Lang Andrew
The Disentanglers
XII. ADVENTURE OF THE CANADIAN HEIRESS
I. At Castle Skrae
‘How vain a thing is wealth,’ said Merton. ‘How little it can give of what we really desire, while of all that is lost and longed for it can restore nothing – except churches – and to do that ought to be made a capital offence.’
‘Why do you contemplate life as a whole, Mr. Merton? Why are you so moral? If you think it is amusing you are very much mistaken! Isn’t the scenery, isn’t the weather, beautiful enough for you? I could gaze for ever at the “unquiet bright Atlantic plain,” the rocky isles, those cliffs of basalt on either hand, while I listened to the crystal stream that slips into the sea, and waves the yellow fringes of the seaweed. Don’t be melancholy, or I go back to the castle. Try another line!’
‘Ah, I doubt that I shall never wet one here,’ said Merton.
‘As to the crystal stream, what business has it to be crystal? That is just what I complain of. Salmon and sea-trout are waiting out there in the bay and they can’t come up! Not a drop of rain to call rain for the last three weeks. That is what I meant by moralising about wealth. You can buy half a county, if you have the money; you can take half a dozen rivers, but all the millions of our host cannot purchase us a spate, and without a spate you might as well break the law by fishing in the Round Pond as in the river.’
‘Luckily for me Alured does not much care for fishing,’ said Lady Bude, who was Merton’s companion. The Countess had abandoned, much to her lord’s regret, the coloured and figurative language of her maiden days, the American slang. Now (as may have been observed) her style was of that polished character which can only be heard to perfection in circles socially elevated and intellectually cultured – ‘in that Garden of the Souls’ – to quote Tennyson.
The spot where Merton and Lady Bude were seated was beautiful indeed. They reclined on the short sea grass above a shore where long tresses of saffron-hued seaweed clothed the boulders, and the bright sea pinks blossomed. On their right the Skrae, now clearer than amber, mingled its waters with the sea loch. On their left was a steep bank clad with bracken, climbing up to perpendicular cliffs of basalt. These ended abruptly above the valley and the cove, and permitted a view of the Atlantic, in which, far away, the isle of the Lewis lay like a golden shield in the faint haze of the early sunset. On the other side of the sea loch, whose restless waters ever rushed in or out like a rapid river, with the change of tides, was a small village of white thatched cottages, the homes of fishermen and crofters. The neat crofts lay behind, in oblong strips, on the side of the hill. Such was the scene of a character common on the remote west coast of Sutherland.
‘Alured is no maniac for fishing, luckily,’ Lady Bude was saying. ‘To-day he is cat-hunting.’
‘I regret it,’ said Merton; ‘I profess myself the friend of cats.’
‘He is only trying to photograph a wild cat at home in the hills; they are very scarce.’
‘In fact he is Jones Harvey, the naturalist again, for the nonce, not the sportsman,’ said Merton.
‘It was as Jones Harvey that he – ’ said Lady Bude, and, blushing, stopped.
‘That he grasped the skirts of happy chance,’ said Merton.
‘Why don’t you grasp the skirts, Mr. Merton?’ asked Lady Bude. ‘Chance, or rather Lady Fortune, who wears the skirts, would, I think, be happy to have them grasped.’
‘Whose skirts do you allude to?’
‘The skirts, short enough in the Highlands, of Miss Macrae,’ said Lady Bude; ‘she is a nice girl, and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, and, after all, there are worse things than millions.’
Miss Emmeline Macrae was the daughter of the host with whom the Budes and Merton were staying at Skrae Castle, on Loch Skrae, only an easy mile and a half from the sea and the cove beside which Merton and Lady Bude were sitting.
‘There is a seal crawling out on to the shore of the little island!’ said Merton. ‘What a brute a man must be who shoots a seal! I could watch them all day – on a day like this.’
‘That is not answering my question,’ said Lady Bude. ‘What do you think of Miss Macrae? I know what you think!’
‘Can a humble person like myself aspire to the daughter of the greatest living millionaire? Our host can do almost anything but bring a spate, and even that he could do by putting a dam with a sluice at the foot of Loch Skrae: a matter of a few thousands only. As for the lady, her heart it is another’s, it never can be mine.’
