Macleod of Dare, William Black [always you kirsty moseley .txt] 📗

of the effect of that wild 'Hi!' And what if I had burst into a fit of laughter without any apparent cause?"

Apparently Miss White had not been much impressed by her visit to Mr. Lemuel's palace of art, and she made thereafter but slight mention of it, though she had been prevailed upon to let the artist borrow the expression of her face for his forthcoming picture. She had other things to think about now, when she wrote to Castle Dare.

For one day Lady Macleod went into her son's room and said to him, "Here is a letter, Keith, which I have written to Miss White. I wish you to read it."

He jumped to his feet, and hastily ran his eyes over the letter. It was a trifle formal, it is true; but it was kind, and it expressed the hope that Miss White and her father would next summer visit Castle Dare. The young man threw his arms round his mother's neck and kissed her. "That is like a good mother," said he. "Do you know how happy she will be when she receives this message from you?"

Lady Macleod left him the letter to address. He read it over carefully; and though he saw that the handwriting was the handwriting of his mother, he knew that the spirit that had prompted these words was that of the gentle cousin Janet.

This concession had almost been forced from the old lady by the patience and mild persistence of Janet Macleod; but if anything could have assured her that she had acted properly in yielding, it was the answer which Miss Gertrude White sent in return. Miss White wrote that letter several times over before sending it off, and it was a clever piece of composition. The timid expressions of gratitude; the hints of the writer's sympathy with the romance of the Highlands and the Highland character; the deference shown by youth to age; and here and there just the smallest glimpse of humor, to show that Miss White, though very humble and respectful and all that, was not a mere fool. Lady Macleod was pleased by this letter. She showed it to her son one night at dinner. "It is a pretty hand," she remarked, critically.

Keith Macleod read it with a proud heart. "Can you not gather what kind of woman she is from that letter alone?" he said, eagerly. "I can almost hear her talk in it. Janet, will you read it too?"

Janet Macleod took the small sheet of perfumed paper and read it calmly, and handed it back to her aunt. "It is a nice letter," said she. "We must try to make Dare as bright as maybe when she comes to see us, that she will not go back to England with a bad account of the Highland people." That was all that was said at the time about the promised visit of Miss Gertrude White to Castle Dare. It was only as a visitor that Lady Macleod had consented to receive her. There was no word mentioned on either side of anything further than that. Mr. White and his daughter were to be in the Highlands next summer; they would be in the neighborhood of Castle Dare; Lady Macleod would be glad to entertain them for a time, and make the acquaintance of two of her son's friends. At all events, the proud old lady would be able to see what sort of woman this was whom Keith Macleod had chosen to be his wife.

And so the winter days and nights and weeks dragged slowly by; but always, from time to time, came those merry and tender and playful letters from the South, which he listened to rather than read. It was her very voice that was speaking to him, and in imagination he went about with her. He strolled with her over the crisp grass, whitened with hoar-frost, of the Regent's Park; he hurried home with her in the chill gray afternoons--the yellow gas-lamps being lit--to the little tea-table. When she visited a picture gallery, she sent him a full report of that, even.

"Why is it," she asked, "that one is so delighted to look a long distance, even when the view is quite uninteresting? I wonder if that is why I greatly prefer landscapes to figure subjects. The latter always seem to me to be painted from models just come from the Hampstead Road. There was scarcely a sea-piece in the exhibition that was not spoiled by figures, put in for the sake of picturesqueness, I suppose. Why, when you are by the sea you want to be alone, surely! Ah, if I could only have a look at those winter seas you speak of!"

He did not echo that wish at all. Even as he read he could hear the thunderous booming of the breakers into the giant caves. Was it for a pale rose-leaf to brave that fell wind that tore the waves into spindrift, and howled through the lonely chasms of Ben-an-Sloich?

To one of these precious documents, written in the small, neat hand on pink-toned and perfumed paper, a postscript was added: "If you keep my letters," she wrote, and he laughed when he saw that _if_, "I wish you would go back to the one in which I told you of papa and me calling at Mr. Lemuel's house, and I wish, dear Keith, you would burn it. I am sure it was very cruel and unjust. One often makes the mistake of thinking people affected when there is no affectation about them. And if a man has injured his health and made an invalid of himself, through his intense and constant devotion to his work, surely that is not anything to be laughed at? Whatever Mr. Lemuel may be, he is, at all events, desperately in earnest. The passion that he has for his art, and his patience and concentration and self-sacrifice, seems to me to be nothing less than noble. And so, dear Keith, will you please to burn that impertinent letter?"

