Part 73 (1/2)
”Me lay han' upo' 'im!” cried Malcolm, surprised at her behaviour.
”Gien 't hadna been for you, naebody wad hae fun' oot the w'y intil the cave,” she rejoined, her gray eyes, blue with the fire of anger, looking straight into his.
”Phemy! Phemy!” said her mother. ”For shame!”
”There's nae shame intill 't,” protested the child indignantly.
”But there is shame intill 't,” said Malcolm quietly, ”for ye wrang an honest man.”
”Weel, ye canna deny,” persisted Phemy, in mood to brave the evil one himself, ”'at ye was ower at Kirkbyres on ane o' the markis's mears, an' heild a lang confab wi' the laird's mither!”
”I gaed upo' my maister's eeran',” answered Malcolm.
”Ow, ay! I daursay!--But wha kens--wi' sic a mither!”
She burst out crying, and ran into the street.
Malcolm understood it now.
”She's like a' the lave (rest)!” he said sadly, turning to her mother.
”I'm jist affront.i.t wi' the bairn!” she replied, with manifest annoyance in her flushed face.
”She's true to him,” said Malcolm, ”gien she binna fair to me.
Sayna a word to the la.s.sie. She 'll ken me better or lang. An' noo for my story.”
Mrs Mair said nothing while he told how he had come upon Lizzy, the state she was in, and what had pa.s.sed between them; but he had scarcely finished, when she rose, leaving a cup of tea untasted, and took her bonnet and shawl from a nail in the back of the door.
Her husband rose also.
”I 'll jist gang as far 's the Boar's Craig wi' ye mysel', Annie,”
he said.
”I'm thinkin' ye'll fin' the puir la.s.sie whaur I left her,” remarked Malcolm. ”I doobt she daured na gang hame.”
That night it was all over the town, that Lizzy Findlay was in a woman's worst trouble, and that Malcolm was the cause of it.
CHAPTER LI: THE LAIRD'S BURROW
Annie Mair had a brother, a carpenter, who, following her to Scaurnose, had there rented a small building next door to her cottage, and made of it a workshop. It had a rude loft, one end of which was loosely floored, while the remaining part showed the couples through the bare joists, except where some planks of oak and mahogany, with an old door, a boat's rudder, and other things that might come in handy, were laid across them in store. There also, during the winter, hung the c.u.mulus clouds of Blue Peter's herring nets; for his cottage, having a garret above, did not afford the customary place for them in the roof.
When the cave proved to be no longer a secret from the laird's enemies, Phemy, knowing that her father's garret could never afford him a sufficing sense of security, turned the matter over in her active little brain until pondering produced plans, and she betook herself to her uncle, with whom she was a great favourite. Him she found no difficulty in persuading to grant the hunted man a refuge in the loft. In a few days he had put up a part.i.tion between the part which was floored and that which was open, and so made for him a little room, accessible from the shop by a ladder and a trapdoor.
He had just taken down an old window frame to glaze for it, when the laird coming in and seeing what he was about, scrambled up the ladder, and, a moment after, all but tumbled down again in his eagerness to put a stop to it: the window was in the gable, looking to the south, and he would not have it glazed.
In blessed compensation for much of the misery of his lot, the laird was gifted with an inborn delicate delight in nature and her ministrations such as few poets even possess; and this faculty was supplemented with a physical hardiness which, in a.s.sociation with his weakness and liability to certain appalling attacks, was truly astonis.h.i.+ng. Though a rough hand might cause him exquisite pain, he could sleep soundly on the hardest floor; a hot room would induce a fit, but he would lie under an open window in the sharpest night without injury; a rude word would make him droop like a flower in frost, but he might go all day wet to the skin without taking cold.
To all kinds of what are called hards.h.i.+ps, he had readily become inured, without which it would have been impossible for his love of nature to receive such a full development. For hence he grew capable of communion with her in all her moods, undisabled either by the deadening effects of present, or the aversion consequent on past suffering. All the range of earth's shows, from the grandeurs of sunrise or thunderstorm down to the soft unfolding of a daisy or the babbling birth of a spring, was to him an open book. It is true, the delight of these things was constantly mingled with, not unfrequently broken, indeed, by the troublous question of his origin; but it was only on occasions of jarring contact with his fellows, that it was accompanied by such agonies as my story has represented. Sometimes he would sit on a rock, murmuring the words over and over, and dabbling his bare feet, small and delicately formed, in the translucent green of a tide abandoned pool. But oftener in a soft dusky wind, he might have been heard uttering them gently and coaxingly, as if he would wile from the evening zephyr the secret of his birth--which surely mother Nature must know. The confinement of such a man would have been in the highest degree cruel, and must speedily have ended in death. Even Malcolm did not know how absolute was the laird's need, not simply of air and freedom, but of all things accompanying the enjoyment of them.
There was nothing then of insanity in his preference of a windowless bedroom;--it was that airs and odours, birds and sunlight--the sound of flapping wing, of breaking wave, and quivering throat, might be free to enter. Cool clean air he must breathe, or die; with that, the partial confinement to which he was subjected was not unendurable; besides, the welcome rain would then visit him sometimes, alighting from the slant wing of the flying blast; while the sun would pour in his rays full and mighty and generous, unsifted by the presumptuous gla.s.s--green and gray and crowded with distorting lines; and the sharp flap of pigeon's wing would be mimic thunder to the flash which leapt from its whiteness as it shot by.