“I have a great deal to be sorry for, papa,” she said; and then she renewed her entreaties that her two companions should abandon their notion of going to a theatre, and resolve to spend the rest of the evening in what she consented to call her home.
After all, they formed a comfortable little company when they sat around the fire, which had been lit for cheerfulness rather than warmth, and Ingram at least was in a particularly pleasant mood. For Sheila had seized the opportunity, when her father had gone out of the room for a few minutes, to say suddenly, “Oh, my dear friend, if you care for her, you have a great happiness before you.”
“Why, Sheila?” he said, staring.
“She cares for you more than you can think: I saw it to-night in everything she said and did.”
“I thought she was just a trifle saucy, do you know. She shunted me out of the conversation altogether.”
Sheila shook her head and smiled. “She was embarrassed. She suspects that you like her, and that I know it, and that I came to see her. If you ask her to marry you she will do it gladly.”
“Sheila,” Ingram said, with a severity that was not in his heart, “you must not say such things. You might make fearful mischief by putting these wild notions into people’s heads.”
“They are not wild notions,” she said, quietly. “A woman can tell what another woman is thinking about better than a man.”
“And am I to go to the Tyrol and ask her to marry me?” he said, with the air of a meek scholar.
“I should like to see you married – very, very much, indeed,” Sheila said.
“And to her?”
“Yes, to her,” the girl said frankly. “For I am sure she has great regard for you, and she is clever enough to put value on – on – but I cannot flatter you, Mr. Ingram.”
“Shall I send you word about what happens in the Tyrol?” he said, still with the humble air of one receiving instructions.
“Yes.”
“And if she rejects me what shall I do?”
“She will not reject you.”
“Shall I come to you for consolation, and ask you what you meant by driving me on such a blunder?”
“If she rejects,” Sheila said with a smile, “it will be your own fault, and you will deserve it. For you are a little too harsh with her, and you have too much authority, and I am surprised that she will be so amiable under it. Because, you know, a woman expects to be treated with much gentleness and deference before she has said she will marry. She likes to be entreated, and coaxed, and made much of, but instead of that you are very overbearing with Mrs. Lorraine.”
“I did not mean to be, Sheila,” he said, honestly enough. “If anything of the kind happened it must have been in a joke.”
“Oh, no, not a joke,” Sheila said, “and I have noticed it before – the very first evening you came to their house. And perhaps you did not know of it yourself; and then Mrs. Lorraine she is clever enough to see that you did not mean to be disrespectful. But she will expect you to alter that a great deal if you ask her to marry you; that is, until you are married.”
“Have I ever been overbearing to you, Sheila?” he asked.
“To me? Oh, no. You have always been very gentle to me; but I know how that is. When you first knew me I was almost a child, and you treated me like a child; and ever since then it has always been the same. But to others – yes, you are too unceremonious; and Mrs. Lorraine will expect you to be much more mild and amiable, and you must let her have opinions of her own.”
“Sheila, you give me to understand that I am a bear,” he said, in tones of injured protest.
Sheila laughed: “Have I told you the truth at last? It was no matter so long as you had ordinary acquaintances to deal with. But now if you wish to marry that pretty lady, you must be much more gentle if you are discussing anything with her; and if she says anything that is not very wise, you must not say bluntly that it is foolish, but you must smooth it away, and put her right gently, and then she will be grateful to you. But if you say to her: ‘Oh, that is nonsense!’ as you might say to a man, you will hurt her very much. The man would not care – he would think you were stupid to have a different opinion from him; but a woman fears she is not as clever as the man she is talking to, and likes his good opinion; and if she says something careless like that, she is sensitive to it, and it wounds her. To-night you contradicted Mrs. Lorraine about the h in those Italian words, and I am quite sure you were wrong. She knows Italian much better than you do, and yet she yielded to you very prettily.”
“Go on, Sheila, go on,” he said, with a resigned air. “What else did I do?”
“Oh, a great many rude things. You should not have contradicted Mrs. Kavanagh about the color of an amethyst.”
“But why? You know she was wrong; and she said herself, a minute afterwards that she was thinking of a sapphire.”
“But you ought not to contradict a person older than yourself,” said Sheila, sententiously.
