aside I began to wonder how best to aid our friends by strategy rather than force of arms. All at once I had mind that at the back of the land facing the shore an outhouse with a thatched roof ran at a high pitch well up against the kitchen window, and I stepped through a close farther up and set, at this outhouse, to the climbing, leaving my friends fighting out in the darkness in a town tumultuous. To get up over the eaves of the outhouse was no easy task, and I would have failed without a doubt had not the stratagem of John Splendid come to his aid a little later than my own and sent him after me. He helped me first on the roof, and I had him soon beside me. The window lay unguarded (all the inmates of the house being at the front), and we stepped in and found ourselves soon in a household vastly calm considering the rabble dunting on its doors.
“A pot of scalding water and a servant wench at that back-window we came in by would be a good sneck against all that think of coming after us,” said John Splendid, stepping into the passage where we had met Mistress Betty the day before—now with the stair-head door stoutly barred and barricaded up with heavy chests and napery-aumries.
“God! I’m glad to see you, sir!” cried the Provost, “and you, Elrigmore!” He came forward in a trepidation which was shared by few of the people about him.
Young MacLachlan stood up against the wall facing the barricaded door, a lad little over twenty, with a steel-grey quarrelsome eye, and there was more bravado than music in a pipe-tune he was humming in a low key to himself. A little beyond, at the door of the best room, half in and half out, stood the goodwife Brown and her daughter. A long-legged lad, of about thirteen, with a brog or awl was teasing out the end of a flambeau in preparation to light it for some purpose not to be guessed at, and a servant lass, pock-marked, with one eye on the pot and the other up the lum, as we say of a glee or cast, made a storm of lamentation, crying in Gaelic—
“My grief! my grief! what’s to come of poor Peggy?” (Peggy being herself.) “Nothing for it but the wood and cave and the ravishing of the Ben Bhuidhe wolves.”
Mistress Betty laughed at her notion, a sign of humour and courage in her (considering the plight) that fairly took me.
“I daresay, Peggy, they’ll let us be,” she said, coming forward to shake Splendid and me by the hand. “To keep me in braws and you in ashets to break would be more than the poor creatures would face, I’m thinking. You are late in the town, Elrigmore.”
“Colin,” I corrected her, and she bit the inside of her nether lip in a style that means temper.
“It’s no time for dalliance, I think. I thought you had been up the glen long syne, but we are glad to have your service in this trouble, Master—Colin” (with a little laugh and a flush at the cheek), “also Barbreck. Do you think they mean seriously ill by MacLachlan?”
“Ill enough, I have little doubt,” briskly replied Splendid. “A corps of MacNicolls, arrant knaves from all airts, worse than the Macaulays or the Gregarach themselves, do not come banging at the burgh door of Inner-aora at this uncanny hour for a child’s play. Sir” (he went on, to MacLachlan), “I mind you said last market-day at Kilmichael, with no truth to back it, that you could run, shoot, or sing any Campbell ever put on hose; let a Campbell show you the way out of a bees’-bike. Take the back-window for it, and out the way we came in. I’ll warrant there’s not a wise enough (let alone a sober enough) man among all the idiots battering there who’ll think of watching for your retreat.”
MacLachlan, a most extraordinarily vain and pompous little fellow, put his bonnet suddenly on his head, scragged it down vauntingly on one side over the right eye, and stared at John Splendid with a good deal of choler or hurt vanity.
“Sir,” said he, “this was our affair till you put a finger into it. You might know me well enough to understand that none of our breed ever took a back-door if a front offered.”
“Whilk it does not in this case,” said John Splendid, seemingly in a mood to humour the man. “But I’ll allow there’s the right spirit in the objection—to begin with in a young lad. When I was your age I had the same good Highland notion that the hardest way to face the foe was the handsomest ‘Pallas Armata’ * (is’t that you call the book of arms, Elrigmore?) tells different; but ‘Pallas Armata’ (or whatever it is) is for old men with cold blood.”
* It could hardly be ‘Pallas Armata.’ The narrator
anticipates Sir James Turner’s ingenious treatise by several
years.—N. M.
Of a sudden MacLachlan made dart at the chests and pulled them back from the door with a most surprising vigour of arm before any one could prevent him. The Provost vainly tried to make him desist; John Splendid said in English, “Wha will to Cupar maun to Cupar,” and in a jiffy the last of the barricade was down, but the door was still on two wooden bars slipping into stout staples. Betty in a low whisper asked me to save the poor fellow from his own hot temper.
At the minute I grudged him the lady’s consideration—too warm, I thought, even in a far-out relative, but a look at her face showed she was only in the alarm of a woman at the thought of any one’s danger.
I caught MacLachlan by the sleeve of his shirt—he had on but that and a kilt and vest—and jerked him back from his fool’s employment; but I was a shave late. He ran back both wooden bars before I let him.
With a roar and a display of teeth and steel the MacNicolls came into the lobby from the crowded stair, and we were driven to the far parlour end. In the forefront of them was Nicol Beg MacNicoll, the nearest kinsman of the murdered Braleckan lad. He had a targe on his left arm—a round buckler of darach or oakwood covered with dun cow-hide, hair out, and studded in a pleasing pattern with iron bosses—a prong several inches long in the middle of it Like every other scamp in the pack, he had dirk out. Beg or little he was in the countryside’s bye-name, but in truth he was a fellow of six feet, as hairy as a brock and in the same straight bristly fashion. He put out his arms at full reach to keep back his clansmen, who were stretching necks at poor MacLachlan like weasels, him with his nostrils swelling and his teeth biting his bad temper.
“Wait a bit, lads,” said Nicol Beg; “perhaps we may get our friend here to come peaceably with us. I’m sorry” (he went on, addressing the Provost) “to put an honest house to rabble at any time, and the Provost of Inneraora specially, for I’m sure there’s kin’s blood by my mother’s side between us; but there was no other way to get MacLachlan once his tail was gone.”
“You’ll rue this, MacNicoll,” fumed the Provost—as red as a bubblyjock at the face—mopping with a napkin at his neck in a sweat of annoyance; “you’ll rue it, rue it, rue it!” and he went into a coil of lawyer’s threats against the invaders, talking of brander-irons and gallows, hame-sucken and housebreaking.
We were a daft-like lot in that long lobby in a wan candle-light. Over me came that wonderment that falls on one upon stormy occasions (I mind it at the sally of Lecheim), when the whirl of life seems to come to a sudden stop, all’s but wooden dummies and a scene empty of atmosphere, and between your hand on the basket-hilt and the drawing of the sword is a lifetime. We could hear at the close-mouth and far up and down the street the shouting of the burghers, and knew that at the stair-foot they were trying to pull out the bottom-most of the marauders like tods from a hole. For a second or two nobody said a word to Nicol MacNicoll’s remark, for he put the issue so cool (like an invitation to saunter along the road) that all at once it seemed a matter between him and MacLachlan alone. I stood between the housebreakers and the women-folk beside me—John Splendid looking wonderfully ugly for a man fairly clean fashioned at the face by nature. We left the issue to MacLachlan, and I must say he came up