‘Whose it is?’ asked Lady Bude.
‘Is it not, or do my trained instincts deceive me, that of young Blake, the new poet? Is she not “the girl who gives to song what gold could never buy”? He is as handsome as a man has no business to be.’
‘He uses belladonna for his eyes,’ said Lady Bude. ‘I am sure of it.’
‘Well, she does not know, or does not mind, and they are pretty inseparable the last day or two.’
‘That is your own fault,’ said Lady Bude; ‘you banter the poet so cruelly. She pities him.’
‘I wonder that our host lets the fellow keep staying here,’ said Merton. ‘If Mr. Macrae has a foible, except that of the pedigree of the Macraes (who were here before the Macdonalds or Mackenzies, and have come back in his person), it is scientific inventions, electric lighting, and his new toy, the wireless telegraph box in the observatory. You can see the tower from here, and the pole with box on top. I don’t care for that kind of thing myself, but Macrae thinks it Paradise to get messages from the Central News and the Stock Exchange up here, fifty miles from a telegraph post. Well, yesterday Blake was sneering at the whole affair.’
‘What is this wireless machine? Explain it to me,’ said Lady Bude.
‘How can you be so cruel?’ asked Merton.
‘Why cruel?’
‘Oh, you know very well how your sex receives explanations. You have three ways of doing it.’
‘Explain them!’
‘Well, the first way is, if a man tries to explain what “per cent” means, or the difference of “odds on,” or “odds against,” that is, if they don’t gamble, they cast their hands desperately abroad, and cry, “Oh, don’t, I never can understand!” The second way is to sit and smile, and look intelligent, and think of their dressmaker, or their children, or their young man, and then to say, “Thank you, you have made it all so clear!”’
‘And the third way?’
‘The third way is for you to make it plain to the explainer that he does not understand what he is explaining.’
‘Well, try me; how does the wireless machine work?’
‘Then, to begin with a simple example in ordinary life, you know what telepathy is?’
‘Of course, but tell me.’
‘Suppose Jones is thinking of Smith, or rather of Smith’s sister. Jones is dying, or in a row, in India. Miss Smith is in Bayswater. She sees Jones in her drawing-room. The thought of Jones has struck a receiver of some sort in the brain, say, of Miss Smith. But Miss Smith may not see him, somebody else may, say her aunt, or the footman. That is because the aunt or the footman has the properly tuned receiver in her or his brain, and Miss Smith has not.’
‘I see, so far – but the machine?’
‘That is an electric apparatus charged with a message. The message is not conducted by wires, but is merely carried along on a new sort of waves, “Hertz waves,” I think, but that does not matter. They roam through space, these waves, and wherever they meet another machine of the same kind, a receiver, they communicate it.’
‘Then everybody who has such a machine as Mr. Macrae’s gets all Mr. Macrae’s messages for nothing?’ asked Lady Bude.
‘They would get them,’ said Merton. ‘But that is where the artfulness comes in. Two Italian magicians, or electricians, Messrs. Gianesi and Giambresi, have invented an improvement suggested by a dodge of the Indians on the Amazon River. They make machines which are only in tune with each other. Their machine fires off a message which no other machine can receive or tap except that of their customer, say Mr. Macrae. The other receivers all over the world don’t get it, they are not in tune. It is as if Jones could only appear as a wraith to Miss Smith, and vice versa.’
‘How is it done?’
‘Oh, don’t ask me! Besides, I fancy it is a trade secret, the tuning. There’s one good thing about it, you know how Highland landscape is spoiled by telegraph posts?’
‘Yes, everywhere there is always a telegraph post in the foreground.’
‘Well, Mr. Macrae had them when he was here first, but he has had them all cut down, bless him, since he got the new dodge. He was explaining it all to Blake and me, and Blake only scoffed, would not understand, showed he was bored.’
‘I think it delightful! What did Mr. Blake say?’
‘Oh, his usual stuff. Science is an expensive and inadequate substitute for poetry and the poetic gifts of the natural man, who is still extant in Ireland. He can flash his thoughts, and any trifles of news he may pick up, across oceans and continents, with no machinery at all. What is done in Khartoum is known the same day in Cairo.’
