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A Princess of Thule

by William Black · English · Gutenberg #49786 · 1,054,307 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Princess of Thule

Author: William Black


        
Release date: August 26, 2015 [eBook #49786]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PRINCESS OF THULE ***

                         A PRINCESS OF THULE.

                                  BY

                            WILLIAM BLACK,

                               AUTHOR OF

            “A DAUGHTER OF HETH,” “MADCAP VIOLET,” “STRANGE
                    ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON,” ETC.

                               NEW YORK:
                        JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY,
                         14 & 16 VESEY STREET.




                         A PRINCESS OF THULE.

                           By WILLIAM BLACK.




CHAPTER I.

“LOCHABER NO MORE.”


On a small headland of the distant island of Lewis, an old man stood
looking out on a desolate waste of rain-beaten sea. It was a wild and
wet day. From out of the lowering Southwest fierce gusts of wind were
driving up volumes and flying rags of clouds, and sweeping onward at the
same time the gathering waves that fell hissing and thundering on the
shore. Far as the eye could reach, the sea and the air and the sky
seemed to be one indistinguishable mass of whirling and hurrying vapor,
as if beyond this point there were no more land, but only wind and
water, and the confused and awful voice of their strife.

The short, thick-set, powerfully-built man who stood on this solitary
point paid little attention to the rain that ran off the peak of his
sailor’s cap, or to the gusts of wind that blew about his bushy gray
beard. He was still following, with an eye accustomed to pick out
objects far at sea, one speck of purple that was now fading into the
gray mist of the rain; and the longer he looked the less it became,
until the mingled sea and sky showed only the smoke that the great
steamer left in its wake. As he stood there, motionless and regardless
of everything around him, did he cling to the fancy that he could still
trace out the path of the vanished ship? A little while before it had
passed almost close to him. He had watched it steam out of Stornoway
Harbor. As the sound of the engines came nearer and the big boat went
by, so that he could have almost called to it, there was no sign of
emotion on the hard and stern face, except, perhaps, that the lips were
held firm and a sort of frown appeared over the eyes. He saw a tiny
white handkerchief being waved to him from the deck of the vessel; and
he said, almost as though he were addressing some one there:

“My good little girl!”

But in the midst of that roaring of the sea and the wind how could any
such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the
land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the
engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and
visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the
man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his
own--as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be
broken--were now trying, through overflowing and blinding tears, to send
him a last look of farewell.

The gray mists of the rain gathered within their folds the big vessel
and all the beating hearts it contained, and the fluttering of that
little token disappeared with it. All that remained was the sea,
whitened by the rushing of the wind and the thunder of waves on the
beach. The man, who had been gazing so long down into the Southeast,
turned his face landward and set out to walk over a tract of wet grass
and sand toward a road that ran near by. There was a large wagonette of
varnished oak and a pair of small powerful horses waiting for him there;
and having dismissed the boy who had been in charge, he took the reins
and got up. But even yet the fascination of the sea and of that sad
farewell was upon him, and he turned once more, as if, now that sight
could yield him no further tidings, he would send her one more word of
good-by. “My poor little Sheila!” That was all he said; and then he
turned to the horses and sent them on, with his head down to escape the
rain, and a look on his face like that of a dead man.

As he drove through the town of Stornoway the children playing within
the shelter of the cottage doors called to each other in a whisper and
said: “That is the King of Borva.”

But the elderly people said to each other, with a shake of the head, “It
iss a bad day, this day, for Mr. Mackenzie, that he will be going home
to an empty house. And it will be a ferry bad thing for the poor folk of
Borva, and they will know a great difference, now that Miss Sheila iss
gone away, and there is nobody--not anybody at all--left in the island
to tek the side of the poor folk.”

He looked neither to the right nor to the left, though he was known to
many of the people, as he drove away from the town into the heart of the
lonely and desolate land. The wind had so far died down, and the rain
had considerably lessened, but the gloom of the sky was deepened by the
drawing on of the afternoon, and lay heavily over the dreary wastes of
moor and hill. What a wild and dismal country was this which lay before
and all around him, now that the last traces of human occupation were
passed! There was not a cottage, not a stone wall, not a fence, to break
the monotony of the long undulations of moorland, which in the distance
rose into a series of hills that were black under the darkened sky. Down
from those mountains ages ago, glaciers had slowly crept to eat out
hollows in the plains below; and now in those hollows were lonely lakes,
with not a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere
around were the traces of this glacier drift--great gray boulders of
gneiss fixed fast into the black peat moss, or set amid the browns and
greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of
rock and morass was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and
turbid, that plunged down their narrow channels to the sea.

The rain now ceased altogether, but the mountains in the far south had
grown still darker, and to the fishermen passing by the coast it must
have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the
lowering clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for
the first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along this lonely
route sometimes cast a glance down toward this threatening of a storm,
but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the backs of the
horses, and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising
and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy
lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of
water--The Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the
Fine Sand, and so forth--to measure the distance he had traversed; but
he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was
with a glance of something like surprise, that he suddenly found himself
overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in
which was his home.

He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Gara-na-hina. At
the door, muffled up in a warm woolen plaid, stood a young girl,
fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.

“Mr. Mackenzie,” she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation
that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in
the schools, “it was Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she said
I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help to you
in the house.”

The girl was crying, although the blue eyes looked bravely through the
tears as if to disprove the fact.

“Ay, my good lass,” he said, putting his hand gently on her head, “and
it wass Sheila wrote to you?”

“Yes, sir, and I hef come down from Suainabost.”

“It is a lonely house you will be going to,” he said, absently.

“But Miss Sheila said I wass--I wass to--” But here the young girl
failed in her effort to explain that Miss Sheila had asked her to go
down to make the house less lonely. The elderly man in the wagonette
seemed scarcely to notice that she was crying; he bade her come up
beside him; and when he had got her into the wagonette he left some
message with the innkeeper, who had come to the door, and drove off
again.

They drove along the high land that overlooks a portion of Loch Roag,
with its wonderful network of islands and straits, and then they stopped
on the lofty plateau of Callernish, where there was a man waiting to
take the wagonette and horses.

“And you would be seeing Miss Sheila away, sir?” said the man; “and it
was Duncan Macdonald will say that she will not come back no more to
Borva.”

The old man with the big gray beard only frowned and passed on. He and
the girl made their way down the side of the rocky hill to the shore,
and here there was an open boat awaiting them. When they approached, a
man considerably over six feet in height, keen-faced, gray-eyed,
straight-limbed and sinewy in frame, jumped into the big and rough boat
and began to get ready for their departure. There was just enough wind
to catch the brown mainsail, and the King of Borva took the tiller, his
henchman sitting down by the mast. And no sooner had they left the shore
and stood out towards one of the channels of this arm of the sea, than
the tall, spare keeper began to talk of that which made his master’s eye
grow dark. “Ah, well,” he said, in the plaintive drawling of his race,
“and it iss an empty house you will be going to, Mr. Mackenzie; and it
iss a bad thing for us all that Miss Sheila hass gone away; and it iss
many’s ta time she will hef been wiss me in this very boat--”

“---- ---- ---- ---- you, Duncan Macdonald!” cried Mackenzie, in an access
of fury, “what will you talk of like that? It iss every man, woman and
child on the island will talk of nothing but Sheila! I will drive my
foot through the bottom of the boat if you do not hold your peace!”

The tall gillie patiently waited until his master had exhausted his
passion, and then he said, as if nothing had occurred: “And it will not
do much good, Mr. Mackenzie, to tek ta name o’ God in vain; and there
will be much more of trinking in ta island, and it will be a great
difference mirover. And she will be so far away that no one will see her
no more--far away beyond ta sound of Sleat, and far away beyond Oban, as
I hef heard people say. And what will she do in London, when she has no
boat at all, and she will never go out to ta fishing? And I will hear
people say that you will walk a whole day and never come to ta sea, and
what will Miss Sheila do for that? And she will tame no more o’ ta wild
ducks’ young things, and she will find out no more o’ ta nests in the
rocks, and she will hef no more horns when the deer is killed, and she
will go out no more to see ta cattle swim across Loch Roag when they go
to ta sheilings. It will be all different, all different, now; and she
will never see us no more. And it iss as bad as if you was a poor man,
Mr. Mackenzie, and had to let your sons and your daughters go away to
America, and never come back no more. And she ta only one in your house!
And it wass the son of Mr. Macintyre, of Sutherland, he would have
married her, and come to live on ta island, and not have Miss Sheila go
away among strangers that doesna ken her family, and will put no store
by her, no more than if she was a fisherman’s lass. It wass Miss Sheila
herself had a sore heart tis morning when she went away; and she turned
and she looked at Borva as the boat came away, and I said, ’Tis iss the
last time Miss Sheila will be in her boat, and she will not come no more
again to Borva.”

Mr. Mackenzie heard not one word or syllable of all this. The dead,
passionless look had fallen over the powerful features, and the deep-set
eyes were gazing, not on the actual Loch Roag before them, but on a
stormy sea that lies between Lewis and Skye, and on a vessel
disappearing in the midst of the rain. It was by a sort of instinct that
he guided this open boat through the channels, which were now getting
broader as they neared the sea, and the tall and grave-faced keeper
might have kept up his garrulous talk for hours without attracting a
look or a word.

It was now the dusk of the evening, and wild and strange indeed was the
scene around the solitary boat as it slowly moved along. Large
islands--so large that any one of them might have been mistaken for the
mainland--lay over the dark waters of the sea, remote, untenanted and
silent. There were no white cottages along these rocky shores; only a
succession of rugged cliffs and sandy bays, but half mirrored in the
sombre water below. Down in the South the mighty shoulders and peaks of
Suainabhal and its sister mountains were still darker than the darkening
sky; and when at length the boat had got well out from the network of
islands and fronted the broad waters of the Atlantic, the great plain of
the western sea seemed already to have drawn around it the solemn mantle
of the night.

“Will you go to Borvapost, Mr. Mackenzie, or will we run her into your
own house?” asked Duncan--Borvapost being the name of the chief village
on the island.

“I will not go on to Borvapost,” said the old man, peevishly. “Will they
not have plenty to talk about at Borvapost?”

“And it iss no harm tat ta folk will speak of Miss Sheila,” said the
gillie with some show of resentment: “it iss no harm tey will be sorry
she is gone away--no harm at all, for it was many things tey had to
thank Miss Sheila for; and now it will be all ferry different--”

“I tell you, Duncan Macdonald, to hold your peace!” said the old man,
with a savage glare of the deep-set eyes; and then Duncan relapsed into
a sulky silence, and the boat held on its way.

In the gathering twilight a long gray curve of sand became visible, and
into the bay thus indicated Mackenzie turned his small craft. This
indentation of the island seemed as blank of human occupation as the
various points and bays they had passed, but as they neared the shore a
house came into sight, about half way up the slope rising from the sea
to the pasture land above. There was a small stone pier jutting out at
one portion of the bay, where a mass of rocks was embedded in the white
sand; and here at length the boat was run in, and Mackenzie helped the
young girl ashore.

The two of them, leaving the gillie to moor the little vessel that had
brought them from Callernish, went silently toward the shore, and up the
narrow road leading to the house. It was a square, two-storied
substantial building of stone, but the stone had been liberally oiled to
keep out the wet, and the blackness thus produced had not a very
cheerful look. Then, on this particular evening the scant bushes
surrounding the house hung limp and dark in the rain, and amid the
prevailing hues of purple, blue-green and blue, the bit of scarlet
coping running around the black house was wholly ineffective in
relieving the general impression of dreariness and desolation.

The King of Borva walked into a large room, which was but partially lit
by two candles on the table and by the blaze of a mass of peats in the
stone fire-place, and threw himself into a big easy-chair. Then he
suddenly seemed to recollect his companion, who was timidly standing
near the door, with her shawl still around her head.

“Mairi,” he said, “go and ask them to give you some dry clothes. Your
box it will not be here for half an hour yet.” Then he turned to the
fire.

“But you yourself, Mr. Mackenzie, you will be ferry wet--”

“Never mind me, my lass; go and get yourself dried.”

“But it wass Miss Sheila,” began the girl diffidently--“it wass Miss
Sheila asked me--she asked me to look after you, sir--”

With that he rose abruptly, and advanced to her and caught her by the
wrist. He spoke quite quietly to her, but the girl’s eyes, looking up at
the stern face, were a trifle frightened.

“You are a ferry good little girl, Mairi,” he said slowly, “and you will
mind what I say to you. You will do what you like in the house, you will
take Sheila’s place as much as you like, but you will mind this--not to
mention her name, not once. Now go away, Mairi, and find Scarlett
Macdonald, and she will give you some dry clothes; and you will tell her
to send Duncan down to Borvapost, and bring up John the Piper and
Alisternan-Each, and the lads of the _Nighean dubh_, if they are not
gone home to Habost yet. But it iss John the Piper must come directly.”

The girl went away to seek counsel of Scarlett Macdonald, Duncan’s wife,
and Mr. Mackenzie proceeded to walk up and down the big and half-lit
chamber. Then he went to the cupboard, and put out on the table a number
of tumblers and glasses, with two or three odd-looking bottles of
Norwegian make, consisting of four semicircular tubes of glass, meeting
at top and bottom, leaving the center of the vessel thus formed open. He
stirred up the blazing peats in the fire-place. He brought down from a
shelf a box filled with coarse tobacco, and put it on the table. But he
was evidently growing impatient, and at last he put on his cap again and
went out into the night.

The air blew cold in from the sea, and whistled through the bushes that
Sheila had trained about the porch. There was no rain now, but a great
and heavy darkness brooded overhead, and in the silence he could hear
the breaking of the waves along the hard coast. But what was this other
sound he heard, wild and strange in the stillness of the night--a shrill
and plaintive cry that the distance softened, until it almost seemed to
be the calling of a human voice? Surely those were words he heard, or
was it only that the old, sad air spoke to him?

    For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more,
    Maybe to return to Lochaber no more.

That was the message that came to him out of the darkness, and it seemed
to him as if the sea and the night and the sky were wailing over the
loss of his Sheila. He walked away from the house and up the hill
behind. Led by the sound of the pipes, that grew louder and more
unearthly as he approached, he found himself at length on a bit of high
table-land overlooking the sea, where Sheila had had a rude bench of
iron and wood fixed into the rock. On this bench sat a little old man,
humpbacked and bent, and with long white hair falling down to his
shoulders. He was playing the pipes--not wildly and fiercely, as if he
were at a drinking-bout of the lads come home from the Caithness
fishing, nor yet gaily and proudly, as if he were marching at the head
of a bridal procession, but slowly, mournfully, monotonously, as though
he were having the pipes talk to him.

Mackenzie touched him on the shoulder, and the old man started. “Is it
you, Mr. McKenzie?” he said in Gaelic. “It is a great fright you have
given me.”

“Come down to the house, John. The lads from Habost and Alister, and
some more will be coming; and you will get a ferry good dram, John, to
put wind in the pipes.”

“It’s no dram I’m thinking of, Mr. Mackenzie,” said the old man. “And
you will have plenty of company without me. But I will come down to the
house, Mr. Mackenzie--oh, yes, I will come down to the house--but _in a
little while_ I will come to the house.”

Mackenzie turned from him with a petulant exclamation, and went along
and down the hill rapidly, as he could hear voices in the darkness. He
had just got into the house when his visitors arrived. The door of the
room was opened, and there appeared some six or eight tall and stalwart
men, mostly with profuse brown beards and weather-beaten faces, who
advanced into the chamber with some show of shyness. Mackenzie offered
them a rough and hearty welcome, and as soon as their eyes had got
accustomed to the light bade them help themselves to the whisky on the
table. With a certain solemnity each poured out a glass and drank
“_Shlainte!_” to his host as if it were some funeral rite. But when he
bade them replenish their glasses, and got them seated with their faces
to the blaze of the peats, then the flood of Gaelic broke loose. Had the
wise little girl from Suainabost warned these big men? There was not a
word about Sheila uttered. All their talk was of the reports that had
come from Caithness, and of the improvements of the small harbor near
the Butt, and of the black sea-horse that had been seen in Lock
Suainabhal, and of some more sheep having been found dead on the Pladda
Isles, shot by the men of the English smacks. Pipes were lit, the peat
stirred up anew, another glass or two of whisky drunk, and then, through
the haze of the smoke, the brown faces of the men could be seen in eager
controversy, each talking faster than the other, and comparing facts and
fancies that had been brooded over through solitary nights of waiting on
the sea. Mackenzie did not sit down with them; he did not even join them
in their attention to the curious whisky-flasks. He paced up and down
the opposite side of the room, occasionally being appealed to with a
story or question, and showing by his answers that he was but vaguely
hearing the vociferous talk of his companions. At last he said, “Why the
teffle does not John the Piper come? Here, you men--you sing a song,
quick! None of your funeral songs, but a good brisk one of trinking and
fighting.”

But were not nearly all their songs--like those of all dwellers on a
rocky and dangerous coast--of a sad and sombre hue, telling of maidens
whose lovers were drowned, and of wives bidding farewell to husbands
they were never to see again? Slow and mournful are the songs that the
Northern fishermen sing as they set out in the evening, with the
creaking of the long oars keeping time to the music, until they get out
beyond the shore to hoist the red mainsail and catch the breeze blowing
over from the regions of the sunset. Not one of these Habost fishermen
could sing a brisk song, but the nearest approach to it was a ballad in
praise of a dark-haired girl, which they, owning the _Nighean dubh_,
were bound to know. And so one young fellow began to sing, “Mo Nighean
dubh d’fhas boidheach dubh, mo Nighean dubhna treig mi,”[1] in a slow
and doleful fashion, and the others joined in the chorus with a like
solemnity. In order to keep time, four of the men followed the common
custom of taking a pocket handkerchief (in this case an immense piece of
brilliant red silk, which was evidently the pride of its owner), and
holding it by the four corners letting it slowly rise and fall as they
sang. The other three men laid hold of a bit of rope, which they used
for the same purpose. “Mo Nighean dubh,” unlike most of the Gaelic
songs, has but a few verses; and, as soon as they were finished, the
young fellow, who seemed pleased with his performance, started another
ballad. Perhaps he had forgotten his host’s injunction, perhaps he knew
no merrier song, but at any rate he began to sing the “Lament of
Monaltrie.” It was one of Sheila’s songs. She had sung it the night
before in this very room, and her father had listened to her describing
the fate of young Monaltrie as if she had been foretelling her own, and
scarcely dared to ask himself if ever again he should hear the voice
that he loved so well. He could not listen to the song. He abruptly left
the room and went out once more into the cool night-air and the
darkness. But even here he was not allowed to forget the sorrow he had
been vainly endeavoring to banish, for in the far distance the pipes
still played the melancholy wail of Lochaber.

    Lochaber no more! Lochaber no more!

--that was the only solace brought him by the winds from the sea; and
there were tears running down the hard gray face as he said to himself,
in a broken voice, “Sheila, my little girl, why did you go away from
Borva?”




CHAPTER II.

THE FAIR-HAIRED STRANGER.


“Why you must be in love with her yourself!”

“I in love with her? Sheila and I are too old friends for that!”

The speakers were two young men seated in the stern of the steamer
Clansman as she ploughed her way across the blue and rushing waters of
the Minch. One of them was a tall young fellow of three-and-twenty, with
fair hair and light blue eyes, whose delicate and mobile features were
handsome enough in their way, and gave evidence of a nature at once
sensitive, nervous and impulsive. He was clad in light gray from head to
heel--a color that suited his fair complexion and yellow hair; and he
lounged about the white deck in the glare of the sunlight, steadying
himself from time to time as an unusually big wave carried the Clansman
aloft for a second or two, and then sent her staggering and groaning
into a hissing trough of foam. Now and again he would pause in front of
his companion, and talk in a rapid, playful, and even eloquent fashion
for a minute or two; and then, apparently a trifle annoyed by the slow
and patient attention which greeted his oratorical efforts, would start
off once more on his unsteady journey up and down the white planks.

The other was a man of thirty-eight, of middle height, sallow complexion
and generally insignificant appearance. His hair was becoming
prematurely gray. He rarely spoke. He was dressed in a suit of rough
blue cloth, and indeed looked somewhat like a pilot who had gone ashore,
taken to study and never recovered himself. A stranger would have
noticed the tall and fair young man who walked up and down the gleaming
deck, evidently enjoying the brisk breeze that blew about his yellow
hair, and the sunlight that touched his pale and fine face or sparkled
on his teeth when he laughed, but would have paid little attention to
the smaller, brown-faced, gray-haired man, who lay back on the bench
with his two hands clasped around his knee, and with his eye fixed on
the southern heavens, while he murmured to himself the lines of some
ridiculous old Devonshire ballad or replied in monosyllables to the
rapid and eager talk of his friend.

