know very well it has nothing to do with harvesting nor harrowing,” he cried; “I said kirtles, didn’t I! And you needn’t be so coy about the matter; surely to God you never learned modesty at your trade of sacking towns. Many a wench——”
“About this counsel,” I put in; “I have no trick or tale of wenchcraft beyond the most innocent. And beside, sir, I think we were just talking of a lady who is your daughter.”
Even in his glass he was the gentleman, for he saw the suggestion at once.
“Of course, of course, Colin,” he said hurriedly, coughing in a confusion. “Never mind an old fool’s havering.” Then said he again, “There’s a boy at many an old man’s heart. I saw you standing there and my daughter was yonder, and it just came over me like the verse of a song that I was like you when I courted her mother. My sorrow! it looks but yesterday, and yet here’s an old done man! Folks have been born and married (some of them) and died since syne, and I’ve been going through life with my eyes shut to my own antiquity. It came on me like a flash three minutes ago, that this gross oldster, sitting of a Saturday sipping the good aqua of Elrigmore, with a pendulous waistcoat and a wrinkled hand, is not the lad whose youth and courtship you put me in mind of.”
“Stretch your hand, Provost, and fill your glass,” said my father. He was not merry in his later years, but he had a hospitable heart.
The two of them sat dumb a space, heedless of the bottle or me, and at last, to mar their manifest sad reflections, I brought the Provost back to the topic of his counsel.
“You had a word of advice,” I said, very softly. There was a small tinge of pleasure in my guess that what he had to say might have reference to his daughter.
“Man! I forget now,” he said, rousing himself. “What were we on?”
“Harvesting,” said father.
“No, sir; kirtles,” said I.
“Kirtles—so it was,” said the Provost. “My wife at Betty’s age, when I first sought her company, was my daughter’s very model, in face and figure.”
“She was a handsome woman, Provost,” said my father. “I can well believe it,” said I. “She is that to-day,” cried the Provost, pursing his lips and lifting up his chin in a challenge. “And I learned one thing at the courting of her which is the gist of my word of wisdom to you, Colin. Keep it in mind till you need it. It’s this: There’s one thing a woman will put up with blandly in every man but the one man she has a notion of, and that’s the absence of conceit about himself or her.” In the field by the river, the harvesters sat at a mid-day meal, contentedly eating their bannock and cheese. They were young folks all, at the age when toil and plain living but give a zest to the errant pleasures of life, so they filled their hour of leisure with gallivanting among the mown and gathered grass. And oh! mo chridhe, but that was long ago! Let no one, remembering the charm of an autumn field in his youth, test its cheerfulness when he has got up in years. For he will find it lying under a sun less genial than then; he will fret at some influence lost; the hedges tall and beautiful will have turned to stunted boundaries upon his fancy; he will ache at the heart at the memory of those old careless crops and reapers when he sits, a poor man or wealthy, among the stubble of grass and youth.
As I lay on the shady side of an alder bank watching our folk at their gambols, I found a serenity that again set me at my ease with the Provost’s daughter. I gathered even the calmness to invite her to sit beside me, and she made no demur.
“You are short of reapers, I think, by the look of them,” she said; “I miss some of the men who were here last year.”
They were gone with MacCailein, I explained, as paid volunteers.
“Oh! those wars!” she cried sadly. “I wish they were ended. Here are the fields, good crops, food and happiness for all, why must men be fighting?”
“Ask your Highland heart,” said I. “We are children of strife.”
“In my heart,” she replied, “there’s but love for all. I toss sleepless, at night, thinking of the people we know—the good, kind, gallant; merry lads we know—waging savage battle for something I never had the wit to discover the meaning of.”
“The Almighty’s order—we have been at it from the birth of time.”
“So old a world might have learned,” she said, “to break that order when they break so many others. Is his lordship likely to be back soon?”
“I wish he might be,” said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the heather above the myrtle and MacCailein’s head on a post “Did you hear of the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?”
“Yes,” she said; “an ugly business! What has that to do with MacCailein’s home-coming?”
“Very little indeed,” I answered, recalling our bond; “but she cursed his lordship and his army with a zeal that was alarming, even to an old soldier of Sweden.”
“God ward all evil!” cried Betty in a passion of earnestness. “You’ll be glad to see your friend M’Iver back, I make no doubt.”
“Oh! he’s an old hand at war, madam; he’ll come safe out of this by his luck and skill, if he left the army behind him.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said she, smiling.
“What!” I cried in raillery; “would you be grateful for so poor a balance left of a noble army?”
And she reddened and smiled again, and a servant cried us in to the dinner-table.
In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home in the fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter, the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by the Lowlands, where he had a mission to the Estates. The war, for the time, was over, a truce of a kind was patched up, and there was a cheerful prospect—too briefly ours—that the country would settle anon to peace.
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