man jumped from the cart and fumbled with the harness, to find that further progress, wanting a girth, was not to be contemplated.
“I will walk into the town,” he said, “and get a rope, if you sit here till I return. You will not mind my leaving you, Margaret?”
“Mind!” she exclaimed with bitterness; “I have learned my lesson, and there is no more to mind.” But she fondled the thing concealed in her plaid, and her man walked quickly towards the wan lights of the tenements, leaving her all alone.
For a moment only she heard his footsteps, the sound of them soon lost in the din of nature – the uproar of the forest trees, whose ponderous branches creaked; the wind, canorous, blowing between the mountains; the booming crepitation of the sea upon the rocks. And yet no sense of solitude depressed her, for her mind was occupied by one triumphant thought – that young John Clerk should at least be spared the horror and shame of a public execution.
She had drawn, at first, the drenched plaid over her head to shield her and shut her in from the noise of tempest; but her hands in a little while were so busily engaged with her secret possession that the tartan screen at last rolled back on her shoulders, and she was aware of another sound than those of nature – the near, faint clang of chains. It was scarcely audible, but unmistakable – the beat of a loose end of iron links against wood, somewhere above her head, as she sat in the cart by the side of Creag-nan-caoraich. She stared up into the darkness and saw nothing, then stood to her feet and felt above her with trembling hand.
Her fingers searched along a beam with a rope attached to it, whose meaning flooded to her brain with a gush that stunned; she touched a dead man’s feet! and the pitiless clouds that had swept all night across the heavens heaved for a moment from the face of the reeling moon, and she saw the wretch upon the gibbet!
“My son! my son!” she screamed till the rocks and trees gave back the echo, and yet the distant lights of the burgh town glowed on with unconcern.
Her cries had ceased; she was sunk in a listless torpor in the bottom of the cart when her man returned in a state as wretched as her own, running with stumbling feet along the rutted highway.
“My God! my God!” said he, “I have learned of something dreadful!”
“I have learned it for myself,” said his wife. “You’re a day behind the fair.”
“Not one day, but eleven of them,” said her husband, hardly taking her meaning. “It is the fifteenth of September, and I’m so fearful of the worst. I dared not rap at a door in the town and ask.”
“The fifteenth of September,” she repeated dully; “we have not slept so sound this month back that we could miss a fortnight. Have you lost your reason?”
“I have seen a placard put up on the mercat cross,” said her husband, with his brow upon the horse’s back. “I read it in the light of the tolbooth windows, and it tells that the Government have decreed that, the day after September 2nd should be September 14th. Eleven days are dropped; it is called – it is called the Gregorian Calendar, and I have forgotten about the rope.”
The woman harshly laughed.
“Are you hearing me, Margaret?” he cried, putting up his arms to seize her, feeling some fresh terror.
“Gregorian here, Gregorian there!” she exclaimed. “Whose Calendar but the cursed Campbells’, who have bonnily diddled me of my son! Our times are in God’s hands, you said; you are witness now they are in the devil’s!”
“But it may be I was right, and that this is our Father’s miracle; John could not be – could not die but on the day appointed, and no such day, it seems, was on the Calendar. But I dared not ask, I dared not ask; I was dumfounded and ran to you, and here I am even without the rope.”
Again the woman harshly laughed.
“You need not fash about the rope, good-man,” said she; “at your very hand is plenty for your purpose, for there my son is, young John Clerk, and he hangs upon the tree.”
The woman would not put a hand upon the body. Without her aid her husband lowered the burden from the gibbet, laid it in the cart and covered it with his plaid; and when a girth for the horse had been improvised from a part of the shameful halter, the two of them turned for home, walking side by side through the dawn that now was coming, slow and ashen, to the east.
The man was dumb, and walked without volition, wrestling with satanic doubts of a Holy Purpose that had robbed him of his son with such unnecessary and ghastly mockery; the woman cuddled her cold secret in her bosom, stared glassily at the coming day, and for a time let fury and despair whirl through her brain like poison vapours.
“I will never rest,” she cried at last, “till Lochgair has paid the penalty for this trick upon us. My laddie’s death is at his door!”
Her man said nothing, leading the horse.
“At his door!” she cried more vehemently. “Are you hearing me? He has slain my son in this shameful way as surely as if he had tied the rope himself.”
Her husband made no answer; he found in her words but the thought of one for the time demented, and he walked appalled at the chaos into which the precious edifice of his faith had tumbled. Rudely she plucked his arm and screamed in his ear —
“What will you do to Campbell?”
“To Campbell?” he repeated vaguely. “God forgive him his false hopes and negligence, but it was not he who condemned our son.”
“But for him,” said the woman, “my son would have died like a gentleman, and not like a common thief.”
“I do not understand,” said her husband blankly.
“No, you never understand,” she sneered, “that was ever your failing. Do you think that if I had not the promise of Lochgair, I should let my laddie die upon the gallows? The first of his race! the first of his race! I had brought with me his pistol that he might save himself the scandal of the doomster’s hand,” and she took the weapon from her bosom.
Her husband looked at it, grasped at once the Spartan spirit of her scheme, and swithered between chagrin that it had been foiled, and shame that the sin of self-slaughter should for a moment seem desirable.
“Oh, Margaret!” he cried, “you terrify me. Throw that dreadful weapon in the sea,” and he made to take it from her, but she restored it to her plaid.
“No, no,” she cried, “there may be use for it – ”
“Use for it!” he repeated, and she poured into his ear the torrent of her hatred of Lochgair. “He could have won my laddie off,” she said; “we had his own assurance. And if we had not put our trust in him, we would have gone to others – Asknish or Stonefield, or the Duke himself – the Duke would have had some pity on a mother.”
“Lochgair may have sore deceived us,” said her husband, “yet he was but an instrument; our laddie’s doom was a thing appointed from the start of Time.”
“Then from the start of Time you were doomed to slay Lochgair.”
“What! I?” quo’ he,
“One or other of us. We are, it seems by your religion, all in the hands of fate and cannot help ourselves. Stand up like a man to this filthy Campbell, and give him
