“John and I are promised at a wrestling in the town,” he said; “would the next day—”
The girl drew her screen about her like one smitten by a cold wind.
“Alan, Alan! your worst friend!” said she.
“The decentest lad in the world; he quarrels with none.”
“So much the readier can he make you the fool.”
“To sing in the ale-house—a poor schooling, my dear!”
“I never before saw the jollity of living.”
“It’s no flattery to one Ealasaid; has he said aught of the seriousness of death?”
Alan hummed the end of a verse and then laughed slyly.
“Lass,” said he, “does it make much differ that he thinks you the handsomest girl in the parish?”
“I would sooner you yourself thought me the plainest, and yet had some pleasure in my company.”
“Yesterday (on a glass), he said your eyes were the fullest, your hair the yellowest, your step the lightest, your face the sweetest in all real Argyll.”
“Then he’s the man who should be doing your courting,” said the girl, with a bitterness; and she went home sore-hearted.
The days passed on birds’ feathers; the brackens coarsened in the gloomy places of the forest; the young of bird and beast lost themselves in the tangled richness of the field and wood. No rains came for many days, and the sun, a gallant horseman, rode from hill to hill, feasting his eye on the glens he saw too seldom.
In those hours the winds dozed upon the slimmest stem of heather; the burns, that for ordinary tear down our braes, bragging loud to the lip, hung back in friendly hollows under saugh-branch, rowan, and darach leaf; “but a little sleep,” said they—“a little sleep, that we may finish a dream we woke in the middle of,” and the grasshopper’s chirrup drowned their prayer.
In their old fashion the glensfolk shifted for the time their homes to the shielings high up on the hills, in the breasts of the corries where are sappy levels that the heifers come to from the cropped glens like misers to a gentleman’s table. While their cattle on the long day ends tugged the crisp grasses, the people would come out of their bothies and huts and sit in a company, above them the openings between the hills, the silver dusk that never grew dark, and the prickle of stars. Then Red John carried himself among the company like a chief, full of _bardachd_, { 295} of wit, of the most fairy music, so that even the girl whose lover he borrowed gave him credit for a warlock’s charm.