Both men were good sailors, and they had need to be, for although the
sky above them was as blue and clear as the heart of the sapphire, and
although the sunlight shone on the decks and the rigging, a strong
north-easter had been blowing all the morning, and there was a
considerable sea on. The far blue plain was whitened with the tumbling
crests of the waves, that shone and sparkled in the sun, and ever and
anon a volume of water would strike the Clansman’s bow, rise high in the
air with the shock, and fall in heavy showers over the forward decks.
Sometimes, too, a wave caught her broadside, and sent a handful of spray
over the two or three passengers who were safe in the stern; but the
decks here remained silvery and white, for the sun and wind speedily
dried up the traces of the sea-showers.

At length the taller of the young men came and sat down by his
companion: “How far to Stornoway yet?”

“An hour.”

“By Jove, what a distance! All day yesterday getting up from Oban to
Skye, all last night churning our way up to Loch Gair, all to-day
crossing to this outlandish island, that seems as far away as
Iceland;--and for what?”

“But don’t you remember the moonlight last night as we sailed by the
Cuchullins? And the sunrise this morning as we lay in Loch Gair? Were
not these worth coming for.”

“But that was not what you came for, my dear friend. No. You came to
carry off this wonderful Miss Sheila of yours, and of course you wanted
somebody to look on; and here I am, ready to carry the ladder and the
dark lantern and the marriage-license. I will saddle your steeds for you
and row you over lakes, and generally do anything to help you in so
romantic an enterprise.”

“It is very kind of you, Lavender,” said the other with a smile, “but
such adventures are not for old fogies like me. They are the exclusive
right of young fellows like you, who are tall and well-favored, have
plenty of money and good spirits, and have a way with you that all the
world admires. Of course the bride will tread a measure with you. Of
course all the bridesmaids would like to see you marry her. Of course
she will taste the cup you offer her. Then a word in her ear, and away
you go as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and as if the
bridegroom was a despicable creature merely because God had only given
him five feet six inches. But you couldn’t have a Lochinvar five feet
six.”

The younger man blushed like a girl and laughed a little, and was
evidently greatly pleased. Nay, in the height of his generosity he began
to protest. He would not have his friend imagine that women cared only
for stature and good looks. There were other qualities. He himself had
observed the most singular conquests made by men who were not
good-looking, but who had a certain fascination about them. His own
experience of women was considerable, and he was quite certain that the
best women, now--the sort of women whom a man would respect--the women
who had brains--

And so forth and so forth. The other listened quite gravely to these
well-meant, kindly, blundering explanations, and only one who watched
his face narrowly could have detected in the brown eyes a sort of amused
consciousness of the intentions of the amiable and ingenuous youth.

“Do you really mean to tell me, Ingram,” continued Lavender, in his
rapid and impetuous way, “do you mean to tell me that you are not in
love with this Highland princess? For ages back you have talked of
nothing but Sheila. How many an hour have I spent in clubs, up the
river, down at the coast, everywhere, listening to your stories of
Sheila, and your praises of Sheila, and your descriptions of Sheila! It
was always Sheila, and again Sheila, and still again Sheila. But, do you
know, either you exaggerated or I failed to understand your
descriptions; for the Sheila I came to construct out of your talk, is a
most incongruous and incomprehensible creature. First, Sheila knows
about stone and lime and building; and then I suppose her to be a
practical young woman, who is a sort of overseer to her father. But
Sheila, again, is romantic and mysterious, and believes in visions and
dreams; and then I take her to be an affected school-miss. But then
Sheila can throw a fly and play her sixteen-pounder, and Sheila can
adventure upon the lochs in an open boat, managing the sail herself; and
then I find her to be a tom-boy. But, again, Sheila is shy and rarely
speaks, but looks unutterable things with her soft and magnificent eyes;
and what does that mean but that she is an ordinary young lady, who has
not been in society, and who is a little interesting, if a little
stupid, while she is unmarried, and who, after marriage, calmly and
complacently sinks into the dull domestic hind, whose only thought is of
butchers’ bills and perambulators!”

This was a fairly long speech, but it was no longer than many which
Frank Lavender was accustomed to utter when in the vein for talking. His
friend and companion did not pay much heed. His hands were still clasped
around his knee, his head leaning back, and all the answer he made was
to repeat, apparently to himself, these not very pertinent lines:

    “In Ockington, in Devonsheer,
    My vather he lived vor many a yeer:
    And I, his son, with him did dwell,
    To tend his sheep: ’twas doleful well.
                Diddle-diddle!”

“You know, Ingram, it must be precious hard for man who has to knock
about in society, and take his wife with him, to have to explain to
everybody that she is in reality a most unusual and gifted young person,
and that she must not be expected to talk. It is all very well for him
in his own house--that is to say, if he can preserve all the sentiment
that made her shyness fine and wonderful before their marriage--but a
man owes a little to society, even in choosing a wife.”

Another pause.

    “It happened on a zartin day
    Four-score o’ the sheep they rinned astray
    Says vather to I, ‘Jack, rin arter ’m, du!’
    Says I to vather, ‘I’m darned if I du!’
                Diddle-diddle!”

“Now you are the sort of a man, I should think, who would never get
careless about your wife. You would always believe about her what you
believed at first; and I dare say you would live very happily in your
own house if she was a decent sort of woman. But you would have to go
out into society sometimes; and the very fact that you had not got
careless--as many men would, leaving their wives to produce any sort of
impression they might--would make you vexed that the world could not,
off-hand, value your wife as you fancy she ought to be valued. Don’t you
see?”

This was the answer:

    “Puvoket much at my rude tongue,
    A dish o’ brath at me he vlung,
    Which so incensed me to wrath,
    That I up an’ knack un instantly to arth,
                Diddle-diddle!”

“As for your Princess Sheila, I firmly believe you have some romantic
notion of marrying her and taking her up to London with you. If you
seriously intend such a thing, I shall not argue with you. I shall
praise her by the hour together, for I may have to depend on Mrs. Edward
Ingram for my admission to your house. But if you only have the fancy as
a fancy, consider what the result would be. You say she has never been
to a school; that she has never had the companionship of a girl of her
own age; that she has never read a newspaper; that she has never been
out of this island; and that almost her sole society has been that of
her mother, who educated her and tended her, and left her as ignorant of
the real world as if she had lived all her life in a lighthouse.
Goodness gracious! what a figure such a girl would cut in South
Kensington!”

“My dear fellow,” said Ingram at last, “don’t be absurd. You will soon
see what are the relations between Sheila Mackenzie and me, and you will
be satisfied. I marry her? Do you think I would take the child to London
to show her its extravagance and shallow society, and break her heart
with thinking of the sea, and of the rude islanders she knew, and of
their hard and bitter struggle for life? No. I should not like to see my
wild Highland doe shut up in one of your southern parks, among your tame
fallow-deer. She would look at them askance. She would separate herself
from them, and by and by she would make one wild effort to escape and
kill herself. That is not the fate in store for our good little Sheila;
so you need not make yourself unhappy about her or me.

    ‘Now all ye young men, of every persuasion,
      Never quarl wi’ your vather upon any occasion;
      For instead of being better, you’ll vind you’ll be wuss,
      For he’ll kick you out o’ doors, without a varden in your puss!
                                          Diddle-diddle!’”

“Talking of Devonshire, how is that young American lady you met at
Torquay in the Spring?”

“There, now, is the sort of woman a man would be safe in marrying!”

“And how?”

“Oh, well, you know,” said Frank Lavender, “I mean the sort of woman who
would do you credit--hold her own in society, and that sort of thing.
You must meet her some day. I tell you, Ingram, you will be delighted
and charmed with her manners, and her grace, and the clever things she
says; at least, everybody else is.”

“Ah, well!”

“You don’t seem to care much for brilliant women,” remarked the other,
rather disappointed that his companion showed so little interest.

“Oh, yes, I like brilliant women very well. A clever woman is always a
pleasanter companion than a clever man. But you were talking of the
choice of a wife; and pertness in a girl, although it may be amusing at
the time, may become something else by and by. Indeed, I shouldn’t
advise a young man to marry an epigrammatist, for you see her shrewdness
and smartness are generally the result of experiences in which _he_ has
had no share.”

“There may be something in that,” said Lavender; “but of course, you
know, with a widow it is different; and Mrs. Lorraine never does go in
for the _ingenue_.”

The pale blue cloud that had for some time been lying faintly along the
horizon now came nearer and more near, until they could pick out
something like the configuration of the island, its bays and
promontories and mountains. The day seemed to become warmer as they got
out of the driving wind of the Channel, and the heavy roll of the sea
had so far subsided. Through comparatively calm water the great Clansman
drove her away, until, on getting near the land and under shelter of the
peninsula of Eye, the voyagers found themselves on a beautiful blue
plain, with the spacious harbor of Stornoway opening out before them.
There, on the one side, lay a white and cleanly town, with its shops,
and quays and shipping. Above the bay in front stood a great gray
castle, surrounded by pleasure-grounds and terraces and gardens; while
on the southern side the harbor was overlooked by a semi-circle of
hills, planted with every variety of tree. The white houses, the blue
bay and the large gray building set amid green terraces and overlooked
by wooded hills, formed a bright and lively little picture on this fresh
and brilliant forenoon; and young Lavender, who had a quick eye for
compositions which he was always about to undertake, but which never
appeared on canvas, declared enthusiastically that he would spend a day
or two in Stornoway on his return from Borva, and take home with him
some sketch of the place.

“And is Miss Sheila on the quay, yonder?” he asked.

“Not likely,” said Ingram. “It is a long drive across the island, and I
suppose she would remain at home to look after our dinner in the
evening.”

“What? The wonderful Princess Sheila look after our dinner! Has she
visions among the pots and pans, and does she look unutterable things
when she is peeling potatoes?”

Ingram laughed: “There will a pretty alteration in your tune in a couple
of days. You are sure to fall in love with her, and sigh desperately for
a week or two. You always do when you meet a woman anywhere. But it
won’t hurt you much, and she wont know anything about it.”

“I should rather like to fall in love with her to see how furiously
jealous you would become. However, here we are.”

“And there is Mackenzie--the man with the big gray beard and the peaked
cap--and he is talking to the chamberlain of the island.”

“What does he get up on his wagonette for, instead of coming on board to
meet you?”

“Oh, that is one of his little tricks,” said Ingram, with a good-humored
smile. “He means to receive us in state, and impress you, a stranger,
with his dignity. The good old fellow has a hundred harmless ways like
that, and you must humor him. He has been accustomed to be treated _en
roi_, you know.”

“Then the papa of the mysterious princess is not perfect?”

“Perhaps I ought to tell you now that Mackenzie’s oddest notion is that
he has a wonderful skill in managing men, and in concealing the manner
of his doing it. I tell you this that you mayn’t laugh and hurt him when
he is attempting something that he considers particularly crafty, and
that a child could see through.”

“But what is the aim of it all?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“He does not do a little bet occasionally?”

“Oh, dear! no. He is the best and honestest fellow in the world, but it
pleases him to fancy that he is profoundly astute, and that other people
don’t see the artfulness with which he reaches some little result that
is not of the least consequence to anybody.”

“It seems to me,” remarked Mr. Lavender, with a coolness and shrewdness
that rather surprised his companion, “that it would not be difficult to
get the King of Borva to assume the honors of a papa-in-law.”

The steamer was moored at last; the crowd of fishermen and loungers drew
near to meet their friends who had come up from Glasgow--for there are
few strangers, as a rule, arriving at Stornoway to whet the curiosity of
the islanders--and the tall gillie who had been standing by Mackenzie’s
horses came on board to get the luggage of the young men.

“Well, Duncan,” said the elder of them, “and how are you, and how is Mr.
Mackenzie, and how is Miss Sheila? You have not brought her with you, I
see.”

“But Miss Sheila is ferry well, whatever, Mr. Ingram, and it is a great
day, this day, for her, tat you will be coming to the Lewis; and it wass
tis morning she wass up at ta break o’ day, and up ta hills ta get some
bits o’ green things for ta rooms you will hef, Mr. Ingram. Ay, it iss a
great day, tis day, for Miss Sheila.”

“By Jove, they all rave about Sheila up in this quarter!” said Lavender,
giving Duncan a fishing-rod and a bag he had brought from the cabin. “I
suppose in a week’s time I shall begin to rave about her, too. Look
sharp, Ingram, and let us have audience of His Majesty.”

The King of Borva fixed his eye on young Lavender, and scanned him
narrowly as he was being introduced. His welcome of Ingram had been
most gracious and friendly, but he received his companion with something
of a severe politeness. He requested him to take a seat beside him, so
that he might see the country as they went across to Borva; and Lavender
having done so, Ingram and Duncan got into the body of the wagonette,
and the party drove off.

Passing through the clean and bright little town, Mackenzie suddenly
pulled up his horses in front of a small shop, in the windows of which
some cheap bits of jewelry were visible. The man came out, and Mr.
Mackenzie explained with some care and precision that he wanted a silver
brooch of a particular sort. While the jeweler had returned to seek the
article in question, Frank Lavender was gazing around him in some wonder
at the appearance of so much civilization on this remote and rarely
visited island. There were no haggard savages, unkempt and scantily
clad, coming forth from their dens in the rocks to stare wildly at the
strangers. On the contrary, there was a prevailing air of comfort and
“bien-ness” about the people and their houses. He saw handsome girls
with coal-black hair and fresh complexions, who wore short and thick
blue petticoats, with a scarlet tartan shawl wrapped around their bosom
and fastened at the waist; stalwart, thick-set men, in loose blue jacket
and trowsers and scarlet cap, many of them with bushy red beards; and
women of extraordinary breadth of shoulder, who carried enormous loads
in a creel strapped on their backs, while they employed their hands in
contentedly knitting stockings as they passed along. But what was the
purpose of these mighty loads of fish-bones they carried--burdens that
would have appalled a railway porter of the South?

“You will see, sir,” observed the King of Borva, in reply to Lavender’s
question, “there is not much of the phosphates in the grass of this
island; and the cows they are mad to get the fish-bones to lick, and it
is many of them you cannot milk unless you put the bones before them.”

“But why do the lazy fellows lounging about there let the women carry
those enormous loads?”

Mr. Mackenzie stared: “Lazy fellows! They hef harder work than any who
will know of in your country; and besides the fishing, they will do the
ploughing and much of the farm work. And iss the women to do none at
all? That iss the nonsense that my daughter talks; but she has got it
out of books, and what do they know how the poor people hef to live?”

At this moment the jeweler returned with some half dozen brooches
displayed on a plate, and shining with all the brilliancy of cairngorm
stones, polished silver and variously-colored pebbles.

“Now, John Mackintyre, this is a gentleman from London,” said Mackenzie,
regarding the jeweler sternly, “and he will know all apout such fine
things, and you will not put a big price on them.”

It was now Lavender’s turn to stare, but he good-naturedly accepted the
duties of referee, and eventually a brooch was selected and paid for,
the price being six shillings. Then they drove on again.

“Sheila will know nothing of this; it will be a great surprise for her,”
said Mackenzie, almost to himself, as he opened the white box, and saw
the glaring piece of jewelry lying on the white cotton.

“Good Heavens, sir,” cried Frank Lavender, “you don’t mean to say you
bought that brooch for your daughter?”

“And why not?” said the King of Borva, in great surprise.

The young man perceived his mistake, grew considerably confused, and
only said: “Well, I should have thought that--that some small piece of
gold jewelry, now, would be better suited for a young lady.”

Mackenzie smiled shrewdly: “I had something to go on. It was Sheila
herself was in Stornoway three weeks ago, and she was wanting to buy a
brooch for a young girl who had come down to us from Suainabost, and is
very useful in the kitchen, and it wass a brooch, just like this one,
she gave to her.”

“Yes, to a kitchen-maid,” said the young man, meekly.

“But Mairi is Sheila’s cousin,” said Mackenzie, with continued surprise.

“Lavender does not understand Highland ways yet, Mr. Mackenzie,” said
Ingram, from behind. “You know we, in the South, have different
fashions. Our servants are nearly always strangers to us--not relations
and companions.”

“Oh, I hef peen in London myself,” said Mackenzie, in somewhat of an
injured tone; and then he added, with a touch of satisfaction: “and I
hef been in Paris, too.”

“And Miss Sheila, has she been in London?” asked Lavender, feigning
ignorance.

“She has never been out of the Lewis.”

“But don’t you think the education of a young lady should include some
little experience of traveling?”

“Sheila, she will be educated quite enough; and is she going to London
or Paris without me?”

“You might take her.”

“I have too much to do on the island now, and Sheila has much to do. I
do not think she will ever see any of those places, and she will not be
much the worse.”

Two young men off for their holidays, a brilliant day shining all around
them, the sweet air of the sea and the moorland blowing about them--this
little party that now drove away from Stornoway ought to have been in
the best of spirits. And indeed the young fellow who sat beside
Mackenzie was bent on pleasing his host by praising everything he saw.
He praised the gallant little horses that whirled them past the
plantations and into the open country. He praised the rich black peat
that was visible in long lines and heaps, where the townspeople were
slowly eating into the moorland. Then all these traces of occupation
were left behind, and the travelers were alone in the untenanted heart
of the island, where the only sounds audible were the humming of insects
in the sunlight and the falling of the streams. Away in the south the
mountains were of a silvery and transparent blue. Nearer at hand the
rich reds and browns of the moorland softened into a tender and
beautiful green on nearing the margins of the lakes; and these stretches
of water were now as fair and bright as the sky above them, and were
scarcely ruffled by the moorfowl moving out from the green rushes. Still
nearer at hand great masses of white rock lay embedded in the soft soil;
and what could have harmonized better with the rough and silver-gray
surface than the patches of rose-red bell-heather that grew up in the
clefts or hung over their summits. The various and beautiful colors
around seemed to tingle with light and warmth as the clear sun shone on
them and the keen mountain air blew over them; and the King of Borva was
so far thawed by the enthusiasm of his companions that he regarded the
fair country with a pleased smile, as if the enchanted land belonged to
him, and as if the wonderful colors and the exhilarating air and the
sweet perfumes were of his own creation.

Mr. Mackenzie did not know much about tints and hues, but he believed
what he heard; and it was perhaps, after all, not very surprising that a
gentleman from London, who had skill of pictures and other delicate
matters, should find strange marvels in a common stretch of moor, with a
few lakes here and there, and some lines of mountains only good for
sheilings. It was not for him to check the raptures of his guest. He
began to be friendly with the young man, and could not help regarding
him as a more cheerful companion than his neighbor Ingram, who would sit
by your side for an hour at a time without breaking the monotony of the
horses’ tramp with a single remark. He had formed a poor opinion of
Lavender’s physique from the first glimpse he had of his white fingers
and girl-like complexion; but surely a man who had such a vast amount of
good spirits and such a rapidity of utterance must have something
corresponding to these qualities in substantial bone and muscle. There
was something pleasing and ingenuous too about this flow of talk. Men
who had arrived at years of wisdom, and knew how to study and use their
fellows, were not to be led into these betrayals of their secret
opinions; but for a young man--what could be more pleasing than to see
him lay open his soul to the observant eye of a master of men? Mackenzie
began to take a great fancy to young Lavender.

“Why,” said Lavender, with a fine color mantling in his cheeks as the
wind caught them on a higher portion of the road, “I had heard of Lewis
as a most bleak and desolate island, flat moorland and lake, without a
hill to be seen. And everywhere I see hills, and yonder are great
mountains which I hope to get nearer before we leave.”

“We have mountains in this island,” remarked Mackenzie slowly as he kept
his eye on his companion, “we have mountains in this island sixteen
thousand feet high.”

Lavender looked sufficiently astonished, and the old man was pleased. He
paused for a moment or two and said. “But this iss the way of it: you
will see that the middle of the mountains it has all been washed away by
the weather, and you will only have the sides now dipping one way and
the other at each side o’ the island. But it iss a very clever man in
Stornoway will tell me that you can make out what wass the height o’ the
mountain, by watching the dipping of the rocks on each side; and it iss
an older country, this island, than any you will know of; and there
were the mountains sixteen thousand feet high long before all this
country and all Scotland and England wass covered with ice.”

