CHAPTER XXVI.

A WEDDING ON THE DOORSTEP.

It was at the drakes' dridd that Dan roused me, and we left McAllan's Locker behind us with its gruesome keepers, and came down the hillside to the burn. I mind that there was a raven above us in the morning air, and his vindictive croak-croak was the only living sound that came to us as we marched.

At the burn I saw the track of the garron where he had crossed in the night, and at the burnside Dan stopped.

"Many a time have I wearied for the sight o' a burn, Hamish, cold and sweet and clean, when we would be drinking water that was stinking,"

and he made preparations to splash his face; and it was droll to see the bronze of his face stop at the throat, and the skin below like a leek for whiteness.

There were many things to be telling the wanderer--that he had got some notion of from McNeilage of the _Seagull_, but for the most part it was hard to talk to a man walking fast.

We came up over the last of the three lonely hills, with bare moorlands and peat hags fornent us, and away below the sea, and I held on for the house on the moor that once was McCurdy's hut. The first beast we saw was a raddy, a droll sheep with four daft-like horns, and there came a great crying of curlews; and then, when we came near to the house without yet seeing it, there was a look of wonder in Dan's face.

"There was nae gra.s.s here when I left hame," says he; "this will be your work, Hamish. Ye were aye a great hand for gra.s.s."

As he spoke, it seemed to me that the voice was the same voice that I kent when I was a boy, but I was at the walking now and hurried him on.

"Gra.s.s," said I; "look at yon," and I pointed to the parks and the steading, with the smoke rising straight from the lums into the frosty morning air.

"That was the young lad's work," said I.

"He will be a farmer at all events . . ." and there was on Dan's face as he spoke a look of pride and pity all mixed.

"Belle will not be knowing you are here."

"Ay, but she will that, Hamish--ye don't ken Belle; look, man, look, she's at the doorstep now." And if ever a man had it in his bones to run it was Dan, and at the door they met--the very door where the woman had kissed her man and smote him on the cheek, when I lay in the heather, and the Laird of Scaurdale rode with the wean in the crook of his arm--the same Helen that had brought them there then, had brought also this happy meeting. It was a picture I would be aye wishing I could be painting--Belle, her dark face flushed, her eyes suffused, the pride, the love, the longing of her, and her hands twisting and clasping, and her lips trembling, without words coming to them. The heaving breast and the little flutter at the delicate nostril, what man can be telling of these things; and Dan, his brows pulled down, and the scar red on his cheek, and his arms half outstretched--Dan took his woman into his arms as a man lifts a wean, and I saw his head bend to her face, and the wild clasp of her arms round him, and her lips parting as she raised them to his.

I did a daftlike thing then, for I put the saddle on the great horse--and he was a mettle beast, with many outlandish capers--and I rode through the hill to the kirk, and left word that the minister would be doing well to ceilidh at the house on the moor.

And indeed it was well on in the afternoon when that grave man dismounted a little stiffly from his pony, and I made bold to search for Dan and Belle, and tell my errand. It would maybe be a chancy business, but these two were like bairns then--and on the doorstep they were married. And when the minister's little pony was on its road home, and the sun still red to the west, and we three still standing at the door, Belle with with her two hands on Dan's arm, said he--

"I had clean forgot, my dear, but Hamish would always be remembering the due observances o' the sacraments."

A wedding, it seems to me, will be waking the devil of speech in all women, and old Betty would be havering like all that.

"What would I be telling ye?" she would say. "Has he not had the wale of all the weemen, and never the wan could be keeping him but you. 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."

Dan came back to his farming as a boy returns to his play, and it was droll whiles at the head-rig to see him straighten his back from the plough stilts, with also a quick far-seeing look to right and left of him, and an upward tilt to his chin that brought back the soldier in a moment; and then ye would hear the canny coaxing to get the horses into the furrow again, and the lost years were all forgotten.

My uncle took the news of the wedding finely.

"I'll not be denying Belle is a clever woman," says he, "a managing two-handed la.s.s--imphm. There might have been more of a splore," says he, "and no harm done--a wheen hens and a keg would not have been out of place."

