Midwinter changed the tune, and the air was now that which he had played that night on Otmoor in the camp of the moor-men.
“Three naked men we be,
Stark aneath the blackthorn tree.”
He laid down his violin. “I bade you call me to your aid, Alastair Maclean, if all else failed you and your pride miscarried. Maybe that moment has come. We in this place are three naked men.”
“I am bare to the bone,” said Alastair, “I have given up my lady, and I have failed in duty to my Prince. I have no rag of pride left on me, nor ambition, nor hope.”
Johnson spoke. “I am naked enough, but I had little to lose. I am a scholar and a Christian and, I trust, a gentleman, but I am bitter poor, and ill-favoured, and sore harassed by bodily affliction. Naked, ay, naked as when I came from the womb.”
Midwinter moved into the firelight, with a crooked smile on his broad face. “We be three men in like case,” he said. “Nakedness has its merits and its faults. A naked man travels fast and light, for he has nothing that he can lose, and his mind is free from cares, so that it is better swept and garnished for the reception of wisdom. But if he be naked he is also defenceless, and the shod feet of the world can hurt him. You have been sore trampled on, sirs. One has lost a lady whom he loved as a father, and the other a mistress and a Cause. Naturally your hearts are sore. Will you that I help in the healing of them? Will you join me in Old England, which is the refuge of battered men?”
Alastair looked up and gently shook his head. “For me,” he said, “I go up to Ramoth-Gilead, like the King of Israel I heard the parson speak of this morning. It is fated that I go there and it is fated that I fail. Having done so much to wreck the Cause, the least I can do is to stand by it to the end. I am convinced that the end is not far off, and if it be also the end of my days I am content.”
“And I,” said Johnson, “have been minded since this morning to get me a sword and fight in His Highness’s army.”
Alastair looked at the speaker with eyes half affectionate, half amused.
“Nay, that I do not permit. In Scotland we strive on our own ground and in our own quarrel, and I would involve no Englishman in what is condemned to defeat. You have not our sentiments, sir, and you shall not share our disasters. But I shall welcome your company to within sight of Ramoth-Gilead.”
“I offer the hospitality of Old England,” said Midwinter.
There was no answer and he went on—
“It is balm for the wearied, sirs, and a wondrous opiate for the unquiet. If you have lost all baggage, you retire to a world where baggage is unknown. If you seek wisdom, you will find it, and you will forget alike the lust of life and the dread of death.”
“Can you teach me to forget the fear of death?” Johnson asked sharply. “Hark you, sir, I am a man of stout composition, for there is something gusty and gross in my humour which makes me careless of common fear. I will face an angry man, or mob, or beast with equanimity, even with joy. But the unknown terrors of death fill me, when I reflect on them, with the most painful forebodings. I conjecture, and my imagination wanders in labyrinths of dread. I most devoutly believe in the living God, and I stumblingly attempt to serve Him, but ’tis an awful thing to fall into His hand.”
“In Old England,” said Midwinter, “they look on death as not less natural and kindly than the shut of evening. They lay down their heads on the breast of earth as a flower dies in the field.”
Johnson was looking with abstracted eyes to the misty woods beyond a lozenged window, and he replied like a man thinking his own thoughts aloud.
“The daedal earth!” he muttered. “Poets, many poets, have sung of it, and I have had glimpses of it. … A sweet and strange thing when a man quits the servitude of society and goes to nurse with Gaea. I remember …”
Then a new reflection seemed to change his mood and bring him to his feet with his hands clenched.
“Tut, sir,” he cried, “these are but brutish consolations. I can find that philosophy in pagan writers, and it has small comfort for a Christian. I thank you, but I have no part in your world of woods and mountains. I am better fitted for a civil life, and must needs return to London and bear the burden of it in a garret. But I am not yet persuaded as to that matter of taking arms. I have a notion that I am a good man of my hands.”
Midwinter’s eyes were on Alastair, who smiled and shook his head.
“You offer me Old
