Part 26 (1/2)

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 wis.h.i.+ng 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.