‘What did Mr. Macrae say?’
‘He asked why the Cairo people did not make fortunes on the Stock Exchange.’
‘And Mr. Blake?’
‘He looked a great deal, but he said nothing. Then, as I said, he showed that he was bored when Macrae exhibited to us the machine and tried to teach us how it worked, and the philosophy of it. Blake did not understand it, nor do I, really, but of course I displayed an intelligent interest. He didn’t display any. He said that the telegraph thing only brought us nearer to all that a child of nature – ’
‘He a child of nature, with his belladonna!’
‘To all that a child of nature wanted to forget. The machine emitted a serpent of tape, news of Surrey v. Yorkshire, and something about Kaffirs, and Macrae was enormously pleased, for such are the simple joys of the millionaire, really a child of nature. Some of them keep automatic hydraulic organs and beastly machines that sing. Now Macrae is not a man of that sort, and he has only one motor up here, and only uses that for practical purposes to bring luggage and supplies, but the wireless thing is the apple of his eye. And Blake sneered.’
‘He is usually very civil indeed, almost grovelling, to the father,’ said Lady Bude. ‘But I tell you for your benefit, Mr. Merton, that he has no chance with the daughter. I know it for certain. He only amuses her. Now here, you are clever.’
Merton bowed.
‘Clever, or you would not have diverted me from my question with all that science. You are not ill looking.’
‘Spare my blushes,’ said Merton; adding, ‘Lady Bude, if you must be answered, you are clever enough to have found me out.’
‘That needed less acuteness than you suppose,’ said the lady.
‘I am very sorry to hear it,’ said Merton. ‘You know how utterly hopeless it is.’
‘There I don’t agree with you,’ said Lady Bude.
Merton blushed. ‘If you are right,’ he said, ‘then I have no business to be here. What am I in the eyes of a man like Mr. Macrae? An adventurer, that is what he would think me. I did think that I had done nothing, said nothing, looked nothing, but having the chance – well, I could not keep away from her. It is not honourable. I must go… I love her.’
Merton turned away and gazed at the sunset without seeing it.
Lady Bude put forth her hand and laid it on his. ‘Has this gone on long?’ she asked.
‘Rather an old story,’ said Merton. ‘I am a fool. That is the chief reason why I was praying for rain. She fishes, very keen on it. I would have been on the loch or the river with her. Blake does not fish, and hates getting wet.’
‘You might have more of her company, if you would not torment the poet so. The green-eyed monster, jealousy, is on your back.’
Merton groaned. ‘I bar the fellow, anyhow,’ he said. ‘But, in any case, now that I know you have found me out, I must be going. If only she were as poor as I am!’
‘You can’t go to-morrow, to-morrow is Sunday,’ said Lady Bude. ‘Oh, I am sorry for you. Can’t we think of something? Cannot you find an opening? Do something great! Get her upset on the loch, and save her from drowning! Mr. Macrae dotes on her; he would be grateful.’
‘Yes, I might take the pin out of the bottom of the boat,’ said Merton. ‘It is an idea! But she swims at least as well as I do. Besides – hardly sportsmanlike.’
Lady Bude tried to comfort him; it is the mission of young matrons. He must not be in such a hurry to go away. As to Mr. Blake, she could entirely reassure him. It was a beautiful evening, the lady was fair and friendly; Nature, fragrant of heather and of the sea, was hushed in a golden repose. The two talked long, and the glow of sunset was fading; the eyes of Lady Bude were a little moist, and Merton was feeling rather consoled when they rose and walked back towards Skrae Castle. It had been an ancient seat of the Macraes, a clan in relatively modern times, say 1745, rather wild, impoverished, and dirty; but Mr. Macrae, the great Canadian millionaire, had bought the old place, with many thousands of acres ‘where victual never grew.’
