“I will never rest,” she cried at last, “till Lochgair has paid the penalty for this trick upon us. My laddie’s death is at his door!”
“At his door!” she cried more vehemently. “Are you hearing me? He has slain my son in this shameful way as surely as if he had tied the rope himself.”
Her husband made no answer; he found in her words but the thought of one for the time demented, and he walked appalled at the chaos into which the precious edifice of his faith had tumbled. Rudely she plucked his arm and screamed in his ear—
“To Campbell?” he repeated vaguely. “God forgive him his false hopes and negligence, but it was not he who condemned our son.”
“But for him,” said the woman, “my son would have died like a gentleman, and not like a common thief.”
“I do not understand,” said her husband blankly.
“No, you never understand,” she sneered, “that was ever your failing. Do you think that if I had not the promise of Lochgair, I should let my laddie die upon the gallows? The first of his race! the first of his race! I had brought with me his pistol that he might save himself the scandal of the doomster’s hand,” and she took the weapon from her bosom.
Her husband looked at it, grasped at once the Spartan spirit of her scheme, and swithered between chagrin that it had been foiled, and shame that the sin of self-slaughter should for a moment seem desirable.
“Oh, Margaret!” he cried, “you terrify me. Throw that dreadful weapon in the sea,” and he made to take it from her, but she restored it to her plaid.
“No, no,” she cried, “there may be use for it—”
“Use for it!” he repeated, and she poured into his ear the torrent of her hatred of Lochgair. “He could have won my laddie off,” she said; “we had his own assurance. And if we had not put our trust in him, we would have gone to others—Asknish or Stonefield, or the Duke himself—the Duke would have had some pity on a mother.”
“Lochgair may have sore deceived us,” said her husband, “yet he was but an instrument; our laddie’s doom was a thing appointed from the start of Time.”
“Then from the start of Time you were doomed to slay Lochgair.”
“One or other of us. We are, it seems by your religion, all in the hands of fate and cannot help ourselves. Stand up like a man to this filthy Campbell, and give him the bullet that was meant for a better man.”