The band to-night was playing at first delightful selections from operas, then they got on to the sweet bonnie lilts of old Scotland. Then to waltzes, and this was more than blood of sailors could stand. The middies had turned out in a body, and the men forward, too, kept it up.
Then McTavish, with Madge, and every other wardroom officer with any partner they could pick up.
"May I lead you forward sister dear, just to show you how our fellows can hornpipe."
The band stopped now. Kep's marvellous pipe soon filled the deck with hornpipe dancers. As soon as one dropped out of the ring another hopped in and this continued for an hour.
Then came the broadsword-men of the _Breezy_ on deck, and this was the grandest treat ever Madge had known in all her young lifetime. But the duel between Stormalong and McTavish fairly brought down the house.
Mac of course had the tartans on, and being begged of to dance the sword dance, he did so, and with real Highland glee too.
Poor Squire Drummond was visibly affected,
But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, the bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white, then melts for ever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place.
Every good time has an end. And so had this evening.
Kep and Mac took Madge and her father on shore. Hardly anyone spoke. No one could under such a starlit canopy with the big moon silvering all the sea southwards.
I wonder what made Mac squeeze the little hand that somehow--accident, I suppose--found its way into his, and was the gentle pressure he thought was returned, all mere imagination on his part?
Next evening Kep went on shore with his friend McTavish. They went long, long before sundown, because first the surgeon must talk a bit with the Squire, then Madge and the young men were going to be off on a ramble over the moor with Bounder.
The Squire and the gallant Navy surgeon talked chiefly about Scotland and the Clans. The ancestors of both had been out in the 45.
Drummond found that Mac was descended directly from a chief of the McTavish clan, which delighted the old man.
What delighted him most, however, was Mac's sturdily stating the facts which English boys need so much to be taught, that the short but bloody war that took place between the Jacobites and the Hanoverian was decidedly not a war between Scotland and England. There were as many so-called "Royalists" in Scotland as there were so-called rebels. That had Prince Charlie reached Norfolk his army would have been trebled in number.