"Call it the Campbell liar," I cried bitterly, thinking of my father. "Your clan has not the reputation of guile for nothing, and if you refused straightforward honest outside counsel sometimes, it was not for the want of its offering."
"I cry your pardon," said MacCailein, meekly; "I should have learned to discriminate by now. Blood's thicker than water, they say, but it's not so pure and transparent; I have found my blood drumly enough."
"And ready enough to run freely for you," said M'Iver, but half comprehending this perplexed mind. "Your lordship should be the last to echo any sentiment directed against the name and fame of Clan Campbell."
"Indeed they gave me their blood freely enough--a thousand of them lying yonder in the north--I wish they had been so lavish, those closest about me, with truth and honour. For that I must depend on an honest servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one man in my pay with the courage to confront me with no cloaked speech, but his naked thought, though it should lash me like whips. Oh, many a time my wife, who is none of our race, warned me against the softening influence, the blight and rot of this eternal air of flattery that's round about Castle Inneraora like a swamp vapour. She's in Stirling to-day--I ken it in my heart that to-night shell weep upon her pillow because she'll know fate has found the weak joint in her goodman's armour again."
John Splendid's brow came down upon a most perplexed face; this seemed all beyond him, but he knew his master was somehow blaming the world at large for his own error.
"Come now, John," said his lordship, turning and leaning on his arm and looking curiously at his kinsman. "Come now, what do you think of me here without a wound but at the heart, with Auchinbreac and all my gallant fellows yonder?"
"Auchinbreac was a soldier by trade and a good one too," answered M'Iver, at his usual trick of prevarication.
"And a flatterer like yourself, you mean," said his lordship. "He and you learned the lesson in the same school, I'm thinking. And as ill-luck had it, his ill counsel found me on the swither, as yours did when Colkitto came down the glens there to rape and burn. That's the Devil for you; he's aye planning to have the minute and the man together. Come, sir, come, sir, what do you think, what do you think?"