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

met one or two gentlemen who had written very fine things about her in the papers; and certain highly distinguished people had been good enough to send her cards of invitation; and she had once or twice been persuaded to read some piece of dramatic poetry at Mr. Lemuel's afternoon parties; and she even suggested that Mr. Lemuel had almost as much as said that he would like to paint her portrait. Mr. Lemuel had also offered her, but she had refused to accept, a small but marvellous study by Pinturicchio, which most people considered the gem of his collection.

Macleod, reading and re-reading these letters many a time in the solitudes of western Mull, came to the opinion that there must be a good deal of amusement going on in London. And was it not natural that a young girl should like to be petted, and flattered, and made much of? Why should he complain when she wrote to say how she enjoyed this and was charmed by that? Could he ask her to exchange that gay and pleasant life for this hibernation in Mull? Sometimes for days together the inhabitants of Castle Dare literally lived in the clouds. Dense bands of white mist lay all along the cliffs; and they lived in a semi-darkness, with the mournful dripping of the rain on the wet garden, and the mournful wash of the sea all around the shores. He was glad, then, that Gertrude White was not at Castle Dare.

But sometimes, when he could not forbear opening his heart to her, and pressing her for some more definite assurance as to the future, the ordinary playful banter in which she generally evaded his urgency gave place to a tone of coldness that astonished and alarmed him. Why should she so cruelly resent this piteous longing of his? Was she no longer, then, so anxious to escape from the thraldom that had seemed so hateful to her?

"Hamish," said Macleod, abruptly, after reading one of these letters, "come, now, we will go and overhaul the _Umpire_, for you know she is to be made very smart this summer; for we have people coming all the way from London to Dare, and they must not think we do not know in Mull how to keep a yacht in shipshape."

"Ay, sir," said Hamish; "and if we do not know that in Mull, where will they be likely to know that?"

"And you will get the cushions in the saloon covered again; and we will have a new mirror for the ladies' cabin, and Miss Macleod, if you ask her, will put a piece of lace round the top of that, to make it look like a lady's room. And then, you know, Hamish, you can show the little boy Johnny Wickes how to polish the brass; and he will polish the brass in the ladies' cabin until it is as white as silver. Because, you know, Hamish, they have very fine yachts in the South. They are like hotels on the water. We must try to be as smart as we can."

"I do not know about the hotels," said Hamish, scornfully. "And perhaps it is a fine thing to hef a hotel; and Mr. M'Arthur they say he is a ferry rich man, and he has ferry fine pictures too; but I was thinking that if I will be off the Barra Head on a bad night--between the Sgriobh bhan and the Barra Head on a bad night--it is not any hotel I will be wishing that I wass in, but a good boat. And the _Umpire_ she is a good boat; and I hef no fear of going anywhere in the world with her--to London or to Inverary, ay, or the Queen's own castle on the island--and she will go there safe, and she will come back safe; and if she is not a hotel--well, perhaps she will not be a hotel; but she is a fine good boat, and she has swinging lamps whatever."

But even the presence of the swinging-lamps, which Hamish regarded as the highest conceivable point of luxury, did little to lessen the dolorousness of the appearance of the poor old _Umpire_. As Macleod, seated in the stern of the gig, approached her, she looked like some dingy old hulk relegated to the duty of keeping stores. Her top-mast and bowsprit removed; not a stitch of cord on her; only the black iron shrouds remaining of all her rigging; her skylights and companion-hatch covered with waterproof--it was a sorry spectacle. And then when they went below, even the swinging-lamps were blue-moulded and stiff. There was an odor of damp straw throughout. All the cushions and carpets had been removed; there was nothing but the bare wood of the floor and the couches and the table; with a match-box saturated with wet, an empty wine-bottle, a newspaper five months old, a rusty corkscrew, a patch of dirty water--the leakage from the skylight overhead.

That was what Hamish saw.