The young man was very desirous to show his interest in this matter, but
did not know very well how. At last he ventured to ask whether there
were any fossils in the blocks of gneiss that were scattered over the
moorland.

“Fossils?” said Mackenzie. “Oh, I will not care much about such small
things. If you will ask Sheila, she will tell you all about it, and
about the small things she finds growing on the hills. That is not of
much consequence to me; but I will tell you what is the best thing the
island grows; it is good girls and strong men--men that can go to the
fishing and come back to plough the fields and cut the peat and build
the houses, and leave the women to look after the fields and the gardens
when they go back again to the fisheries. But it is the old people--they
are ferry cunning, and they will not put their money in the bank at
Stornoway, but will hide it away about the house, and then they will
come to Sheila and ask for money to put a pane of glass in their house.
And she has promised that to every one who will make a window in the
wall of their house; and she is very simple with them and does not
understand the old people that tell lies. But when I hear of it I say
nothing to Sheila--she will know nothing about it--but I have a watch
put upon the people; and it was only yesterday I will take back two
shillings she gave to an old woman of Borvabost that told many lies.
What does a young thing know of these old people? She will know nothing
at all, and it is better for some one else to look after them, but not
to speak one word of it to her.”

“It must require great astuteness to manage a primitive people like
that,” said young Lavender, with an air of conviction; and the old man
eagerly and proudly assented, and went on to tell of the manifold
diplomatic arts he used in reigning over his small kingdom, and how his
subjects lived in blissful ignorance that this controlling power was
being exercised.

They were startled by an exclamation from Ingram, who called to
Mackenzie to pull up the horses just as they were passing over a small
bridge.

“Look there, Lavender, did you ever see salmon jumping like that? Look
at the size of them!”

“Oh, it iss nothing,” said Mackenzie, driving on again. “Where you will
see the salmon, it is in the narrows of Loch Roag, where they come into
the rivers, and the tide is low. Then you will see them jumping; and if
the water wass too low for a long time, they will die in hundreds and
hundreds.”

“But what makes them jump before they get into the rivers?”

Old Mackenzie smiled a crafty smile, as if he had found out all the ways
and the secrets of the salmon. “They will jump to look about them--that
iss all.”

“Do you think a salmon can see where he is going?”

“And maybe you will explain this to me, then,” said the king, with a
compassionate air, “how iss it the salmon will try to jump over some
stones in the river, and he will see he can’t go over them; but does he
fall straight down on the stones and kill himself? Neffer--no, neffer.
He will get back to the pool he left by turning in the air; that is what
I hef seen hundreds of times myself.”

“Then they must be able to fly as well as see in the air.”

“You may say about it what you will please, but that is what I
know--that is what I know ferry well myself.”

“And I should think there were not many people in the country who knew
more about salmon than you,” said Frank Lavender. “And I hear, too, that
your daughter is a great fisher.”

But this was a blunder. The old man frowned; “Who will tell you such
nonsense? Sheila has gone out many times with Duncan, and he will put a
rod in her hand; yes, and she will have caught a fish or two, but it iss
not a story to tell. My daughter she will have plenty to do about the
house without any of such nonsense. You will expect to find us all
savages, with such stories of nonsense.”

“I am sure not,” said Lavender, warmly. “I have been very much struck
with the civilization of the island, so far as I have seen it; and I can
assure you I have always heard of Miss Sheila as a singularly
accomplished young lady.”

“Yes,” said Mackenzie, somewhat mollified, “Sheila has been well brought
up; she is not a fisherman’s lass, running about wild and catching the
salmon. I cannot listen to such nonsense, and it iss Duncan will tell
it.”

“I can assure you, no. I have never spoken to Duncan. The fact is,
Ingram mentioned that your daughter had caught a salmon or two--as a
tribute to her skill, you know.”

“Oh, I know it wass Duncan,” said Mackenzie, with a deeper frown coming
over his face. “I will hef some means taken to stop Duncan from talking
such nonsense.”

The young man knowing nothing as yet of the childlike obedience paid to
the King of Borva by his islanders, thought to himself, “Well, you are a
strong and self-willed old gentleman, but if I were you I should not
meddle much with that tall keeper with the eagle beak and the gray eyes.
I should not like to be a stag, and know that fellow was watching me
somewhere with a rifle in his hands.”

At length they came upon the brow of the hill overlooking
Gara-na-hina[2] and the panorama of the western lochs and mountains.
Down there on the side of the hill was the small inn, with its little
patch of garden; then a few moist meadows leading over to the estuary of
the Black river; and beyond that an illimitable prospect of heathy
undulations rising into the mighty peaks of Cracabhal, Mealasabhal and
Suainabhal. Then on the right, leading away to the as yet invisible
Atlantic, lay the blue plain of Loch Roag, with a margin of yellow
seaweed along its shores, where the rocks revealed themselves at low
water, and with a multitude of large, variegated and verdant islands
which hid from sight the still greater Borva beyond.

They stopped to have a glass of whisky at Gara-na-hina, and Mackenzie
got down from the wagonette and went into the inn.

“And this is a Highland loch!” said Lavender, turning to his companion
from the South. “It is an enchanted sea; you could fancy yourself in the
Pacific, if only there were some palm trees on the shores of the
islands. No wonder you took for an Eve any sort of woman you met in such
a paradise!”

“You seem to be thinking a good deal about that young lady.”

“Well, who would not wish to make the acquaintance of a pretty girl,
especially when you have plenty of time on your hands, and nothing to do
but pay her little attentions, you know, and so forth, as being the
daughter of your host?”

There was no particular answer to such an incoherent question, but
Ingram did not seem so well pleased as he had been with the prospect of
introducing his friend to the young Highland girl whose praises he had
been reciting for many a day.

However, they drank their whisky, drove on to Callernish, and here
paused for a minute or two to show the stranger a series of large
so-called Druidical stones which occupy a small station overlooking the
loch. Could anything have been more impressive than the sight of these
solitary gray pillars placed on this bit of table-land high over the
sea, and telling of a race that vanished ages ago, and left the
surrounding plains, and hills, and shores a wild and untenanted
solitude? But, somehow Lavender did not care to remain among those
voiceless monuments of a forgotten past. He said he would come and
sketch them some other day. He praised the picture all around, and then
came back to the stretch of ruffled blue water lying at the base of the
hill. “Where was Mr. Mackenzie’s boat?” he asked.

They left the high plain, with its _Tuirsachan_,[3] or Stones of
Mourning, and descended to the side of the loch. In a few moments,
Duncan, who had been disposing of the horses and the wagonette, overtook
them, got ready the boat, and presently they were cutting asunder the
bright blue plain of summer waves.

At last they were nearing the King of Borva’s home, and Ingram began to
study the appearance of the neighboring shores, as if he would pick out
some feature of the island he remembered. The white foam hissed down the
side of the open boat. The sun burned hot on the brown sail. Far away
over the shining plain the salmon were leaping into the air, catching a
quick glint of silver on their scales before they splashed again into
the water. Half a dozen sea-pyes, with their beautiful black and white
plumage and scarlet beaks and feet, flew screaming out from the rocks
and swept in rapid circles above the boat. A long flight of solan geese
could just be seen slowly sailing along the westward horizon. As the
small craft got out toward the sea the breeze freshened slightly, and
she lay over somewhat as the brine-laden winds caught her and tingled on
the cheeks of her passengers from the softer South. Finally, as the
great channel widened out, and the various smaller islands disappeared
behind, Ingram touched his companion on the shoulder, looked over to a
long and low line of rock and hill, and said, “Borva!”

And this was Borva!--nothing visible but an indefinite extent of rocky
shore, with here and there a bay of white sand, and over that a
table-land of green pasture, apparently uninhabited.

“There are not many people on the island,” said Lavender, who seemed
rather disappointed with the look of the place.

“There are three hundred,” said Mackenzie with the air of one who had
experienced the difficulties of ruling over three hundred islanders.

He had scarcely spoken when his attention was called by Duncan to some
object that the gillie had been regarding for some minutes back.

“Yes, it is Miss Sheila,” said Duncan.

A sort of flush of expectation passed over Lavender’s face, and he
sprang to his feet. Ingram laughed. Did the foolish youth fancy he could
see half as far as this gray-eyed, eagle-faced man, who had now sunk
into his accustomed seat by the mast? There was nothing visible to
ordinary eyes but a speck of a boat, with a single sail up, which was,
apparently, in the distance, running in for Borva.

“Ay, ay, ay,” said Mackenzie in a vexed way, “it is Sheila, true enough;
and what will she do out in the boat at this time, when she wass to be
at home to receive the gentlemen that hef come all the way from London?”

“Well, Mr. Mackenzie,” said Lavender, “I should be sorry to think that
our coming had interfered in any way whatever with your daughter’s
amusements.”

“Amusements!” said the old man with a look of surprise. “It iss not
amusements she will go for; that is no amusements for her. It is for
some teffle of a purpose she will go, when it iss the house that is the
proper place for her, with friends coming from so great a journey.”

Presently it became clear that a race between the two boats was
inevitable, both of them making for the same point. Mackenzie would take
no notice of such a thing, but there was a grave smile on Duncan’s face,
and something like a look of pride in his keen eyes.

“There iss no one, not one,” he said, almost to himself, “will take her
in better that Miss Sheila--not one in ta island. And it wass me tat
learnt her every bit o’ ta steering about Borva.”

The strangers could now make out that in the other boat there were two
girls--one seated in the stern, the other by the mast. Ingram took out
his handkerchief and waved it: a similar token of recognition was
floated out from the other vessel. But Mackenzie’s boat presently had
the better of the wind, and slowly drew on ahead, until, when her
passengers landed on the rude stone quay, they found the other and
smaller craft still some little distance off.

Lavender paid little attention to his luggage. He let Duncan do with it
what he liked. He was watching the small boat coming in, and getting a
little impatient, and perhaps a little nervous, in waiting for a glimpse
of the young lady in the stern. He could vaguely make out that she had
an abundance of dark hair looped up; that she wore a small straw hat
with a short white feather in it; and that, for the rest, she seemed to
be habited entirely in some rough and close-fitting costume of dark
blue. Or was there a glimmer of a band of rose-red around her neck?

The small boat was cleverly run alongside the jetty: Duncan caught her
bow and held her fast, and Miss Sheila, with a heavy string of lythe in
her right hand, stepped, laughing and blushing, on to the quay. Ingram
was there. She dropped the fish on the stones and took his two hands in
hers, and without uttering a word, looked a glad welcome into his face.
It was a face capable of saying unwritten things--fine and delicate in
form, and yet full of an abundance of health and good spirits that shone
in deep gray-blue eyes. Lavender’s first emotion was one of surprise
that he should have heard this handsome, well-knit and proud-featured
girl called “little Sheila,” and spoken of in a pretty and caressing
way. He thought there was something almost majestic in her figure, in
the poising of her head and the outline of her face. But presently he
began to perceive some singular suggestions of sensitiveness and
meekness in the low, sweet brow, in the short and exquisitely curved
upper lip, and in the look of the tender blue eyes, which had long,
black eyelashes to give them a peculiar and indefinable charm. All this
he noticed hastily and timidly as he heard Ingram, who still held the
girl’s hands in his, saying, “Well, Sheila, and you haven’t quite
forgotten me? And you are grown such a woman now: why, I musn’t call you
Sheila any more, I think. But let me introduce you to my friend, who has
come all the way from London to see all the wonderful things at Borva.”

If there was any embarrassment or blushing during that simple ceremony
it was not on the side of the Highland girl, for she frankly shook hands
with him and said, “Are you very well?”

The second impression which Lavender gathered from her was, that nowhere
in the world was English pronounced so beautifully as in the Island of
Lewis. The gentle intonation with which she spoke was so tender and
touching--the slight dwelling on the _e_ in “very” and “well” seemed to
have such a sound of sincerity about it that he could have fancied he
had been a friend of hers for a lifetime. And if she said “ferry” for
“very,” what then? It was the most beautiful English he had ever heard.

The party now moved off toward the shore, above the long white curve of
which Mackenzie’s house was visible. The old man himself led the way,
and had, by his silence, apparently not quite forgiven his daughter for
having been absent from home when his guests arrived.

“Now, Sheila,” said Ingram, “tell me all about yourself; what have you
been doing?”

“This morning?” said the girl, walking beside him, with her hand laid on
his arm, and with the happiest look on her face.

“This morning, to begin with. Did you catch those fish yourself?”

“Oh, no, there was no time for that. And it was Mairi and I saw a boat
coming in, and it was going to Mevaig, but we overtook it, and got some
of the fish, and we thought we should be back before you came. However,
it is no matter since you are here. And you have been very well! And did
you see any differences in Stornoway when you came over?”

Lavender began to think that Styornoway sounded ever so much more
pleasant than mere Stornoway.

“We had not a minute to wait in Stornoway. But tell me, Sheila, all
about Borva and yourself; that is better than Stornoway. How are your
schools getting on? And have you bribed or frightened all the children
into giving up Gaelic yet? How is John the Piper? and does the Free
Church minister still complain of him? And have you caught any more wild
ducks and tamed them? And are there any gray geese up at Lochan-Eilean?”

“Oh, that is too many at once,” said Sheila, laughing. “But I am afraid
your friend will find Borva very lonely and dull. There is not much
there at all, for all the lads are away at the Caithness fishing. And
you should have shown him all about Stornoway, and taken him up to the
castle and the beautiful gardens.”

“He has seen all sorts of castles, Sheila, and all sorts of gardens in
every part of the world. He has seen everything to be seen in the great
cities and countries that are only names to you. He has traveled in
France, Italy, Russia, Germany, and seen all the big towns that you hear
of in history.”

“That is what I should like to do if I were a man,” said Sheila; “and
many and many a time I wished I had been a man, that I could go to the
fishing and work in the fields, and, then, when I had enough money, go
away and see other countries and strange people.”

“But if you were a man I should not have come all the way from London to
see you,” said Ingram, patting the hand that lay on his arm.

“But if I were a man,” said the girl, quite frankly, “I should go up to
London to see you.”

Mackenzie smiled grimly, and said, “Sheila, it is nonsense you will
talk.”

At this moment Sheila turned around and said, “Oh, we have forgotten
poor Mairi. Mairi, why did you not leave the fish for Duncan? They are
too heavy for you. I will carry them to the house.”

But Lavender sprang forward, and insisted on taking possession of the
thick cord with its considerable weight of lythe.

“This is my cousin, Mairi,” said Sheila; and forthwith the young,
fair-faced, timid-eyed girl shook hands with the gentlemen, and said,
just as if she had been watching Sheila, “And are you ferry well, sir?”

For the rest of the way up to the house Lavender walked by the side of
Sheila; and as the string of lythe had formed the introduction to their
talk, it ran pretty much upon natural history. In about five minutes
she had told him more about sea-birds and fish than ever he knew in his
life; and she wound up this information by offering to take him out on
the following morning, that he might himself catch some lythe.

“But I am a wretchedly bad fisherman, Miss Mackenzie,” he said. “It is
some years since I tried to throw a fly.”

“Oh, there is no need for good fishing when you catch lythe,” she said
earnestly. “You will see Mr. Ingram catch them. It is only a big white
fly you will need, and a long line, and when the fish takes the fly,
down he goes--a great depth. Then when you have got him and he is
killed, you must cut the sides, as you see that is done, and string him
to a rope and trail him behind the boat all the way home. If you do not
do that it is no use at all to eat. But if you like the salmon-fishing
my papa will teach you that. There is no one,” she added proudly, “can
catch salmon like my papa--not even Duncan--and the gentlemen who come
in the autumn to Stornoway, they are quite surprised when my papa goes
to fish with them.”

“I suppose he is a good shot, too,” said the young man, amused to notice
the proud way in which the girl spoke of her father.

“Oh, he can shoot anything. He will shoot a seal if he comes up but for
one moment above the water; and all the birds--he will get you all the
birds if you will wish to take any away with you. We have no deer on the
island--it is too small for that--but in the Lewis and in Harris there
are many, many thousands of deer, and my papa has many invitations when
the gentlemen come up in the autumn; and if you look in the game-book of
the lodges you will see there is not any one who has shot so many deer
as my papa--not any one whatever.”

At length they reached the building of dark and rude stone-work, with
its red coping, its spacious porch, and its small enclosure of garden in
front. Lavender praised the flowers in this enclosure; he guessed they
were Sheila’s particular care; but in truth there was nothing rare or
delicate among the plants growing in this exposed situation. There were
a few clusters of large yellow pansies, a calceolaria or two, plenty of
wallflower, some clove-pinks, and an abundance of sweet-william in all
manner of colors. But the chief beauty of the small garden was a
magnificent tree-fuchsia which grew in front of one of the windows, and
was covered with deep rose-red flowers set amid its small and deep-green
leaves. For the rest, a bit of honeysuckle was turned up one side of the
porch, and at the small wooden gate there were two bushes of sweetbrier
that filled the warm air with fragrance.

Just before entering the house the two strangers turned to have a look
at the spacious landscape lying all around in the perfect calm of a
Summer day. And lo! before them there was but a blinding mass of white
that glared upon their eyes, and caused them to see the far sea and the
shores and hills as but faint shadows appearing through a silvery haze.
A thin fleece of cloud lay across the sun, but the light was
nevertheless so intense that the objects near at hand--a disused boat
lying bottom upward, an immense anchor of foreign make, and some such
things--seemed to be as black as night as they lay on the warm road. But
when the eye got beyond the house and the garden, and the rough hillside
leading down to Loch Roag, all the world appeared to be a blaze of calm,
silent and luminous heat. Suainabhal and its brother mountains were only
as clouds in the south. Along the western horizon the portion of the
Atlantic that could be seen lay like a silent lake under a white sky. To
get any touch of color they had to turn eastward, and there the sunlight
faintly fell on the green shores of Borva, on the narrows of Loch Roag,
and the loose red sail of a solitary smack that was slowly coming round
a headland. They could hear the sound of the long oars. A pale line of
shadow lay in the wake of the boat, but otherwise the black hull and the
red sail seemed to be coming through a plain of molten silver. When the
young men turned to go into the house the hall seemed a cavern of
impenetrable darkness, and there was a flush of crimson light dancing
before their eyes.

When Ingram had his room pointed out Lavender followed him into it and
shut the door.

“By Jove, Ingram,” he said, with a singular light of enthusiasm on his
handsome face, “what a beautiful voice that girl has! I have never heard
anything so soft and musical in all my life, and then when she smiles
what perfect teeth she has! And then, you know, there is an appearance,
a style, a grace about her figure--but, I say, do you seriously mean to
tell me you are not in love with her?”

“Of course I am not,” said the other, impatiently, as he was busily
engaged with his portmanteau.

“Then let me give you a word of information,” said the young man, with
an air of profound shrewdness; “she is in love with you.”

Ingram rose with some little touch of vexation on his face; “Look here,
Lavender, I am going to talk to you seriously. I wish you wouldn’t fancy
that every one is in that condition of simmering love-making you delight
in. You never were in love, I believe--I doubt whether you ever will
be--but you are always fancying yourself in love, and writing very
pretty verses about it and painting very pretty heads. I like the verses
and the paintings well enough, however they are come by; but don’t
mislead yourself into believing that you know anything whatever of a
real or serious passion by having engaged in all sorts of imaginative
and semi-poetical dreams. It is a much more serious thing than that,
mind you, when it comes to a man. And, for Heaven’s sake, don’t
attribute any of that sort of sentimental make-believe to either Sheila
Mackenzie or myself. We are not romantic folks. We have no imaginative
gifts whatever, but we are very glad, you know, to be attentive and
grateful to those who have. The fact is, I don’t think it quite fair--”

“Let us suppose I am lectured enough,” said the other, somewhat stiffly.
“I suppose I am as good a judge of the character of women as most other
men, although I am no great student, and have no hard and dried rules of
philosophy at my fingers’ ends. Perhaps, however, one may learn more by
mixing with other people and going out into the world, than by sitting
in a room with a dozen of books, and persuading one’s self that men and
women are to be studied in that fashion.”

“Go away, you stupid boy, and unpack your portmanteau, and don’t quarrel
with me,” said Ingram, putting out on the table some things he had
brought for Sheila; “and if you are friendly with Sheila and treat her
like a human being, instead of trying to put a lot of romance and
sentiment about her, she will teach you more than you could learn in a
hundred drawing-rooms in a thousand years.”




CHAPTER III.

THERE WAS A KING IN THULE.