“Goodness gracious me! Because one person is born in one year, and one in another, is that any reason why you should say that an amethyst is blue? Mr. Mackenzie, come and talk to this girl. She is trying to pervert my principles. She says that in talking to a woman you have to abandon all hope of being accurate, and that respect for the truth is not to be thought of. Because a woman has a pretty face she is to be allowed to say that black is white, and white pea-green. And if you say anything to the contrary, you are a brute, and had better go and bellow by yourself in a wilderness.”
“Sheila is quite right,” said old Mackenzie, at a venture.
“Oh, do you think so?” Ingram asked coolly. “Then I can understand how her moral sentiment has been destroyed, and it is easy to see where she has got a set of opinions that strike at the very roots of a respectable and decent society.”
“Do you know,” said Sheila, seriously, “that it is very rude of you to say so, even in jest. If you treat Mrs. Lorraine in this way – ”
She suddenly stopped. Her father had not heard, being busy among his pipes. So the subject was discreetly dropped, Ingram reluctantly promising to pay some attention to Sheila’s precepts of politeness.
Altogether, it was a pleasant evening they had, but when Ingram had left, Mr. Mackenzie said to his daughter, “Now, look at this Sheila. When Mr. Ingram goes away from London, you hef no friend at all then in the place, and you are quite alone. Why will you not come to the Lewis, Sheila! It is no one there will know anything of what has happened here; and Mairi she is a good girl, and she will hold her tongue.”
“They will ask me why I come back without my husband,” Sheila said, looking down.
“Oh, you will leave that all to me,” said her father, who knew he had surely sufficient skill to thwart the curiosity of a few simple creatures in Borva. “There is many a girl hass to go home for a time while her husband he is away on his business; and there will no one hef the right to ask you any more than I will tell them; and I will tell them what they should know – oh, yes, I will tell them ferry well – and you will hef no trouble about it. And, Sheila, you are a good lass, and you know that I hef many things to attend to that is not easy to write about – ”
“I do know that, papa,” the girl said, “and many a time have I wished you would go back to the Lewis.”
“And leave you here by yourself? Why, you are talking foolishly, Sheila. But now, Sheila, you will see how you could go back with me; and it would be a ferry different thing for you running about in the fresh air than shut up in a room in the middle of a town. And you are not looking ferry well, my lass, and Scarlett she will hef to take the charge of you.”
“I will go to the Lewis with you, papa, when you please,” she said, and he was glad and proud to hear her decision, but there was no happy light of anticipation in her eyes, such as ought to have been awakened by this projected journey to the far island which she had known as her home.
And so it was that one rough and blustering afternoon the Clansman steamed into Stornoway harbor, and Sheila, casting timid and furtive glances toward the quay, saw Duncan standing there, with the wagonette some little distance back under charge of a boy. Duncan was a proud man that day. He was the first to shove the gangway on to the vessel, and he was the first to get on board; and in another minute Sheila found the tall, keen-eyed, brown-faced keeper before her, and he was talking in a rapid and eager fashion, throwing in an occasional scrap of Gaelic in the mere hurry of his words.
“Oh, yes, Miss Sheila, Scarlett she is ferry well whatever, but there is nothing will make her so well as your coming back to sa Lewis; and we wass saying yesterday that it looked as if it wass more as three or four years, or six years, since you went away from sa Lewis, but now it iss no time at all, for you are just the same Miss Sheila as we knew before; and there is not one in all Borva but will think it iss a good day this day that you will come back.”
“Duncan,” said Mackenzie, with an impatient stamp of his foot, “why will you talk like a foolish man? Get the luggage to the shore, instead of keeping us all the day in the boat.”
“Oh, ferry well, Mr. Mackenzie,” said Duncan, departing with an injured air, and grumbling as he went, “it iss no new thing to you to see Miss Sheila, and you will have no thocht for any one but yourself. But I will get out the luggage – oh yes, I will get out the luggage.”
Sheila, in truth, had but little luggage with her, but she remained on board the boat until Duncan was quite ready to start, for she did not wish just then to meet any of her friends in Stornoway. Then she stepped ashore and crossed the quay, and got into the wagonette; and the two horses, whom she had caressed for a moment, seemed to know that they were carrying Sheila back to her own country, from the speed with which they rattled out of the town and away into the lonely moorland.
