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"Hadn't you better tell your master what has happened?" at length said Ian. "He ought to know why you curse one of your fellows so bitterly." Alister was dumb. For a moment he looked aghast. "Ian!" he said: "You think he wants to be told anything? I always thought you believed in his divinity!" "Ah!" returned Ian, "but do you? How am I to imagine it, when you go on like that in his hearing?
The danger she had been in, and her deliverance through the voluntary sharing of it by Ian, had awaked the simpler, the real nature of the girl, hitherto buried in impressions and their responses. She had lived but as a mirror meant only to reflect the outer world: something of an operative existence was at length beginning to appear in her. She was growing a woman.
Alister and Mercy wandered a little higher, to the shadow of a great stone; Christina went inside the hut and looked from its door upon the world; Ian leaned against the side of it, and looked up to the sky. Suddenly a few great drops fell it was hard to say whence.
She reasoned that Ian had enjoyed a period of great happiness in his marriage with her, in spite of the singularity of its conditions; but that now, while Milly could never satisfy his fastidious nature, she herself had grown to be a hinderance, a dissonance in his life.
The most mounted and took place, the procession put itself into motion with clatter and laughter. The children and boys ran after to where the road dipped over the hill. A cluster of village folk turned the long, descending street. In passing they spoke to Alexander and Ian. "Who was married? Jock Wilson and Janet Macraw, o' Langmuir." The two lounged against the kirkyard wall, beneath the yews.
"Dat is troo, an' vat I has obsarve oftin," said Rollin, looking earnestly into a kettle which rested on the fire. "Never mind, Vic," said Ian heartily, "we'll be at it again to-morrow, bright and early. We're sure to succeed in the long-run. Petawanaquat can't travel at night in the woods any more than we can." Old Peegwish glared at the fire as though he were pondering these sayings deeply.
Heartily he held with Ian, but shrank from any difference with his mother. For her sake he received Sunday after Sunday in silence what was to him a bushel of dust with here and there a bit of mouldy bread in it; but the mother did not imagine any great coincidence of opinion between her and Alister any more than between her and Ian.
"I know that my aunt will grieve for the break that has come between my uncle and myself. I have, too," said Ian, with deliberation, "been quarreled with by an old friend. That also may distress her." The lawyer appeared to listen to sounds from the street. Rising, he moved to the window, then returned. "Bonnet lairds coming into town! You are referring now to Glenfernie?"
Perhaps you will like better to dance to them in the hall than to be deafened with their harmony without taking part in the exercise they invite us to. Waverley took Flora's hand. The dance, song, and merry-making proceeded, and closed the day's entertainment at the castle of Vich Ian Vohr.
Glenfernie, free to speak of Ian, spoke freely, with the relief of there, at least, a sunny day. It somewhat amazed and disquieted, even while it touched, the older man of quiet passions and even ways, the old strength of this friendship. Glenfernie seemed to brood with a mother-passion over Ian. To an extent here he confided in Strickland.
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