At daybreak we buried them side by side in one grave on the top of Shap,
their feet pointing northward to their own mountains. When the last clod
had been replaced, and a great boulder reverently carried up to mark the
spot, I turned, covered my head, and prepared to go, but the men stood on.
I looked back. They were loath to go. Something that should be done, had
been left undone.
I divined what they had in mind, turned back, bared my head as they
uncovered, and repeated the Lord's Prayer aloud.
I am thankful to this day to those men whom fools and bigots call
savages. They taught me to pray again.
"Man Captain," said the one who had English, as we walked away in a body,
"ye wad mak' a gran' meenister."
I could not withhold a smile, but before I could reply there was a
scattered rattle of shots from the dip. Looking around, I saw a body of
enemy horse on the lower hill across the valley to my left.
We were overtaken. We should have to fight.
CHAPTER XXIV
MY LORD BROCTON PILES UP HIS ACCOUNT
On the tenth day of my captivity, hope glimmered for the first time. When
a man has been penned up in a dull room for ten days, with
half-a-hundred-weight of rusty iron shackling his wrists and ankles, with
poor food, and little of it at that, to eat, he can extract comfort out of
a trifle.
In my case the trifle was a smile, her first smile in ten days. So far
she had been as sulky as she was shapeless, bringing me my poor meals
either without saying a word or, at best, snapping me up and saying that I
got far better treatment than a rebel deserved.
She never told me her name, and I never learned it from any other source,
so 'she' she must remain for me and my tale. She was perhaps thirty,
perhaps five feet high, the shape of a black pudding, with stony, rather
than ugly, features, and cruel, cat-like eyes. I hated her handsomely till
she smiled at me.
She was, I suppose, my jailer's daughter, or servant, or something of the
sort. I never knew, and my ignorance does not matter. She brought me my
food, spake or spake not, according to the degree of vileness in her
prevailing humour, and went off, leaving me to my thoughts and my painful
shamblings round my prison-chamber.
My ignorance was limitless. I was a prisoner, and my prison was a room in
a sizable farm-house with thick stone walls. Where the house was I had no
idea other than that it could not be far from the place where I was taken,
which, again, could not be far from the town of Penrith. There was one
window in my cell, the sill of which was as high from the ground as my
chin when standing upright. But I never stood upright, being jammed into a
cross made of good, solid iron, foul with rust, and having bracelets at
the tips for my ankles and wrists. It kept me a foot short of my full
stretch. I could get my eye to the edge of the window and no farther, and
then I saw much sky and a little desolate moorland running up into a
gauntly-wooded hill country.
I spent my waking hours thinking of Margaret and the others dreaming of
her. Now was my chance to learn to do without her altogether. It would not
be for long. I was in the Duke's clutches, and he would not let me go till
my head rolled off my shoulders. Had I been free and with her, we should
have been farther apart than before--by the width of Donald's grave. But
here, parted for ever, with the block or the gallows just ahead of me,
there was no bar to my lonely love. Time and time again she was so near to
me, so vividly present to my imagination, that I stretched out my arms to
grasp her. The shackles clanked, and I cursed myself for a fool, but I
never cured myself of the habit.
Because this is the dreariest time of my life, I have plumped right into
the middle of it to get it over. And, indeed, there is little worth the
telling between the top of Shap and her smile. I was in jail because I was
no soldier. That, apparently, should go without saying, and if I had come
to grief over some piece of important soldier-craft, no one would have