John Splendid: The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn

by Neil Munro

  CHAPTER XXXIII.--THE BROKEN SWORD.

  We went along the road two and two, M'Iver keeping company behind withthe valet, who would have stabbed me in the back in all likelihood erewe had made half our journey, had there been no such caution. We walkedat a good pace, and fast as we walked it was not fast enough for myeagerness, so that my long steps set the shorter ones of MacLachlanpattering beside me in a most humorous way that annoyed him much, tojudge from the efforts he made to keep time and preserve his dignity.Not a word, good or bad, was exchanged between us; he left the guidanceto me, and followed without a pause when, over the tip of the brae atTarra Dubh, I turned sharply to the left and plunged into the wood.

  In this part of the wood there is a _larach_ or site of an ancientchurch. No stone stands there to-day, no one lives who has known anotherwho has heard another say he has seen a single stone of this umquhilehouse of God; but the sward lies flat and square as in a garden,levelled, and in summer fringed with clusters of the nettle that growsover the ruins of man with a haste that seems to mock the brevity of hisinterests, and the husbandman and the forester for generations have putno spade to its soil. A _cill_ or cell we call it in the language; andthe saying goes among the people of the neighbourhood that on the eveof Saint Patrick bells ring in this glade in the forest, sweet, soft,dreamy bells, muffled in a mist of years--bells whose sounds have come,as one might fancy, at their stated interval, after pealing in a waveabout God's universe from star to star, back to the place of their firstchiming. Ah! the monk is no longer there to hear them, only the maviscalls and the bee in its period hums where matins rose. A queer thoughtthis, a thought out of all keeping with my bloody mission in the wood,which was to punish this healthy youth beside me; yet to-day, lookingback on the occasion, I do not wonder that, going a-murdering, my mindin that glade should soften by some magic of its atmosphere. For, everwas I a dreamer, as this my portion of history may long since havedisclosed. Ever must I be fronting the great dumb sorrow of theuniverse, thinking of loves undone, of the weakness of man, poor man,a stumbler under the stars, the sickening lapse of time, the vast andawesome voids left by people dead, laughter quelled, eyes shut forevermore, and scenes evanished. And it was ever at the crisis of thingsmy mind took on this mood of thought and pity.

  It was not of my own case I reflected there, but of the great swooningsilences that might be tenanted ere the sun dropped behind the firs bythe ghost of him I walked with. Not of my own father, but of an evenolder man in a strath beyond the water hearing a rap at his chamber doorto-night and a voice of horror tell him he had no more a son. A fool,a braggart, a liar the less, but still he must leave a vacancy at thehearth! My glance could not keep off the shoulder of him as he walkedcockily beside me, a healthy brown upon his neck, and I shivered tothink of this hour as the end of him, and of his clay in a littlestretched upon the grass that grew where psalm had chanted and the feetof holy men had passed. Kill him! The one thrust of fence I dare notneglect was as sure as the arrow of fate; I knew myself in my innermosthis executioner.

  It was a day, I have said, of exceeding calm, with no trace left almostof the winter gone, and the afternoon came on with a crimson upon thewest, and numerous birds in flying companies settled upon the bushes.The firs gave a perfume from their tassels and plumes, and a littleburn among the bushes gurgled so softly, so like a sound of liquor in agoblet, that it mustered the memories of good companionship. No more mymind was on the knave and liar, but on the numerous kindnesses of man.

  We stepped in upon the bare _larach_ with the very breath checked uponour lips. The trees stood round it and back, knowing it sanctuary; talltrees, red, and rough at the hide, cracked and splintered in roaringstorms; savage trees, coarse and vehement, but respecting that patchof blessed memory vacant quite but of ourselves and a little bird whoturned his crimson breast upon us for a moment then vanished with athrill of song. Crimson sky, crimson-vested bird, the colour of thatessence I must be releasing with the push of a weapon at that youthbeside me!

  John Splendid was the first to break upon the silence.

