The low sun gleamed golden upon the rough white bark of the little group of birches, picking out the shining dark red of the newly-grown twigs which drooped from their branches amongst a confusion of bright leaves and dense fronds of grey-green lichen. From a perch near the top of one of the trees a blackbird was singing merrily, and divers other small birds flitted, twittered and cheeped amongst the undergrowth of bracken and hazel.
In the middle of the little wood, in a spot hidden from all sides by that undergrowth and by the shape of the Braes of Balquhidder rising about it, there was a movement. A small part of the ground seemed to rise up and throw off the leaf litter which half-covered it, and in the process revealed itself to be in fact the sleeve and skirts of a great-coat; then the coat subsided again, and was still.
Perhaps a minute later the great-coat moved again in the same way. And again, rather less time after that.
At last, Alan Breck Stewart—for the coat was his, and he the origin of its strange repeated tossings and turnings—sat up, carefully removed a few yellow birch leaves from his hair and squinted towards the sun, just visible between the tree-trunks and the outlines of the hills beyond. Yes, it was evening; it would be dark before very long; and so it was, he judged, safe to leave his hiding-place.
For this, more than anything, he wished to do. Excellent as the hiding-place which he had found the previous day was, he could not stand to lie there any longer to-night. It was not—you understand—the irritation of the midges which swarmed about above his sheltering great-coat, nor that he was too cold to lie comfortably beneath his coat out of doors in the evening (and he a Hielandman; he scorned the notion!), nor that he was so womanish as to fret over every minute during which his friend was out of his sight, but... But yet, all the time he had been lying there he was remembering the reason why he was alone beneath the coat to-day, and remembering many other things also: his incessant insults and teasings of the day before; the fight to which they had almost led, and its swift abandonment; David's sudden collapse, and his own more sudden realisation of how unwell the poor lad was; and, finally, Davie asking him as they went down the burn together afterwards, 'What makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?'...
And so it had come into his mind that, be the dangers what they might, he must go and see David to-night.
Alan stood up, pulled the great-coat round him, placed his hat upon his head and set off over the braes. The curious eyes of the birds in the wood watched him go; but they were the only eyes that did.
It was but a short way to the house of Duncan Dhu and Mrs Maclaren. Those worthy people, Alan reasoned as he went, would either be with David or asleep, and there was no sense in disturbing them if it was the latter; so, instead of knocking at the door, he went straight round to the back room where David had been placed and looked in through the wide open window. The stems of the heather thatch nudged against the feathers in his hat as he leaned further forward to look into the room.
There was a lamp burning on the little table below the window. Its light mingled with that of the fading evening, for the sun had by now sunk beneath the hills, and it was in the resulting mixed dimness that he saw the bed set along the adjacent wall of the room, and the man who lay upon it. He was quite still at first; then, with a little sound of pain, he began to move about from side to side as restlessly as Alan himself had been doing not long since.
Taking off his hat, Alan scrambled through the window and over the table, and went to his side.
'Davie,' said he, taking the hand which drooped over the side of the narrow bed. Alan was no doctor, and knew little enough of the right treatment for a man in a fever; but he was nonetheless glad that he had come here. David ought not to be alone.
Mrs Maclaren had covered her guest's bed quite liberally with blankets, but that guest now began to push them forcefully away. 'Ah, it's so hot,' he muttered. 'The sun... it will find us out, if those red-coats do not. Is there no water?'
Alan looked round the room. There was a water-jug upon the table, with a cup beside it. Hastily he filled the cup and brought it over to the bed. 'All that's long over, Davie,' he said. 'Ye've naething to fear from the red-coats now, and there's water in plenty. Here, now, drink this.'
He had to hold David's head up with one hand and lift the cup to his lips with the other; but, so helped, David drank gladly, and seemed eased by it.
For a few minutes more he lay quietly, though still apparently unaware of Alan's presence. His face was horribly pale, and Alan wondered to himself how on earth he had not noticed how ill he was looking the previous day—not until Davie, moments after standing ready to fight him, had declared himself like to die where he stood! Alan had much to make up for... He placed an experimental hand upon David's forehead and felt him burning hot indeed as that sun in Glencoe. In drawing his hand back, he paused to brush aside a lock of hair which had fallen across David's face in the disorder of his movements.