He never took that advice. He had already transformed Sheila into a
heroine during the half hour of their stroll from the beach and around
the house. Not that he fell in love with her at first sight, or anything
even approaching to that. He merely made her the central figure of a
little speculative romance, as he had made many another woman before. Of
course, in these little fanciful dramas, written along the sky-line, as
it were, of his life, he invariably pictured himself as the fitting
companion of the fair creatures he saw there. Who but himself could
understand the sentiment of her eyes, and teach her little love-ways,
and express unbounded admiration of her? More than one practical young
woman, indeed, in certain circles of London society, had been informed
by her friends that Mr. Lavender was dreadfully in love with her; and
had been much surprised, after this confirmation of her suspicions, that
he sought no means of bringing the affair to a reasonable and sensible
issue. He did not even amuse himself by flirting with her, as men would
willingly do who could not be charged with any serious purpose whatever.

His devotion was more mysterious and remote. A rumor would get about
that Mr. Lavender had finished another of those charming heads in
pastel, which, at a distance, reminded one of Greuze, and that Lady
So-and-so, who had bought it forthwith, had declared that it was the
image of this young lady, who was partly puzzled and partly vexed by the
incomprehensible conduct of her reputed admirer. It was the fashion, in
these social circles, to buy those heads of Lavender when he chose to
paint them. He had achieved a great reputation by them. The good people
liked to have genius in their own set whom they had discovered, and who
was only to be appreciated by persons of exceptional taste and
penetration. Lavender, the uninitiated were assured, was a most
brilliant and cultivated young man. He had composed some charming songs,
he had written, from time to time, some quite delightful little poems,
over which fair eyes had grown full and liquid. Who had not heard of
the face that he painted for a certain young lady whom every one
expected him to marry?

The young man escaped a great deal of the ordinary consequences of this
petting, but not all. He was at bottom really true-hearted, frank and
generous--generous even to an extreme--but he had a habit of producing
striking impressions which dogged and perverted his every action and
speech. He disliked losing a few shillings at billiards, but he did not
mind losing a few pounds; the latter was good for a story. Had he
possessed any money to invest in shares, he would have been irritated by
small rises or small falls; but he would have been vain of a big rise,
and he would have regarded a big fall with equanimity, as placing him in
a dramatic light. The exaggerations produced by this habit of his
fostered strange delusions in the minds of people who did not know him
very well: and sometimes the practical results, in the way of expected
charities or what not, amazed him. He could not understand why people
should have made such mistakes, and resented them as an injustice.

And as they sat at dinner on this still, brilliant evening in Summer, it
was Sheila’s turn to be clothed in the garments of romance. Her father,
with his great gray beard and heavy brow, became the King of Thule,
living in this solitary house overlooking the sea, and having memories
of a dead sweetheart. His daughter, the princess, had the glamor of a
thousand legends dwelling in her beautiful eyes; and when she walked by
the shores of the Atlantic, that were now getting yellow under the
sunset, what strange and unutterable thoughts must appear in the wonder
of her face! He remembered no more how he had pulled to pieces Ingram’s
praises of Sheila. What had become of the “ordinary young lady, who
would be a little interesting, if a little stupid, before marriage, and
after marriage sink into the dull, domestic hind?” There could be no
doubt that Sheila often sat silent for a considerable time, with her
eyes fixed on her father’s face when he spoke, or turning to look at
some other speaker. Had Lavender now been asked if this silence had not
a trifle of dullness in it, he would have replied by asking if there
were dullness in the stillness and the silence of the sea. He grew to
regard her calm and thoughtful look as a sort of spell; and if you had
asked him what Sheila was like, he would have answered by saying that
there was moonlight in her face.

The room, too, in which this mystic princess sat, was strange and
wonderful. There were no doors visible, for the four walls were
throughout covered by paper of foreign manufacture, representing
spacious Tyrolese landscapes and incidents of the chase. When Lavender
had first entered this chamber his eye had been shocked by these coarse
and prominent pictures--by the green rivers, the blue lakes and the
snow-peaks that rose above certain ruddy chalets. Here a chamois was
stumbling down a ravine, and there an operatic peasant some eight or ten
inches in actual length, was pointing a gun. The large figures, the
coarse colors, the impossible scenes--all this looked, at first sight,
to be in the worst possible taste, and Lavender was convinced that
Sheila had nothing to do with the introduction of this abominable
decoration. But somehow, when he turned to the line of ocean that was
visible from the window, to the lonely shores of the island and the
monotony of colors showing in the still picture without, he began to
fancy that there might be a craving up in these latitudes for some
presentation, however rude and glaring, of the richer and more
variegated life of the South. The figures and mountains on the walls
became less prominent. He saw no incongruity in a whole chalet giving
way and allowing Duncan, who waited at table, to bring from this
aperture to the kitchen a steaming dish of salmon, while he spoke some
words in Gaelic to the servants at the other end of the tube. He even
forgot to be surprised at the appearance of little Mairi, with whom he
had shaken hands a little while before, coming round the table with
potatoes. He did not, as a rule, shake hands with servant-maids, but was
not this fair-haired, wistful-eyed girl some relative, friend or
companion of Sheila’s, and had he not already begun to lose all
perception of the incongruous or the absurd in the strange pervading
charm with which Sheila’s presence filled the place?

He suddenly found Mackenzie’s deep-set eyes fixed upon him, and became
aware that the old man had been mysteriously announcing to Ingram that
there were more political movements abroad than people fancied. Sheila
sat still and listened to her father as he expounded these things, and
showed that, although at a distance, he could perceive the signs of the
times. Was it not incumbent, moreover, on a man who had to look after a
number of poor people and simple folks, that he should be on the alert?

“It iss not bekass you will live in London you will know everything,”
said the King of Borva, with a certain significance in his tone. “There
iss many things a man does not see at his feet that another man will see
who is a good way off. The International, now--”

He glanced furtively at Lavender.

“--I hef been told there will be agents going out every day to all parts
of this country and other countries, and they will hef plenty of money
to live like gentlemen, and get among the poor people, and fill their
minds with foolish nonsense about a revolution. Oh yes, I hear about it
all, and there iss many members of Parliament in it; and it is every day
they will get farther and farther, all working hard, though no one sees
them who does not understand to be on the watch.”

Here again the young man received a quiet, scrutinizing glance; and it
began to dawn upon him, to his infinite astonishment, that Mackenzie
half suspected him of being an emissary of the International. In the
case of any other man he would have laughed and paid no heed, but how
could he permit Sheila’s father to regard him with any such suspicion?

“Don’t you think, sir,” he said boldly, “that those Internationalists
are a lot of incorrigible idiots?”

As if a shrewd observer of men and motives were to be deceived by such a
protest! Mackenzie regarded him with increased suspicion, although he
endeavored to conceal the fact that he was watching the young man from
time to time. Lavender saw all the favor he had won during the day
disappearing, and moodily wondered when he should have a chance of
explanation.

After dinner they went outside and sat down on a bench in the garden,
and the men lit their cigars. It was a cool and pleasant evening. The
sun had gone down in the red fire behind the Atlantic, and there was
still left a rich glow of crimson in the West, while overhead, in the
pale yellow of the sky, some filmy clouds of rose-color lay motionless.
How calm was the sea out there, and the whiter stretch of water coming
into Loch Roag! The cool air of the twilight was scented with
sweetbrier. The wash of the ripples along the coast could be heard in
the stillness. It was a time for lovers to sit by the sea, careless of
the future or the past.

But why would this old man keep prating of his political prophecies?
Lavender asked of himself. Sheila had spoken scarcely a word all the
evening; and of what interest could it be to her to listen to theories
of revolution and the dangers besetting our hot-headed youth? She merely
stood by the side of her father, with her hand on his shoulder. He
noticed, however, that she paid particular attention whenever Ingram
spoke; and he wondered whether she perceived that Ingram was partly
humoring the old man, at the same time that he was pleasing himself with
a series of monologues, interrupted only by his cigar.

“That is true enough, Mr. Mackenzie,” Ingram would say, laying back with
his two hands clasped around his knee, as usual; “you’ve got to be
careful of the opinions that are spread abroad, even in Borva, where not
much danger is to be expected. But I don’t suppose our young men are
more destructive in their notions than young men always have been. You
know every fellow starts in life by knocking down all the beliefs he
finds before him, and then spends the rest of his life in setting them
up again. It is only after some years he gets to know that all the
wisdom of the world lies in the old commonplaces he once despised. He
finds that the old familiar ways are the best, and he sinks into being a
commonplace person, with much satisfaction to himself. My friend
Lavender, now, is continually charging me with being commonplace. I
admit the charge. I have drifted back into all the old ways and
beliefs--about religion and marriage, and patriotism, and what not--that
ten years ago I should have treated with ridicule.”

“Suppose the process continues?” suggested Lavender, with some evidence
of pique.

“Suppose it does,” continues Ingram carelessly. “Ten years hence I may
be proud to become a vestryman, and have the most anxious care about the
administration of the rates. I shall be looking after the drainage of
houses and the treatment of paupers, and the management of
Sunday-schools--but all this is an invasion of your province, Sheila,”
he suddenly added, looking up to her.

The girl laughed and said, “Then I have been commonplace from the
beginning?”

Ingram was about to make all manner of protests and apologies, when
Mackenzie said, “Sheila, it wass time you go in-doors, if you have
nothing about your head. Go in and sing a song to us, and we will listen
to you; and not a sad song, but a good merry song. These teffles of the
fishermen, it iss always drownings they will sing about from the morning
till the night.”

Was Sheila about to sing in this clear, strange twilight, while they sat
there and watched the yellow moon come up behind the Southern hills?
Lavender had heard so much of her singing of these fishermen’s ballads
that he could think of nothing more to add to the enchantment of this
wonderful night. But he was disappointed. The girl put her hand on her
father’s head, and reminded him that she had had her big greyhound,
Bras, imprisoned all the afternoon, that she had to go down to
Borvapost, with a message for some people who were leaving by the boat
in the morning, and would the gentleman therefore excuse her not singing
to them for this one evening?

“But you cannot go away down to Borvapost by yourself, Sheila,” said
Ingram. “It will be dark before you return.”

“It will not be darker than this all the night through,” said the girl.

“But I hope you will let us go with you,” said Lavender, rather
anxiously; and she assented with a gracious smile, and went to fetch the
great deerhound that was her constant companion.

And lo! he found himself walking with a princess in the wonderland
through that magic twilight that prevails in Northern latitudes.
Mackenzie and Ingram had gone on in front. The large deerhound, after
regarding him attentively, had gone to his mistress’ side, and remained
closely there. Lavender could scarcely believe his ears that the girl
was talking to him lightly and frankly, as though she had known him for
years, and was telling him of all her troubles with the folks at the
Borvapost, and of those poor people whom she was now going to see. No
sooner did he understand that they were emigrants, and that they were
going to Glasgow before leaving finally for America, than in quite an
honest and enthusiastic fashion he began to bewail the sad fate of such
poor wretches as have to forsake their native land, and to accuse the
aristocracy of the country of every act of selfishness, and to charge
the Government of shameful indifference. But Sheila brought him up
suddenly. In the gentlest fashion she told him that she knew of these
poor people, and how emigration affected them, and so forth, until he
was ready to curse the hour in which he had blundered into taking a side
on a question about which he cared nothing and knew less.

“But some other time,” continued Sheila, “I will tell you what we do
here, and I will show you a great many letters I have from friends of
mine who have gone to Greenock and to New York and Canada. Oh, yes, it
is very bad for the old people; they never get reconciled to the
change--never; but it is very good for the young people, and they are
glad of it, and are much better off than they were here. You will see
how proud they are of the better clothes they have, and of good food,
and of money to put in the bank; and how could they get that in the
Highlands, where the land is so poor that a small piece is no use, and
they have not money to rent the large sheep farms? It is very bad to
have people go away--it is very hard on many of them--but what can they
do? The piece of ground that was very good for the one family, that is
expected to keep the daughters when they marry, and the sons when they
marry, and then there are five or six families to live on it. And hard
work--that will not do much with very bad land and the bad weather we
have here. The people get downhearted when they have their crops spoiled
by the long rain, and they cannot get their peats dried; and very often
the fishing turns out bad, and they have no money at all to carry on the
farm. But now you will see Borvapost.”

Lavender had to confess that this wonderful princess would persist in
talking in a very matter-of-fact way. All the afternoon, while he was
weaving a luminous web of imagination around her, she was continually
cutting it asunder, and stepping forth as an authority on the growing of
some wretched plants or the means by which rain was to be excluded from
window-sills. And now, in this strange twilight, when she ought to have
been singing of the cruelties of the sea or listening to half-forgotten
legends of mermaids, she was engaged with the petty fortunes of men and
girls who were pleased to find themselves prospering in the Glasgow
police force or educating themselves in a milliner’s shop in Edinburgh.
She did not appear conscious that she was a princess. Indeed, she seemed
to have no consciousness of herself at all, and was altogether occupied
in giving him information about practical subjects in which he
professed a profound interest he certainly did not feel.

But even Sheila, when they had reached the loftiest part of their route,
and could see beneath them the island and the water surrounding it, was
struck by the exceeding beauty of the twilight, and as for her
companion, he remembered it many a time thereafter as if it were a dream
of the sea. Before them lay the Atlantic--a pale line of blue, still,
silent and remote. Overhead, the sky was of a clear, pale gold, with
heavy masses of violet cloud stretched across from North to South, and
thickening as they got near to the horizon. Down at their feet, near the
shore, a dusky line of huts and houses was scarcely visible, and over
these lay a pale blue film of peat-smoke that did not move in the still
air. Then they saw the bay into which the White Water runs, and they
could trace the yellow glimmer of the river stretching into the island
through a level valley of bog and morass. Far away, toward the East, lay
the bulk of the island--dark green undulations of moorland and pasture;
and there, in the darkness, the gable of one white house had caught the
clear light of the sky, and was gleaming Westward like a star. But all
this was as nothing to the glory that began to shine in the Southeast,
where the sky was of a pale violet over the peaks of Melasabhal and
Suainabhal. There, into the beautiful dome, rose the golden crescent of
the moon, warm in color, as though it still retained the last rays of
the sunset. A line of quivering gold fell across Loch Roag, and touched
the black hull and spars of the boat in which Sheila had been sailing in
the morning. That bay down there, with its white sands and massive
rocks, its still expanse of water and its background of mountain peaks
palely colored by the yellow moonlight, seemed really a home for a magic
princess who was shut off from all the world. But here, in front of
them, was another sort of sea and another sort of life--a small fishing
village, hidden under a cloud of pale peat-smoke, and fronting the great
waters of the Atlantic itself, which lay under a gloom of violet clouds.

“Now,” said Sheila, with a smile, “we have not always weather as good as
this in the island. Will you not sit on the bench over there with Mr.
Ingram, and wait until my papa and I come up from the village again?”

“May not I go down with you?”

“No. The dogs would learn you were a stranger, and there would be a
great deal of noise, and there will be many of the poor people asleep.”

So Sheila had her way; and she and her father went down the hillside
into the gloom of the village, while Lavender went to join his friend
Ingram, who was sitting on the wooden bench silently smoking a clay
pipe.

“Well, I have never seen the like of this,” said Lavender, in his
impetuous way; “it is worth going a thousand miles to see. Such colors
and such clearness! and then the splendid outlines of those mountains,
and the grand sweep of this loch! This is the sort of thing that drives
me to despair, and might make one vow never to touch a brush again. And
Sheila says it will be like this all the night through.”

He was unaware that he had spoken of her in a very familiar way, but
Ingram noticed it.

“Ingram,” he said, suddenly, “that is the first girl I have ever seen
whom I should like to marry.”

“Stuff!”

“But it is true. I have never seen any one like her--so handsome, so
gentle, and yet so very frank in setting you right. And then she is so
sensible, you know, and not too proud to have much interest in all sorts
of common affairs--”

There was a smile in Ingram’s face, and his companion stopped in some
vexation: “You are not a very sympathetic confidant.”

“Because I know the story of old. You have told it me about twenty
women; and it is always the same. I tell you, you don’t know anything at
all about Sheila Mackenzie yet; perhaps you never may. I suppose you
will make a heroine of her, and will fall in love with her for a
fortnight, and then go back to London and get cured by listening to the
witticisms of Mrs. Lorraine.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you. Some day, no doubt, you will love a
woman for what she is, not for what you fancy her to be; but that is a
piece of good fortune that seldom occurs to a youth of your age. To
marry in a dream, and wake up six months afterwards--that is the fate of
ingenuous twenty-three. But don’t you let Mackenzie hear you talk of
marrying Sheila, or he’ll have some of his fishermen throw you into Loch
Roag.”

“There, now, that _is_ one point I can’t understand about her,” said
Lavender, eagerly. “How can a girl of her shrewdness and good sense have
such a belief in that humbugging old idiot of a father of hers, who
fancies me a political emissary, and plays small tricks to look like
diplomacy? It is always ‘My papa can do this,’ and ‘My papa can do
that,’ and ‘There is no one at all like my papa.’ And she is continually
fondling him, and giving little demonstrations of affection, of which he
takes no more notice than if he were an Arctic bear.”

Ingram looked up with some surprise in his face. “You don’t mean to say,
Lavender,” he said, slowly, “that you are already jealous of the girl’s
own father?”

He could not answer, for at this moment Sheila, her father and the big
greyhound came up the hill. And again it was Lavender’s good fortune to
walk with Sheila across the moorland path they had traversed some little
time before. And now the moon was still higher in the heavens, and the
yellow lane of light that crossed the violet waters of Loch Roag
quivered in a deeper gold. The night air was scented with the Dutch
clover growing down by the shore. They could hear the curlew whistling
and the plover calling amid that monotonous plash of the waves that
murmured all around the coast. When they returned to the house the
darker waters of the Atlantic and the purple clouds of the West were
shut out of sight, and before them there was only the liquid plain of
Loch Roag, with its pathway of yellow fire, and far away on the other
side the shoulders and peaks of the Southern mountains, that had grown
gray and clear and sharp in the beautiful twilight. And this was
Sheila’s home.




PART II.




CHAPTER IV.

ROMANCE-TIME.


Early morning at Borva, fresh, luminous and rare; the mountains in the
South grown pale and cloud-like under a sapphire sky; the sea ruffled
into a darker blue by a light breeze from the west; and the sunlight
lying hot on the red gravel and white shells around Mackenzie’s house.
There is an odor of sweetbrier about, hovering in the warm, still air,
except at such times as the breeze freshens a bit, and brings around the
shoulder of the hill the cold, strange scent of the rocks and the sea
beyond.

And on this fresh and pleasant morning Sheila sat in the big garden-seat
in front of the house, talking to the stranger to whom she had been
introduced the day before. He was no more a stranger, however, to all
appearance, for what could be more frank and friendly than their
conversation, or more bright and winning than the smile with which she
frequently turned to speak or to listen? Of course, this stranger could
not be her friend as Mr. Ingram was--that was impossible. But he talked
a great deal more than Mr. Ingram, and was apparently more anxious to
please and be pleased; and indeed was altogether very winning and
courteous and pleasant in his ways. Beyond this vague impression Sheila
ventured upon no further comparison between the two men. If her older
friend had been down, she would doubtless have preferred talking to him
about all that had happened in the island since his last visit; but here
was this newer friend thrown, as it were, upon her hospitality, and
eager, with a most respectful and yet simple and friendly interest, to
be taught all that Ingram already knew. Was he not, too, in mere
appearance like one of the princes she had read of in many an ancient
ballad--tall and handsome and yellow-haired, fit to have come sailing
over the sea, with a dozen merry comrades, to carry off some sea-king’s
daughter to be his bride? Sheila began to regret that the young man
knew so little about the sea and the Northern islands and those old-time
stories; but then he was very anxious to learn.

“You must say _Mach-Klyoda_ instead of Macleod,” she was saying to him,
“if you like _Styornoway_ better than Stornoway. It is the Gaelic, that
is all.”

“Oh, it is ever so much prettier,” said young Lavender, with a quite
genuine enthusiasm in his face, not altogether begotten of the letter
_y_; “and, indeed, I don’t think you can possibly tell how singularly
pleasant and quaint it is to an English ear to hear just that little
softening of the vowels that the people have here, I suppose you don’t
notice that they say _gyarden_, for garden--”

“They!” As if he had paid attention to the pronunciation of any one
except Sheila herself.

“But not quite so hard as I pronounce it. And so with a great many other
words, that are softened and sweetened and made almost poetical in their
sound by the least bit of inflection. How surprised and pleased English
ladies would be to hear you speak! Oh! I beg your pardon--I did not mean
to--I--I beg your pardon--”

Sheila seemed a little astonished by her companion’s evident
mortification, and said with a smile, “If others speak so in the island,
of course I must too; and you say it does not shock you.”