What Macleod saw, as he stood there absently staring at the bare wood, was very different. It was a beautiful, comfortable saloon that he saw, all brightly furnished and gilded, and there was a dish of flowers--heather and rowan-berries intermixed--on the soft red cover of the table. And who is this that is sitting there, clad in sailor-like blue and white, and laughing, as she talks in her soft English speech? He is telling her that, if she means to be a sailor's bride, she must give up the wearing of gloves on board ship, although, to be sure, those gloved small hands look pretty enough as they rest on the table and play with a bit of bell-heather. How bright her smile is. She is in a mood for teasing people. The laughing face, but for the gentleness of the eyes, would be audacious. They say that the width between those long-lashed eyes is a common peculiarity of the artist's face; but she is no longer an artist; she is only the brave young yachtswoman who lives at Castle Dare. The shepherds know her, and answer her in the Gaelic when she speaks to them in passing; the sailors know her, and would adventure their lives to gratify her slightest wish; and the bearded fellows who live their solitary life far out at Dubh Artach lighthouse, when she goes out to them with a new parcel of books and magazines, do not know how to show their gladness at the very sight of her bonnie face. There was once an actress of the same name, but this is quite a different woman. And to-morrow--do you know what she is going to do to-morrow?--to-morrow she is going away in this very yacht to a loch in the distant island of Lewis, and she is going to bring back with her some friends of hers who live there; and there will be high holiday at Castle Dare. An actress? Her cheeks are too sun-browned for the cheeks of an actress.

"Well, sir?" Hamish said, at length; and Macleod started.

"Very well, then," he said, impatiently, "why don't you go on deck and find out where the leakage of the skylight is?"

Hamish was not used to being addressed in this fashion, and walked away with a proud and hurt air. As he ascended the companion-way, he was muttering to himself in his native tongue,--

"Yes, I am going to find out where the leakage is, but perhaps it would be easier to find out below where the leakage is. If there is something the matter with the keel, is it the cross-trees you will go to to look for it? But I do not know what has come to the young master of late."

When Keith Macleod was alone, he sat down on the wooden bench and took out a letter, and tried to find there some assurance that this beautiful vision of his would some day be realized. He read it and re-read it; but his anxious scrutiny only left him the more disheartened. He went up on deck. He talked to Hamish in a perfunctory manner about the smartening up of the _Umpire_. He appeared to have lost interest in that already.

And then again he would seek relief in hard work, and try to forget altogether this hated time of enforced absence. One night word was brought by some one that the typhoid fever had broken out in the ill-drained cottages of Iona, and he said at once that next morning he would go round to Bunessan and ask the sanitary inspector there to be so kind as to inquire into this matter, and see whether something could not be done to improve these hovels.

"I am sure the duke does not know of it, Keith," his cousin Janet said, "or he would have a great alteration made."

"It is easy to make alterations," said he, "but it is not easy to make the poor people take advantage of them. They have such good health from the sea-air that they will not pay attention to ordinary cleanliness. But now that two or three of the young girls and children are ill, perhaps it is a good time to have something done."

Next morning, when he rose before it was daybreak, there was every promise of a fine day. The full moon was setting behind the western seas, lighting up the clouds there with a dusky yellow; in the east there was a wilder glare of steely blue high up over the intense blackness on the back of Ben-an-Sloich; and the morning was still, for he heard, suddenly piercing the silence, the whistle of a curlew, and that became more and more remote as the unseen bird winged its flight far over the sea. He lit the candles, and made the necessary preparations for his journey; for he had some message to leave at Kinloch, at the head of Loch Scridain, and he was going to ride round that way. By and by the morning light had increased so much that he blew out the candles.

No sooner had he done this than his eye caught sight of something outside that startled him. It seemed as though great clouds of golden-white, all ablaze in sunshine, rested on the dark bosom of the deep. Instantly he went to the window; and then he saw that these clouds were not clouds at all, but the islands around glittering in the "white wonder of the snow," and catching here and there the shafts of the early sunlight that now streamed through the valleys of Mull. The sudden marvel of it! There was Ulva, shining beautiful as in a sparkling bridal veil; and Gometra a paler blue-white in the shadow; and Colonsay and Erisgeir also a cold white; and Staffa pale gray; and then the sea that the gleaming islands rested on was a mirror of pale-green and rose-purple hues reflected from the morning sky. It was all dream-like, so still, and beautiful, and silent. But he now saw that that fine morning would not last. Behind the house clouds of a suffused yellow began to blot out the sparkling peaks of Ben-an-Sloich. The colors of the plain of the sea were troubled with gusts of wind until they disappeared altogether. The sky in the north grew an ominous black, until the farther shores of Loch Tua were dazzling white against that bank of angry cloud. But to Bunessan he would go.

Janet Macleod was not much afraid of the weather at any time, but she said to him at breakfast, in a laughing way,

"And if you are lost in a snowdrift in Glen Finichen, Keith, what are we to do for you?"

"What are you to do