"I know nothing at all," she answered bitterly. "It seems that nowadays the lady is the last to be taken into confidence about her own marriage."

"Are you telling me?" he asked incredulously.

"I'm swearing it down your throat," she cried. "If I had a friend in this countryside he would be pitying my shame that I must be bargained for like beast at a fair and not have a word in the bargain."

"My name's what my name may be," said he, putting out an arm and addressing the world, "and you are my master's daughter; I would cut off that hand to save you a minute's vexation. What did Black Duncan know but that you had the picking of the gentleman yourself--and you might have picked worse, though I tell you I did not care to hear about the money in it."

"The money," she exclaimed, turning pale to the lips; "then--then--then there's money in it?"

"He's a smart young fellow----"

"No name, no name, or you are no friend of mine! Money, you say?"

"I could have picked no better for you myself."

"Did you say money?"

"I thought once there might be something."

"Money, money," she repeated to herself.

"A tocher should not be all on one side," said he, "and I know the gentleman would be glad to have you----"

"Perhaps the whole countryside knows more about it than I do; it could scarcely know less. I wondered why they were looking at me in the church on Sunday. Oh! I feel black burning shame--shame--shame!"

She put her hands to her face to hide her tears; she trembled in every part.

"They know; the cries are in at least," said Duncan.

"The cries! the cries!" she repeated. "Is my fate so near at hand as that?"

"You'll be a married woman before the General takes the road," said he.

She took her hands from her face; her eyes froze and snapped, cold as ice, the very redness of her weeping cooling pale in her pa.s.sion. She had no words to utter; she left him hurriedly, and ran fast into the house.

CHAPTER XXVIII--GILIAN'S OPPORTUNITY

Her father was at the door when she went in. Now for the first time she knew the reason for his change of manner lately, for that bustle about trivial affairs when she was near, that averted eye when she was fond and humorous. She went past him, unable to speak more than an indifferent word, and great was his relief at that, for he had been standing there bracing his courage to consult her on what she must be told of sooner or later. He looked after her as she sped upstairs. "I wonder how she'll take it?" he said to himself, greatly perplexed. "A father has some unco' tasks to perform, and here's a father not very well fitted by nature for the management of a daughter." He took off his hat and dried a clammy brow that showed how much the duty postponed had been disturbing him. "It's for the best, but it's a vulgar business even then. If it was her uncle, now, he would wake her out of her sleep to tell her the news. Poor girl, poor girl! I wish she had her mother."

He went into the barn, where corn was piling up, the straw filling the gloomy gable-ends with rustling gold. Loud he stormed among some workers there; loud he stormed, for him a thing unusual; and they bent silent to their work and looked at one another knowingly, sensible that he was ashamed of himself. Sitting dry-eyed on the edge of her bed, Nan reflected upon her next step. At a cast of her mind round all the countryside she could think of no woman to turn to in this trouble, and only with a woman could she share it. Her pride first, and then the fear of her father's anger, left her only certain limits in which to operate.

Her pride would not let her even show curiosity in the ident.i.ty of the man who was to be her doom, nor confess to another that she did not know his name. And the whole parish, if it was acquainted with her sale (as now she deemed it), must be her enemy. Against any other outrage than this she would have gone straight to her father. He that she loved and caressed, on whose knees sometimes even yet she sat, would not be deaf to any ordinary plea or protest of hers. She would need but to nestle in his arms, and loose and tie the antique queue, and perhaps steal a kiss willingly surrendered, and all would be well But this, all her instincts, all her knowledge of her father told her, was no ordinary decision of his. He had gone too far to draw back. The world knew it; he feared to face her because for once to please her he could not cancel what was done. There was no hope, she told herself, in that direction; even if there was she would not have gone there, for the sordid horror of this transaction put a gulf between them. Feverishly she turned over her lowland letters, and there she found but records of easy heart and gaiety; no sacrificing friends were offering themselves in the pages she had mourned over in her moods of evening loneliness. And again she brought her mind back to her own country, and sitting still dry-eyed, with a burning skin, upon her bed, reviewed her relatives and friends, weighing which would be most like to help her.