His distress at his own rudeness now found an easy vent. He protested
that no people could talk English like the people of Lewis. He gave
Sheila to understand that the speech of English folks was as the
croaking of ravens compared with the sweet tones of the Northern isles;
and this drew him on to speak of his friends in the South, and of
London, and the chances of Sheila ever going thither.

“It must be so strange never to have seen London,” he said. “Don’t you
ever dream of what it is like? Don’t you ever try to think of a great
space, nearly as big as this island, all covered over with large houses,
the roads between the houses all made of stone, and great bridges going
over the rivers, with railway trains standing? By the way, you have
never seen a railway engine?”

He looked at her for a moment in astonishment, as if he had not hitherto
realized to himself the absolute ignorance of the remote princess.
Sheila, with some little touch of humor appearing in her calm eyes,
said: “But I am not quite ignorant of all these things. I have seen
pictures of them, and my papa has described them so often that I will
feel as if I had seen them all; and I do not think that I should be
surprised, except, perhaps, by the noise of the big towns. It was many a
time my papa told me of that; but he says I cannot understand it, nor
the great distance of land you travel over to get to London. That is
what I do not wish to see. I was often thinking of it, and that to pass
so many places that you do not know would make you very sad.”

“That can be easily avoided,” he said, lightly. “When you go to London
you must go from Glasgow or Edinburgh in a night train, and fall fast
asleep, and in the morning you will find yourself in London, without
having seen anything.”

“Just as if one had gone across a great distance of sea, and come to
another island you will never see before,” said Sheila, with the
gray-blue eyes under the black eyelashes grown strange and distant.

“But you must not think of it as a melancholy thing,” he said, almost
anxiously. “You will find yourself among all sorts of gaities and
amusements; you will have cheerful people around you, and plenty of
things to see; you will drive in beautiful parks, and go to theatres,
and meet people in large and brilliant rooms, filled with flowers, and
silver, and light. And all through the winter, that must be so cold and
dark up here, you will find an abundance of warmth and light, and plenty
of flowers, and every sort of pleasant thing. You will hear no more of
those songs of drowned people; and you will be afraid no longer of
storms, or listen to the waves at night; and by-and-by, when you have
got quite accustomed to London, and got a great many friends, you might
be disposed to stay there altogether; and you would grow to think of
this island as a desolate and melancholy place, and never seek to come
back.”

The girl rose suddenly and turned to a fuchsia tree, pretending to pick
some of its flowers. Tears had sprung to her eyes unbidden, and it was
in rather an uncertain voice that she said, still managing to conceal
her face: “I like to hear you talk of those places, but--but I will
never leave Borva.”

What possible interest could he have in combating this decision so
anxiously, almost so imploringly? He renewed his complaints against the
melancholy of the sea and the dreariness of the Northern winters. He
described again and again the brilliant lights and colors of town life
in the South. As a mere matter of experience and education she ought to
go to London; and had not her papa as good as intimated his intention of
taking her?

In the midst of these representations a step was heard in the hall, and
then the girl looked around with a bright light on her face.

“Well, Sheila,” said Ingram, according to his custom, and both the
girl’s hands were in his the next minute, “you are down early. What have
you been about? Have you been telling Mr. Lavender about the Black Horse
of Loch Suainabhal?”

“No; Mr. Lavender has been telling me of London.”

“And I have been trying to induce Miss Mackenzie to pay us a visit, so
that we may show her the difference between a city and an island. But
all to no purpose. Miss Mackenzie seems to like hard winters, and
darkness, and cold; and as for that perpetual and melancholy and cruel
sea that in the winter time, I should fancy, might drive anybody into a
lunatic asylum--”

“Ah, you must not talk badly of the sea,” said the girl, with all her
courage and brightness returned to her face: “It is our very good
friend. It gives us food, and keeps many people alive. It carries the
lads away to other places, and brings them back with money in their
pockets--”

“And sometimes it smashes a few of them on the rocks, or swallows up a
dozen families, and the next morning it is as smooth and treacherous and
fair as if nothing had happened.”

“But that is not the sea at all,” said Sheila; “that is the storms that
will wreck the boats; and how can the sea help that? When the sea is
left alone the sea is very good to us.”

Ingram laughed aloud and patted the girl’s head fondly; and Lavender,
blushing a little, confessed he was beaten, and that he would never
again, in Miss Mackenzie’s presence, say anything against the sea.

The King of Borva now appearing, they all went in to breakfast; and
Sheila sat opposite the window, so that all the light coming in from the
clear sky and the sea was reflected upon her face, and lit up every
varying expression that crossed it or that shone up in the beautiful
deeps of her eyes. Lavender, his own face in shadow, could look at her
from time to time, himself unseen; and as he sat in almost absolute
silence, and noticed how she talked with Ingram, and what deference she
paid him, and how anxious she was to please him, he began to wonder if
he should ever be admitted to a like friendship with her. It was so
strange, too, that this handsome, proud-featured, proud-spirited girl
should so devote herself to the amusement of a man like Ingram, and,
forgetting all the court that should have been paid to a pretty woman,
seem determined to persuade him that he was conferring a favor upon her
by every word and look. Of course, Lavender admitted to himself, Ingram
was a very good sort of a fellow--a very good sort of a fellow, indeed.
If any one was in a scrape about money, Ingram would come to the rescue
without a moment’s hesitation, although the salary of a clerk in the
Board of Trade might have been made the excuse, by any other man, for a
very justifiable refusal. He was very clever, too--had read much, and
all that kind of thing. But he was not the sort of man you might expect
to get on well with women. Unless with very intimate friends he was a
trifle silent and reserved. Often he was inclined to be pragmatic and
sententious, and had a habit of saying unpleasantly better things when
some careless joke was being made.

He was a little dingy in appearance, and a man who had a somewhat cold
manner, who was sallow of face, who was obviously getting gray, and who
was generally insignificant in appearance, was not the sort of man, one
would think, to fascinate an exceptionally handsome girl, who had brains
enough to know the fineness of her own face. But here was this princess
paying attentions to him, such as must have driven a more impressionable
man out of his senses, while Ingram sat quiet and pleased, sometimes
making fun of her, and generally talking to her as if she were a child.
Sheila had chatted very pleasantly with him, Lavender, in the morning,
but it was evident that her relations with Ingram were of a very
different kind, such as he could not well understand. For it was
scarcely possible that she could be in love with Ingram, and yet, surely
the pleasure that dwelt in her expressive face, when she spoke to him or
listened to him, was not the result of a mere friendship.

If Lavender had been told at that moment that these two were lovers, and
that they were looking forward to an early marriage, he would have
rejoiced with an enthusiasm of joy. He would have honestly and cordially
shaken Ingram by the hand; he would have made plans for introducing the
young bride to all the people he knew; and he would have gone straight
off, on reaching London, to buy Sheila a diamond necklace, even if he
had to borrow the money from Ingram himself.

“And have you got rid of the _Airgiod-cearc_,[4] Sheila?” said Ingram,
suddenly breaking in upon these dreams; “or does every owner of hens
still pay his annual shilling to the Lord of Lewis?”

“It is not away yet,” said the girl, “but when Sir James comes in the
autumn I will go over to Stornoway and ask him to take away the tax; and
I know he will do it, for what is the shilling worth to him, when he has
spent thousands and thousands of pounds on the Lewis? But it will be
very hard on some of the poor people that only keep one or two hens; and
I will tell Sir James of all that--”

“You will do nothing of the kind, Sheila,” said her father, impatiently.
“What is the _Airgiod-cearc_ to you, that you will go over to Stornoway
only to be laughed at and make a fool of yourself?”

“That is nothing--not anything at all,” said the girl, “if Sir James
will only take away the tax.”

“Why, Sheila, they would treat you as another Lady Godiva,” said Ingram,
with a good-humored smile.

“But Miss Mackenzie is quite right,” exclaimed Lavender, with a sudden
flush of color leaping into his handsome face, and an honest glow of
admiration into his eyes. “I think it is a very noble thing for her to
do, and nobody, either in Stornoway or anywhere else, would be such a
brute as to laugh at her for trying to help those poor people, who have
not too many friends and defenders, God knows.”

Ingram looked surprised. Since when had the young gentleman across the
table acquired such a singular interest in the poorer classes, of whose
very existence he had for the most part seemed unaware? But the
enthusiasm in his face seemed quite honest; there could be no doubt of
that. As for Sheila, with a beating heart she ventured to send to her
companion a brief and timid glance of gratitude, which the young man
observed, and never forgot.

“You will not know what it is all about,” said the King of Borva, with a
peevish air, as though it were too bad that a person of his authority
should have to descend to details about a petty hen-tax. “It is many and
many a tax and a due Sir James will take away from his tenants in the
Lewis, and he will spend more money a thousand times than ever he will
get back; and it was this _Airgiod-cearc_, it will stand in the place of
a great many things taken away, just to remind the folk that they have
not their land all in their own right. It is many things you will have
to do in managing the poor people, not to let them get too proud, or
forgetful of what they owe to you; and now there is no more tacksmen to
be the masters of the small crofters, and the crofters they would think
they were landlords themselves if there were no dues for them to pay.”

“I have heard of those middlemen; they were dreadful tyrants and
thieves, weren’t they?” said Lavender. Ingram kicked his foot under the
table. “I mean, that was the popular impression of them--a vulgar error,
I presume,” continued the young man, in the coolest manner. “And so you
have got rid of them? Well, I dare say many of them were honest men, and
suffered very unjustly in common report.”

Mackenzie answered nothing, but his daughter said quickly: “But you
know, Mr. Lavender, they have not gone away merely because they cease to
have the letting of the land to the crofters. They have still their old
holdings, and so have the crofters, in most cases. Every one now holds
direct from the proprietor, that is all.”

“So that there is no difference between the former tacksman and his
serf, except the relative size of their farms?”

“Well, the crofters have no leases, but the tacksmen have,” said the
girl, somewhat timidly; and then she added: “But you have not decided
yet, Mr. Ingram, what you will do to-day. It is too clear for the salmon
fishing. Will you go over to Meavig and show Mr. Lavender the Bay of Uig
and the seven hunters?”

“Surely we must show him Borvapost first, Sheila,” said Ingram. “He saw
nothing of it last night in the dark, and I think if you offered to take
Mr. Lavender around in your boat, and show him what a clever sailor you
are, he would prefer that to walking over the hill.”

“I can take you all around in the boat, certainly,” said the girl, with
a quick blush of pleasure; and forthwith a message was sent to Duncan
that cushions should be taken down to the Maighdean-mhara, the little
vessel of which Sheila was both skipper and pilot.

How beautiful was the fair sea-picture that lay around them as the
Maighdean-mhara stood out to the mouth of Loch Roag on this bright
Summer morning! Sheila sat in the stern of the small boat, her hand on
the tiller. Lufrath lay at her feet, his nose between the long and
shaggy paws. Duncan, grave and watchful as to the wind and the points of
the coast, sat amidships, with the sheets of the mainsail held fast, and
superintended the seamanship of his young mistress with a respectful but
most evident pride. And as Ingram had gone off with Mackenzie to walk
over the White Water before going down to Borvapost, Frank Lavender was
Sheila’s sole companion out in this wonderland of rock and sea and blue
sky.

He did not talk much to her, and she was so well occupied with the boat
that he could regard with impunity the shifting lights and graces of her
face and all the wonder and winning depths of her eyes. The sea was blue
around them; the sky overhead had not a speck of cloud in it; the white
sand-bays, the green stretches of pasture and the far and spectral
mountains trembled in a haze of sunlight. Then there was all the delight
of the fresh and cool wind, the hissing of the water along the boat, and
the joyous rapidity with which the small vessel, lying over a little,
ran through the crisply curling waters, and brought into view the newer
wonders of the opening sea.

Was it not all a dream, that he should be sitting by the side of this
sea-princess, who was attended only by her deerhound and the tall
keeper? And if a dream, why should it not go on forever? To live forever
in this magic land--to have the princess herself carry him in this
little boat into the quiet bays of the islands, or out at night, in the
moonlight, on the open sea--to forget forever the godless South and its
social phantasmagoria, and live in this beautiful and distant solitude,
with the solemn secrets of the hills and the moving deep forever present
to the imagination, might not that be a nobler life? And some day or
other he would take this island-princess up to London, and he would bid
the women that he knew--the scheming mothers and the doll-like
daughters--stand aside from before this perfect work of God. She would
carry with her the mystery of the sea in the deeps of her eyes, and the
music of the far hills would be heard in her voice, and all the
sweetness and purity and brightness of the clear Summer skies would be
mirrored in her innocent soul. She would appear in London as some
wild-plumaged bird hailing from distant climes, and before she had lived
there long enough to grow sad, and have the weight of the city cloud the
brightness of her eyes, she would be spirited away again into this
strange sea-kingdom, where there seemed to be perpetual sunshine and the
light music of the waves.

Poor Sheila! She little knew what was expected of her, or the sort of
drama into which she was being thrown as a central figure. She little
knew that she, a simple Highland girl, was being transformed into a
wonderful creature of romance, who was to put to shame the gentle dames
and maidens of London society, and do many other extraordinary things.
But what would have appeared the most extraordinary of all these
speculations, if she had only known of them, was the assumption that she
would marry Frank Lavender. _That_ the young man had quite naturally
taken for granted; but, perhaps, only as a basis for his imaginative
scenes. In order to do these fine things she would have to be married to
somebody, and why not to himself? Think of the pride he would have in
leading this beautiful girl, with her quaint manners and fashion of
speech, into a London drawing-room! Would not every one wish to know
her? Would not everyone listen to her singing of those Gaelic songs?
for, of course, she must sing well. Would not all his artist friends be
anxious to paint her? and she would go to the Academy to convince the
loungers there how utterly the canvas had failed to catch the light and
dignity and sweetness of her face.

When Sheila spoke he started.

“Did you not see it?”

“What?”

“The seal; it rose for a moment just over there,” said the girl, with a
great interest visible in her eyes.

The beautiful dreams he had been dreaming were considerably shattered by
this interruption. How could a fairy princess be so interested in some
common animal showing its head out of the sea? It also occurred to him,
just at this moment, that if Sheila and Mairi went out in this boat by
themselves, they must be in the habit of hoisting up the mainsail; and
was such rude and coarse work befitting the character of a princess?

“He looks very like a black man in the water, when his head comes up,”
said Sheila--“when the water is smooth, so that you will see him look at
you. But I have not told you yet about the Black Horse that
Alister-nan-Each saw at Loch Suainabhal one night. Loch Suainabhal, that
is inland and fresh water--so it was not a seal; but Alister was going
along the shore, and he saw it lying up by the road, and he looked at it
for a long time. It was quite black, and he thought it was a boat; but
when he came near, he saw it begin to move, and then it went down across
the shore, and splashed into the loch. And it had a head bigger than a
horse, and quite black, and it made a noise as it went down the shore to
the loch.”

“Don’t you think Alister must have been taking a little whisky, Miss
Mackenzie?”

“No, not that, for he came to me just after he will see the beast.”

“And do you really believe he saw such an animal?” said Lavender, with a
smile.

“I do not know,” said the girl, gravely. “Perhaps it was only a fright,
and he imagined he saw it; but I do not know it is impossible there can
be such an animal at Loch Suainabhal. But that is nothing; it is of no
consequence. But I have seen stranger things than the Black Horse, that
many people will not believe.”

“May I ask what they are?” he said, gently.

“Some other time, perhaps, I will tell you; but there is much
explanation about it, and, you see, we are going in to Borvapost.”

Was this, then, the capital of the small empire over which the princess
ruled? He saw before him but a long row of small huts or hovels,
resembling beehives, which stood above the curve of a white bay, and at
one portion of the bay was a small creek, near which a number of large
boats, bottom upward, lay on the beach. What odd little dwellings those
were! The walls, a few feet high, were built of rude blocks of stone or
slices of turf, and from those low supports rose a rounded roof of
straw, which was thatched over by a further layer of turf. There were
few windows, and no chimneys at all--not even a hole in the roof. And
what was meant by the two men, who, standing on one of the turf walls,
were busily engaged in digging into the rich brown and black thatch and
heaving it into a cart? Sheila had to explain to him that while she was
doing everything in her power to get the people to suffer the
introduction of windows, it was hopeless to think of chimneys; for by
carefully guarding against the egress of the peat smoke, it slowly
saturated the thatch of the roof, which at certain periods of the year
was then taken off to dress the fields, and a new roof of straw put on.

By this time they had run the Maighdean-mhara--the “Sea Maiden” into a
creek, and were climbing up the steep beach of shingle that had been
worn smooth by the unquiet waters of the Atlantic.

“And will you want to speak to me, Ailasa?” said Sheila, turning to a
small girl who had approached her somewhat diffidently.

She was a pretty little thing, with a round, fair face, tanned by the
sun, brown hair and soft, dark eyes. She was bare-headed, bare-footed
and bare-armed, but she was otherwise smartly dressed, and she held in
her hand an enormous flounder, apparently about half as heavy as
herself.

“Will ye hef the fesh, Miss Sheila,” said the small Ailasa, holding out
the flounder, but looking down all the same.

“Did you catch it yourself, Ailasa?”

“Yes, it wass Donald and me; we wass out in a boat, and Donald had a
line.”

“And it is a present for me?” said Sheila, patting the small head and
its wild and soft hair. “Thank you, Ailasa. But you must ask Donald to
carry it up to the house and give it to Mairi. I cannot take it with me
just now, you know.”

There was a small boy cowering behind one of the upturned boats, and by
his furtive peepings showing that he was in league with his sister.
Ailasa, not thinking that she was discovering his whereabouts, turned
quite naturally in that direction, until she was suddenly stopped by
Lavender, who called to her and put his hand in his pocket. But he was
too late. Sheila had stepped in, and with a quick look, which was all
the protest that was needed, shut her hand over the half crown he had in
his fingers.

“Never mind, Ailasa,” she said. “Go away and get Donald, and bid him
carry the fish up to Mairi.”

Lavender put up the half-crown in his pocket in a somewhat dazed
fashion; what he chiefly knew was that Sheila had for a moment held his
hand in hers, and that her eyes had met his.

Well, that little incident of Ailasa and the flounder was rather
pleasant to him. It did not shock the romantic associations he had begun
to weave around his fair companion. But when they had gone up to the
cottages--Mackenzie and Ingram not yet having arrived--and when Sheila
proceeded to tell him about the circumstances of the fishermen’s lives,
and to explain how such and such things were done in the fields and
pickling-houses, and so forth, Lavender was a little disappointed.
Sheila took him into some of the cottages, or rather hovels, and he
vaguely knew in the darkness that she sat down by the low glow of the
peat-fire, and began to ask the women about all sorts of improvements in
the walls and windows and gardens, and what not. Surely it was not for a
princess to go advising people about particular sorts of soap, or
offering to pay for a pane of glass if the husband of the woman would
make the necessary aperture in the stone-wall. The picture of Sheila
appearing as a sea-princess in a London drawing-room was all very
beautiful in its way, but here she was discussing as to the quality
given to broth by the addition of a certain vegetable which she offered
to send down from her own garden, if the cottager in question would try
to grow it.

“I wonder, Miss Mackenzie,” he said, at length, when they got outside,
his eyes dazed with the light and smarting with the peat-smoke, “I
wonder you can trouble yourself with such little matters, that those
people should find out for themselves.”

The girl looked up with some surprise: “That is the work I have to do.
My papa cannot do everything in the island.”

“But what is the necessity for your bothering yourself about such
things? Surely they ought to be able to look after their own gardens and
houses. It is no degradation--certainly not; for anything you interested
yourself in would become worthy of attention by the very fact--but,
after all, it seems such a pity you should give up your time to these
commonplace details.”

“But some one must do it,” said the girl, quite innocently, “and my papa
has no time. And they will be very good in doing what I ask
them--everyone in the island.”

