Macmurdo came to her shop door. "Eh, the
laird, wi' all the straw of all that's past alight in his heart!"
Alexander answered the "good days," but he did not draw rein. He rode
slowly up the steep village street and over the bare waste bit of hill
until here was the manse, with the kirk beyond it. Coming out of the
manse gate was the minister. Glenfernie checked his mare. All around
spread a bare and lonely hilltop. The manse and the kirk and the
minister's figure buttressed each the others with a grim strength. The
wind swept around them and around Glenfernie.
Mr. M'Nab, standing beside the laird, spoke earnestly. "We rejoice,
Glenfernie, that you are about once more! There is the making in you
of a grand man, like your father. It would have been down-spiriting if
that son of Belial had again triumphed in mischief. The weak would
have found it so."
"What is triumph?"
"Ye may well ask that! And yet," said M'Nab, "I know. It is the
warm-feeling cloak that Good when it hath been naked wraps around it,
seeing the spoiler spoiled and the wicked fallen into the pit that he
digged!"
"Aye, the naked Good."
The minister looked afar, a dark glow and energy in his thin face.
"They are in prison, and the scaffolds groan--they who would out with
the Kirk and a Protestant king and in with the French and popery!"
"Your general wrong," said Glenfernie, "barbed and feathered also for
a Scots minister's own inmost nerve! And is not my wrong general
likewise? Who hates and punishes falsity, though it were found in his
own self, acts for the common good!"
"Aye!" said the minister.
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