Mackenzie let them have their way. Past the solitary lakes they went, past the long stretches of undulating morass, past the lonely sheilings perched far upon the hills; and the rough and blustering wind blew about them, and the gray clouds hurried by, and the old strong-bearded man who shook the reins and gave the horses their heads could have laughed aloud in his joy that he was driving his daughter home. But Sheila – she sat there as one dead: and Mairi, timidly regarding her, wondered what the impassable face and the bewildered, sad eyes meant. Did she not smell the sweet, strong smell of the heather? Had she no interest in the great birds that were circling in the air over by the Barbhas mountains? Where was the pleasure she used to exhibit in remembering the curious names of the small lakes they passed?
And lo! the rough gray day broke asunder, and a great blaze of fire appeared in the West, shining across the moors and touching the blue slopes of the distant hills. Sheila was getting near the region of beautiful sunsets and lambent twilights and the constant movement and mystery of the sea. Overhead the heavy clouds were still hurried on by the wind; and in the South the Eastern slopes of the hills and the moors were getting to be of a soft purple; but all along the West, where her home was, lay a great flush of gold, and she knew that Loch Roag was shining there, and the gable of the house at Borvapost getting warm in the beautiful light.
“It is a good afternoon you will be getting to see Borva,” her father said to her; but all the answer she made was to ask her father not to stop at Garra-na-hina, but to drive straight on to Callernish. She would visit the people at Garra-na-hina some other day.
The boat was waiting for them at Callernish, and the boat was the Maighdean-mhara.
“How pretty she is! How have you kept her so well, Duncan?” said Sheila, her face lighting up for the first time as she went down the path to the bright painted little vessel that scarcely rocked in the water below.
“Bekaas we neffer knew but that it was this week or the week before, or the next week you would come back, Miss Sheila, and you would want your boat; but it was Mr. Mackenzie himself, it wass he that did all the pentin of the boat; and it iss as well done as Mr. McNicol could have done it, and a great better than that mirover.”
“Won’t you steer her yourself, Sheila?” her father suggested, glad to see that she was at last being interested and pleased.
“Oh, yes, I will steer her, if I have not forgotten all the points that Duncan taught me?”
“And I am sure you hef not done that, Miss Sheila,” Duncan said, “for there wass no one knew Loch Roag better as you, not one, and you hef not been so long away; and when you tek the tiller in your hand, it will all come back to you, just as if you wass going away from Borva the day before yesterday.”
She certainly had not forgotten, and she was proud and pleased to see how well the shapely little craft performed its duties. They had a favorable wind, and ran rapidly along the opening channels until, in due course, they glided into the well-known bay over which, and shining in the yellow light from the sunset, they saw Sheila’s home.
Sheila had escaped so far the trouble of meeting friends, but she could not escape her friends in Borvapost. They had waited for her for hours, not knowing when the Clansman might arrive at Stornoway; and now they crowded down to the shore, and there was a great shaking of hands, and an occasional sob from some old crone, and a thousand repetitions of the familiar “And are you ferry well, Miss Sheila?” from small children who had come across from the village in defiance of mothers and fathers. And Sheila’s face brightened into a wonderful gladness, and she had a hundred questions to ask for one answer she got, and she did not know what to do with the number of small brown fists that wanted to shake hands with her.
“Will you let Miss Sheila alone?” Duncan called out, adding something in Gaelic which came strangely from a man who sometimes reproved his own master for swearing. “Get away with you, you brats; it wass better you would be in your beds than bothering people that wass come all the way from Stornoway.”
Then they all went up in a body to the house, and Scarlett, who had neither eyes, ears nor hands, but for the young girl who had been the very pride of her heart, was nigh driven to distraction by Mackenzie’s stormy demands for oatcake and glasses and whisky. Scarlett angrily remonstrated with her husband for allowing this rabble of people to interfere with the comfort of Miss Sheila; and Duncan, taking her reproaches with great good-humor, contented himself with doing her work, and went and got the cheese and the plates and the whisky, while Scarlett, with a hundred endearing phrases, was helping Sheila to take off her traveling things. And Sheila, it turned out, had brought with her, in her portmanteau, certain huge and wonderful cakes, not of oatmeal, from Glasgow; and these were soon on the great table in the kitchen, and Sheila herself distributing pieces to those small folks who were so awe-stricken by the sight of this strange dainty that they forgot their injunctions and thanked her timidly in Gaelic.