Was this a willful affectation? he said to himself. Or was she really
incapable of understanding that there was anything incongruous in a
young lady of her position, education and refinement busying herself
with the curing of fish and the cost of lime? He had himself marked the
incongruity long ago, when Ingram had been telling him of the remote and
beautiful maiden whose only notions of the world had been derived from
literature--who was more familiar with the magic land in which Endymion
wandered than with any other--and that at the same time she was about as
good as her father at planning a wooden bridge over a stream. When
Lavender had got outside again--when he found himself walking with her
along the white beach in front of the blue Atlantic--she was again the
princess of his dreams. He looked at her face, and he saw in her eyes
that she must be familiar with all the romantic nooks and glades of
English poetry. The plashing of the waves down there and the music of
her voice recalled the sad legends of the fishermen he hoped to hear her
sing. But ever and anon there occurred a jarring recollection--whether
arising from a contradiction between his notion of Sheila and the actual
Sheila, or whether from some incongruity in itself, he did not stop to
consider. He only knew that a beautiful maiden who had lived by the sea
all her life, and who had followed the wanderings of Endymion in the
enchanted forest, need not have been so particular about a method of
boiling potatoes, or have shown so much interest in a pattern for
children’s frocks.

Mackenzie and Ingram met them. There was the usual “Well, Sheila?”
followed by a thousand questions about the very things she had been
inquiring into. That was one of the odd points about Ingram that puzzled
and sometimes vexed Lavender; for if you are walking home at night it is
inconvenient to be accompanied by a friend who would stop to ask about
the circumstances of some old crone hobbling along the pavement, or who
could, on his own door-step, stop to have a chat with a garrulous
policeman. Ingram was about as odd as Sheila herself in the attention he
paid to those wretched cotters and their doings. He could not advise on
the important subject of broth, but he would have tasted it by way of
discovery, even if it had been presented to him in a tea-cup. He had
already been prowling around the place with Mackenzie. He had inspected
the apparatus in the creek for hauling up the boats. He had visited the
curing houses. He had examined the heaps of fish drying on the beach. He
had drunk whisky with John the Piper and shaken hands with
Alister-nan-Each. And now he had come to tell Sheila that the piper was
bringing down luncheon from Mackenzie’s house, and that after they had
eaten and drunk on the white beach they would put out the
Maighdean-mhara once more to sea, and sail over to Mevaig, that the
stranger might see the wondrous sands of the Bay of Uig.

But it was not in consonance with the dignity of a king that his guests
should eat from off the pebbles, like so many fishermen, and when Mairi
and another girl brought down the baskets, luncheon was placed in the
stern of the small vessel, while Duncan got up the sails and put out
from the stone quay. As for John the Piper, was he insulted for having
been sent on a menial errand? They had scarcely got away from the shore
when the sounds of the pipes were wafted to them from the hillside
above, and it was the “Lament of Mackrimmon” that followed them out to
sea:

    Mackrimmon shall no more return,
    Oh never, never more return!

That was the wild and ominous air that was skirling up on the hillside;
and Mackenzie’s face, as he heard it, grew wroth. “That teffle of a
piper, John!” he said, “will be playing _Cha till mi tuiligh?_”

“It is out of mischief, papa,” said Sheila--“that is all.”

“It will be more than mischief if I burn his pipes and drive him out of
Borva. Then there will be no more of mischief.”

“It is very bad of John to do that,” said Sheila to Lavender, apparently
in explanation of her father’s anger, “for we have given him shelter
here when there will be no more pipes in all the Lewis. It was the Free
Church ministers, they put down the pipes, for there was too much
wildness at the marriages when the pipes would play.”

“And what do the people dance to now?” asked the young gentleman, who
seemed to resent this paternal government.

Sheila laughed in an embarrassed way.

“Miss Mackenzie would rather not tell you,” said Ingram. “The fact is,
the noble mountaineers of these districts have had to fall back on the
Jew’s harp. The ministers allow the instrument to be used--I suppose
because there is a look of piety in the name. But the dancing doesn’t
get very mad when you have two or three young fellows playing a
strathspey on a bit of a trembling wire.”

“That teffle of a piper John!” growled Mackenzie, under his breath; and
so the Maighdean-mhara lightly sped on her way, opening out the various
headlands of the islands, until at last she got into the narrows by
Eilean-Aird-Meinish, and ran up the long arm of the sea to Mevaig.

They landed and went up the rocks. They passed two or three small white
houses overlooking the still, green waters of the sea, and then,
following the line of a river, plunged into the heart of a strange and
lonely district, in which there appeared to be no life. The river track
took them up a green glen, the sides of which were about as sheer as a
railway cutting. There were no trees or bushes about, but the green
pasture along the bed of the valley wore its brightest colors in the
warm sunlight, and far up on the hillsides the browns and crimsons of
the heather and the silver gray of the rocks trembled in the white haze
of the heat. Over that again the blue sky, as still and silent as the
world below.

They wandered on, content with idleness and a fine day. Mr. Mackenzie
was talking with some little loudness, so that Lavender might hear, of
Mr. John Stuart Mill, and was anxious to convey to Ted Ingram that a
wise man, who is responsible for the well-being of his fellow creatures,
will study all sides of all questions, however dangerous. Sheila was
doing her best to entertain the stranger, and he, in a dream of his own,
was listening to the information she gave him. How much of it did he
carry away? He was told that the gray goose built its nest in the rushes
at the edge of lakes; Sheila knew several nests in Borva. Sheila also
caught the young of the wild duck when the mother was guiding them down
the hill-rivulets to the sea. She had tamed many of them, catching them
thus before they could fly. The names of most of the mountains about
here ended in _bhal_, which was a Gaelic corruption of the Norse
_fiall_, a mountain. There were many Norse names all through the Lewis,
but more particularly towards the Butt. The termination _bost_, for
example, at the end of many words, meant an inhabited place, but she
fancied _bost_ was Danish. And did Mr. Lavender know of the legend
connected with the air of _Cha till, cha till mi tuille?_

Lavender started as from a trance, with an impression that he had been
desperately rude. He was about to say that the gray gosling in the
legend could not speak Scandinavian, when he was interrupted by Mr.
Mackenzie turning and asking him if he knew from what ports the English
smacks hailed that came up hither to the cod and the ling fishing for a
couple of months in the autumn. The young man said he did not know.
There were many fishermen at Brighton. And when the King of Borva turned
to Ingram, to see why he was shouting with laughter, Sheila suddenly
announced to the party that before them lay the great Bay of Uig.

It was certainly a strange and impressive scene. They stood on the top
of a lofty range of hills, and underneath them lay a vast semicircle,
miles in extent, of gleaming white sand, that had in by-gone ages been
washed in by the Atlantic. Into this vast plain of silver whiteness the
sea, entering by a somewhat narrow portal, stretched in long arms of a
pale blue. Elsewhere the great crescent of sand was surrounded by a low
line of rocky hill, showing a thousand tints of olive-green and gray and
heather purple; and beyond that again rose the giant bulk of
Mealasabhal, grown pale in the heat, into the Southern sky. There was
not a ship visible along the blue plain of the Atlantic. The only human
habitation to be seen in the strange world beneath them was a solitary
manse. But away toward the summit of Mealasabhal two specks slowly
circled in the air, which Sheila thought were eagles; and far out on the
Western sea, lying like dusky whales in the vague blue, were the Plada
Islands--the remote and unvisited Seven Hunters--whose only inhabitants
are certain flocks of sheep belonging to dwellers on the main land of
Lewis.

The travelers sat down on a low rock of gneiss to rest themselves, and
then and there did the King of Borva recite his grievances and rage
against the English smacks. Was it not enough that they should in
passing steal the sheep, but that they should also, in mere wantonness,
stalk them as deer, wounding them with rifle bullets, and leaving them
to die among the rocks. Sheila said bravely that no one could tell that
it was the English fishermen who did that. Why not the crews of merchant
vessels, who might be of any nation? It was unfair to charge upon any
body of men such a despicable act, when there was no proof of it
whatever.

“Why, Sheila,” said Ingram, with some surprise, “you never doubted
before that it was the English smacks that killed the sheep.”

Sheila cast down her eyes and said nothing.

Was the sinister prophecy of John the Piper to be fulfilled? Mackenzie
was so much engaged in expounding politics to Ingram, and Sheila was so
proud to show her companion all the wonders of Uig, that when they
returned to Mevaig in the evening the wind had altogether gone down and
the sea was as a sea of glass. But if John the Piper had been ready to
foretell for Mackenzie the fate of Mackrimmon, he had taken means to
defeat destiny by bringing over from Borvapost a large and heavy boat
pulled by six rowers. These were not strapping young fellows, clad in
the best blue cloth to be got in Stornoway, but elderly men, gray,
wrinkled, weather-beaten and hard of face, who sat stolidly in the boat
and listened with a sort of bovine gaze to the old hunchback’s wicked
stories and jokes. John was in a mischievous mood, but Lavender, in a
confidential whisper, informed Sheila, that her father would speedily be
avenged on the inconsiderate piper.

“Come, men, sing us a song, quick!” said Mackenzie, as the party took
their seats in the stern and the great oars splashed into the sea of
gold. “Look sharp, John, and no teffle of a drowning song!”

In a shrill, high, querulous voice the piper, who was himself pulling
one of the two stroke oars, began to sing, and then the men behind him
gathering courage, joined in an octave lower, their voices being even
more uncertain and lugubrious than his own. These poor fishermen had not
had the musical education of Clan-Alpine’s warriors. The performance was
not enlivening, and as the monotonous and melancholy sing-song that kept
time to the oars told its story in Gaelic, all that the English
strangers could make out was an occasional reference to Jura or Scarba
or Isla. It was, indeed, the song of an exile shut up in “sea-worn
Mull,” who was complaining of the wearisome look of the neighboring
islands.

“But why do you sing such Gaelic as that, John?” said young Lavender,
confidently. “I should have thought a man in your position--the last of
the Hebridean bards--would have known the classical Gaelic. Don’t you
know the classical Gaelic?”

“There iss only the wan sort of Kâllic, and it is a ferry goot sort of
Kâllic,” said the piper, with some show of petulance.

“Do you mean to tell me you don’t know your own tongue? Do you not know
what the greatest of all the bards wrote about your own island? ‘O et
præsidium et dulce decus meum, _agus_, Tityre tu catulæ recubans sub
tegmine _Styornoway_, Arma virumque cano, _Macklyoda_ et _Borvapost_ sub
tegmine fagi?’”

Not only John the Piper, but all the men behind him, began to look
amazed and sorely troubled; and all the more so that Ingram--who had
picked up more Gaelic words than his friend--came to his assistance, and
began to talk to him in this unknown tongue. They heard references in
the conversation to persons and things with which they were familiar in
their own language, but still accompanied by much more they could not
understand.

The men now began to whisper awe-stricken questions to each other, and
at last John the Piper could not restrain his curiosity. “What in the
name of Kott is tat sort of Kâllic?” he asked, with some look of fear in
his eyes.

“You are not such a student, John,” said Lavender, carelessly, “but
still a man in your position should know something of your own language.
A bard, a poet, and not know the classical form of your own tongue!”

“Is it ta Welsh Kâllic?” cried John, in desperation, for he knew that
the men behind him would carry the story of his ignorance all over
Borvapost.

“The Welsh Gaelic? No. I see you will have to go to school again.”

“There iss no more Kâllic in ta schools,” said the piper, eagerly
seizing the excuse. “It iss Miss Sheila; she will hef put away all ta
Kâllic from ta schools.”

“But you were born half a century before Miss Sheila; how is it that you
neglected to learn that form of Gaelic that has been sacred to the use
of the bards and poets since the time of Ossian?”

There were no more quips or cranks for John the Piper during the rest
of the pull home. The wretched man relapsed into a moody silence and
worked methodically at his oar, brooding over this mysterious language
of which he had not even heard. As for Lavender, he turned to Mackenzie
and begged to know what he thought of affairs in France.

And so they sailed back to Borvapost over the smooth water that lay like
a lake of gold. Was it not a strange sight to see the Atlantic one vast
and smooth yellow plain under the great glow of saffron that spread
across the regions of the sunset? It was a world of light, unbroken but
by the presence of a heavy coaster that had anchored in the Bay, and
that sent a long line of trembling black down on the perfect mirror of
the sea. As they got near the shore, the portions that were in shadow
showed with a strange distinctness the dark green of the pasture and the
sharp outlines of the rocks; and there was a cold scent of sea-weed in
the evening air. The six heavy oars plashed into the smooth bay. The big
boat was moored to the quay, and its passengers landed once more in
Borva. And when they turned, on their way home, to look from the brow of
the hill, on which Sheila had placed a garden seat, lo! all the West was
on fire, the mountains in the South had grown dark on their Eastern
side, and the plain of the sea was like a lake of blood, with the heavy
hull and masts of the coaster grown large and solemn and distant. There
was scarcely a ripple around the rocks at their feet to break the
stillness of the approaching twilight.

So another day had passed, devoid of adventure or incident. Lavender had
not rescued his wonderful princess from an angry sea, nor had he shown
prowess in slaying a dozen stags, nor in any way distinguished himself.
To all outward appearance the relations of the party were the same at
night as they had been in the morning. But the greatest crises of life
steal on us imperceptibly, and have sometimes occurred and wound us in
their consequences before we know. The memorable things in a man’s
career are not always marked by some sharp convulsion. The youth does
not necessarily marry the girl whom he happens to fish out of a
mill-pond; his life may be far more definitely shaped for him at a
prosaic dinner-table, where he fancies he is only thinking of the wines.
We are indeed but as children seated on the shore, watching the ripples
that come on to our feet; and while the ripples unceasingly repeat
themselves, and while the hour that passes is but as the hour before it,
constellation after constellation has gone by over our heads unheeded,
and we wake with a start to find ourselves in a new day, with all our
former life cut off from us and become as a dream.




CHAPTER V.

SHEILA SINGS.


A knocking at Ingram’s door.

“Well, what’s the matter?”

“Will ye be goin’ to ta fishin’, Mr. Ingram?”

“Is that you, Duncan? How the devil have you got over from Mevaig at
this hour of the morning?”

“Oh, there wass a bit breeze tis morning, and I hef prought over ta
Maighdean-mhara. And there iss a very good ripple on ta water, if you
will tak ta other gentleman to try for ta salmon.”

“All right. Hammer at his door until he gets up. I shall be ready in ten
minutes.”

About half an hour thereafter the two young men were standing at the
front of Mackenzie’s house examining the enormous rod that Duncan had
placed against the porch. It was still early morning, and there was a
cold wind blowing in from the sea, but there was not a speck of cloud in
the sky, and the day promised to be hot. The plain of the Atlantic was
no longer a sheet of glass; it was rough and gray, and far out an
occasional quiver of white showed where a wave was hissing over. There
was not much of a sea on, but the heavy wash of the water around the
rocks and sandy bays could be distinctly heard in the silence of the
morning.

And what was this moving object down there by the shore where the
Maighdean-mhara lay at anchor? Both the young men at once recognized the
glimmer of the small white feather and the tightly-fitting blue dress of
the sea-princess.

“Why, there is Sheila!” cried Ingram. “What in all the world is she
about at such an hour?”

At this moment Duncan came out with a book of flies in his hand, and he
said in rather a petulant way, “And it iss no wonder Miss Sheila will be
out. And it was Miss Sheila herself will tell me to see if you will go
to ta White Water and try for a salmon.”

“And she is bringing up something from the boat; I must go and carry it
for her,” said Lavender, making down the path to the shore with the
speed of a deer.

When Sheila and he came up the hill, there was a fine color in the
girl’s face from her morning’s exertions, but she was not disposed to go
in-doors to rest. On the contrary, she was soon engaged in helping Mairi
to bring in some coffee to the parlor, while Duncan cut slices of ham
and cold beef big enough to have provisioned a fishing-boat bound for
Caithness. Sheila had had her breakfast; so she devoted all her time to
waiting upon her guests, until Lavender could scarcely eat through the
embarrassment produced by her noble servitude. Ingram was not so
sensitive, and made a very good meal indeed.

“Where’s your father, Sheila?” said Ingram, when the last of their
preparations had been made and they were about to start for the river.
“Isn’t he up yet?”

“My father?” said the girl, with the least possible elevation of her
eyebrows--“he will be down at Borvapost an hour ago. And I hope that
John the Piper will not see him this morning. But we must make haste,
Mr. Ingram, for the wind will fall when the sun gets stronger, and then
your friend will have no more of the fishing.”

So they set out, and Ingram put Sheila’s hand on his arm, and took her
along with him in that fashion, while the tall gillie walked behind with
Lavender, who was or was not pleased with the arrangement. The young
man, indeed, was a trifle silent, but Duncan was in an amiable and
communicative mood, and passed the time in telling him stories of the
salmon he had caught, and of the people who had tried to catch them and
failed. Sheila and Ingram certainly went a good pace up the hill and
around the summit of it, and down again into the valley of the White
Water. The light step of the girl seemed to be as full of spring as the
heather on which she trod; and as for her feet getting wet, the dew must
have soaked them long ago. She was in the brightest of spirits. Lavender
could hear her laughing in a low, pleased fashion, and then presently
her head would be turned up toward her companion, and all the light of
some humorous anecdote would appear in her face and in her eloquent
eyes, and it would be Ingram’s turn to break out into one of those
short, abrupt laughs that had something sardonic in them.

But hark! From the other side of the valley comes another sound, the
faint and distant skirl of the pipes, and yonder is the white-haired
hunchback, a mere speck in a waste of brown and green morass. What is he
playing to himself now?

“He is a foolish fellow, that John,” said the tall keeper, “for if he
comes down to Borvapost this morning, it iss Mr. Mackenzie will fling
his pipes in ta sea, and he will haf to go away and work in ta
steamboat. He iss a very foolish fellow; and it wass him tat wass goin’
in ta steamboat before, and he went to a tailor in Styornoway, and he
said to him, ‘I want a pair o’ troosers.’ And the tailor said to him,
‘What sort o’ troosers iss it you will want?’ And he said to him, ‘I
want a pair o’ troosers for a steamboat.’ A pair o’ troosers for a
steamboat!--he is a teffle of a foolish fellow. And it wass him that
went in ta steamboat with a lot o’ freens o’ his, that wass a goin’ to
Skye to a big weddin’ there; and it wass a very bad passage, and when
tey got into Portree, the captain said to him, ‘John, where iss all your
freens that tey do not come ashore?’ And he said to him, ‘I hef peen
down below, sir, and four-thirds o’ ta whole o’ them are a’
half-troonded and sick and tead.’ Four-thirds o’ ta whole o’ them! And
he iss just the ferry man to laugh at every other pody when it iss a
mistake you will make in ta English.”

“I suppose,” said Lavender, “you found it rather difficult to learn good
English?”

“Well, sir, I hefna got ta good English yet. But Miss Sheila she has put
away all the Gaelic from the schools, and the young ones they will learn
more of ta good English after that.”

“I wish I knew as much Gaelic as you know English,” said the young man.

“Oh, you will soon learn. It iss ferry easy if you will only stay in ta
island.”

“It would take me several months to pick it up, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes--nine or six--that will do,” said Duncan. “You will begin to
learn ta names o’ ta Islands and ta places. There now, as far as you can
see is ta Seann Bheinn; and it means ta old hill. And there is a rock
there; it is Stac-nan-Balg--”

Here Duncan looked rather perplexed.

“Yes,” said Lavender; “what does that mean?”

“It means--it means,” said Duncan, in still greater perplexity, and
getting a little impatient, “it means--_stac_, tat iss a steep rock;
Stac-nan-Balg--it means--well, sir, _it is ower deep for ta English_.”

The tone of mortification in which Duncan uttered these words warned
Lavender that his philological studies might as well cease; and indeed
Sheila and Ingram had by this time reached the banks of the White Water,
and were waiting Duncan and his majestic rod.

It was much too bright and pleasant a morning for good fishing, but
there was a fair ripple on the pools of the stream where ever and anon a
salmon fresh run from the sea would leap into the air, showing a
gleaming curve of silver to the sunlight. The splash of the big fish
seemed an invitation, and Duncan was all anxiety to teach the stranger,
who, as he fancied, knew nothing about throwing a fly. Ingram lay down
on a rock some little distance back from the banks, and put his hands
beneath his head and watched the operations going forward. But was it
really Duncan who was to teach the stranger? It was Sheila who picked
out flies for him. It was Sheila who held the rod while he put them on
the line. It was Sheila who told where the bigger salmon usually
lay--under the opposite bank of the broad and almost lake-like pool into
which the small but rapid White Water came tumbling and foaming down its
narrow channel of rocks and stones.

Then Sheila waited to see her pupil begin. He had evidently a little
difficulty about the big double-handed rod, a somewhat more formidable
engine of destruction than the supple little thing with which he had
whipped the streams of Devonshire and Cornwall.