  "I was never so much struck with the Sunday feeling of a place," hesaid; "I daresay we could find a less melancholy spot for our meeting ifwe searched for it, but the day goes, and I must not be putting off aninteresting event both of you, I'm sure, are eager to begin."

  "Indeed we might have got a more suitable place in many ways," Iconfessed, my hands behind me, with every scrap of passion gone from myheart.

  MacLachlan showed no such dubiety. "What ails you at the place?" heasked, throwing his plaid to his servant, and running his jacket offits wooden buttons at one tug. "It seems to me a most particularly fineplace for our business. But of course," he added with a sneer, "I havenot the experience of two soldiers by trade, who are so keen to forcethe combat."

  He threw off his belt, released the sword from its scabbard--a clumsyweapon of its kind, abrupt, heavy, and ill-balanced, I could tell by itsslow response to his wrist as he made a pass or two in the air to getthe feel of it. He was in a cold bravado, the lad, with his spiritup, and utterly reckless of aught that might happen him, now sayinga jocular word to his man, and now gartering his hose a little moretightly.

  I let myself be made ready by John Splendid without so much as puttinga hand to a buckle, for I was sick sorry that we had set out upon thisadventure. Shall any one say fear? It was as far from fear as it wasfrom merriment. I have known fear in my time--the fear of the night, oftumultuous sea, of shot-ploughed space to be traversed inactively andslowly, so my assurance is no braggadocio, but the simple truth. Thevery sword itself, when I had it in my hand, felt like something aliveand vengeful.

  Quick as we were in preparing, the sun was quicker in descending, andas we faced each other, without any of the parades of foreign fence, thesky hung like a bloody curtain between the trees behind MacLachlan.

  M'Iver and the servant now stood aside and the play began. MacLachlanengaged with the left foot forward, the trick of a man who is used tothe targaid, and I saw my poor fool's doom in the antiquity of his firstguard. In two minutes I had his whole budget of the art laid bare tome; he had but four parries--quarte and tierce for the high lines, withseptime and second for the low ones--and had never seen a counter-parryor lunge in the whole course of his misspent life.

  "Little hero!" thought I, "thou art a spitted cockerel already, and yethope, the blind, the ignorant, has no suspicion of it!"

  A faint chill breeze rose and sighed among the wood, breathed from thewest that faced me, a breeze bearing the odour of the tree more strongthan before, and of corrupt leafage in the heughs. Our weapons tinkledand rasped, the true-points hissed and the pommels rang, and into themidst of this song of murderous game there trespassed the innocentlove-lilt of a bird. I risked him the flash of an eye as he stood, abecking black body on a bough, his yellow beak shaking out a flutey noteof passionate serenade. Thus the irony of nature; no heed for us, thehead and crown of things created: the bird would build its home andhatch its young upon the sapling whose roots were soaked by youngMacLachlan's blood.

  His blood! That was now the last thing I desired. He fought withsuppleness and strength, if not with art; he fought, too, with venom inhis strokes, his hair tossed high upon his temples, his eyes the whitestof his person, as he stood, to his own advantage, that I never grudgedhim, with his back against the sunset I contented with defence till hecursed with a baffled accent. His man called piteously and eagerly; butM'Iver checked him, and the fight went on. Not the lunge, at least,I determined, though the punishment of a trivial wound was scarcecommensurate with his sin. So I let him slash and sweat till I weariedof the game, caught his weapon in the curved guard of my hilt, and brokeit in two.

  He dropped the fragment in his hand with a cry of mingled anger anddespair, snatched a knife from his stocking, and rushed on me to stab.Even then I had him at my mercy. As he inclosed, I made a complete voltewith the left foot, passed back my right in rear of his, changed mysword into my left hand, ho
lding it by the middle of the blade andpresenting the point at his throat, while my right hand, across hisbody, seized his wrist.

