"THE SELF-SATISFACTION FLICKERED OUT OF HIS FACE"
"THE SELF-SATISFACTION FLICKERED OUT OF HIS FACE"
He pronounced this in so matter-of-fact a voice that the lad came instantly aft, and began to search carefully in the side lockers and drawers. Two of these were locked and had to be opened with the blade of Scarlett's dagger. Wat cut away part of the wood round the wards of the lock, into which aperture Jan inserted an iron spike that lay in the bottom of the boat, whereupon the locks gave sharply in both cases. In one compartment was a small compass, and in the other a sheaf of charts.
*****
When the morning broke on the third day of their cruise a long, low island was in sight immediately in front. Then a flat coast with rolling country stretchedaway behind, with many woods shining palely green, and looking newly washed as the morning sun sucked the night dews from the leaves. An ancient castle stood gray and stern on the left, and far to the right the tower of a noble church took the sun and gleamed like the white sail of a ship.
Wise Jan Pettigrew, who had long since composed himself to all his duties and become the devoted slave of Jack Scarlett (whom his eyes followed with a kind of rapt adoration), pointed with his finger.
"Branksea!" he cried, with pride both in voice and gesture.
And indeed he had some reason for self-congratulation. For the cross channel voyage in an open boat, together with a long trip down the coast, had not often been so successfully undertaken.
Keeping the boat well to the left, they rounded a low spit of shingle and turned in sharply towards a tiny landing-place, from which a neat path extended up into the woods.
A flag was flying among the trees and making a splash of brave color among the greenery.
The long-boat grated on the beach and Wise Jan was the first ashore. Scarlett and Wat disembarked in more leisurely fashion, and stretched themselves luxuriously after their long and cramped boat voyage.
They were employing themselves in taking out of the stern such articles as they had stowed there, when a challenging voice rang out clear and high from the woods above.
"Jan Pettigrew! Jan Pettigrew!" it cried, "what do you here with our long-boat? Why are you not in the Low Countries, making love to the little Dutch maids with faces like flat-irons?"
"No, they ain't neither," cried Wise Jan, apparently not at all astonished, making a face in the direction of his unseen querist; "they're a sight better-looking than you be—and they comb their hair!"
He looked apologetically at Scarlett.
"Heed her not," he said, in a low voice, "'tis but crosspatch Mehitabel Smith, our master's daughter. He has spoilt her by sparing of the wand to beat her with when she was young, and now that she is grown—and well grown, too—she will be forever climbing trees and crying uncivil words to decent folk as they go by, and all, as she counts it, for merriment and mischief-making."
"Ah, Jan! Wise Jan Pettigrew," the voice went on, "Jan that drank the cow's milk and gave the calf water,because it was better for its stomach—you are right early astir. And who are the brisk lads with you? I know not that my father will be pleased to see strangers on Branksea. Hold up your head, Jan, and learn to answer a lady civilly. You have surely forgot or mislaid all the manners you ever had. Shut your mouth, Jan—I do advise it; and do not, I pray you, so mump with your chin and wamble with your legs!"
"Madcap!" cried Jan, stung by the pointed allusions to his defects of person, "my legs are as straight as yours be, and serve me well, albeit I wrap them not, as women do, in clouts and petticoats. And at least if my legs are crooked and my jaw slack my eyes are straight set in my head."
"And if eyes do look two ways," retorted the voice out of the unseen, "'tis only with trying to keep them on the antics of both Jan Pettigrew's legs at once; for your knees do so knock together like Spanish castanets, and your legs so jimble-jamble in their sockets, that 'tis as good as a puppet-with-strings dancing at the fair just to watch 'em!"
Jan looked still more apologetically at Scarlett.
"I am black ashamed," he said; "but, after all, she means no harm by it. She has never had any one to teach her religion or good manners, but has run wild here on Branksea among the goats and the ignorant sailormen."
"I hear thee, Wise Jan," cried the voice again; "tell no lying tales on your betters, or I in my turn will tell the tale of how Wise Jan went to Portsmouth—how the watch bade him go in and bathe, because that the lukewarm town's-water was good for warts. And when he had gone in, glad at heart to hear the marvel, being exceedingly warty, the watch stole his clothes, and then put him a week in Bridewell for walking of the streets without them in sight of the admiral's mother-in-law!"