“Well, Sheila, my lass,” said her father to her, as they stood at the door of the house and watched the troop of their friends, children and all, go over the hill to Borvapost in the red light of the sunset, “and are you glad to be home again?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, heartily enough, and Mackenzie thought that things were going on favorably.
“You hef no such sunsets in the South, Sheila,” he observed, loftily casting his eyes around, although he did not usually pay much attention to the picturesqueness of his native island. “Now look at the light on Suainabhal. Do you see the red on the water down there, Sheila? Oh, yes; I thought you would say it wass ferry beautiful – it is a ferry good color on the water. The water looks ferry well when it is red. You hef no such things in London – not any, Sheila. Now, we must go in-doors, for these things you can see any day here, and we must not keep our friends waiting.”
An ordinary, dull-witted or careless man might have been glad to have a little quiet after so long and tedious a journey, but Mr. Mackenzie was no such person. He had resolved to guard against Sheila’s first evening at home being in any way languid or monotonous, and so he had asked one or two of his especial friends to remain and have supper with them. Moreover, he did not wish the girl to spend the rest of the evening out of doors when the melancholy time of the twilight drew over the hills, and the sea began to sound remote and sad. Sheila should have a comfortable evening in-doors; and he would himself, after supper, when the small parlor was well lit up, sing for her one or two songs, just to keep the thing going, as it were. He would let nobody else sing. These Gaelic songs were not the sort of music to make people cheerful. And if Sheila herself would sing for them?
And Sheila did. And her father chose the songs for her, and they were the blithest he could find, and the girl seemed really in excellent spirits. They had their pipes and hot whisky and water in this little parlor; Mr. Mackenzie explaining that although his daughter was accustomed to spacious and gilded drawing-rooms where such a thing was impossible, she would do anything to make her friends welcome and comfortable, and they might fill their glasses and their pipes with impunity. And Sheila sang again and again, all cheerful and sensible English songs, and she listened to the odd jokes and stories her friends had to tell her; and Mackenzie was delighted with the success of his plans and precautions. Was not her very appearance now a triumph? She was laughing, smiling, talking to every one; he had not seen her so happy for many a day.
In the midst of it all, when the night had come apace, what was this wild skirl outside that made everybody start? Mackenzie jumped to his feet, with an angry vow in his heart that if this “teffle of a piper, John” should come down the hill playing “Lochaber no more,” or “Cha til mi tuladh,” or any other mournful tune, he would have his chanter broken in a thousand splinters over his head. But what was the wild air that came nearer and nearer, until John marched into the house, and came, with ribbons and pipes, to the very door of the room, which was flung open to him? Not a very appropriate air, perhaps, for it was
The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!
The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!
The Campbells are coming to bonny Lochleven.
The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!
But it was, to Mr. Mackenzie’s rare delight, a right good joyous tune, and it was meant as a welcome to Sheila; and forthwith he caught the white-haired piper by the shoulder, and dragged him in, and said: “Put down your pipes, and come into the house, John – put down your pipes and tek off your bonnet, and we shall hef a good dram together this night, by Kott! And it is Sheila herself will pour out the whisky for you, John; and she is a good Highland girl, and she knows the piper was never born that could be hurt by whisky, and the whisky was never yet made that could hurt a piper. What do you say to that, John?”
John did not answer; he was standing before Sheila with his bonnet in his hand, but with his pipes still proudly over his shoulder. And he took the glass from her and called out “Shlainte!” and drained every drop of it out, to welcome Mackenzie’s daughter home.
PART XI
CHAPTER XXV.
THE VOYAGE OF THE PHŒBE
IT was a cold morning in January, and up here among the Jura hills the clouds had melted into a small and chilling rain that fell ceaselessly. The great “Paps of Jura” were hidden in the mist; even the valleys near at hand were vague and dismal in the pale fog; and the Sound of Islay, lying below, and the far sea beyond, were gradually growing indistinguishable. In a rude little sheiling, built on one of the plateaus of rock, Frank Lavender sat alone, listening to the plashing of the rain without. A rifle that he had just carefully dried lay across his knees. A brace of deer-hounds had stretched out their paws on the earthen floor, and had put their long noses between their paws to produce a little warmth. It was, indeed, a cold and damp morning, and the little hut was pervaded with a smell of wet wood and also of peat ashes, for one of the gillies had tried to light a fire, but the peats had gone out.