  For a moment I felt the anger at his treachery almost overmaster me. Hethought himself gone. He let his head fall helplessly on my breast, andstood still as one waiting the stroke, with his eyes, as M'Iver toldme again, closed and his mouth parted. But a spasm of disgust at theuncleanness of the task to be done made me retch and pause.

  "Home, dog!" I gasped, and I threw him from me sprawling on the sod.He fell, in his weariness, in an awkward and helpless mass; the knife,still in his hand, pierced him on the shoulder, and thus the injury Icould not give him by my will was given him by Providence. Over on hisback he turned with a plash of blood oozing at his shirt, and he graspedwith clawing fingers to stanch it, yet never relinquishing his look ofbitter anger at me. With cries, with tears, with names of affection, thegillie ran to his master, who I saw was not very seriously injured.

  M'Iver helped me on with my coat.

  "You're far too soft, man!" he said. "You would have let him goscathless, and even now he has less than his deserts. You have a prettystyle of fence, do you know, and I should like to see it paraded againsta man more your equal."

  "You'll never see it paraded by me," I answered, sorrowfully. "Here's mylast duello, if I live a thousand years." And I went up and looked at myfallen adversary. He was shivering with cold, though the sweat hung uponthe young down of his white cheeks, for the night air was more bitterevery passing moment The sun was all down behind the hills, thevalley was going to rest, the wood was already in obscurity. If ourbutcher-work had seemed horrible in that sanctuary in the open light ofday, now in the eve it seemed more than before a crime against Heaven.The lad weltering, with no word or moan from his lips; the servantstanching his wound, shaken the while by brotherly tears; M'Iver, theold man-at-arms, indifferent, practised to such sights, and with theheart no longer moved by man-inflicted injury; and over all a broodingsilence; over all that place, consecrated once to God and prayer by menof peace, but now degraded to a den of beasts--over it shone of a suddenthe new wan crescent moon! I turned me round, I turned and fell toweeping in my hands!

  This abject surrender of mine patently more astounded the company thanhad the accident to MacLachlan. M'Iver stood dumfounded, to behold acavalier of fortune's tears, and MacLachlan's face, for all his pain,gave up its hate and anger for surprise, as he looked at me over theshoulder of his kneeling clansman plying rude leech-craft on his wound.

  "Are you vexed?" said he, with short breaths.

  "And that bitterly!" I answered.

  "Oh, there is nothing to grieve on," said he, mistaking me mostlamentably. "I'll give you your chance again. I owe you no less; but myknife, if you'll believe me, sprang out of itself, and I struck at youin a ruddy mist of the senses."

  "I seek no other chance," I said; "our feuds are over: you were egged onby a subterfuge, deceit has met deceit, and the balance is equal."

  His mood softened, and we helped him to his feet, M'Iver a silent manbecause he failed to comprehend this turn of affairs. We took him to acothouse down at the foot of the wood, where he lay while a boy was sentfor a skilly woman.

  In life, as often as in the stories of man's invention, it is the onewanted who comes when the occasion needs, for God so arranges, and if itmay seem odd that the skilly woman the messenger brought back with himfor the dressing of MacLachlan's wound was no other than our Dark Dameof Lorn, the dubiety must be at the Almighty's capacity, and not at mychronicle of the circumstance. As it happened, she had come backfrom Dalness some days later than ourselves, none the worse for herexperience among the folks of that unchristian neighbourhood, who hadfailed to comprehend that the crazy tumult of her mind might, like thesea, have calm in its depths, and that she was more than by accidentthe one who had alarmed us of their approach. She had come back with herfrenzy reduced, and was now with a sister at Balantyre the Lower, whosefields slope on Aora's finest bend.

  For skill she had a name in three parishes; she had charms sure andcertain for fevers and hoasts; the lives of children were in her handswhile yet their mothers bore them; she knew manifold brews, decoctions,and clysters; at morning on the saints' days she would be in the woods,or among the rocks by the rising of the sun, gathering mosses and herbsand roots that contain the very juices of health and the secret ofage. I little thought that day when we waited for her, and my enemy laybleeding on the fern, that she would bring me the cure for a sore heart,the worst of all diseases.