But fever is a cruel thing in its whims and changes. Only a short while later David, after muttering to himself a few more disconnected fragments, abruptly decided that instead of being too hot he was now freezing cold, and he began drawing the blankets back up round himself with a pitiful distracted desperation.
'Here,' said Alan at once, taking off his great-coat and laying it over him. David clutched at the thick cloth, and the next few moments they spent in hindering each other quite effectively in their respective, equally urgent attempts at arranging the coat; but then, having tucked part of the lapel firmly round his chin, David calmed down again. Indeed, he lay frowning at the great-coat with something more like sense in his eyes than Alan had seen there yet this evening.
'But this—' he said, stroking the cloth with the fingers of the hand that still lay outside the covers. 'This is Alan's. How...'
Then he looked up, and his eyes widened in certain recognition.
He sat up abruptly. 'Alan!' said he. 'What are you doing here? Did we not agree that you would stay in your hiding-place? You're not safe here!'
'That's nae matter,' said Alan. 'It's dark enough to hide me from any dangers, whatever.' David still shook his head and frowned unhappily, so Alan turned to a different subject. 'And where is Mrs Maclaren, then? I should have said ye were in nae fit state to be left here alane.'
David lifted himself up a little on his elbows. He was still pale, and his voice had an awful sound of weakness and weariness, but his eyes were clear and steady; certainly he was now in his right senses. 'Mrs Maclaren must get her sleep, as much as anyone,' he said. 'I do fine here. The doctor called earlier, you know; I'm quite well taken care of.'
Alan only shook his head; then, with an air of suddenly remembering something, rummaged in the inside pockets of his blue coat and brought out a parcel of wrapped cloth, which proved to contain a couple of small barley-bannocks and some cheese. 'Ye'll have something to eat, Davie?' he said, breaking off a piece of bread and proffering it carefully.
David, sitting up in the bed, accepted the food gratefully, and allowed Alan to continue breaking up the bread into little pieces for him—though this not without a sidelong smile. When he had demolished the last of the bannocks and all the cheese he settled back against the pillows, regarding Alan with something of the same look still in his eyes, and said quietly, 'Well, then, I suppose I can be doing with the company.'
Meanwhile Alan had risen from his station beside the bed and begun to pace the length of the little room back and forth. 'David,' said he now, 'I have been fairly tormented over those downright foolish, senseless things I said yesterday. Ye said we should say nae mair about it, but it's been going round in my mind all the time, and I—I can only ask your forgiveness again.'
David nodded slowly. 'Well, if we are to speak of it again,' he said, 'then I suppose I have a deal to apologise for too. Ah, when I think of my sermonising!... But you were good to me in the end; and you're good to me now.' And he held out his hand.
'After long enew!' muttered Alan, taking David's hand and pressing it fervently. But he felt himself walking now on unsteady ground, like a bog full of black peaty pools and with the footing treacherous between them; to say too much more of yesterday would still be risking his steps more than was wise, and so he said nothing.
'Well,' said David after a short silence, shaking his head where it lay against the pillow, 'I think it is past now.' And then, a little while later, 'Alan, is there any more water?'
Alan fetched the cup from the table, and David took it and swallowed perhaps half the contents at one draught. Perhaps such eagerness for food and drink was a good sign; certainly he would need it if he was to recover his strength. It was really dark outside now, or as dark as it ever would get in the Highlands in July; the cool, still air drifted rather than blew in through the window, smelling of heather and thyme and clear water, and with almost no sound upon it, perhaps only the whistle of a solitary whaup going to its roost upon the muir, or the whispering of the wings of a bat as it looped past the house in its pursuit of the midges.
'How are ye feeling now?' asked Alan, when David had finished his drink and Alan had taken the cup from him again and sat down upon the bed.
David considered the question, with a tired little frown. 'Better, I think,' he said. 'It's been to and fro like this most of the day. The doctor said things didn't seem to be getting any worse, at least. I shan't die.' With this conclusion he looked pleased.
'I am glad to hear it,' said Alan.
There was another silence, during which a lone soft gust of wind blew into the room, sending tiny ripples over the surface of the water in the jug.
At last, 'Alan, do you mean to stay here all night?' said David.
