CHAPTER XLVIII
THE MASTER COMES HOME
And what in all the annals of romantic adventure could be found more utterly hopeless than Wat Gordon's quest? He was doubly outlawed. For not only had James Stuart proclaimed him outlaw, but he had been out with the enemies of the Prince of Orange, now King William the Third of Great Britain and Ireland. He had fought at Killiekrankie and Dunkeld. He had ridden through all the north country at Dundee's bridle-rein. He was a fugitive from a military prison in the prince's own province of the Netherlands. He possessed but ten golden guineas in the world. His ancestral tower of Lochinvar was little better than a dismantled fortalice. And then as to his quest, he went to seek his love in her home, to rescue her from among her friends, and from the midst of the retainers of her father's estate, and those more numerous and reckless riders who had come with my lady the duchess from the Grenoch. Doubtless, also, my Lord of Barra would bring with him a great attendance of his friends. The chances against Lochinvar's success were infinite. Another man would have given up in despair, but in the mind of Wat Gordon there was only one thought: "She called me and I will go to her. Though I am traitor and outlaw alike to the king-over-the-water and the prince at Whitehall, proscribed alike by white rose and orange lily, I am yet all true to Kate and to love."
The desperate, unutterable details of that great mad journey can never be written down. For even Wat himself, in after-days, scarce remembered how, when one horse was wearied, he managed to exchange it for another and ride on – sometimes salving his conscience by leaving to the owner one of his dwindling golden guineas; or how he was attacked by footpads and escaped, having cut down one and frightened the other into delivering over (in trust, as it were, for King James) every stiver of his ill-gotten gains – poor crazed Wat meanwhile tossing his fevered head and wavering a pistol before the knave's astonished eyes as he bade him stand and deliver.
"'Tis a lesson to you," said Wat, didactically; "ye will thank me for it one day when ye lie down to die a clean-straw death instead of dancing your last on a gallows, with the lads crying your dying speech beneath your very feet as ye dangle over the Grass-market."
How he won through with bare life Wat never knew; nor yet with what decent householders he had negotiated exchange of horses without their consent. For long years afterwards, whenever Wat was a little feverish, scraps of conversations used to return to him, and forgotten incidents flashed clear upon him, which he knew must have happened during these terrible last days ere, with the homing instinct of a wounded animal chased desperately by the hunters, he reached the little gray tower of Lochinvar set lonely in the midst of its moorland loch. Sometimes on the Edinburgh street in after-years he stumbled unexpectedly on a face he recognized. A countryman newly come into market would set his hands on his hips and stare earnestly up at him. Then Wat would say to himself, "There goes a creditor of mine; I wonder if I gave him a better horse than I took, or if he wants to claim the balance now."
But who in the great lord of Parliament could spy out the white-faced, desperate lad – half-hero, half-highwayman – whose supple sword flashed like the waving of a willow wand, and whose cocked pistol was in his fingers at the faintest hint of opposition?
It was evening of a great, solemn, serene September day when Wat reached the edges of the loch, upon the little island in the midst of which stood the ancestral tower of his forebears. There was no smoke going up from its chimneys. The water slept black from the very margin, deeply stained with peat. The midges danced and balanced; the moor-birds cried; the old owl hooted from the gables; the retired stars twinkled reticently above, just as they had done in Wat's youth. A strange fancy came over him. He had come home from market at Dumfries. Presently his father would cry down to him from his chamber what was the price of sheep on the Plainstones that day, and if that behindhand rascal, Andrew Sim of Gordieston, had paid his rent yet. His mother —
Ah! but wait; he had no father! He had seen his father's head over the port of Edinburgh, and something, he could not remember what, happened after that. Had he not buried his mother in the green kirkyard of Dalry? What, then, had he come home for? There was some one he loved in danger – some one with eyes deep as the depths of the still and gloomy waters that encircled Lochinvar.
Ah, now he remembered – the heart, Kate's heart of gold! It was safe in his bosom. Ten days' grace when he left his cousin Will! But had he ridden five days or fifty? Sometimes it seemed but one day, and sometimes an eternity, since he rode away from Jack Scarlett at the ford above Dunkeld.
What was that noise? An enemy? Wat clutched his sword instinctively. No, nothing more than his poor horse, the last incarnation of his cousin Will's charger, with which he had left the stables of Dunkeld.
The poor beast had tried to drink of the peaty brew of the loch, but what with the fatigue and the rough riding, it had fallen forward, with its nose in the shallows, and now lay breathing out its last in rattling gasps.