"'Tis a lie!" shouted Jan, looking up from the boat, out of which he had carefully extracted all the various belongings he had brought with him; "a great and manifest lie it is! It was, as all men know, for fighting with six sailormen of the fleet that I was shut up in Bridewell."
"Wise Jan, Wise Jan, think upon what parson says concerning the day of judgment!" replied the voice, reproachfully. "For if thus you deny your true doings and confess them not, you will set all the little devils down below to the carrying of firewood to be ready against the day of your hanging."
Wise Jan did not deign to reply. He resigned the unequal wordy fray, and taking a back-load of stuff on his shoulders, he led the way up the neatly gravelled path, which wound from the little wooden landing-stage into the green and arching woods.
As Scarlett and Wat followed after and looked about them with much interest, a tall maid, clad in a blue skirt and figured blouse, and with her short tangles of hair blowing loose about her ears, dropped suddenly and lightly as a brown squirrel upon the path before them. Whereat Wat and Scarlett stopped as sharply as if a gun had been loosed off at them; for the girl had handed herself unceremoniously down from among the leaves, and there she stood right in their path, as little disconcerted as if that were the customary method of receiving strangers upon the Isle of Branksea.
"I bid you welcome, gentlemen," she said, bowing to them like a courteous boy of the court. Indeed, her kirtle was not much longer than many a boy's Sunday coat, and her hair, cropped short and very curly, had a boy's cap set carelessly upon the back of it.
Scarlett stared vaguely at the pleasant apparition.
"The Lord have mercy!" he said, as if to himself; "is this another of them? 'Tis indeed high time we found that runaway love."
But Wat Gordon, to whom courtesy to women came by nature, placed himself before the old soldier. He had his cap in his hand and bowed right gracefully. Scarlett might cozen Wise Jan an he liked; but he, Wat Gordon, at least knew better how to speak to a woman than did any ancient Mustache of the Wars.
"My Lady of the Isle," he said, in the manner of the time, "I thank you for your most courteous and unexpected welcome. We are two exiles from Holland, escaping from prison. This good gentleman of yours has helped us to set our feet again upon the shores of Britain, and in return we have aided him to restore his master's property."
The girl listened with her head at the side, like a bird making up its mind whether or not to fly. When Wat was half-way through with his address she yawned.
"That is a long sermon and very dull," she said; "one might almost as well have been in church. Come to breakfast."
So, much crestfallen, Wat followed meekly in the wake of Scarlett, whose shoulders were shaking at the downfall of the squire of dames. At the corner of the path, just where it opened out upon a made road of beaten earth, Jack Scarlett turned with the obvious intention of venturing a facetious remark, but Wat met him in the face with a snarl so fierce that for peace' sake he thought better of it and relapsed into covertly smiling silence.
"If you crack so much as one of your rusty japes upon me, Jack Scarlett, I declare I'll set the point of my knife in your fat back!" he said, viciously.
And for the rest of the way Scarlett laughed inwardly, while Wat followed, plodding along sullenly and in an exceedingly evil temper.
The house to which they went was a curious one for the time and country. It was built wholly of wood, witheaves that came down five or six feet over the walls, so that they formed a continuous shelter all about the house, very pleasant in hot weather. A wooden floor, scrubbed very white and with mats of foreign grasses and straw upon it, went all around under these wide eaves. Twisted shells, shining stones, and many other remarkable and outlandish curiosities were set in corners or displayed in niches.
At the outer door the girl turned sharply upon them.
"My name is Mehitabel Smith," she said, "and this is my father's house. I like your looks well enough, but I would also know your degree and your business. For Branksea is for the nonce in my keeping, and that you have come with Wise Jan Pettigrew is no recommendation—since, indeed, the creature takes up with every wastrel and run-the-country he can pick up."
Wat had not got over the rebuff of his first introduction, and sulkily declined to speak; but Scarlett hastened to assure Mistress Mehitabel of the great consideration Wat and he enjoyed both at home and abroad.
"And for what were you in prison in Holland?" she said. "Washein prison?" she continued, without waiting for any answer, looking at Wat.
Scarlett nodded. He had it on the tip of his tongue to say that it had been owing to a brawl in a tavern. But at the last moment, seeing Wat's dejected countenance, he made a little significant gesture of drawing his hand across his throat.
