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"About the words ye would be telling her yon night ye left wi' the kist, and her not there to be hearing. She would be giving me siller," said the halflin. I am thinking he would get mair siller. And most of that day, it would be nothing but questions, Bryde sitting with his brother on his knee, and Dan going out of himself with little kindnesses. "Hugh is not married, ye tell me.
It is in me to hold you here against my heart for the bravery of it." "Take me," she whispered "see, I am ready," and she opened her arms wide and held her face upwards. Her eyes were fast shut and the long lashes dark on her cheek. There came a look of infinite tenderness on the fierce swarthy face of Bryde McBride. "And afterwards, my brave lass?" "Ah, then, I could not let you go.
And the lad lisped and boggled at the English, till I shook the Gaelic into him and there was the story. It would be two nights ago that Bryde McBride came into the loft where the halflin was sleeping, and bade him dress.
And you a young thing yet there will be time for a scroosch of weans; it is Betty that kens, and Bryde the lad will be daidlin' his brother on his knee. "Ye could have been waiting," says she, "till the lad would be home, and standing under his mother's shawl before the minister, but ye would be that daft to be at the marrying hoot, toot."
Go there and I will come soon," and the lad walked the horses away, and these two stood watching. Then Helen turned to Bryde and looked at him, her black eyes flashing, her cheeks wind-whipped, her hair a disarray with the speed of her travelling, and her lips smiling. If ever there would be beauty in a woman in the white night with a half gale, it was in Helen.
For months never did I awake but my first thought would be, "What is there not right?" and then I would be remembering that Bryde was not any more on the moorlands.
"She is beautiful," she would tell me, "and merry and a great lady, and I think any man will be loving her," but there were many nights when Margaret lay wide-eyed, for all that she drove Bryde from her with jest and laughter. But I think it was well that she never kent of the meeting of Bryde and Helen Stockdale at the ford in the burn yonder at the foot of the Urie.
She sprang to her feet, twisting her whip in her brown hands. By the horses she turned "Am I lame, or blind, or ugly?" she cried. "Oh, man, I could kill you . . . but some day, Monsieur, some day I shall laugh when that proud Mistress Margaret flouts your love . . ." She laughed, mocking. "'It will be no concern of mine whether Bryde McBride goes or stays, says the Lady Margaret.
And old Betty, Betty of eighty winters, sat by the fireside and would look at Bryde with her old, old eyes, hardly seeing, and whiles she would be calling the boy "Young Dan," and whiles havering of Miss Janet, his grandmother. "You will be clever, clever," she would be saying to Belle, "and you will get another man yet. . . ."
It would be Betty that brought the laughing on us, for she would be crying to us to ken who was the stranger. And when Bryde went to her bedside, she scrambled up among her pillows. "Will you have been fetching a silk dress for Betty?" she cried at him. "Silk and lace and more," said Bryde. "Not brandy," says she, her lips pursed up. "Just brandy."
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