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"I think we might be going," said I in a whisper, my heart thud-thudding at my vest, my mind sharing some of John Splendid's apprehension that we were intruders on some profound grief. And yet my hunger was a furious thing that belched red-hot at my stomach. "Royal's my race!" said Stewart "I'll be kept tirling at no door-pin in the Highlands, let us drive in the bar."
I think he saw the truth as clearly as I did myself, for he spoke with more than common softness when he answered. "I like your tale," he said, "which had a different conclusion and a more noble one than what I looked for at the opening." Then he leaned out and put a hand on John Splendid's sleeve. "Human nature," said he, "is the most baffling of mysteries.
He affected to laugh at Splendid's rejoinder, turned the conversation upon the disjasket condition of the town, and edged round to get as polite a passage as possible between us, without betraying any haste to sever himself from our company. But both John Splendid and I had our knees pretty close together, and the very topic he started seemed to be the short cut to the quarrel we sought.
Our eyes were on him at the time, and when he came closer we fell back into the rear of our dark retreat, thinking he might not push his inquiry further. For once John Splendid's cunning forsook him in the most ludicrous way.
Then John Splendid's play-acting came to its conclusion, as it was ever bound to do when his innermost man was touched. He forgot the carriage of his shoulders; indifferent to the disposition of his reins, he reached and wrung a hundred hands, crying back memory for memory, jest for jest, and always the hope for future meetings.
She put a head in at my tent last night, and 'Listen, MacCailein, said she, 'and keep on high roads, said she, 'and Inverlochy's a perilous place, said she, 'and I'd be wae to see the heather above the gall." John Splendid's back was to him as he sat at the prow of a boat coming close on our stern, but I saw the skin of his neck flame.
John Splendid's brow came down upon a most perplexed face; this seemed all beyond him, but he knew his master was somehow blaming the world at large for his own error. "Come now, John," said his lordship, turning and leaning on his arm and looking curiously at his kinsman. "Come now, what do you think of me here without a wound but at the heart, with Auchinbreac and all my gallant fellows yonder?"
The fact came to my knowledge in a way rather odd, but characteristic of John Splendid's anxiety to save his friends the faintest breeze of ill-tidings.
Then, softly, said she, "I wish him well and a safe return from his travelling. I wish him better than his deserts. That he goes at all surprises me. I thought it but John Splendid's promise to be acted on or not as the mood happened." "Yes," I said; "he goes without a doubt. I saw him to-day kiss his farewells with half-a-dozen girls on the road between the Maltland and the town."
It was one of John Splendid's; the words and air were his as well as the performance of them, and though the English is a poor language wherein to render any fine Gaelic sentiment, I cannot forbear to give something of its semblance here. He called it in the Gaelic "The Sergeant of Pikes," and a few of its verses as I mind them might be Scotticed so
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