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قراءة كتاب The McBrides A Romance of Arran

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‏اللغة: English
The McBrides
A Romance of Arran

The McBrides A Romance of Arran

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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your spirit, but I'm the Belle o' your death, Dan, the Death-Bell. Now!"

No words of mine can convey my impression of that scene. There were the hills, silent and grandly contemptuous, there was a rabbit loping across the road to the hedge foot, and there the road the woman had come stretched upwards; but as she spoke some subtle essence seemed to flood her veins, her sombre eyes flashed, her cheeks glowed darkly, and she trembled so that I could see her clenched hands flutter like segans.[1] It was not excitement, but to my mind as though some vital powerful force had taken possession of her body and shook it, as an aspen quivers in a gale.

The power seemed to grow stronger and stronger as she spoke, until with her word it seemed to break free and envelop us.

Where I have written "Now" she leaned rigidly towards Chieftain and almost hissed, so sharply came a word between her teeth. With some such sound, I think, will the devil unshackle his hounds. Well for me that my horses were rugging at the hedge, or I had never been troubled more with headache.

For the stallion reared his huge bulk into the air with a scream of brute rage. I have never heard such a sound since, and never wish to again. He turned like an eel, his mouth agape, and the veins round his nostrils like cord. His great gleaming teeth snapped like a trap at his rider's legs, and snapped again after he had a blow on the head that might have stunned him, and at the hollow sound of it I felt my teeth take an edge to them. Twice he reared and fell backwards, and twice Dan was astride as he rose. I could see the sweat running down his face and the bulging of the muscles as his knees pressed and clung to the heaving spume-spattered flanks. I think he knew he was fighting for his life, but his smile seemed graven on his face, though it looked like the smile of a man in sore distress. I knew every muscle felt red-hot, and time would give the victory to the stronger brute. And then I saw the change like a lightning-flash. Dan's shoulders haunched themselves, his head was low and stretched forward, and a look of the most devilish ferocity came over his face, his lips were pulled down, and his eyes almost hidden under the bunched and corrugated brows.

There was a knotted rope rein in his hand, and his arm, brown and bare to the elbow, and hard as an oak branch, rose, and I saw his teeth clench till the muscles on his jaws stood out like crab-apples.

"Ye wid fecht wi' me," he crooned—"me, damn ye, me." At every reiterated word the rein fell, and the weals rose on the stallion's neck and flank, and he snorted and screamed with rage.

"Woman," said I, having led the other horses away and returned—"woman or devil, whatever you are, ye have made a horse mad this day, and now the man's mad. Will ye put an end to this business before worse happens, for the horse is worth siller if the man's regardless, and there's many a lass will greet herself to sleep till the fires of her youth are burnt out if harm comes to Dan McBride. Have ye no pity for your ain sex?"

"Peety," she cries—"peety for a wheen licht-heided hussies that lo'e the man best that tells the bonniest lees, or speaks them fairest. Na, na, ma lad, nae peety. I'm watchin' a man that has tied their strings and kissed their bonny ankles, when he should have let them dry his sweat wi' their hair an' his feet wi' their braws.[2] Oh, why, why," she kind of wailed—"why will the King aye gang the cadger's road, and ken himsel' a king, and the cadger a cadger." The horse, panting and grunting at every breath, had breenged to the knowe on the roadside, and still the knotted rein fell; and then with a mighty plunge he reared up, balanced an instant on hind-legs, and then crashed backwards and lay, and I felt my heart give a mighty beat as Dan sprang on the brute's head and lay there, horse and man done.

"Come, you," snarled the man, as though he spoke to a dog; and the girl went to him.

"Quate the brute," said he, "for he's trimmlin' sair, and I like his temper a' the better for no' bein' broken."

"Ay, I'll quate the brute, easy as I wid yoursel'."

You may think you know a man till something happens, and you find him a stranger, and so I found, for at her words the man sprang to his feet as she soothed the horse.

"Say ye so," said he, and took her by the shoulder—"say ye so. I've broken many a horse afore this ane, and, Belle, I'll break you," and I watched the swarthy flush rise on the girl's face, and looked at the man's eyes and saw the reason of it.

"Wheest, lad, wheest," she cried; "let me go to the wean."

"Wean—ye never had a wean. . . ."

And then she did a queer thing. She bent her dark head till I could not see her eyes, but only the smooth eyelids and dark lashes, and she put her little brown hand over the man's eyes and stood a picture of humility, with a sad little smile on her face.

"Don't break me . . . yet," she murmured, and I saw Dan kiss her hand as she slid it down over his lips, and her face brightened like a flower in sunlight.

And there were the horses, rugging at the hedge where I had tethered them; and Chieftain on his feet, shaky and foam-flecked, and trembling at his knees; and the gipsy lass's wean greetin' at the hedge foot, with one wee bare arm clear of the shawl, seeming to beckon all the world to its aid.

And Belle the gipsy lass lifted the child and wrapped her in the shawl, and took the road in front of us. I had mind of Belle when she was the bonniest lass among a wheen of black-avised Eastern folk, that camped for many's the year on the ground of Scaurdale, where my uncle's friend, John o' Scaurdale, farmed land; but I was not prepared for her strange powers on horse, or for the beauty of her, and I think Dan was of my way of thinking also, for at the stable door says he: "I think, Hamish, a fee from John o' Scaurdale would not be such a bad thing with a lass like Belle to be seeing in the gloaming."

[1] Ires—"flags."

[2] Costly apparel.

CHAPTER II.

MAKES SOME MENTION OF ONE JOCK McGILP, AND TELLS HOW BELLE BROUGHT
  THE WEAN IN THE TARTAN SHAWL INTO THE HOUSE OF NOURN.

Nourn was home to me in my holidays and vacations from the college, and here I was back again for good, having become Magister Artium and well acquainted with the plane-stanes and glaber of the town of Glasgow—back again to the green countryside on my uncle's land of Nourn, concerned more about horses and cattle beasts than with the Arts, and with enough siller left me by my parents to be able to follow my inclinations.

My uncle—the Laird of Nourn, as he was called—had married kind of late, a common habit where the years bring strength and not eld; and Dan, his brother Ewan the soldier's son, had been at Nourn since he could creep, being early left an orphan.

On the Sunday after the coming of Belle the gipsy I lay long abed. In those days my cousin Dan and I made a practice of sleeping above the horses, "to be near them," as Dan said; but for myself I aye thought it would be that he might the easier slip out at night, and in again in the morning, and nobody the wiser.

In the years I would be at the college Dan had become airt and pairt of every wildness in the countryside, and in these times every man with red blood in him was concerned with the smuggling or the distilling of whisky,—and that is the reason that mothers were wishful that their sons should be able to "take a horse by the head and a boat by the helm," for these would be very needful attributes in a handy lad.

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