"I am now Estaiblished," she repeated. "Div ye ken the new asseestant frae Inchcawdy pairish? I'm the mon" (a second deep curtsy here). "I trust, leddies, that ye'll mak' the maist o' your releegious preevileges, an' that ye'll be constant at the kurruk.--Have you given papa's consent, Salemina? And isn't it dreadful that he is Scotch?"
"Isn't it dreadful that she is not?" asked Mr. Macdonald. "Yet to my mind no woman in Scotland is half as lovable as she!"
"And no man in America begins to compare with him," Francesca confessed sadly. "Isn't it pitiful that out of the millions of our own countrypeople we couldn't have found somebody that would do? What do you think now, Lord Ronald Macdonald, of those dangerous international alliances?"
"You never understood that speech of mine," he replied, with prompt mendacity. "When I said that international marriages presented more difficulties to the imagination than others, I was thinking of your marriage and mine, and that, I knew from the first moment I saw you, would be extremely difficult to arrange!"
"And soon a score of fires, I ween, From height, and hill, and cliff, were seen;
Each after each they glanced to sight, As stars arise upon the night. They gleamed on many a dusky tarn, Haunted by the lonely earn; On many a cairn's grey pyramid, Where urns of mighty chiefs lie hid."
The rain continued at intervals throughout the day, but as the afternoon wore on the skies looked a trifle more hopeful. It would be "saft," no doubt, climbing the Law, but the bonfire must be lighted. Would Pettybaw be behind London? Would Pettybaw desert the Queen in her hour of need? Not though the rain were bursting the well-heads on Cawda; not though the swollen mountain burns drowned us to the knee! So off we started as the short midsummer night descended.
We were to climb the Law, wait for the signal from Cawda's lonely height, and then fire Pettybaw's torch of loyalty to the little lady in black; not a blaze flaming out war and rumors of war, as was the beacon-fire on the old gray battlements of Edinburgh Castle in the days of yore, but a message of peace and good will. Pausing at a hut on the side of the great green mountain, we looked north toward Helva, white-crested with a wreath of vapor. (You need not look on your map of Scotland for Cawda and Helva, for you will not find them any more than you will find Pettybaw and Inchcaldy.) One by one the tops of the distant hills began to clear, and with the glass we could discern the bonfire cairns upbuilt here and there for Scotland's evening sacrifice of love and fealty. Cawda was still veiled, and Cawda was to give the signal for all the smaller fires. Pettybaw's, I suppose, was counted as a flash in the pan, but not one of the hundred patriots climbing the mountain side would have acknowledged it; to us the good name of the kingdom of Fife and the glory of the British Empire depended on Pettybaw fire. Some of us had misgivings, too,--misgivings founded upon Miss Grieve's dismal prophecies. She had agreed to put nine lighted candles in each of our cottage windows at ten o'clock, but had declined to go out of her kitchen to see a procession, hear a band, or look at a bonfire. She had had a sair sickenin' day, an amount of work too wearifu' for one person by her lane. She hoped that the bonfire wasna built o' Mrs. Sinkler's coals nor Mr. Macbrose's kindlings, nor soaked with Mr. Cameron's paraffine; and she finished with the customary but irrelative and exasperating allusion to the exceedingly nice family with whom she had lived in Glasgy.