But my aunt was not in his way of thinking.

"There would surely be no occasion," said she (when Margaret was not there), "the woman was well enough done by already."

"You would not have him live there in open scandal?" said I.

"An old song now," says she; "we always kind of put a face on things, but if Dan would be making a decent woman of Belle, there is nothing to be said."

I rode with Hugh and Margaret to be seeing Dan for the first time, and he had his soldier garb on him when we sat down to meat; and Margaret kept close to him at the table, and their talk was of the Low Countries and a soldier's life, and yet for all that he would be telling her how the la.s.sies would be dressing themselves, or the manner of the braiding of their hair, and for Hugh and me he would be giving a great insight into the working of soils and manures, and the different kinds of cattle beasts and horse; and very little talk of war we got from him, unless, maybe, it would be a story he would be telling that would give us an inkling of the business. He would aye be harping on the waste of land, and indeed if there was nothing else to be doing, he would be having good red earth carted from useless places and scattered on his own fields, which I think the old monks would be doing round their monasteries long ago, a practice maybe learned from Rome in the early days, but I have no sure knowledge of it.

It was that day that Helen came to the moor house, and among us, with word from John of Scaurdale for Dan to be coming to see him, and I saw that the very sight of her made a difference; for the face of Hugh flushed as he stood to greet her, and Margaret took to the talking in a vivacious manner that was not like her.

And Dan had many words for his visitor. "For," says he, in a grand fashion, "were it not for you, madam, I might be finding myself lying in harness, with the half o' Europe between me and this bonny place;"

and again, after a quizzing look, "I will not be the one to think you will be overly religious either"; but I am thinking I was the only one that would be getting the meaning of that saying.

"But why did you not return--many years?" said Helen.

"Just precisely that I would never be the one to see one o' my name dangling at the end o' a cart tether," said Dan, "or jingling at a cross-roads on a wuddy. Many a night I would be at this place," says he, with a smile to his wife, "but there was no word for me, and the years came and went, and there would be fighting to be going on with--och, it was a weary waiting when there was no little war somewhere, but it's by wi' now, the great thing is that it's by with. . . ."

Hugh and Mistress Helen went their own road, and we watched them from the doorstep, and Dan himself put the saddle gear on Margaret's little horse, and walked a bit of the way with us on the home road.

"I am liking that man too," said Margaret, when we were alone, "but I am thinking there was a liking for the wandering, and the fighting in him, or else he had been back long syne."

"He would have his happy days these twenty years," said she, "in new towns and among new folk, and Belle kind of chained to the moor here--it is that silent woman I will be liking the best of all, Hamish."

"My dear," said I, "you are not understanding the pride of your ain folk. Yon was the G.o.d's truth and nothing else he told Mistress Helen; the hangman's rope is no decent to be coiled about a man's folk. It's just the cleverness of Helen Stockdale I will be made up with--the simple sending of a screed of news; what beats me is why she did it."

"And that's easy to me," says Margaret. "It would just be a gift to Belle, Hamish."

"To Belle," says I.

"There are maybe more ways o' killing a cat than choking it with b.u.t.ter," said the la.s.s, "but that will be a very effective way, and even the cat might like it, I am thinking. Ye'll mind, Hamish, that Belle is the mother o' Bryde McBride, and what could not but be pleasing to the mother, would be like enough to please the lad, that doted on her a' his days."

"I think I am seeing it," said I.

"Ay, but Helen never would be seeing it like that, Hamish. She saw it like a flash, and sent the letter that brought back Dan, and I am not sure but Bryde would be here yet, if the mail had but come to hand sooner."

"Margaret," said I, "are there none among the young sparks coming about the place that you could be tholing about ye?"

"No," says she, with a smile; "there is a word among the kitchen wenches that whiles comes into my mind, Hamish."

"The kitchen wenches' conversation will be doing finely for me," says I, a little put out.

"It is none such a bad saying either, Hamish. This is it," said she, "and there's no great occasion to be in a black mood with a la.s.s--

"A clean want, Hamish, is better than a dirty breakfast. That's what the la.s.sies say, whiles, in the kitchen."