The first cast sent both flies and a lump of line tumbling on to the
pool, and would have driven the boldest of salmon out of its wits. The
second pretty nearly took a piece out of Ingram’s ear, and made him
shift his quarters with rapidity. Duncan gave him up in despair. The
third cast dropped both flies with the lightness of a feather in the
running waters of the other side of the pool; and the next second there
was a slight wave along the surface, a dexterous jerk with the butt, and
presently the line was whirled out into the middle of the pool, running
rapidly off the reel from the straining rod.

“Plenty o’ line, sir, plenty o’ line!” shouted Duncan, in a wild fever
of anxiety, for the fish had plunged suddenly.

Ingram had come running down to the bank. Sheila was all excitement and
interest as she stood and watched every slackening or tightening of the
line as the fish went up the pool and down the pool, and crossed the
current in his efforts to escape. The only self-possessed person,
indeed, was Lavender himself, who presently said, “Miss Mackenzie, won’t
you take the rod now and have the honor of landing him? I don’t think he
will show much more fight.”

At this moment, however, the line slackened suddenly, and the fish threw
himself clean out of the water, turning a complete somersault. It was a
dangerous moment, but the captive was well hooked, and in his next
plunge Lavender was admonished by Duncan to keep a good strain on him.

“I will take the second one,” Sheila promised, “if you like; but you
must surely land your first salmon yourself.”

I suppose nobody but a fisherman can understand the generosity of the
offer made by the young man. To have hooked your first salmon--to have
its first wild rushes and plunges safely over--and to offer to another
the delight of bringing him victoriously to bank! But Sheila knew. And
what could have surpassed the cleverness with which he had hooked the
fish, and the coolness and courage he showed throughout the playing of
him, except this more than royal offer on the part of the young hero?

The fish was losing strength. All the line had been got in, although the
forefinger of the fisherman felt the pulse of his captive, as it were,
ready for any expiring plunge. They caught occasional glimpses of a
large white body gliding through the ruddy-brown water. Duncan was down
on his knees more than once, with the landing-net in his hand, but again
and again the big fish would sheer off, with just such indications of
power as to make his conqueror cautious. At length he was guided slowly
in to the bank. Behind him the landing-net was gently let into the
water--then a quick forward movement, and a fourteen pounder was scooped
up and flung upon the bank, landing-net and all. “Hurrah!” cried Ingram,
and Lavender blushed like a school-girl; and Sheila, quite naturally and
without thinking, shook hands with him and said, “I congratulate you;”
and there was more congratulation in her glad eyes than in that simple
little gesture.

It was a good beginning, and of course the young man was very much
pleased to show Sheila that he was no mere lily-fingered idler about
town. He buckled to his work in earnest. With a few more casts he soon
got into the way of managing the big rod; and every time the flies fell
lightly on the other side of the pool, to be dragged with gentle jerks
across the foaming current of the stream. Ingram went back to his couch
on the rock. He lay and watched the monotonous flinging back of the long
rod, the light whistle of the line through the air, and the careful
manipulation of the flies through the water. Or was it something else
that he was watching--something that awakened in his mind a sudden sense
of surprise and fear, and a new and strange consciousness that he had
been guiltily remiss?

Sheila was wholly pre-occupied with her companion and his efforts. He
had had one or two rises, but had struck either too soon or too late,
until at last there was a terrific plunge and rush, and again the line
was whirled out. But Duncan did not like the look of it somehow. The
fish had been sheering off when it was hooked, and the deep plunge at
the outset was ugly.

“Now will you take the rod?” said Lavender to Sheila.

But before she could answer the fish had come rushing up to the surface,
and had thrown itself out of the water, so that it fell on the opposite
bank. It was a splendid animal, and Duncan, despite his doubts, called
out to Lavender to slacken his hold. There was another spring into the
air, the fish fell with a splash into the water, and the line was flying
helplessly into the air with the two flies floating about.

“Ay,” said Duncan, with a sigh, “it wass foul-hooked. It wass no chance
of catching him whatever.”

Lavender was most successful next time, however, with a pretty little
grilse of about half a dozen pounds, that seemed to have in him the
spirit and fight of a dozen salmon. How he rushed and struggled, how he
plunged and sulked, how he burrowed along the banks, and then ran out to
the middle of the pool, and then threw himself into the air, with the
line apparently, but not really, doubling up under him. All these things
can only be understood by the fisherman who has played in a Highland
stream a wild and powerful little grilse fresh in from the salt water.
And it was Sheila who held him captive, who humored him when he sulked,
and gently guided him away from dangerous places, and kept him well in
hand when he tried to cross the current, until at last, all the
fierceness gone out of him, he let himself be tenderly inveigled into
the side of the pool, where Duncan, by a dexterous movement, surrounded
him with network and placed his shining body among the bright green
grass.

But Ingram was not so overjoyed this time. He complimented Sheila in a
friendly way, but he was rather grave, and obviously did not care for
this business of fishing. And so Sheila, fancying that he was rather
dull because he was not joining in the sport, proposed that he should
walk back to the house with her, leaving Mr. Lavender with Duncan. And
Ingram was quite ready to do so.

But Lavender protested that he cared very little for salmon-fishing. He
suggested that they should all go back together. The sun was killing the
wind, and soon the pools would be as clear as glass. Had they not better
try in the afternoon, when, perhaps, the breeze would freshen? And so
they walked back to the house.

On the garden-seat a book lay open. It was Mr. Mill’s “Essay on
Liberty,” and it had evidently been left there by Mr. Mackenzie,
perhaps--who knows?--to hint to his friends from the South that he was
familiar with the problems of the age. Lavender winked to Ingram, but
somehow his companion seemed in no humor for a joke.

They had luncheon then, and after luncheon Ingram touched Lavender on
the shoulder, and said, “I want to have a word with you privately. Let’s
walk down to the shore.”

And so they did; and when they had got some little distance from the
house, Ingram said: “Look here, Lavender. I mean to be frank with you. I
don’t think it fair that you should try to drag Sheila Mackenzie into a
flirtation. I knew you would fall in love with her. For a week or two,
that does not matter--it harms no one. But I never thought of the chance
of her being led into such a thing, for what is a mere passing amusement
to you would be a very serious thing to her.”

“Well?”

“Well? Is not that enough? Do you think it fair to take advantage of
this girl’s innocence of the world?”

Lavender stopped in the middle of the path, and said, somewhat stiffly,
“This may be as well settled at once. You have talked of flirtation and
all that sort of thing. You may regard it as you please, but before I
leave this island I mean to ask Sheila Mackenzie to be my wife.”

“Why, you are mad!” cried Ingram, amazed to see that the young man was
perfectly serious.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you mean to say,” continued Ingram, “that even supposing Sheila
would consent--which is impossible--you would try to take away that girl
from her father?”

“Girls must leave their fathers sometime or other,” said Lavender,
somewhat sullenly.

“Not unless they are asked.”

“Oh, well, they are sure to be asked, and they are sure to go. If their
mothers had not done so before them, where would they be? It’s all very
well for you to talk about it, and argue it out as a theory, but I know
what the facts of the case are, and what any man in my position would
do; and I know that I am careless of any consequences, so long as I can
secure her for my wife.”

“Apparently you are--careless of any consequences to herself or those
about her.”

“But what is your objection, Ingram?” said the young man, suddenly
abandoning his defiant manner; “why should you object? Do you think I
would make a bad husband to the woman I married?”

“I believe nothing of the sort. I believe you would make a very good
husband, if you were to marry a woman whom you know something about, and
whom you had really learned to love and respect through your knowledge
of her. I tell you, you know nothing about Sheila Mackenzie as yet. If
you were to marry her to-morrow, you would discover in six months she
was a woman wholly different from what you had expected.”

“Very well, then,” said Lavender, with an air of triumph; “you can’t
deny this; you think so much of her that the real woman I would discover
must be better than the one I imagine; and so you don’t expect I shall
be disappointed?”

“If you marry Sheila Mackenzie you will be disappointed--not through her
fault, but your own. Why, a more preposterous notion never entered a
man’s head! She knows nothing of your friends or your ways of life; you
know nothing of hers. She would be miserable in London, even if you
could persuade her father to go with her, which is the most unlikely
thing in the world. Do give up this foolish idea, like a good fellow,
and do it before Sheila is dragged into a flirtation that may have the
most serious consequences to her.”

Lavender would not promise, but all that afternoon various resolutions
and emotions were struggling within him for mastery, insomuch that
Duncan could not understand the blundering way in which he whipped the
pools. Mackenzie, Sheila and Ingram had gone off to pay a visit to an
old crone who lived in a neighboring island, and in whom Ingram had been
much interested a few years before; so that Lavender had an opportunity
of practicing the art of salmon-fishing without interruptions. But all
the skill he had shown in the morning seemed to have deserted him; and
at last he gave the rod to Duncan, and sitting down on a top-coat flung
on the wet heather, indolently watched the gillie’s operations.

Should he at once fly from temptation and return to London? Would it not
be heroic to leave this old man in possession of his only daughter?
Sheila would never know of the sacrifice, but what of that? It might be
for her happiness that he should go.

But when a young man is in love, or fancies himself in love, with a
young girl, it is hard for him to persuade himself that anybody else can
make her as happy as he might. Who could be so tender to her, so
watchful over her, as himself? He does not reflect that her parents have
had the experience of years in taking care of her, while he would be a
mere novice at the business. The pleasure with which he regards the
prospect of being constantly with her he transfers to her, and she seems
to demand it of him as a duty that he should confer upon her this new
happiness.

Lavender met Sheila in the evening, and he was yet undecided. Sometimes
he fancied, when their eyes met unexpectedly, that there was something
wistful as well as friendly in her look; was she, too, dreaming of the
vague possibilities of the future? This was strange, too, that after
each of these little chance reveries she seemed to be moved by a
resolution to be more than usually affectionate toward her father, and
would go around the table and place her hand on his shoulder and talk
to him. Perhaps these things were but delusions begotten of his own
imaginings, but the possibility of their being real agitated him not a
little, and he scarcely dared to think what might follow.

That evening Sheila sang, and all his half-formed resolutions vanished
into air. He sat in a corner of the curious, dimly-lit and old-fashioned
chamber, and, lying back in the chair, abandoned himself to dreams as
Sheila sang the mystic songs of the Northern coast. There was something
strangely suggestive of the sea in the room itself, and all her songs
were of the sea. It was a smaller room than the large apartment in which
they had dined, and it was filled with curiosities from distant shores,
and with the strange captures made by the Borva fishermen. Everywhere,
too, were the trophies of Mackenzie’s skill with rod and rifle. Deer’s
horns, seal skins, stuffed birds, salmon in glass cases, masses of
coral, enormous shells, and a thousand similar things made the little
drawing-room a sort of grotto; but it was a grotto within hearing of the
sound of the sea, and there was no musty atmosphere in a room that was
open all day to the cold winds of the Atlantic.

With a smoking tumbler of whisky and water before him, the King of Borva
sat at the table, poring over a large volume containing plans for
bridges. Ingram was seated at the piano in continual consultation with
Sheila about her songs. Lavender, in the dusky corner, lay and listened,
with all sorts of fancies crowding in upon him as Sheila sang of the sad
and wild legends of her home. Was it by chance, then, he asked himself,
that these songs seemed so frequently to be the lamentation of a
Highland girl for a fair-haired lover beyond the sea? First of all, she
sang the “Wail of Dunevegan,” and how strangely her voice thrilled with
the sadness of the song!--

    Morn, oh mantle thy smiles of gladness!
    Night, oh come with thy clouds of sadness!
    Earth, thy pleasures to me seem madness!
    Macleod, my leal love, since thou art gone.
          Dunevegan, oh! Dunevegan, oh!
          Dunevegan! Dunevegan!

It was as in a dream that he heard Ingram talking in a matter-of-fact
way about the airs, and asking the meaning of certain lines of Gaelic to
compare them with the stiff and old-fashioned phrases of the
translation. Surely this girl must have sat by the shore and waited for
her absent lover, or how could she sing with such feeling?--

    Say, my love, why didst thou tarry
          Far over the deep sea?
    Knew’st thou not my heart was weary,
    Heard’st thou not how I sighed for thee?
    Did no light wind bear my wild despair
          Far over the deep sea?

He could imagine that beautiful face grown pale and wild with anguish.
And then some day, as she went along the lonely island, with all the
light of hope gone out of her eyes, and with no more wistful glances
cast across the desolate sea, might not the fair-haired lover come at
last, and leap ashore to clasp her in his arms, and hide the
wonder-stricken eyes and the glad face in his bosom? But Sheila sang of
no such meeting. The girl was always alone, her lover gone away from her
across the sea or into the wilds.

    Oh long on the mountain he tarries, he tarries:
      Why tarries the youth with the bright yellow hair?
    Oh long on the mountain he tarries, he tarries:
      Why seeks he the hill when his flock is not there?

That was what he heard her sing, until it seemed to him that her singing
was a cry to be taken away from these melancholy surroundings of sea and
shore, and carried to the secure and comfortable South, to be cherished
and tended and loved. Why should this girl be left to live a cruel life
up in these wilds, and to go through this world without knowing anything
of the happy existence that might have been hers? It was well for harder
and stronger natures to withstand the buffetings of wind and rain, and
be indifferent to the melancholy influences of the lonely sea and the
darkness of the Northern winters; but for her--for this beautiful,
sensitive, tender-hearted girl--surely some other and gentler fate was
in store. What he, at least, could do, he would. He would lay his life
at her feet; and if she chose to go away from this bleak and cruel home
to the sunnier South, would not he devote himself, as never a man had
given himself to a woman before, to the constant duty of enriching her
life with all the treasures of admiration and respect and love?

It was getting late, and Sheila retired. As she bade “good night” to
him, Lavender fancied her manner was a little less frank toward him than
usual, and her eyes were cast down. All the light of the room seemed to
go with her when she went.

Mackenzie mixed another tumbler of toddy, and began to expound to
Ingram his views upon deer-forests and sheep-farms. Ingram lit a cigar,
stretched out his legs and proceeded to listen with much complacent
attention. As for Lavender, he sat awhile, hearing vaguely the sounds of
his companions’ voices, and then, saying he was a trifle tired, he left
and went to his own room. The moon was then clearly shining over
Suainabhal, and a pathway of glimmering light lay across Loch Roag.

He went to bed, but not to sleep. He had resolved to ask Sheila
Mackenzie to be his wife, and a thousand conjectures as to the future
were floating about his imagination. In the first place, would she
listen to his prayer? She knew nothing of him beyond what she might have
heard from Ingram. He had had no opportunity, during their friendly
talking, of revealing to her what he thought of herself; but might she
not have guessed it? Then her father--what action might not this
determined old man take in the matter? Would his love for his daughter
prompt him to consider her happiness alone?

All these things, however, were mere preliminaries, and the imagination
of the young man soon overleapt them. He began to draw pictures of
Sheila as his wife in their London home, among his friends, at Hastings,
at Ascot, in Hyde Park. What would people say of the beautiful
sea-princess with the proud air, the fearless eye and the gentle and
musical voice? Hour after hour he lay and could not sleep; a fever of
anticipation, of fear and hope combined, seemed to stir in his blood and
throb in his brain. At last, in a paroxysm of unrest, he rose, hastily
dressed himself, stole down stairs, and made his way out into the cool
air of the night.

It could not be the coming dawn that revealed to him the outlines of the
shore and the mountains and the loch? The moon had already sunk in the
Southwest; not from her came that strange clearness by which all these
objects were defined. Then the young man bethought him of what Sheila
had said of the twilight in these latitudes, and, turning to the North,
he saw there a pale glow which looked as if it were the last faint
traces of some former sunset. All over the rest of the heavens something
of the same metallic clearness reigned, so that the stars were pale, and
a gray hue lay over the sea, and over the island, the white bays, the
black rocks and the valleys, in which lay a scarcely perceptible mist.

He left the house and went vaguely down to the sea. The cold air,
scented strongly with the seaweed, blew about him, and was sweet and
fresh on the lips and the forehead. How strange was the monotonous sound
of the waves, mournful and distant, like the sound in a sea-shell! That
alone spoke in the awful stillness of the night, and it seemed to be
telling of those things which the silent stars and the silent hills had
looked down on for ages and ages. Did Sheila really love this terrible
thing, with its strange voice talking in the night, or did she not
secretly dread it and shudder at it when she sang of all that old
sadness? There was ringing in his ears the “Wail of Dunevegan” as he
listened for a while to the melancholy plashing of the waves all around
the lonely shores; and there was a cry of “Dunevegan, oh! Dunevegan,
oh!” weaving itself curiously with those wild pictures of Sheila in
London, which were still floating before his imagination.

He walked away around the coast, seeing almost nothing of the objects
around him, but conscious of the solemn majesty of the mountains and the
stillness of the throbbing stars. He could have called aloud, “Sheila!
Sheila!” but that all the place seemed associated with her presence; and
might he not turn suddenly to find her figure standing by him, with her
face grown wild and pale as it was in the ballad, and a piteous and
awful look in her eyes? He scarcely dared look around, lest there should
be a phantom Sheila appealing to him for compassion, and complaining
against him with her speechless eyes for a wrong that he could not
understand. He fled from her, but he knew that she was there; and all
the love in his heart went out to her as if beseeching her to go away
and forsake him, and forgive him the injury of which she seemed to
accuse him. What wrong had he done her that he should be haunted by this
spectre, that did not threaten, but only looked piteously toward him
with eyes full of entreaty and pain?

He left the shore, and blindly made his way up to the pasture-land
above, careless whither he went. He knew not how long he had been away
from the house, but here was a small fresh-water lake set around about
with rushes, and far over there in the East lay a glimmer of the
channels between Borva and Lewis. But soon there was another light in
the East, high over the low mists that lay along the land. A pale
blue-gray arose in the cloudless sky, and the stars went out one by
one. The mists were seen to lie in thicker folds along the desolate
valleys. Then a faintly yellow-whiteness stole up into the sky, and
broadened and widened, and, behold! the little moorland loch caught a
reflection of the glare, and there was a streak of crimson here and
there on the dark-blue surface of the water. Loch Roag began to
brighten. Suainabhal was touched with rose-red on its Eastern slopes.
The Atlantic seemed to rise out of its purple sleep with the new light
of a new dawn; and then there was a chirruping of birds over the heath,
and the first shafts of the sunlight ran along the surface of the sea,
and lit up the white wavelets that were breaking on the beach. The new
day struck upon him with a strange sense of wonder. Where was he?
Whither had gone the wild visions of the night, the feverish dread, the
horrible forebodings? The strong mental emotion that had driven him out
now produced its natural reaction; he looked about in a dazed fashion at
the revelation of light around him, and felt himself trembling with
weakness. Slowly, blindly, and hopelessly he set to walk back across the
island, with the sunlight of the fresh morning calling into life ten
thousand audible things of the moorland around him.

And who was this that stood at the porch of the house in the clear
sunshine? Not the pale and ghastly creature who had haunted him during
those wild hours, but Sheila herself, singing some snatches of a song,
and engaged in watering the two bushes of sweet-brier at the gate. How
bright and roseate and happy she looked, with the fine color of her face
lit up by the fresh sunlight, and the brisk breeze from the sea stirring
now and again the loose masses of her hair! Haggard and faint as he was,
he would have startled her if he had gone up to her then. He dared not
approach her. He waited until she had gone around to the gable of the
house to water the plants there, and then he stole into the house and
upstairs, and threw himself upon the bed. And outside he still heard
Sheila singing lightly to herself as she went about her ordinary duties,
little thinking in how strange and wild a drama her wraith had that
night taken part.




PART III.




CHAPTER VI.

AT BARVAS BRIDGE.


Very soon, indeed, Ingram began to see that his friend had spoken to him
quite frankly, and that he was really bent on asking Sheila to become
his wife. Ingram contemplated this prospect with some dismay, and with
some vague consciousness that he was himself responsible for what he
could not help regarding as a disaster. He had half expected that Frank
Lavender would, in his ordinary fashion, fall in love with Sheila--for
about a fortnight. He had joked him about it, even before they came
within sight of Sheila’s home.

