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It was a meeting of extremes, and since Gabrielle had drooped and pined in the bleak northern castle where the lairds of Tarn had dwelt from time immemorial, McDermot laid even his ancestral home upon love's altar and, coming south, had bought Trevarthen Wood, a tree-girt, sheltered house no great distance from Mallow, though further inland.
McDermot was still humming the song to himself as he neared the group; but he stopped short, as he heard the isolated beggar repeat after him in English: "He promised he'd bring me a bunch of blue ribbons, To tie up my bonnie brown hair." He was startled.
There was not an ounce of useless flesh on his body, and every limb, bone, and sinew had been stretched and hardened by riding with the Dakoon's horsemen, by travelling through the jungle for the tiger and the panther, by throwing the kris with Boonda Broke, fencing with McDermot, and by sabre practice with red-headed Sergeant Doolan in the barracks by the Residency Square.
McDermot, the Irish leader, had just gained the mastery of Debriseau, bestriding his body and strangling him, with his fingers so fixed in his throat that they seemed deeply to have entered into the flesh.
At the Residency another thousand men encamped, with a hundred hillsmen and eighty English, under the command of Tang-a-Dahit and McDermot. By the Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which is over against the Tomb where the Dakoon should sleep, another thousand men were patrolled, with a hundred hillsmen, commanded by a kinsman of Pango Dooni.
Behind the gun-carriage, which bore the body, walked the nephew of the great Dakoon, then came a clear space, and then Pango Dooni, and Cumner, and behind these twenty men of the artillery, at whose head rode McDermot and Cumner's Son. As they passed the Path by the Bazaar every eye among the hillsmen and among the handful of British was alert.
"Why do you ask this?" asked McDermot, nodding towards Cumner's Son. The beggar shrugged his shoulders. "That he may not do with me as did the Rajah of Nangoon." "He is not Dakoon," said McDermot. "Will the young man promise me?" "Promise what?" asked Cumner's Son. "A mat to pray on, a house, a servant, and a loaf of bread, a bowl of goat's milk, and a silver najil every day till I die."
At first he thought it might be an Englishman in disguise, but the brown of the beggar's face was real, and there was no mistaking the high narrow forehead, the slim fingers, and the sloe-black eyes. Yet he seemed not a native of Mandakan. McDermot was about to ask him who he was, when there was a rattle of horse's hoofs, and Cumner's Son galloped excitedly up the court-yard.
"Nay, but in the Palace," interrupted Cumner's Son, "and thy daughter also, who hath the wisdom of heaven, that there be always truth shining in these high places." An hour later the Dakoon passed through the Path by the Bazaar. "Whither goes the Dakoon?" asked a native chief of McDermot.
After his wife's death, McDermot had returned to his old home in Scotland and had reassumed his duties there as laird of the district, and when, later on, Death struck again, this time leaving his sister Eliza a widow in none too affluent circumstances, he had presented her with his Cornish home, glad to be rid of a place so haunted by poignant memories. In such wise had Mrs.
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