Though a landlord in the Highlands he was beloved, for he was the friend of crofters, as rent was no object to him, and he did not particularly care for sport. He accepted the argument, dear to the Celt, that salmon are ground game, and free to all, while the natives were allowed to use ancient flint-locked fusils on his black cocks. Mr. Macrae was a thoroughly generous man, and a tall, clean-shaved, graceful personage. His public gifts were large. He had just given 500,000l. to Oxford to endow chairs and students of Psychical Research, while the rest of the million was bestowed on Cambridge, to supply teaching in Elementary Logic. His way of life was comfortable, but simple, except where the comforts of science and modern improvements were concerned. There were lifts, or elevators, now in the castle of Skrae, though Blake always went by the old black corkscrew staircases, holding on by the guiding rope, after the poetical manner of our ancestors.
On a knowe which commanded the castle, in a manner that would have pained Sir Dugald Dalgetty, Mr. Macrae had erected, not a ‘sconce,’ but an observatory, with a telescope that ‘licked the Lick thing,’ as he said. Indeed it was his foible ‘to see the Americans and go one better,’ and he spoke without tolerance of the late boss American millionaire, the celebrated J. P. van Huytens, recently deceased.
Duke Humphrey greater wealth computes,
And sticks, they say, at nothing,
sings the poet. Mr. Macrae computed greater wealth than Mr. van Huytens, though avoiding ostentation; he did not
Wear a pair of golden boots,
And silver underclothing.
The late J. P. van Huytens he regarded with moral scorn. This rival millionaire had made his wealth by the process (apparently peaceful and horticultural) of ‘watering stocks,’ and by the seemingly misplaced generosity of overcapitalising enterprises, and ‘grabbing side shows.’ The nature of these and other financial misdemeanours Merton did not understand. But he learned from Mr. Macrae that thereby J. P. van Huytens had scooped in the widow, the orphan, the clergyman, and the colonel. The two men had met in the most exclusive circles of American society; with the young van Huytenses the daughter of the millionaire had even been on friendly terms, but Mr. Macrae retired to Europe, and put a stop to all that. To do so, indeed, was one of his motives for returning to the home of his ancestors, the remote and inaccessible Castle Skrae. The Sportsman’s Guide to Scotland says, as to Loch Skrae: ‘Railway to Lairg, then walk or hire forty-five miles.’ The young van Huytenses were not invited to walk or hire.
Van Huytens had been ostentatious, Mr. Macrae was the reverse. His costume was of the simplest, his favourite drink (of which he took little) was what humorists call ‘the light wine of the country,’ drowned in Apollinaris water. His establishment was refined, but not gaudy or luxurious, and the chief sign of wealth at Skrae was the great observatory with the laboratory, and the surmounting ‘pole with box on top,’ as Merton described the apparatus for the new kind of telegraphy. In the basement of the observatory was lodged the hugest balloon known to history, and a skilled expert was busied with novel experiments in aerial navigation. Happily he could swim, and his repeated descents into Loch Skrae did not daunt his soaring genius.
Above the basement of the observatory were rooms for bachelors, a smoking-room, a billiard-room, and a scientific library. The wireless telegraphy machine (looking like two boxes, one on the top of the other, to the eye of ignorance) was installed in the smoking-room, and a wire to Mr. Macrae’s own rooms informed him, by ringing a bell (it also rang in the smoking-room), when the machine began to spread itself out in tape conveying the latest news. The machine communicated with another in the establishment of its vendors, Messrs. Gianesi, Giambresi & Co., in Oxford Street. Thus the millionaire, though residing nearly fifty miles from the nearest station at Lairg, was as well and promptly informed as if he dwelt in Fleet Street, and he could issue, without a moment’s procrastination, his commands to sell and buy, and to do such other things as pertain to the nature of millionaires. When we add that a steam yacht of great size and comfort, doing an incredible number of knots an hour on the turbine system, lay at anchor in the sea loch, we have indicated the main peculiarities of Mr. Macrae’s rural establishment. Wealth, though Merton thought so poorly of it, had supplied these potentialities of enjoyment; but, alas! disease had ‘decimated’ the grouse on the moors (of course to decimate now means almost to extirpate), and the crofters had increased the pleasures of stalking by making the stags excessively shy, thus adding to the arduous enjoyment of the true sportsman.
To Castle Skrae, being such as we have described, Lady Bude and Merton returned from their sentimental prowl. They found Miss Macrae, in a very short skirt of the Macrae tartan, trying to teach Mr. Blake to play ping-pong in the great hall.