In fact, Alan had not thought until now of what he meant to do; he had been acting on the same simple impulse which had sent him down from the birch wood amongst the Braes, and had not had room in his mind for planning past the present moment. Davie was in no immediate danger, and was better than when Alan had first found him, though Alan did not trust that he would stay that way. He considered what he might say or do; but before he could answer, David went on with a more serious expression, 'You should not. You shouldn't even stay here in Balquhidder at all. More soldiers may come through here at any time, and word will surely get out that you are here. And my being stuck here is no reason for you not to continue your journey. You might reach the Lowlands and safety in a matter of a few days. I'll follow when I can; it's no hardship. Ye've helped me enough. But you are not safe here.'
He was talking in a low, urgent tone, leaving little room to interrupt—though Alan was trying to as soon as he understood what the purport of David's speech was to be. But he forbore, and spent the last half of the time patiently—or perhaps not very patiently—in examining the pattern of a rug which lay upon the floor before the bed. Finally he said, 'David, I was glad to think we'd made up our quarrel. It's a sore thing to hear ye insult me again—me and all the Hielandmen of Balquhidder into the bargain! Ye are wrong, for word will no get out that I am here while Duncan Dhu and Mrs Maclaren and all my friends here are friends indeed. I suppose ye'll no have heard,' he went on, warming to his subject, 'of how Prince Charlie wandered through the Hielands for months in '46 with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his head, and all the poor clansmen helped him, and nane ever betrayed him, or let the slightest thing slip about him ever so accidentally, or even thought of all that traitor's siller. No, Davie, naething will "get out" here—about me, or you either.'
With this explication of Highland honour David seemed satisfied. He was smiling as Alan went on talking, but it was not a look of mockery or of disbelief. When Alan was finished, he said, 'Very well, then; I'll accept your word for that much, though the danger is still great. But I did not insult you, man Alan.'
'That you certainly did,' said Alan immediately, 'for to suggest that I would happily desert ye, while ye lie here at death's door, for the sake of getting my own safety a little sooner, is a grave insult indeed. After all—well, I wouldnae. I'll no leave this place until ye can leave it with me, and that's just an end of it. I hope ye ken that, Davie.' He had begun this speech with a lightness in his eye and a sort of merry solemnity in his voice, venturing to tease upon what had been so much more serious a matter only the day before. It ended rather differently.
David said nothing, but lay gazing into the darkness of the ceiling for some moments; then his hand crept out again from under the folds of the great-coat, found Alan's hand and gripped it tightly. 'I can only ask your pardon for that insult, then,' he said at last.
And Alan pressed his hand in return.
'Let's not speak of it any more,' murmured David, a few minutes later. 'I want to sleep.'
'Ay, ye do that,' agreed Alan, with another squeeze of his hand; and David, keeping Alan's hand clasped in his, turned over beneath the blankets and Alan's coat, and once more closed his exhausted eyes.
For some time Alan did not move; even his eyes remained fixed upon David's face, pale and drawn in the glow of the lamp. He was thinking of many things. It was not a short time later that he carefully loosed David's hand, rose slowly from where he sat upon the bed, turned towards the window and then back again as if in some confusion, and finally crossed the room and began rearranging the various small objects upon the table and the shelf in the far corner: the jug and cup of water, a few books (there was a Gaelic prayer-book, one of the novels of Henry Fielding and a practical handbook of farming; these Maclarens had quite the varied taste in reading matter), a tiny vase with a few of the golden bog asphodel flowers in it, and one or two other such things. It was apparently an absorbing occupation.
But at the first slight sound from David's bed Alan started, closed Joseph Andrews—which he had taken down from the shelf and begun to read at random—with a snap, and turned from his task at once. It was a little noise of dissatisfaction or discomfort that David had made, and he was turning his face back and forth upon the pillow as if trying to fend off some invisible enemy.
'No,' he said, in a voice scarcely more than a whisper, 'it's not a right thing...'
'Davie?' Alan took a few tentative steps towards the bed. David's eyes were still closed, and his voice had lost that deliberate, rational quality which, though so weak, it had had during their conversation earlier in the night. He was raving in his fever again; was he getting worse? Alan picked up the lamp and knelt down beside the bed, watching him closely.
