Jaunty Jock and Other Stories. Munro Neil

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 the bullet that was meant for a better man.”

      “You are mad, goodwife,” said her husband; “I would shed no man’s blood.”

      “I speak not of men,” said she, “but of that false fiend Lochgair who has kept us on the rack, and robbed Time itself of a fortnight to make his clan diversion. Oh, man! man! are you a coward? Challenge him to the moor; remember that at the worst my son who lies in the cart there could have died in decency and not at the doomster’s hand if Lochgair had not misled us – ”

      “Woman!” cried her husband, “get behind me!” and took refuge in a gust of mumbled prayer.

      They were now upon the Kenmore shore where the sea came deep against the rocks; no living soul had met them on their passage down the coast with their disgraceful burden, and alarmed at the prospect of encounter with any curious wayfarer, they drew the cart behind a thicket, to let an approaching horseman pass without his observation. Far off they heard the clatter of his horse’s hoofs, and while yet he was a good way distant the questing eye of the woman saw he wore a beaver hat, and a familiar coat with silver buttons!

      “Look! look!” she cried, “here comes the very man, delivered to our hands.”

      “I will not touch him! I will not touch him!” said her husband, cowering behind the bushes.

      “Then will I!” said she, and drew the pistol from her breast, and her husband wrestled with her for the weapon.

      Lochgair in a furious haste came galloping, his vision engaged on the road before him, and would have swept on his way unnoticing the cart, its burden, or attendants, but for the altercation in the thicket. He checked his horse, turned round on the saddle, and peered among the branches, where the husband, breathing hard, had got possession of the weapon.

      “He has slain my son, but I will spare him,” said the husband, and the woman put her mouth against his ear.

      “No son of yours,” she whispered, “that is the curse of it! – but his own!”

      “My God!” cried her husband, and fired at the horseman’s breast. He fell like a sack of oats on the roadway, and his horse flew off among the brackens.

      For a while the world seemed in a swound. In a swound the waves lapped up against the rocks; in a swound the leafage moved; in a swound the sea-birds cried, and the man and woman, desperate, sought to hide the evidence of their crime. They turned the dead man over on his back, emptied his pouches, filled his clothes with stones, then threw him, with the pistol, in the sea.

      “Home! home!” the wife commanded, placing the dead man’s papers in her plaid, and she walked, without remorse, by the side of her whimpering man, to Pennymore. She stirred the embers of the fire, and one by one destroyed the dead man’s documents, until the very last, and that she glanced at horror-stricken, for it was her son’s reprieve!

      With a scream she rushed outside and turned her husband’s plaid from the face of the dead man in the cart – and it was not young John Clerk!

      A RETURN TO NATURE

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