“After his lordship’s it might be something of a down-come,” said John Splendid, half to me and half to the woman.
She caught his meaning, though he spoke in the English; and in our own tongue, laughing toothlessly, she said—
“The same stilling, Barbreck, the same stilling I make no doubt MacCailein gets his brown brandy by my brother’s cart from French Foreland; it’s a rough road, and sometimes a bottle or two spills on the way. I’ve a flagon up in a cupboard in my little garret, and I’ll go fetch it.”
She was over-old a woman to climb three steep stairs for the sake of two young men’s drought, and I (having always some regard for the frail) took the key from her hand and went, as was common enough with her younger customers, seeking my own liquor up the stair.
In those windy flights in the fishing season there is often the close smell of herring-scale, of bow tar and the bark-tan of the fishing nets; but this stair I climbed for the wherewithal was unusually sweet-odoured and clean, because on the first floor was the house of Provost Brown—a Campbell and a Gael, but burdened by accident with a Lowland-sounding cognomen. He had the whole flat to himself—half-a-dozen snug apartments with windows facing the street or the sea as he wanted. I was just at the head of the first flight when out of a door came a girl, and I clean forgot all about the widow’s flask of French brandy.
Little more than twelve years syne the Provost’s daughter had been a child at the grammar-school, whose one annoyance in life was that the dominie called her Betsy instead of Betty, her real own name: here she was, in the flat of her father’s house in Inneraora town, a full-grown woman, who gave me check in my stride and set my face flaming. I took in her whole appearance at one glance—a way we have in foreign armies. Between my toe on the last step of the stair and the landing I read the picture: a well-bred woman, from her carriage, the neatness of her apparel, the composure of her pause to let me bye in the narrow passage to the next stair; not very tall (I have ever had a preference for such as come no higher than neck and oxter); very dark brown hair, eyes sparkling, a face rather pale than ruddy, soft skinned, full of a keen nervousness.
In this matter of a woman’s eyes—if I may quit the thread of my history—I am a trifle fastidious, and I make bold to say that the finest eyes in the world are those of the Highland girls of Argile—burgh or landward—the best bred and gentlest of them, I mean: There is in them a full and melting friendliness, a mixture to my sometimes notion of poetry and of calm—a memory, as I’ve thought before, of the deep misty glens and their sights and secrets. I have seen more of the warm heart and merriment in a simple Loch Finne girl’s eyes than in all the faces of all the grand dames ever I looked on, Lowland or foreign.
What pleased me first and foremost about this girl Betty, daughter of Provost Brown, were her eyes, then, that showed, even in yon dusky passage, a humoursome interest in young Elrigmore in a kilt coming up-stairs swinging on a finger the key of Lucky Fraser’s garret. She hung back doubtfully, though she knew me (I could see) for her old school-fellow and sometime boy-lover, but I saw something of a welcome in the blush at her face, and I gave her no time to chill to me.
“Betty lass, ’tis you,” said I, putting out a hand and shaking her soft fingers. “What think you of my ceremony in calling at the earliest chance to pay my devoirs to the Provost of this burgh and his daughter?”
I put the key behind my back to give colour a little to my words; but my lady saw it and jumped at my real errand on the stair, with that quickness ever accompanying eyes of the kind I have mentioned.
“Ceremony here, devoir there!” said she, smiling, “there was surely no need for a key to our door, Elrigmore—”
“Colin, Mistress Brown, plain Colin, if you please.”
“Colin, if you will, though it seems daftlike to be so free with a soldier of twelve years’ fortune. You were for the widow’s garret Does some one wait on you below?”
“John Splendid.”
“My mother’s in-bye. She will be pleased to see you back again if you and your friend call. After you’ve paid the lawing,” she added, smiling like a rogue.
“That will we,” said I; but I hung on the stair-head, and she leaned on the inner sill of the stair window.
We got into a discourse upon old days, that brought a glow to my heart the brandy I forgot had never brought to my head. We talked of school, and the gay days in wood and field, of our childish wanderings on the shore, making sand-keps and stone houses, herding the crabs of God—so little that bairns dare not be killing them, of venturings to sea many ells out in the fishermen’s coracles, of journeys into the brave deep woods that lie far and wide round Inneraora, seeking the branch for the Beltane fire; of nutting in the hazels of the glens, and feasts upon the berry on the brae. Later, the harvest-home and the dance in green or barn when I was at almost my man’s height, with the pluck to put a bare lip to its apprenticeship on a woman’s cheek; the songs at ceilidh fires, the telling of sgeulachdan and fairy tales up on the mountain sheiling——
“Let me see,” said I; “when I went abroad, were not you and one of the Glenaora Campbells chief?”
I said it as if the recollection had but sprung to me, while the truth is I had thought on it often in camp and field, with a regret that the girl should throw herself off on so poor a partner.
She laughed merrily with her whole soul in the business, and her face without art or pretence—a fashion most wholesome to behold.
“He married some one nearer him in years long syne,” said she. “You forget I was but a bairn when we romped in the hay-dash.” And we buckled to the crack again, I more keen on it than ever. She was a most marvellous fine girl, and I thought her (well I mind me now) like the blue harebell that nods upon our heather hills.
We might, for all I dreamt of the widow’s brandy, have been conversing on the stair-head yet, and my story had a different conclusion, had not a step sounded on the stair, and up banged John Splendid, his sword-scabbard clinking against the wall of the stair with the haste of him.
“Set a cavalier at the side of an anker of brandy,” he cried, “an——”
Then he saw he was in company. He took off his bonnet with a sweep I’ll warrant he never learned anywhere out of France, and plunged into the thick of our discourse with a query.
“At your service, Mistress Brown,” said he. “Half my errand to town to-day was to find if young MacLach-lan, your relative, is to be at the market here to-morrow. If so——”
“He is,” said Betty.
“Will he be intending to put up here all night, then?”
“He comes to supper at least,” said she, “and his biding overnight is yet to be settled.”
John Splendid toyed with the switch in his hand in seeming abstraction, and yet as who was pondering on how to put an unwelcome message in plausible language.
“Do you know,” said he at last to the girl, in a low voice, for fear his words should reach the ears of her mother in-bye, “I would as well see MacLachlan out of town the morn’s night. There’s a waft of cold airs about this place not particularly wholesome for any of his clan or name. So much I would hardly care to say to himself; but he might take it from you, madam, that the other side of the loch is the safest place for sound sleep for some time to come.”
“Is it the MacNicolls you’re thinking of?” asked the girl.
“That same, my dear.”
“You ken,” he went on, turning fuller round to me, to tell a story he guessed a new-comer was unlikely to know the ins and outs of—“you ken that one of the MacLachlans, a cousin-german of old Lachie the chief, came over in a boat to Braleckan a few weeks syne on an old feud,