  While M'Iver and I and the gillie waited the woman's coming, MacLachlantossed in a fever, his mind absent and his tongue running on withoutstoppage, upon affairs of a hundred different hues, but all leadingsooner or later to some babble about a child. It was ever "the dearchild," the "_m'eudailgheal_" "the white treasure," "the orphan "; itwas always an accent of the most fond and lingering character. I paidno great heed to this constant wail; but M'Iver pondered and studied,repeating at last the words to himself as MacLachlan uttered them.

  "If that's not the young one in Carlunnan he harps on," he concluded atlast, "I'm mistaken. He seems even more wrapt in the child than does theone we know who mothers it now, and you'll notice, by the way, he hasnothing to say of her."

  "Neither he has," I confessed, well enough pleased with a fact he had noneed to call my attention to.

  "Do you know, I'm on the verge of a most particular deep secret?" saidJohn, leaving me to guess what he was at, but I paid no heed to him.

  The skilly dame came in with her clouts and washes. She dressed thelad's wound and drugged him to a more cooling slumber, and he was to beleft in bed till the next day.

  "What's all his cry about the child?" asked M'Iver, indifferently, as westood at the door before leaving. "Is it only a fancy on his brain, ordo you know the one he speaks of?"

  She put on a little air of vanity, the vanity of a woman who knows asecret the rest of the world, and man particularly, is itching tohear. "Oh, I daresay he has some one in his mind," she admitted; "andI daresay I know who it might be too, for I was the first to sweel thebaby and the last to dress its mother--blessing with her!"

  M'I ver turned round and looked her, with cunning humour, in the face."I might well guess that," he said; "you have the best name in thecountryside for these offices, that many a fumbling dame botches. Isuppose," he added, when the pleasure in her face showed his words hadfound her vanity--"I suppose you mean the bairn up in Carlunnan?"

  "That's the very one," she said with a start; "but who told you?"

  "Tuts!" said he, slyly, "the thing's well enough known about the Castle,and MacLachlan himself never denied he was the father. Do you think asecret like that could be kept in a clattering parish like Inneraora?"

  "You're the first I ever heard get to the marrow of it," confessedthe Dame Dubh. "MacLachlan himself never thought I was in the woman'sconfidence, and I've seen him in Carlunnan there since I came home,pretending more than a cousin's regard for the Provost's daughter sothat he might share in the bairn's fondling. He did it so well, too,that the lady herself would talk of its fatherless state with tears inher eyes."

  I stood by, stunned at the revelation that brought joy from the verylast quarter where I would have sought it. But I must not let my raptureat the idea of MacLachlan's being no suitor of the girl go too far tillI confirmed this new intelligence.

  "Perhaps," I said in a little to the woman, "the two of them fondlingthe bairn were chief enough, though they did not share the secret of itsfatherhood."

  "Chief!" she cried; "the girl has no more notion of MacLachlan than Ihave, if an old woman's eyes that once were clear enough for such thingsstill show me anything. I would have been the first to tell her howthings stood if I had seen it otherwise. No, no; Mistress Brown has aneye in other quarters. What do you say to that, Barbreck?" she added,laughing slyly to my friend.

  A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lainon it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or p
retended to find, inmy silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future. And then thisrapture was followed by a gladness no less profound that Mac-Lachlan,bad as he had been, was not the villain quite I had fancied: if he hadbragged of conquests, it had been with truth though not with decency.

  Inneraora, as we returned to it that night, was a town enchanted; againits lights shone warm and happily. I lingered late in its street, whitein the light of the stars, and looked upon the nine windows of Askaig'shouse. There was no light in all the place; the lower windows of thetenement were shuttered, and slumber was within. It gave me an agreeableexercise to guess which of the unshuttered nine would let in the firstof the morning light on a pillow with dark hair tossed upon it and arounded cheek upon a hand like milk.