We must describe the young lady, though her charms outdo the powers of the vehicle of prose. She was tall, slim, and graceful, light of foot as a deer on the corrie. Her hair was black, save when the sun shone on it and revealed strands of golden brown; it was simply arrayed, and knotted on the whitest and shapeliest neck in Christendom. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes large and lucid,
The greyest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey.
Her complexion was of a clear pallor, like the white rose beloved by her ancestors; her features were all but classic, with the charm of romance; but what made her unique was her mouth. It was faintly upturned at the corners, as in archaic Greek art; she had, in the slightest and most gracious degree, what Logan, describing her once, called ‘the Æginetan grin.’ This gave her an air peculiarly gay and winsome, brilliant, joyous, and alert. In brief, to use Chaucer’s phrase,
She was as wincy as a wanton colt,
Sweet as a flower, and upright as a bolt.
She was the girl who was teaching the poet the elements of ping-pong. The poet usually missed the ball, for he was averse to and unapt for anything requiring quickness of eye and dexterity of hand. On a seat lay open a volume of the Poetry of the Celtic Renascence, which Blake had been reading to Miss Macrae till she used the vulgar phrase ‘footle,’ and invited him to be educated in ping-pong. Of these circumstances she cheerfully informed the new-comers, adding that Lord Bude had returned happy, having photographed a wild cat in its lair.
‘Did he shoot it?’ asked Blake.
‘No. He’s a sportsman!’ said Miss Macrae.
‘That is why I supposed he must have shot the cat,’ answered Blake.
‘What is Gaelic for a wild cat, Blake?’ asked Merton unkindly.
Like other modern Celtic poets Mr. Blake was entirely ignorant of the melodious language of his ancestors, though it had often been stated in the literary papers that he was ‘going to begin’ to take lessons.
‘Sans purr,’ answered Blake; ‘the Celtic wild cat has not the servile accomplishment of purring. The words, a little altered, are the motto of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders. This is the country of the wild cat.’
‘I thought the “wild cat” was a peculiarly American financial animal,’ said Merton.
Miss Macrae laughed, and, the gong sounding (by electricity, the wire being connected with the Greenwich Observatory), she ran lightly up the central staircase. Lady Bude had hurried to rejoin her lord; Merton and Blake sauntered out to their rooms in the observatory, Blake with an air of fatigue and languor.
‘Learning ping-pong easily?’ asked Merton.
‘I have more hopes of teaching Miss Macrae the essential and intimate elements of Celtic poetry,’ said Blake. ‘One box of books I brought with me, another arrived to-day. I am about to begin on my Celtic drama of “Con of the Hundred Battles.”’
‘Have you the works of the ancient Sennachie, Macfootle?’ asked Merton. He was jealous, and his usual urbanity was sorely tried by the Irish bard. In short, he was rude; stupid, too.
However, Blake had his revenge after dinner, on the roof of the observatory, where the ladies gathered round him in the faint silver light, looking over the sleeping sea. ‘Far away to the west,’ he said, ‘lies the Celtic paradise, the Isle of Apples!’
‘American apples are excellent,’ said Merton, but the beauty of the scene and natural courtesy caused Miss Macrae to whisper ‘Hush!’
The poet went on, ‘May I speak to you the words of the emissary from the lovely land?’
‘The mysterious female?’ said Merton brutally. ‘Dr. Hyde calls her “a mysterious female.” It is in his Literary History of Ireland.’
‘Pray let us hear the poem, Mr. Merton,’ said Miss Macrae, attuned to the charm of the hour and the scene.
‘She came to Bran’s Court,’ said Blake, ‘from the Isle of Apples, and no man knew whence she came, and she chanted to them.’
‘Twenty-eight quatrains, no less, a hundred and twelve lines,’ said the insufferable Merton. ‘Could you give us them in Gaelic?’
The bard went on, not noticing the interruption, ‘I shall translate
‘There is a distant isle
Around which sea horses glisten,
A fair course against the white swelling surge,
Four feet uphold it.’
‘Feet of white bronze under it.’