He had listened with a grim humor to Lavender’s outbursts of admiration,
and only asked himself how many times he had heard the same phrases
before. But now things were looking more serious, for the young man had
thrown himself into the prosecution of his new project with all the
generous poetic enthusiasm of a highly impulsive nature. Ingram saw that
everything a young man could do to win the heart of a young girl
Lavender would do; and Nature had dowered him richly with various means
of fascination. Most dangerous of all of these was a gift of sincerity
that deceived himself. He could assume an opinion or express an emotion
at will, with such genuine fervor that he himself forgot how recently he
had acquired it, and was able to convince his companion for the moment
that it was a revelation of his inmost soul. It was this charm of
impetuous sincerity which had fascinated Ingram himself years before,
and made him cultivate the acquaintance of a young man whom he at first
regarded as a somewhat facile, talkative and histrionic person. Ingram
perceived, for example, that young Lavender had so little regard for
public affairs that he would have been quite content to see our Indian
empire go, for the sake of eliciting a sarcasm from Lord Westbury; but
at the same time, if you had appealed to his nobler instincts, and
placed before him the condition of a certain populace suffering from
starvation, he would have done all in his power to aid them; he would
have written letters to the newspapers, would have headed subscriptions,
and would have ended by believing that he had been the constant friend
of the people of India throughout his life, and was bound to stick to
them to the end of it.

As often as not he borrowed his fancies and opinions from Edward Ingram
himself, who was amused and gratified at the same time to find his
humdrum notions receive a dozen new lights and colors when transferred
to the warmer atmosphere of his friend’s imagination. Ingram would even
consent to receive from his younger companion advice, impetuously urged
and richly illustrated, which he had himself offered in similar terms
months before. At this very moment he could see that much of Lavender’s
romantic conceptions of Sheila’s character was only an exaggeration of
some passing hints he, Ingram, had dropped, as the Clansman was steaming
into Stornoway. But then they were ever so much more beautiful. Ingram
held to his conviction that he himself was a distinctly commonplace
person. He had grown reconciled to the ordinary grooves of life. But
young Lavender was not commonplace; he fancied he could see in him an
occasional flash of something that looked like genius; and many and many
a time, in regarding the brilliant and facile powers, the generous
impulses, and the occasional ambitions of his companion, he wondered
whether these would ever lead to anything in the way of production, or
even of consideration of character, or whether they would merely remain
the passing sensations of an indifferent idler. Sometimes, indeed, he
devoutly wished that Lavender had been born a stonemason.

But all these pleasant and graceful qualities, which had made the young
man an agreeable companion, were a serious danger now; for was it not
but too probable that Sheila, accustomed to the rude and homely ways of
the islanders, would be attracted and pleased and fascinated by one who
had about him so much of a soft and Southern brightness with which she
was wholly unfamiliar? This open-hearted frankness of his placed all his
best qualities in the sunshine, as it were: she could not fail to see
the singular modesty and courtesy of his bearing towards women, his
gentle manners, his light-heartedness, his passionate admiration of the
self-sacrifice of others, and his sympathy with their sufferings! Ingram
would not have minded much if Lavender alone had been concerned in the
dilemma now growing imminent; he would have left him to flounder out as
he had got out of previous ones. But he had been surprised and pained,
and even frightened, to detect in Sheila’s manner some faint
indications--so faint that he was doubtful what construction to put on
them--of a special interest in the young stranger whom he had brought
with him to Borva.

What could he do in the matter supposing his suspicions were correct?
Caution Sheila?--it would be an insult. Warn Mackenzie?--the King of
Borva would fly into passion with everybody concerned, and bring endless
humiliation on his daughter, who had probably never dreamed of regarding
Lavender except as a chance acquaintance. Insist upon Lavender going
South at once?--that would merely goad the young man into obstinacy.
Ingram found himself in a grievous difficulty, afraid to say how much of
it was of his own creation. He had no selfish sentiments of his own to
consult: if it were to become evident that the happiness of Sheila and
of his friend depended on their marrying each other, he was ready to
forward such a project with all the influence at his command. But there
were a hundred reasons why he should dread such a marriage. He had
already mentioned several of them to Lavender in trying to dissuade the
young man from his purpose. A few days had passed since then, and it was
clear that Lavender had abandoned all notion of fulfilling those
resolutions he had vaguely formed. But the more Ingram thought over the
matter, and the further he recalled the ancient proverbs and stories
about the fate of intermeddlers, the more evident it became to him that
he could take no immediate action in the affair. He would trust to the
chapter of accidents to save Sheila from what he considered a disastrous
fate. Perhaps Lavender would repent. Perhaps Mackenzie, continually on
the watch for small secrets, would discover something, and bid his
daughter stay in Borva while his guests proceeded on their tour through
Lewis. In any case, it was not all certain that Lavender would be
successful in his suit. Was the heart of a proud-spirited, intelligent
and busily-occupied girl to be won in a matter of three weeks or a
month? Lavender would go South, and no more would be heard of it.

This tour around the island of Lewis, however, was not likely to favor
much any such easy escape from the difficulty. On a certain morning the
larger of Mr. Mackenzie’s boats carried the holiday party away from
Borva; and, even at this early stage, as they sat at the stern of the
heavy craft, Lavender had arrogated to himself the exclusive right of
waiting upon Sheila. He had constituted himself her companion in all
their excursions about Borva which they had undertaken, and now, on this
longer journey, they were to be once more thrown together. It did seem a
little hard that Ingram should be relegated to Mackenzie and his
theories of government; but did he not profess to prefer that? Like most
men, who have got beyond five-and-thirty, he was rather proud of
considering himself an observer of life. He stood aside, as a spectator,
and let other people, engaged in all manner of eager pursuits, pass
before him for review. Toward young folks, indeed, he assumed a
good-naturedly paternal air, as if they were but, as shy-faced children,
to be humored. Were not their love affairs a pretty spectacle? As for
himself, he was far beyond all that. The illusions of love-making, the
devotion, and ambition, and dreams of courtship were no longer possible
to him, but did they not constitute, on the whole, a beautiful and
charming study, that had about it, at times, some little touches of
pathos? At odd moments, when he saw Sheila and Lavender walking together
in the evening, he was himself half inclined to wish that something
might come of the young man’s determination. It would be so pleasant to
play the part of a friendly counselor, to humor the follies of the young
folks, to make jokes at their expense, and then, in the midst of their
embarrassment and resentment, to go forward and pet them a little, and
assure them of a real and earnest sympathy.

“Your time is to come,” Lavender said to him suddenly after he had been
exhibiting some of his paternal forbearance and consideration; “you will
get a dreadful twist some day, my boy. You have been doing nothing but
dreaming about women, but some day or other you will wake up and find
yourself captured and fascinated beyond anything you have ever seen in
other people, and then you will discover what a desperately real thing
it is.”

Ingram had a misty impression that he had heard something like this
before. Had he not given Lavender some warning of the same kind? But he
was so much accustomed to hear those vague repetitions of his own
remarks, and was, on the whole, so well pleased to think that his
commonplace notions should take root and flourish in this goodly soil,
that he never thought of asking Lavender to quote his authority for
those profound observations on men and things.

“Now, Miss Mackenzie,” said the young man as the big boat was drawing
near to Callernish, “what is to be our first sketch in Lewis?”

“The Callernish Stones, of course,” said Mackenzie himself; “it iss more
than one hass come to the Lewis to see the Callernish Stones.”

Lavender had promised to the King of Borva a series of water-color
drawings of Lewis, and Sheila was to choose the subjects from day to
day. Mackenzie was gratified by this proposal, and accepted it with much
magnanimity; but Sheila knew that before the offer was made Lavender had
come to her and asked her if she cared about sketches, and whether he
might be allowed to take a few on this journey and present them to her.
She was very grateful, but suggested that it might please her papa if
they were given to him. Would she superintend them, then, and choose the
topics for illustration? Yes, she would do that; and so the young man
was furnished with a roving commission.

He brought her a little sepia sketch of Borvapost, its huts, its bay,
and its upturned boats on the beach. Sheila’s expressions of praise, the
admiration and pleasure that shone in her eyes, would have turned any
young man’s head. But her papa looked at the picture with a critical
eye, and remarked, “Oh, yes, it is ferry good, but is not the color of
Loch Roag at all. It is the color of a river where there is a flood of
rain. I have neffer at all seen Loch Roag a brown color--neffer at all.”

It was clear then, that the subsequent sketches could not be taken in
sepia, and so Lavender proposed to make a series of pencil-drawings,
which could be washed in with color afterward. There was one subject,
indeed, which since his arrival in Lewis he had tried to fix on paper by
every conceivable means in his power, and that was Sheila herself. He
had spoiled innumerable sheets of paper in trying to get some likeness
of her which would satisfy himself, but all his usual skill seemed
somehow to have gone from him. He could not understand it. In ordinary
circumstances he could have traced in a dozen lines a portrait that
would at least have shown a superficial likeness: he could have
multiplied portraits by the dozen of old Mackenzie or Ingram or Duncan,
but here he seemed to fail utterly. He invited no criticism, certainly.
These efforts were made in his own room, and he asked no one’s opinion
as to the likeness. He could, indeed, certify to himself that the
drawing of the features was correct enough. There was the sweet and
placid forehead, with its low masses of dark hair; there the short upper
lip, the finely carved mouth, the beautifully-rounded chin and throat;
and there the frank, clear, proud eyes, with their long lashes and
highly-curved eyebrows. Sometimes, too, a touch of color added warmth to
the complexion, put a glimmer of the blue sea beneath the long, black
eyelashes, and drew a thread of scarlet around the white neck.

But was this Sheila? Could he take this sheet of paper to his friends in
London and say, Here is the magical princess whom I hope to bring to you
from the North, with all the glamour of the sea around her? He felt
instinctively that there would be an awkward pause. The people would
praise the handsome, frank, courageous head, and look upon the bit of
red ribbon around the neck as an effective artistic touch. They would
hand him back the paper with a compliment, and he would find himself in
an agony of unrest because they had misunderstood the portrait, and seen
nothing of the wonder that encompassed this Highland girl as if with a
garment of mystery and dreams.

So he tore up portrait after portrait--more than one of which would have
startled Ingram by its truth--and then, to prove to himself that he was
not growing mad, he resolved to try a portrait of some other person. He
drew a head of old Mackenzie in chalk, and was amazed at the rapidity
and facility with which he executed the task. Then there could be no
doubt as to the success of the likeness nor as to the effect of the
picture. The King of Borva, with his heavy eyebrows, his aquiline nose,
his keen gray eyes and flowing beard, offered a fine subject; and there
was something really royal and massive and noble in the head that
Lavender, well satisfied with his work, took down stairs one evening.
Sheila was alone in the drawing-room, turning over some music.

“Miss Mackenzie,” he said, rather kindly, “would you look at this?”

Sheila turned around, and the sudden light of pleasure that leapt to her
face was all the praise and all the assurance he wanted. But he had more
than that. The girl was grateful to him beyond all the words she could
utter; and when he asked her if she would accept the picture, she
thanked him by taking his hand for a moment, and then she left the room
to call in Ingram and her father. All the evening there was a singular
look of happiness on her face. When she met Lavender’s eyes with hers
there was a frank and friendly look of gratitude ready to reward him.
When had he earned so much before by a simple sketch? Many and many a
portrait, carefully executed and elaborately framed, had he presented to
his lady friends in London, to receive from them a pretty note and a few
words of thanks when next he called. Here with a rough chalk sketch he
had awakened an amount of gratitude that almost surprised him, in the
most beautiful and tender soul in this world; and had not this princess
among women taken his hand for a moment as a childlike way of expressing
her thanks, while her eyes spoke more than her lips? And the more he
looked at those eyes, the more he grew to despair of ever being able to
put down the magic of them in lines and colors.

At length, Duncan got the boat into the small creek at Callernish, and
the party got out on the shore. As they were going up the steep path
leading to the plain above, a young girl met them, who looked at them in
rather a strange way. She had a fair, pretty, wondering face, with
singularly high eyebrows, and clear, light blue eyes.

“How are you, Eily?” said Mackenzie, as he passed on with Ingram.

But Sheila, on making the same inquiry, shook hands with the girl, who
smiled in a confidential way, and, coming quite close, nodded and
pointed down to the water’s edge.

“Have you seen them to-day, Eily?” said Sheila, still holding the girl
by the hands, and looking at the fair, pretty, strange face.

“It wass sa day before yesterday,” she answered, in a whisper, while a
pleased smile appeared on her face, “and sey will be here sa night.”

“Good-bye, Eily; take care you don’t stay out at night and catch cold,
you know,” said Sheila; and then, with another little nod and a smile,
the young girl went down the path.

“It is Eily of-the-Ghosts, as they call her,” said Sheila to Lavender as
they went on; “the poor thing fancies she sees little people about the
rocks, and watches for them. But she is very good and quiet, and she is
not afraid of them, and she does no harm to any one. She does not belong
to the Lewis--I think she is from Islay--but she sometimes comes to pay
us a visit at Borva, and my papa is very kind to her.”

“Mr. Ingram does not appear to know her; I thought he was acquainted
with every one in the island,” said Lavender.

“She was not here when he has been in the Lewis before,” said Sheila;
“but Eily does not like to speak to strangers, and I do not think you
could get her to speak to you if you tried.”

Lavender had paid but little attention to the “false men” of Callernish
when first he saw them, but now he approached the long lines of big
stones upon this lonely plateau with a new interest; for Sheila had
talked to him about them many a time in Borva, and had asked his opinion
about their origin and their age. Was the central circle of stones an
altar, with the other series marking the approaches to it? Or, was it
the grave of some great chieftain, with the remaining stones indicating
the graves of his relations and friends? Or was it the commemoration of
some battle in olden times, or the record of astronomical or geometrical
discoveries, or a temple once devoted to serpent-worship, or what?
Lavender, who knew absolutely nothing at all about the matter, was
probably as well qualified as anybody else to answer these questions,
but he forebore. The interest, however, that Sheila showed in such
things he very rapidly acquired. When he came to see the rows of stones
a second time he was much impressed by their position on this bit of
hill overlooking the sea. He sat down on his camp-stool with the
determination that, although he could not satisfy Sheila’s wistful
questions, he would present her with some little sketch of these
monuments and their surroundings, which might catch up something of the
mysterious loneliness of the scene.

He would not, of course, have the picture as it then presented itself.
The sun was glowing on the grass around him, and lighting up the tall,
gray pillars of stone with a cheerful radiance. Over there the waters of
Loch Roag were bright and blue, and beyond the lake the undulations of
moorland were green and beautiful, and the mountains in the South grown
pale as silver in the heat. Here was a pretty young lady, in a rough
blue traveling dress and a hat and feather, who was engaged in picking
up wild flowers from the warm heath. There was a gentleman from the
office of the Board of Trade, who was sitting on the grass, nursing his
knees and whistling. From time to time the chief figure in the
foreground was an elderly gentleman, who evidently expected that he was
going to be put into the picture, and who was occasionally dropping a
cautious hint that he did not always wear this rough-and-ready sailor’s
costume. Mackenzie was also most anxious to point out to the artist the
names of the hills and districts lying to the south of Loch Roag,
apparently with the hope that the sketch would have a certain
topographical interest for future visitors.

No; Lavender was content at that moment to take down the outlines of the
great stones and the configuration of the lake and hill beyond, but by
and by he would give another sort of atmosphere to this wild scene. He
would have rain and darkness spread over the island, with the low hills
in the South grown desolate and remote, and the waters of the sea
covered with gloom. No human figure should be visible on this remote
plain, where these strange memorials had stood for centuries exposed to
Western gales and the stillness of the Winter nights, and the awful
silence of the stars. Would not Sheila, at least, understand the
bleakness and desolation of the picture? Of course her father would like
to have everything blue and green. He seemed a little disappointed when
it was clear that no distant glimpse of Borva could be introduced into
the sketch. But Sheila’s imagination would be captured by this sombre
picture, and perhaps by and by in some other land, amid fairer scenes
and in a more generous climate, she might be less inclined to hunger for
the dark and melancholy North when she looked on this record of its
gloom and sadness.

“Iss he going to put any people in the pictures?” said Mackenzie in a
confidential whisper to Ingram.

Ingram got up from the grass, and said with a yawn, “I don’t know. If he
does, it will be afterward. Suppose we go along to the wagonette and
see if Duncan has brought everything up from the boat?”

The old man seemed rather unwilling to be cut out of this particular
sketch, but he went, nevertheless; and Sheila, seeing the young man left
alone, and thinking that not quite fair, went over to him and asked if
she might be permitted to see as much as he had done.

Lavender shut up the book.

“No,” he said with a laugh, “you shall see it to-night. I have
sufficient memoranda to work something out of by and by. Shall we have
another look at the circle up there?”

He folded up and shouldered his camp-stool, and they walked up to the
point at which the lines of the “mourners” converged. Perhaps he was
moved by a great antiquarian curiosity; at all events, he showed a
singular interest in the monuments, and talked to his companion about
all the possible theories connected with such stones in a fashion that
charmed her greatly. She was easily persuaded that the Callernish
“Fir-Bhreige” were the most interesting relics in the world. He had seen
Stonehenge, but Stonehenge was too scattered to be impressive. There was
more mystery about the means by which the inhabitants of a small island
could have hewn and carved and erected these blocks; there was,
moreover, the mystery about the vanished population itself. Yes, he had
been to Carnac also. He had driven down from Auray in a lumbering old
trap, his coachman being unable to talk French. He had seen the
half-cultivated plain on which there were rows and rows of small stones,
scarcely to be distinguished from the stone walls of the adjoining
farms. What was there impressive about such a sight when you went into a
house and paid a franc to be shown the gold ornaments picked up about
the place? Here, however, was a perfect series of those strange
memorials, with the long lanes leading up to a circle, and the tallest
of all the stones placed on the Western side of the circle, perhaps as
the headstone of the buried chief. Look at the position, too--the silent
hill, the waters of the sea-loch around it, and beyond that the
desolation of miles of untenanted moorland. Sheila looked pleased that
her companion, after coming so far, should have found something worth
looking at in the Lewis.

“Does it not seem strange,” he said suddenly, “to think of young folks
of the present day picking up wild flowers from among these old
stones?” He was looking at a tiny bouquet which she had gathered.

“Will you take them?” she said, quite simply and naturally, offering him
the flowers. “They may remind you some time of Callernish.”

He took the flowers and regarded them for a moment in silence, and then
he said gently, “I do not think I shall want these to remind me of
Callernish. I shall never forget our being here.”

At this moment, perhaps fortunately, Duncan appeared, and came along
toward the young people with a basket in his hand.

“It wass Mr. Mackenzie will ask if ye will tek a glass o’ whisky, sir,
and a bit o’ bread and cheese. And he wass sayin’ there was no hurry at
all, and he will wait for you for two hours or half an hour whatever.”

“All right, Duncan; go back and tell him I have finished, and we shall
be there directly. No, thank you, don’t take out the whisky--unless,
Miss Mackenzie,” added the young man with a smile, “Duncan can persuade
you.”

Duncan looked with amazement at the man who dared to joke about Miss
Sheila taking whisky, and without waiting for any further commands
indignantly shut the lid of the basket and walked off.

“I wonder, Miss Mackenzie,” said Lavender, as they went along the path
down the hill--“I wonder what you would say if I happened to call you
Sheila by mistake?”

“I should be glad if you did that. Every one calls me Sheila,” said the
girl quietly enough.

“You would not be vexed?” he said, regarding her with a little surprise.

“No; why should I be vexed?” she answered; and she happened to look up,
and he saw what a clear light of sincerity there was shining in her
eyes.

“May I then call you Sheila?”

“Yes.”

“But--but--” he said, with a timidity and embarrassment of which she
showed no trace whatever--“but people might think it strange, you know;
and yet I should greatly like to call you Sheila; only, not before other
people perhaps.”

“But why not?” she said, with her eyebrows just raised a little. “Why
should you wish to call me Sheila at one time and not at the other? It
is no difference whatever, and every one calls me Sheila.”

Lavender was a little disappointed. He had hoped, when she consented in
so friendly a manner to his calling her by any name he chose, that he
could have established this little arrangement, which would have had
about it something of the nature of a personal confidence. Sheila would
evidently have none of that. Was it that she was really so simple and
frank in her ways that she did not understand why there should be such a
difference, and what it might imply, or was she well aware of everything
he had been wishing, and able to assume this air of simplicity and
ignorance with a perfect grace? Ingram, he reflected, would have said at
once that to suspect Sheila of such duplicity was to insult her; but
then Ingram was perhaps himself a trifle too easily imposed on, and he
had notions about women, despite all his philosophical reading and such
like, that a little more mingling in society might have caused him to
alter. Frank Lavender confessed to himself that Sheila was either a
miracle of ingenuousness or a thorough mistress of the art of assuming
it. On the one hand, he considered it almost impossible for a woman to
be so 

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