Wat stooped and patted the flaccid neck as the spasms relaxed and it rolled to the side.
"Poor thing – poor thing – ye are well away. Maybe there is a heaven for horses also, where the spirit of the beast may find the green eternal pastures, where the rein does not curb and the saddle leather never galls."
So saying Wat divested himself of his arms and upper clothing. He rolled them up, and put them with the saddle and equipment of his dead horse in the safe shelter of a moss-hag. Then, with a last kiss to the gold heart, he dropped silently into the water and swam out towards the island on which the old block-house stood.
Five minutes later Walter Gordon, Lord of Lochinvar, white as death, dripping from head to foot as if the sea had indeed given up its dead, stood on the threshold of the house of his fathers. The master had come home.
The little gray keep on its lonely islet towering above him seemed not so high as of old. It was strangely shrunken. The isle, too, had grown smaller to his travelled eye – probably was so, indeed, for the water had for many years been encroaching on the narrow insulated policies of the tower of Lochinvar.
There to his right was the granite "snibbing-post," to which the boat was usually tied. The pillar had, he remembered, a hole bored through the head of it with a chip knocked out of the side – for making which with a hammer he had been soundly cuffed by his father. And there was the anchored household boat itself, nodding and rocking a little under the northern castle wall, where it descended abruptly into the deeps of the loch.
Wat stood under the carved archway and clattered on the door with a stone picked from the water-side. For the great brass knocker which he remembered had been torn off, no doubt during the troubles which had arisen after Wat himself had been attainted for the wounding of his Grace the Duke of Wellwood.
It was long indeed ere any one came to answer the summons, and meanwhile Wat stood, dripping and shaking, consumed with a deadly weakness, yet conscious of a still more deadly strength. If God would only help him ever so little, he thought – grant him but one night's quiet rest, he could yet do all that which he had come so fast and so far to accomplish.
At last he heard a stir in the tower above. A footstep came steadily and lightly along the stone passages. The thin gleam of a rushlight penetrated beneath the door, and shed a solid ray through the great worn key-hole. The bolts growled and screeched rustily, as if complaining at being so untimely disturbed. The door opened, and there before Wat stood a sweet, placid-browed old lady in the laced cap and stomacher of the ancient days.
"Jean!" he cried, "Jean Gordon, here is your laddie come hame." He spoke just as he had done more than twenty years ago, when many a time he had fallen out with his mother, and betaken himself to the sanctuary of Jean's Wa's by the side of the Garpel Glen.
For Jean Gordon it was, the recluse of the Holy Linn, his cousin Will's ancient nurse and kinswoman, and to them both the kindliest and most lovely old maid in the world.
"Wi' laddie, laddie, what has gotten ye? Ye are a' white and shakin', dripping wet, too; come ben and get a change and let me put ye to your bed."
"What day of the month is this?" cried Wat, eagerly, even before he had crossed the threshold.
"Laddie, what should auld Jean Gordon ken aboot times and seasons? Nocht ava – ye couldna expect it. But there is a decent man in the kitchen that mayhap can tell ye – Peter McCaskill, the Curate o' Dalry, puir body. He was sorely in fear of being rabbled by the Hill Folk, so he cam' his ways here, silly body. There's no' a man in the country-side wad hae laid hand on him – if he would just say his prayer withoot the book, gie his bit sermon, and stop havering aboot King Jamie – at least, till he comes to his ain again."
Thus gossiping to keep up Wat Gordon's spirits, the ancient dame led the way down the passages, with a foot that was yet light upon the heather, though seventy years scarcely counted up all her mortal span.
"Clerk McCaskill," cried Jean, "ye'll mind Maister Walter? Rise up and welcome him! For it is in his hoose that ye are sheltered, and, indeed, his very ale that ye are drinkin' at this moment."
Peter McCaskill rose to his feet and held out his hand to Wat. He was dressed apparently in the same ancient green surtout he had worn in the year of Bothwell – a garment which seemed never to get any worse, nor yet to drop piecemeal from his shoulders with age, but to renew itself from decade to decade in a decrepit but evergreen youth.
"I am rejoiced to see you in your ain castle, my lord," said the curate, ceremoniously. Then, catching sight of the pale, desperate face, he exclaimed, in a different tone, "Preserve us, laddie, what has ta'en ye? Hae ye slain a man to his wounding – a young man to his hurt? Are the dead-runners on your track?"
For, indeed, Wat stood like a wild thing, hard beset by the hunters, which at the last has turned to bay in its lair.
But Wat put aside all questionings with a wave of his hand, a movement which had something of his old, swift recklessness in it, as of the days when they named him the Wildcat of Lochinvar.