Macleod sought out the letter and carefully read it over. He came to the conclusion that he could see no just reason for complying with her demand. Frequently first impressions are best.


CHAPTER XXX.


A GRAVE.

In the by-gone days, this eager, active, stout-limbed young fellow had met the hardest winter with a glad heart. He rejoiced in its thousand various pursuits; he set his teeth against the driving hail; he laughed at the drenching spray that sprung high over the bows of his boat; and what harm ever came to him if he took the short-cut across the upper reaches of Loch Scridain, wading waist-deep through a mile of sea-water on a bitter January day? And where was the loneliness of his life when always, wherever he went by sea or shore, he had these old friends around him--the red-beaked sea-pyots whirring along the rocks; and the startled curlews, whistling their warning note across the sea; and the shy duck swimming far out on the smooth lochs; to say nothing of the black game that would scarcely move from their perch on the larch-trees as he approached, and the deer that were more distinctly visible on the far heights of Ben-an-Sloich when a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen?

But now all this was changed. The awfulness of the dark winter-time amidst those Northern seas overshadowed him. "It is like going into a grave," he had said to her. And, with all his passionate longing to see her and have speech of her once more, how could he dare to ask her to approach these dismal solitudes? Sometimes he tried to picture her coming, and to read in imagination the look on her face. See now!--how she clings terrified to the side of the big open packet-boat that crosses the Frith of Lorn, and she dares not look abroad on the howling waste of waves. The mountains of Mull rise sad and cold and distant before her; there is no bright glint of sunshine to herald her approach. This small dog-cart, now: it is a frail thing with which to plunge into the wild valleys, for surely a gust of wind might whirl into the chasm of roaring waters below Glen-More: who that has ever seen Glen-More on a lowering January day will ever forget it--its silence, its loneliness, its vast and lifeless gloom? Her face is pale now; she sits speechless and awestricken; for the mountain-walls that overhang this sombre ravine seem ready to fall on her, and there is an awful darkness spreading along their summits under the heavy swathes of cloud. And then those black lakes far down in the lone hollows, more death-like and terrible than any tourist-haunted Loch Coruisk: would she not turn to him and, with trembling hands, implore him to take her back and away to the more familiar and bearable South? He began to see all these things with her eyes. He began to fear the awful things of the winter-time and the seas. The glad heart had gone out of him.

Even the beautiful aspects of the Highland winter had something about them--an isolation, a terrible silence--that he grew almost to dread. What was this strange thing, for example? Early in the morning he looked from the windows of his room, and he could have imagined he was not at Dare at all. All the familiar objects of sea and shore had disappeared; this was a new world--a world of fantastic shapes, all moving and unknown--a world of vague masses of gray, though here and there a gleam of lemon-color shining through the fog showed that the dawn was reflected on a glassy sea. Then he began to make out the things around him. That great range of purple mountains was Ulva--Ulva transfigured and become Alpine! Then those wan gleams of yellow light on the sea?--he went to the other window, and behold! the heavy bands of cloud that lay across the unseen peaks of Ben-an-Sloich had parted, and there was a blaze of clear, metallic, green sky; and the clouds bordering on that gleam of light were touched with a smoky and stormy saffron-hue that flashed and changed amidst the seething and twisting shapes of the fog and the mist. He turned to the sea again--what phantom-ship was this that appeared in mid-air, and apparently moving when there was no wind? He heard the sound of oars; the huge vessel turned out to be only the boat of the Gometra men going out to the lobster-traps. The yellow light on the glassy plain waxes stronger; new objects appear through the shifting fog; until at last a sudden opening shows him a wonderful thing far away--apparently at the very confines of the world--and awful in its solitary splendor. For that is the distant island of Staffa, and it has caught the colors of the dawn; and amidst the cold grays of the sea it shines a pale, transparent rose.

He would like to have sent her, if he had got any skill of the brush, some brief memorandum of that beautiful thing; but indeed, and in any case, that was not the sort of painting she seemed to care for just then. Mr. Lemuel, and his Palace of Art, and his mediaeval saints, and what not, which had all for a time disappeared from Miss White's letters, began now to monopolize a good deal of space there; and there was no longer any impertinent playfulness in her references, but, on the contrary, a respect and admiration that occasionally almost touched enthusiasm. From hints more than statements Macleod gathered that Miss White had been made much of by the people frequenting Mr. Lemuel's house. She had there