It was Lavender who had let the fire go out. He had forgotten it. He was thinking of other things – of a song, mostly, that Sheila used to sing, and lines of it went hither and thither through his brain as he recalled the sound of her voice:
Haste to thy barque,
Coastwise steer not:
Sail wide of Mull,
Jura near not!
Farewell, she said,
Her last pang subduing,
Brave Mac Intyre,
Costly thy wooing!
There came into the sheiling a little, wiry old keeper with shaggy gray hair and keen black eyes. “Cosh bless me!” he said, petulantly, as he wrung the rain out of his bonnet, “you hef let the peats go out, Mr. Lavender, and who will tell when the rain will go off?”
“It can’t last long, Neil. It came on too suddenly for that. I thought we were going to get one fine day when we started this morning, but you don’t often manage that here, Neil.”
“Indeed, no, sir,” said Neil, who was not a native of Jura, and was as eager as any one to abuse the weather prevailing there: “it is a ferry bad place for the weather. If the Almichty were to tek the sun away a’ tagether, it would be days and weeks and days before you would find it oot. But it iss a good thing, sir, you will get the one stag before the mist came down; and he is not a stag, mirover, but a fine big hart, and a royal, too, and I hef not seen many finer in the Jura hills. Oh, yes, sir, when he wass crossing the burn I made out his points ferry well, and I wass saying to myself, ‘Now, if Mr. Lavender will get this one, it will be a grand day this day, and it will make up for many a wet day among the hills.’ ”
“They haven’t come back with the pony yet?” Lavender asked, laying down his gun and going to the door of the hut.
“Oh, no,” Neil said, following him. “It iss a long way to get the powny, and maybe they will stop at Mr. MacDougall’s to hef a dram. And Mr. MacDougall was saying to me yesterday that the ferry next time you wass shoot a royal he would hef the horns dressed and the head stuffed to make you a present, for he is ferry proud of the picture of Miss Margaret; and he will say to me many’s sa time that I wass to gif you the ferry best shooting, and not to be afraid of disturbing sa deer when you had a mind to go out. And I am not sure, sir, we will not get another stag to tek down with us yet, if the wind would carry away the mist, for the rain that is nearly on now; and as you are ferry wet, sir, already, it is no matter if we go down through the glen and cross the water to get the side of Ben Bheulah.”
“That is true enough, Neil, and I fancy the clouds are beginning to lift. And there they come with the pony.”
Neil directed his glass toward a small group that appeared to be coming up the side of the valley below them, and that was still at some considerable distance.
“Cosh bless me!” he cried, “what is that? There iss two strangers – oh yes, indeed, and mirover – and there is one of them on the pony.”
Lavender’s heart leaped within him. If they were strangers they were coming to see him, and how long was it since he had seen the face of any of his old friends and companions? It seemed to him years.
“Is it a man or a woman on the pony, Neil?” he asked hurriedly, with some wild fancy flashing through his brain. “Give me the glass.”
“Oh, it is a man,” said Neil, handing over the glass, “What would a woman be doing up sa hills on a morning like this?”
The small party below came up out of the gray mist, and Lavender in the distance heard a long view-halloo.
“Cott tam them!” said Neil, at a venture. “There is not a deer on Benan Cabrach that will not hear them.”
“But if these strangers are coming to see me, I fear we must leave the deer alone, Neil.”
“Ferry well, sir, ferry well, sir; it is a bad day whatever, and it is not many strangers will come to Jura. I suppose they hef come to Port Ascaig, and taken the ferry across the sound.”
“I am going to meet them on chance,” Lavender said; and set off along the side of the deep valley, leaving Neil with the dogs and the rifles.
“Hillo, Johnny!” he cried, in amazement, when he came upon the advancing group. “And you too, Mosenberg! By Jove, how did you ever get here?”
There was an abundance of handshaking and incoherent questions when young Mosenberg jumped down on the wet heather, and the three friends had actually met. Lavender scarcely knew what to say, these two faces were so strange, and yet so familiar – their appearance there was so unexpected, his pleasure so great.