"Tell me the day of the month," he gasped, as he stood there in the midst of the floor before the fire of logs which burned on the irons of the house-place, swaying a little on his feet, and ever checking himself like a man drunken with wine.
The curate took a little calendar from his pocket – a record of saints' days and services, but interspersed with the reckonings of ale-houses and the scores of cock-fightings.
"'Tis the eve of the eighth day of September," he said, moistening his plump thumb to turn over the leaf that he might not be mistaken in the month.
"Thank God, I have yet two days!" cried Wat, and fell forward upon the shoulder of the curate.
CHAPTER XLIX
THE CURATE OF DALRY
Peter McCaskill received the weight deftly, as though he had been accustomed all his life to be charged down upon without a moment's notice by unconscious men.
"Easy does it, my lord," he said; "ye will soon be better. He's been owertaken, ye see – a wee drappie does it on an empty stomach," he explained to Jean Gordon. "Often hae I warned my folk – aye, even frae the pulpit, the very horns o' the altar, as it were – no' to tak' drink on an empty stomach!"
"Empty fiddlestick! Lay the laddie here!" cried Jean Gordon; "do ye no' see that the lad is deein' on his feet? He hasna seen drink for weeks, I'll wager – no, nor Christian meat either, by a' appearances."
She stopped to take off his boots. The soaked remnants of the sole came away in her hand.
"Mercy!" she cried, "the poor lad maun hae been in sore want. Tak' haud o' him soothly and tentily, Peter."
And so the kindly old lady, peering closely with her dim, short-sighted eyes, and the burly, red-gilled curate undressed Wat Gordon gently, and laid him in the bed on which his mother had died – the flanking pillars of which were hacked with the swords of the troopers from Carsphairn who had come to seek him after the sentence of outlawry.
"Peety me!" said Jean Gordon, "what will we do wi' the puir laddie? I'll get him some broth gin he can tak' them."
So, in a trice, Wat, having come a little to himself, was sitting up and taking "guid broth o' the very best, wi' a beef-bane boiled to ribbons intil't," as Jean Gordon nominated the savory stew, while she sat on the bed and fed him in mouthfuls with the only silver spoon Grier of Lag had left in the once well-plenished house of Lochinvar.
Wat sat fingering his gold heart and looking about him. He seemed like a man who has risen to the surface and finds himself unexpectedly in a boat after a nightmare experience of death in perilous deeps of the sea.
"Is there a horse about the house?" queried Wat, presently, looking at Jean Gordon out of his hollow, purple-rimmed eyes.
She thought that he still dreamed or doted.
"A horse, my laddie!" she cried. "How should there be a horse aboot the house of Lochinvar? The stables were never so extensive that I heard o'; and, troth, Rob Grier o' Lag, deil's lick-pot that he is, has no' left mony aboot the estates. There's a plough-horse ower by Gordiestoun, if that's what ye want."
And in her heart she said, "It's a lee, Guid forgie me. But onything to pacify the lad and get him asleep."
"I ken the best horse in a' this country-side," said the curate, going back to his ale as if nothing had happened, "and that's muckle Sandy Gordon's chairger ower at the Earlstoun. He's roarin' at the Convention in Edinburgh, I'se warrant, and he'll no' need 'Drumclog.' Gin ye hae a notion of the beast, I can borrow him for ye."
Wat started up with eager eyes.
"On the morning of the tenth have the horse at the loch-side, and I shall be forever bound and obligated to ye."
The curate nodded his head like one that grants the smallest and easiest favor.
"It shall be done; by six o' the clock Drumclog will be there, or my name is not Peter Mac – Eh! what is't, woman?" he exclaimed, turning a little testily to Jean Gordon, who for the last minute had been nudging him vehemently with her elbow to be quiet. "I'll no' haud my tongue for a bletherin' auld wretch. I hae held my tongue ower often in this pairish. Gin the lad wants a horse, e'en let him hae a horse. It is ane o' the best symptoms that I ken o'. I mind weel, yince, when I was a laddie like him and in love – "
But the reminiscence of Peter McCaskill's early love was not destined to be recorded, at least in this place, for Jean Gordon took the matter into her own hands and pushed the indignant curate out of the room. But even as he went he turned in the doorway and said, "Bide ye still in your bed the day, laddie. Ye shall find muckle Sandy Gordon's horse, Drumclog, at the west landing on the mornin' o' the tenth."
"Deil a fear o' ye," muttered Jean Gordon; "ye'll lie doucely and quietly in your bed till Jean gies ye leave to rise – tenth or no tenth!"