She almost laughed when she found she had reduced all at last to one eligible--Elasaid, her old Skye nurse, and the mother of Black Duncan, who was in what was called the last of the shealings, by the lochs of Karnes. Many a time her mother had gone to the shealing a young matron for motherly counsel, but Nan herself had never been there, though Elasaid had come to Nan to nurse her when her mother died. In the shealing, she felt sure, there was not only counsel, but concealment if occasion demanded that.

But how was she to get there, lost as it was somewhere miles beyond the corner of the Salachary hill, in the wild red moors between the two big waters?

First she thought of Young Islay--first and with a gladness at the sense of his sufficiency in such an enterprise. His was the right nature for knight-errantry in a case like hers, but then she reflected that he was away from home--her father had casually let that drop in conversation at breakfast yesterday; and even if he had been at home, said cooler thought, she would hesitate to enlist him in so sordid a cause.

Then Gilian occurred--less well adapted, she felt, for the circ.u.mstances; but she could speak more freely to him than to any other, and he was out there in the hazel-wood, no doubt, still waiting for her. Gilian would do, Gilian would have to do. If he could have seen how unimpa.s.sioned she was in coming to this conclusion he would have been grieved.

She went out at once, leisurely and with her thoughts constrained upon some unimportant matter, so that her face might not betray her tribulation when she met him.

In the low fields her uncle was scanning the hills with his hands arched above his eyes to shield them from the glare of the westering sun, groaning for the senselessness of sheep that must go roaming on alt.i.tudes when they are wanted specially in the plains. She evaded his supercilious eyes by going round the hedges, and in ten minutes she came upon Gilian, waiting patiently for her to keep her own tryst. His first words showed her the way to a speedy explanation.

"Next week," said he, "we'll try Strongara; the place is as full of berries as the night is full of stars. Here they're not so ripe as on the other side."

"Next week the berries might be as numerous as that at the very door of Maam," said she, "and I none the better for them."

"What's the matter?" he cried, appalled at the omen of her face.

"My father is going abroad at once," she answered.

"Abroad?" he repeated. He had a branch of bramble in his hand, plucked for the crimson of its leaf.a.ge. He drew it through his hands and the thorns bled the palms, but he never felt the pain. She was going too!

She was going away from Maam! He might never see her again! These late days of tryst and happiness in the woods and on the hills were to be at an end, and he was again to be quite alone among his sheep with no voice to think on expectantly in slow-pa.s.sing forenoons, and no light to shine like a friendly eye from Maam in evening dusks!

"Well," she said, looking curiously at him. "My father is going abroad, have you heard?"

"I have not," he answered; and she was relieved, for in that case he had not learned the full ignominy of her story.

"Can you not say so little as 'good luck' to us?" she asked in her lightest manner.

"You--you are going with him, then?" said Gilian, and he delighted in the sharp torture of the thorns that bled his hands.

"No," she answered, "it's worse than that, for I stay. You have not heard? Then you are the only one in the parish, I am sure, so ignorant of my poor business. They're--they're looking for a man for me. Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?" She laughed with a bitterness that shocked him. "Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?" she went on. "I'm wondering they did not lead me on a halter round the country and take the best offer at a fair I It was throwing away good chances to give me to the first offerer, was it not, Gilian?"

"Who is it?" he asked, every nerve jarring at the story.

"Do you think I would ask?" she said sharply. "It does not matter who it is; and it is the last thing I would like to know, for then I would know who knew my price in the market."

"Your father would never do it!"

"My father would not do but what he thought he must. He is poor, though I never thought him so poor as this; and I daresay he would like to see me settled before he goes. It is the black settling when I'm cried in the kirk before I'm courted."

"They can never marry you against your will," said Gilian in a dull, lifeless way, as if he had no great belief in what he laid forth.

"And that would be true," she said, "if I had a friend in the whole countryside. I have not one except----"

He flushed and waited, and so did she expectantly, thinking he would make the fervent protest most lads would do under the same circ.u.mstances. But in the moment's pause he could not find the words for his profound feeling.

"Except old Elasaid, the nurse on the Kames moor," she continued.

"Oh, her!" said he lamely.

"There's no one else I could think of."