'You must go, but you say you will not,' went on David now. 'Ah, and did I not think of leaving you, ay, many a time? Ye were always in more danger... I could have gone. But I didnae...'
If there was any sense in these words at all, it was what might have been an unpleasant revelation. But Alan paid no heed to it. 'It's nae matter, Davie,' he said. 'Go back to sleep.'
'That's right,' said David. 'I wouldnae leave you. It wasn't the shame of it. No—only that I was too much in love to bear parting, even—even at the worst...'
And, evidently happy with having explained this to himself—for he was smiling as he said it—he turned over again and subsided into silence.
The lamp went on burning, dim but steady in the night, and the cool air still wafted the scent of moorland flowers into the room. It was the quietest part of the night, before even the earliest birds of the dawn begin to sing; nothing stirred for some time.
Eventually Alan got up and went over to the window. The room faced east, and the dark hills of the horizon now stood out quite definitely against a growing gleam of red-gold beneath the fading blue of the higher night.
David was slumbering soundly; in his steady breathing, and in the peaceful look of his face where it lay nestled, half turned to one side, against the pillow, there was more of health and strength than there had been yet this night. He would be well; surely he would. And, meanwhile, the short summer night was almost over. Alan was not totally oblivious to the real dangers he faced in Balquhidder, and it would do Davie no good if he were found and captured by the red-coats after all.
And so, after filling the cup with water once more and leaving it beside the bed, and arranging the tails of his own great-coat a little more securely where they covered David's legs (he himself could do well enough without the coat for a little while), Alan left the room, letting himself out by the front door of the house this time, very quietly so as not to disturb the Maclarens. The bold blackbird of the birch-wood, risen to greet the morning, began to sing up ahead of him as he made his steady way back towards the Braes.
David was out of bed within a week, and went on getting stronger with quite decided purposefulness. A few more days and he was happily pottering about the house, helping Mrs Maclaren to feed the hens which crowded round the back door clucking eagerly at the appearance of a bowl of barley-mash, and admiring the new outbuildings which Duncan Dhu had constructed as part of his plans for the improvement of his little farm. ('I might take some lessons for the management of my own estate, when I have gained it back again,' he remarked, much to Duncan's gratification—for he had confided to his hosts those parts of his story which did not pertain to Colin Roy Campbell).
And Alan still spent his days amongst the yellow birch leaves in the hollow of the Braes, and went down every night to the house. The Maclarens welcomed him as a friend, more and more with personal liking as well as with their natural clan loyalty, and the four of them made quite a cheerful little household together.
It was towards the end of one of these nights, a week or so after David had first risen from his bed, when Alan began singing to them the song which he had made upon the victory in the round-house on the brig. Duncan with his pipes caught up the tune, improvising variations upon it, while his wife whirled her skirts in a spontaneous dance as joyful as it was imprecise, and Alan, sitting down on the arm of the chair in which David was installed and slinging his arm across its back above David's shoulders, left off his singing to explain the Gaelic words of the song again to him.
At last, as the pipes fell silent, Alan looked up with a laugh. 'Ah, it's a fine merry time we've had,' said he, 'and I am glad to see ye looking so well, indeed, Davie. But'—with a glance towards the window—'I'm thinking it's time I was off up the hill again.'
'Certainly it is,' said Mrs Maclaren, following his gaze. 'It'll be light soon. Off ye go, then!' She was laughing as she spoke, but there was real concern for Alan's safety behind the merriment in her dark eyes; she was a good woman, and a conscientious hostess in her way.
'Might I walk with you part of the way, Alan?' said David, as Alan rose and drew on his great-coat. 'I've a great desire for a walk.'
Alan looked at him. 'Ay,' he said, 'that ye might.'
He gave David his arm as they set off up the narrow track from the Maclarens' house in the dim grey light of early dawn; and, though David leaned upon it, he walked steadily enough. 'It's a strange thing,' said he as they went. 'When I was lying ill in my bed, I thought I should never be able to bear walking any distance again, after the trials I had on the way here. But now I want nothing so much as to walk, as soon as I can!'
'Ye are improving finely,' said Alan happily. 'Well, ye're a strong lad. I knew all along ye would be well again.'