* * * * *
Then sleep descended like a brown hissing cloud upon the tortured soul and weary body of Wat Gordon, and deep, dreamless, billowy oblivion held him till the morrow. It was ten of the clock when he awoke, with a frenzied start, demanding how long he had slept.
Jean Gordon, in whose hands was the morning porridge-spurtle (and, as it were, the care of all the churches), tried the method of sarcasm.
"Weel, laddie," she said, "ye juist cam' here yestreen, and gin yesterday was the eighth, as Peter telled ye, ye will maybe be able to mak' oot that this will be the ninth. And come off the dead-cauld flags this instant with your bare feet, and you in a pour of sweat. There's nae sense ava in the callant! What are ye in sic a fyke for aboot the tenth and the tenth? Are the eleventh and the twelfth no' as guid days? Did the same Lord no' make them a'?"
Wat went back obediently to bed.
"Mind," he said, "if you are lying to me, you shall fry in hell-fire for that lie. For a man's life and soul are on your truth."
"The boy's fair dementit," cried Jean; "what for should auld Jean Gordon lee to him? Tell me your trouble, laddie," she said, going nearer to him. "For I've had trouble o' my ain a' my life, and weel I ken there are few things so evil that they canna be mended – that is, if ye are minded to stroke them the richt way o' the hair."
At this point Peter McCaskill was heard shuffling along the passage, but Jean was over quick for him. She rose and very promptly and unceremoniously shut the door in his face.
"Gae 'way wi' ye the noo, Peter," she said, peremptorily; "tak' the fish-pole and fetch in a fry o' trouts for the breakfast. Ye'll get naething else to eat gin ye dinna."
"Noo, laddie," she said, sitting down beside Wat, with a world of sympathetic invitation in her voice, "tell me a' your heart's trouble."
So, with a great sense of relief, Wat told the tale to the old lady, whose own love-trouble of fifty years before had kept her maiden all her life.
As he spoke, Jean stroked the hand which hung over the edge of the bed.
"Laddie, my laddie!" were all the articulate words she said, but she soothed Wat with a little, low, continuous murmur of sound as he fretted and fumed at his helplessness.
"Ye shall get your lass – fear ye not that," she said, when he had finished. "I hae heard o' the wedding. They say the lass does naething but bide in her chamber and greet. She has fallen away to a shadow. But be that as it may, there is a great repair o' folk to the house o' Balmaghie. I saw a heap o' the queer, daftlike folk o' the north riding by, wi' feathers in their checked bonnets, and tartan trews on their hurdies – aye, trews of bonny tartan claith – ye never saw the like. But ye shall hae your lass, were it only to spite the menseless crew. Peter and me will help ye to her."
In what manner Jean Gordon was to help him Wat Gordon knew not – nor, for the matter of that, Peter McCaskill either – save by getting him the loan of his cousin Sandy's horse, and even that might be a Highlandman's loan – taken without the asking. But Wat said nothing, only laid him down contentedly, while Jean Gordon set off to provide the breakfast she had so abruptly denied to the curate.
Presently Peter came in with his trouts, for in the loch of Lochinvar the spotted beauties were infinitely less shy and infrequent than in later days they have become.
"Benedictus benedicat!" quoth Peter, who knew his Latin by ear, and sat him down.
"That's a daft, heathen-like grace," said Jean. "I shouldna wonder gin the folks did rabble ye and tear your white clouts ower your head, if ye gied them balderdash like that in the pulpit."
The curate smiled a wry, discomfortable smile at the prophecy, but nevertheless he proceeded to take his breakfast with some fortitude, looking up occasionally to see that the trouts did not burn as they made a pleasant skirling noise in the pan.
"There's nocht like a loch trout newly catched, in a' this bonny God's warld," he said. "I wonder how men can be haythens and ill-doers when there's sic braw loch trout in Gallowa'! And burn trout are just as guid – in fact, there's some that actually prefers them!"
All this day Jean Gordon might have been heard in solemn confabulation with the curate, while Wat lay and listened to the din of their voices, sometimes uplifted in controversy, sometimes hushed in gossip, but ever coming to him pleasantly dulled and harmonized through the thick walls and long echoing passages of the house of Lochinvar. It was a windy day also, and the water sang him a lullaby of his childhood, as it lapped and swished all about him, with a noise like the leafy boughs of trees brushing against the foundations of his ancient castle.
"To-morrow! To-morrow! To-morrow!" said Wat, over and over to himself. "To-morrow my die will be cast for life or death."