The sister took him round to the corner of the house and in at the byre door, and told him to wait. "It'll not be long now," she said.
"Then she's still to the fore," said the wright. "I might have waited on the paymaster's dram at Three Bridges if I had ken't. Women are aye thrawn about dying. They'll put it off to the last, when a man would be glad to be taking the road. Who is she, poor woman?"
"A cousin-german of Nanny's," said the sister, putting a bottle before him, and whipping out for some bannock and cheese. He sat down on a shearing-stool, facing the door, half open, between the byre he was in and the kitchen where Aoirig was at the dying. The stretching-board leaned against the wall outside.
"Aye so gentle, so kind," the woman in the bed was saying in her last dover. "He kissed me first on a day like this. And the blue flowers from Aora?"
In the byre the wright was preeing the drink and paying little heed to food. It was the good warm stuff they brew on the side of Lochow, the heart of the very heart of the barley-fields, with the taste of gall and peat, and he mellowed with every quaich, and took to the soft lilting of Niall Ban's song:--
"'I am the Sergeant fell but kind (Ho! ho! heroes, agus ho-e-ro! ); I only lift but the deaf and blind, The wearied-out and the rest-inclined. Many a booty I drive before, Through the glens, through the glens.' said the Sergeant Mor."
Ben the house the goodwife was saying the prayers for the dying woman the woman should have said for herself while she had the wind for it, but Aoirig harped on her love-tale. She was going fast, and the sisters, putting their hands to her feet, could feel that they were cold as the rocks. Maisie's arms were round her, and she seemed to have the notion that here was the grip of death, for she pushed her back.
"I am not so old--so old. There is Seana, my neighbour at Duart--long past the fourscore and still spinning--I am not so old--God of grace--so old--and the flowers----"
A grey shiver went over her face; her breast heaved and fell in; her voice stopped with a gluck in the throat.
The women stirred round fast in the kitchen. Out on the clay floor the two sisters pushed the table and laid a sheet on it, the goodwife put aside the pillows and let Aoirig's head fall back on the bed. Maisie put her hand to the clock and stopped it.