‘White bronze, what’s that, eh?’ asked the practical Mr. Macrae.
‘Glittering through beautiful ages!
Lovely land through the world’s age,
On which the white blossoms drop.’
‘Beautiful!’ said Miss Macrae.
‘There are twenty-six more quatrains,’ said Merton.
The bard went on,
‘A beautiful game, most delightful
They play – ’
‘Ping-pong?’ murmured Merton.
‘Hush!’ said Lady Bude.
Miss Macrae turned to the poet.
‘They play, sitting at the luxurious wine,
Men and gentle women under a bush,
Without sin, without crime.’
‘They are playing still,’ Blake added. ‘Unbeheld, undisturbed! I verily believe there is no Gael even now who would not in his heart of hearts let drift by him the Elysiums of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, to grasp at the Moy Mell, the Apple Isle, of the unknown Irish pagan! And then to play sitting at the luxurious wine,
‘Men and gentle women under a bush!’
‘It really cannot have been ping-pong that they played at, sitting. Bridge, more likely,’ said Merton. ‘And “good wine needs no bush!”’
The bard moved away, accompanied by his young hostess, who resented Merton’s cynicism
‘Tell me more of that lovely poem, Mr. Blake,’ she said.
‘I am jangled and out of tune,’ said Blake wildly. ‘The Sassenach is my torture! Let me take your hand, it is cool as the hands of the foam-footed maidens of – of – what’s the name of the place?’
‘Was it Clonmell?’ asked Miss Macrae, letting him take her hand.
He pressed it against his burning brow.
‘Though you laugh at me,’ said Blake, ‘sometimes you are kind! I am upset – I hardly know myself. What is yonder shape skirting the lawn? Is it the Daoine Sidh?’
‘Why do you call her “the downy she”? She is no more artful than other people. She is my maid, Elspeth Mackay,’ answered Miss Macrae, puzzled. They were alone, separated from the others by the breadth of the roof.
‘I said the Daoine Sidh,’ replied the poet, spelling the words. ‘It means the People of Peace.’
‘Quakers?’
‘No, the fairies,’ groaned the misunderstood bard. ‘Do you know nothing of your ancestral tongue? Do you call yourself a Gael?’
‘Of course I call myself a girl,’ answered Miss Macrae. ‘Do you want me to call myself a young lady?’
The poet sighed. ‘I thought you understood me,’ he said. ‘Ah, how to escape, how to reach the undiscovered West!’
‘But Columbus discovered it,’ said Miss Macrae.
‘The undiscovered West of the Celtic heart’s desire,’ explained the bard; ‘the West below the waters! Thither could we twain sail in the magic boat of Bran! Ah see, the sky opens like a flower!’
Indeed, there was a sudden glow of summer lightning.
‘That looks more like rain,’ said Merton, who was standing with the Budes at an opposite corner of the roof.
‘I say, Merton,’ asked Bude, ‘how can you be so uncivil to that man? He took it very well.’
‘A rotter,’ said Merton. ‘He has just got that stuff by heart, the verse and a lot of the prose, out of a book that I brought down myself, and left in the smoking-room. I can show you the place if you like.’
‘Do, Mr. Merton. But how foolish you are! do be civil to the man,’ whispered Lady Bude, who shared his disbelief in Blake; and at that moment the tinkle of an electric bell in the smoking-room below reached the expectant ears of Mr. Macrae.
‘Come down, all of you,’ he said. ‘The wireless telegraphy is at work.’
He waited till they were all in the smoking-room, and feverishly examined the tape.
‘Escape of De Wet,’ he read. ‘Disasters to the Imperial Yeomanry. Strike of Cigarette Makers. Great Fire at Hackney.’
‘There!’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘We might have gone to bed in London, and not known all that till we got the morning papers to-morrow. And here we are fifty miles from a railway station or a telegraph office – no, we’re nearer Inchnadampf.’
‘Would that I were in the Isle of Apples, Mell Moy, far, far from civilisation!’ said Blake.
“There shall be no grief there or sorrow,” so sings the minstrel of The Wooing of Etain.
“Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of new milk and ale shalt thou have with me then, fair lady,” Merton read out from the book he had been speaking of to the Budes.