“I can’t believe my eyes yet, Johnny. Why did you bring him here? Don’t you know what you’ll have to put up with in this place? Well, this does do a fellow’s heart good! I am awfully pleased to see you, and it is very kind of you.”
“But I am very cold,” the handsome Jew boy said, swinging his arms and stamping his feet. “Wet boats, wet carts, wet roads, wet saddles, and everywhere cold, cold, cold.”
“And he won’t drink whisky; so what is he to expect?” Johnny Eyre said.
“Come along up to a little hut here,” Lavender said, “and we’ll try to get a fire lit. And I have some brandy there.”
“And you have plenty of water to mix with it,” said the boy, looking mournfully around. “Very good. Let us have the fire and the warm drink; and then – you know the story of the music that was frozen in the trumpet, and that all came out when it was thawed at a fire? When we get warm we have very great news to tell you – oh, very great news indeed.”
“I don’t want any news – I want your company. Come along, like good fellows, and leave the news for afterward. The men are going on with a pony to fetch a stag that has been shot; they won’t be back for an hour, I suppose, at the soonest. This is the sheiling up here where the brandy is secreted. Now, Neil, help us to get up a blaze. If any of you have newspapers, letters, or anything that will set a few sticks on fire – ”
“I have a box of wax matches,” Johnny said, “and I know how to light a peat-fire better than any man in the country.”
He was not very successful at first, for the peats were a trifle damp; but in the end he conquered, and a very fair blaze was produced, although the smoke that had filled the sheiling had nearly blinded Mosenberg’s eyes. Then Lavender produced a small tin pot and a solitary tumbler, and they boiled some water and lit their pipes, and made themselves seats of peat around the fire. All the while a brisk conversation was going on, some portions of which astonished Lavender considerably.
For months back, indeed, he had almost cut himself off from the civilized world. His address was known to one or two persons, and sometimes they sent him a letter; but he was a bad correspondent. The news of his aunt’s death did not reach him till a fortnight after the funeral, and then it was by a singular chance that he noticed it in the columns of an old newspaper. “That is the only thing I regret about coming away,” he was saying to those two friends of his. “I should like to have seen the old woman before she died; she was very kind to me.”
“Well,” said Johnny Eyre, with a shake of the head, “that is all very well; but a mere outsider like myself – you see, it looks to me a little unnatural that she should go and leave her money to a mere friend, and not to her own relations.”
“I am very glad she did,” Lavender said. “I had as good as asked her to do it long before. And Ted Ingram will make a better use of it than I ever did.”
“It is all very well for you to say so now, after all this fuss about those two pictures; but suppose she had left you to starve?”
“Never mind suppositions,” Lavender said, to get rid of the subject. “Tell me, Mosenberg, how is that overture of yours getting on?”
“It is nearly finished,” said the lad, with a flush of pleasure, “and I have shown it in rough to two or three good friends, and – shall I tell you? – it may be performed at the Crystal Palace. But that is a chance. And the fate of it, that is also a chance. But you – you have succeeded all at once, and brilliantly, and all the world is talking of you and yet you go away among mountains, and live in the cold and wet, and you might as well be dead.”
“What an ungrateful boy it is!” Lavender cried. “Here you have a comfortable fire, and hot brandy-and-water, and biscuits, and cigars if you wish; and you talk about people wishing to leave these things and die! Don’t you know that in half an hour’s time you will see that pony come back with a deer – a royal hart – slung across it; and won’t you be proud when MacDougall takes you out and gives you a chance of driving home such a prize? Then you will carry the horns back to London, and you will have them put up, and you will discourse to your friends of the span and the pearls of the antlers and the crockets. To-night after supper you will see the horns and the head brought into the room, and if you fancy that you yourself shot the stag, you will see that this life among the hills has its compensations.”
“It is a very cold life,” the lad said, passing his hands over the fire.
“That is because you won’t drink anything,” said Johnny Eyre, against whom no such charge could be wrought. “And don’t you know that the drinking of whisky is a provision invented by Nature to guard human beings like you and me from cold and wet? You are flying in the face of Providence if you don’t drink whisky among the Scotch hills.”
“And have you people to talk to?” said Mosenberg, looking at Lavender with a vague wonder, for he could not understand why any man could choose such a life.
“Not many.”
“What do you do on the long evenings when you are by yourself?”