To this David said nothing, but went on, 'There was another reason I wanted to come out with you this morning. Alan, I mind something I said in my fever, that first night when ye were there—'
Alan gave a start. 'Do ye remember that night?' said he. 'I'd thought ye were too ill all along to ken I was there—let alone anything ye said, a lot of rambling nonsense as it was.'
'Yes, I remember it,' said David quietly, and ignoring the last piece of description. 'Do you?'
They had stopped walking, and now stood half-turned towards each other, David's hand still on Alan's arm. Somewhere above them a blackbird—probably the same bird again which had sung Alan back to his hiding-place on that first morning—started upon the first few low, warbling phrases of the dawn, as yet rather ornamenting than breaking the tranquil silence.
'Ay,' said Alan, 'I mind it.'
It was a few moments before David spoke again, but when he did his voice was steady. 'Well, it was no rambling nonsense, Alan,' said he. 'I suppose I knew what I was saying, though I would not have said so much without the fever to help me... but it was quite true. It was true all along, I think. But I only knew it after we had quarrelled and—after you left off the quarrel so kindly. I suppose that's why I was talking about it so, for I had to work it out to myself... But, Alan'—for Alan had said nothing throughout this speech, though he kept his eyes on David's face all the time, and did not draw his arm away—'I had to explain it; but if you—don't want to mind it, then I shall say nothing more of the thing.'
There was a little hesitation in these last words; but all along David's voice and manner were terribly earnest, quite as earnest as he had been that afternoon in the wood of Lettermore when he had so carefully explained to Alan the moral questions of the murder which Alan had not committed, or as when he had steadfastly refused Cluny MacPherson's card games (and a wise enough refusal that had turned out to be!). Now, however, what he explained was nothing to jar against Alan's own notions of honour or decency, or even to surprise him in more than that David should be bold enough to say it outright. But neither, as he thought on it with a mind rather stunned, was that such a surprise, after all. David's ideas could be silly enough sometimes, just like an ignorant Lowland laddie, but he believed them, and stood firm in his own ideas; earnestness like that is a kind of courage, and not the most common kind in Alan's experience of the world. No, it was nothing unexpected that he should be courageous again now; his Davie aye had been so...
And so Alan reached up his free hand to cup David's face—stroked his cheek a moment with his thumb—then pulled him down to his own level and kissed him on the mouth.
'Well, now,' said Alan with a little cough, a short while later, 'we hae our answer as to why I liked ye so much—for I recall I said I didn't know, the last time ye asked.'
The laughter that had been sparkling in David's eyes brimmed over at last. 'Too many things entirely had happened that day,' he said. 'I was so glad ye had come back to me, and so sick and weary I could scarce think on anything... I suppose we could not explain it all then.'
'That I suppose we could not,' said Alan gravely. Perhaps, after all, that quarrel had laid bare things which would otherwise have remained hidden; and, after all, this was a far better way to clear things up between them than his attempts to talk over the quarrel had been.
David looked over his shoulder, to where the blackbird was now singing lustily from its favourite perch near the top of one of the birch trees which shaded Alan's daytime hiding-place. The first rays of the sun, just climbing over the ridge of hills to the east, were shining upon the bird and the bright leaves about it; and as David raised his head to watch it they fell also upon his face and the slightly disarranged strands of his hair, with an effect of such beauty as, in Alan's opinion, one might very worthily make a song about. Perhaps he would do so, to while away the time up in the woodland hollow later on; a fine present it would make for Davie...
He had once told Davie that he had surely cast a spell on him; even at the time he had had some notion of what he really meant by that, though he had refused to look the thing in the face, absurd and impossible as it had seemed then. This morning, in the growing sunlight and the blackbird's song and the breeze that shivered down through the heather, even that unorthodox minister who eighty years before had walked with the fairies over these very Braes could hardly have told Alan anything more about their enchantments.
'Alan,' said David at last, turning back to him, 'I'm very glad you have stayed here with me.'
'Ay,' said Alan. 'And I'll hear nae mair of the danger of it, whatever. For I mean to stay with ye still, until ye set out from this place, and after.'
And David, evidently finding words insufficient to convey his feelings about this intention, instead twined his fingers in Alan's hair, leaned down to him and did so by other means.