‘Jolly place, the Celtic Paradise! Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of ale and new milk. Quel luxe!’
‘Is that the kind of entertainment you were offering me, Mr. Blake?’ asked Miss Macrae gaily. ‘Mr. Blake,’ she went on, ‘has been inviting me to fly to the undiscovered West beneath the waters, in the magic boat of Bran.’
‘Did Bran invent the submarine?’ asked Mr. Macrae, and then the company saw what they had never seen before, the bard blushing. He seemed so discomposed that Miss Macrae took compassion on him.
‘Never mind my father, Mr. Blake,’ she said, ‘he is a very good Highlander, and believes in Eachain of the Hairy Arm as much as the crofters do. Have you heard of Eachain, Mr. Blake? He is a spectre in full Highland costume, attached to our clan. When we came here first, to look round, we had only horses hired from Edinburgh, and a Lowlander – mark you, a Lowlander– to drive. He was in the stable one afternoon – the old stable, we have pulled it down – when suddenly the horses began to kick and rear. He looked round to the open door, and there stood a huge Highlander in our tartans, with musket, pistols, claymore, dirk, skian, and all, and soft brogues of untanned leather on his feet. The coachman, in a panic, made a blind rush at the figure, but behold, there was nobody, and a boy outside had seen no man. The horses were trembling and foaming. Now it was a Lowlander from Teviotdale that saw the man, and the crofters were delighted. They said the figure was the chief that fell at Culloden, come to welcome us back. So you must not despair of us, Mr. Blake, and you, that have “the sight,” may see Eachain yourself, who knows?’
This happy turn of the conversation exactly suited Blake. He began to be very amusing about magic, and brownies, and ‘the downy she,’ as Miss Macrae called the People of Peace. The ladies presently declared that they were afraid to go to bed; so they went, Miss Macrae indicating her displeasure to Merton by the coldness of her demeanour.
The men, who were rather dashed by the pleasant intelligence which the telegraph had communicated, sat up smoking for a while, and then retired in a subdued state of mind.
Next morning, which was Sunday, Merton appeared rather late at breakfast, late and pallid. After a snatch of disturbed slumber, he had wakened, or seemed to waken, fretting a good deal over the rusticity of his bearing towards Blake, and over his hopeless affair of the heart. He had vexed his lady. ‘If he is good enough for his hosts, he ought to be good enough for their guests,’ thought Merton. ‘What a brute, what a fool I am; I ought to go. I will go! I ought not to take coffee after dinner, I know I ought not, and I smoke too much,’ he added, and finally he went to breathe the air on the roof.
The night was deadly soft and still, a slight mist hid the furthest verges of the sea’s horizon. Behind it, the summer lightning seemed like portals that opened and shut in the heavens, revealing a glory without form, and closing again.
‘I don’t wonder that these Irish poets dreamed of Isles of Paradise out there:
‘Lands undiscoverable in the unheard-of West,
Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea
Runs without wind for ever.’
thought Merton. ‘Chicago is the realisation of their dream. Hullo, there are the lights of a big steamer, and a very low one behind it! Queer craft!’
Merton watched the lights that crossed the sea, when either the haze deepened or the fainter light on the smaller vessel vanished, and the larger ship steamed on in a southerly direction. ‘Magic boat of Bran!’ thought Merton. He turned and entered the staircase to go back to his room. There was a lift, of course, but, equally of course, there was nobody to manage it. Merton, who had a lighted bedroom-candle in his hand, descended the spiral staircase; at a turning he thought he saw, ‘with the tail of his eye,’ a plaid, draping a tall figure of a Highlander, disappear round the corner. Nobody in the castle wore the kilt except the piper, and he had not rooms in the observatory. Merton ran down as fast as he could, but he did not catch another view of the plaid and its wearer, or hear any footsteps. He went to the bottom of the staircase, opened the outer door, and looked forth. Nobody! The electric light from the open door of his own room blazed across the landing on his return. All was perfectly still, and Merton remembered that he had not heard the footsteps of the appearance. ‘Was it Eachain?’ he asked himself. ‘Do I sleep, do I dream?’
