I looked after her till she went out of sight, wondering what had been the cause of her tirravee. She fair ran at the last, as if eager to get out of my sight; and when she disappeared over the brae that rose from the river-side there was a sense of deprivation within me. I was clean gone in love and over the lugs in it with Isobel Fortune. CHAPTER VI MY DEED ON THE MOOR OF MEARNS Next day I shot David Borland of the Driepps. It was the seventh of March, the first day I heard the laverock that season, and it sang like to burst its heart above the spot where the lad fell with a cry among the rushes. It rose from somewhere in our neighbourhood, aspiring to the heavens, but chained to earth by its own song; and even yet I can recall the eerie influence of that strange conjunction of sin and song as I stood knee-deep in the tangle of the moor with the pistol smoking in my hand. To go up to the victim of my jealousy as he lay ungainly on the ground, his writhing over, was an ordeal I could not face. “Davie, Davie!” I cried to him over the thirty paces; but I got no reply from yon among the rushes. I tried to wet my cracking lips with a tongue like a cork, and “Davie, oh, Davie, are ye badly hurt?” I cried, in a voice I must have borrowed from ancient time when my forefathers fought with the forest terrors. I listened and I better listened, but Borland still lay there at last, a thing insensate like a gangrel's pack, and in all the dreary land there was nothing living but the laverock and me. The bird was high--a spot upon the blue; his song, I am sure, was the song of his kind, that has charmed lovers in summer fields from old time--a melody rapturous, a message like the message of the evening star that God no more fondly loves than that small warbler in desert places--and yet there and then it deaved me like a cry from hell. No heavenly message had the lark for me: he flew aloft there into the invisible, to tell of this deed of mine among the rushes. Not God alone would hear him tell his story: they might hear it, I knew, in shepherds' cots; they might hear it in an old house bowered dark among trees; the solitary witness of my crime might spread the hue and cry about the shire; already the law might be on the road for young Paul Greig. I seemed to listen a thousand years to that telltale in the air; for a thousand years I scanned the blue for him in vain, yet when I looked at my pistol again the barrel was still warm. It was the first time I had handled such a weapon. A senseless tool it seemed, and yet the crooking of a finger made it the confederate of hate; though it, with its duty done, relapsed into a heedless silence, I, that owned it for my instrument, must be wailing in my breast, torn head to foot with thunders of remorse.