"High-treason—a hanging or heading matter!" he answered, nodding his head very gravely.
The girl looked at Wat with a sudden access of interest.
"Lord, Lord, I would that I lived in Holland! High-treason, and at his age!" she exclaimed. "What chances must he not have had!"
Without further questioning concerning antecedentsand character, she led the way within. They passed through a wide hall, and down a gallery painted of a pleasant pale green, into a neat kitchen with windows that opened outward, and which had a brick-built fireplace and a wide Dutch chimney at the end. Brass preserving pans, shining skillets, and tin colanders made a brave show, set in a sort of diminishing perspective upon the walls.
"Now if ye want breakfast ye must e'en put to your hand and help me to set the fire agoing, Gray Badger!" she cried, suddenly, looking at Scarlett. "Go get water to the spring. It is but a hundred yards beyond that oak in the hollow. And you, young Master High Treason, catch hold of that knife and set your white, high-treasonable hands to slicing the bacon."
Mehitabel Smith calmly went to the inner door, and reaching down a linen smock, she slipped it on over her head and fastened it in with a belt at the waist. Wat and Scarlett moved meekly and obediently to their several duties, and the business of breakfast-making went gayly forward.
When Wat returned from the side-table with the bacon sliced, Mehitabel Smith had the frying-pan ready and a fire of brushwood crackling merrily beneath it.
"Do you not think," she said, without looking at him, being busy buttering the bottom of the pan, "that fish and bacon go well together when one is hungry? For me, I am always hungry on Branksea. Were you ever hungry in prison?"
Wat muttered something ungracious enough, which might have been taken as a reply to either question, but the girl went on without heeding his answer. She sprinkled oatmeal over half a dozen fresh fish, and presently she had them making a pleasant, birsling sound in the pan, shielding her eyes occasionally with her hand when they spattered.
"You must have been very happy in prison?" she said.
And for the first time she looked directly at him for an answer. Wat was astonished.
"Happy!" he said, "why, one does not expect to be very happy in a Dutch prison, or for that matter in anyother. Prisons are not set up to add to folks' happiness that ever I heard."
"But what experiences!" she cried; "what famous 'scapes and chances of adventure! To be in prison at your age (you are little more than a lad), and that for high-treason! Here on Branksea one has no such advantages. Only ships and seamen, pots of green paint, and hauling up and down the flag, or, at best, ninnies that think they ought to make love to you, because, forsooth, you are a girl. Ah, I would rather be in prison a thousand years!"
Wat watched her without speaking as she moved nimbly and with a certain deft, defiant ease about the sprucely painted kitchen.
"Do you believe in love? I don't!" she said, unexpectedly, turning the fish out on a platter and lifting the pan from the fire to prepare it for the bacon which Wat had been holding all the time in readiness for his companion.
"Yes, I do believe in love," said Wat, soberly, as though he had been repeating the Apostles' Creed. He thought of the little tight curls crisping so heart-breakingly about the ears of his love, and also of the grave which had been dug so deep under the sand-hills of Lis. There was no question. He believed with all his heart in love.
The girl darted a swiftly inquiring glance at him. But her suspicions were allayed completely by Wat's downcast and abstracted gaze. He was not thinking at all of her. She gave a sigh, half of relief and half of disappointment.
"Oh yes," she returned, quickly, "fathers and mothers, godfathers and godmothers, tutors and governors—that sort of love. But do you believe in love really—the love they sing about in catches, and which the lads prate of when they come awooing?"
Wat nodded his head still more soberly. "I believe in true love," he said.
"Oh, then, I pray you, tell me all about her!" cried Mehitabel Smith, at once laying down the fork with which she had been turning the bacon, and sitting down to look at Wat with a sudden increase of interest.
Scarlett came in a moment after and sniffed, with his nose in the air; then he walked to the pan in which the bacon was skirling.
"It seems to me that the victual is in danger of burning," he said. "I think next time it were wiser for the Gray Badger to fry the pan, and for those that desire to talk—ah! of high-treason—to go and fetch the water."
Mehitabel started up and began turning the bacon quickly.
"A touch of the pan gives flavor, I have ever heard," she said, unabashed; "and if you like it not, Gray Badger, you can always stick to the fish."
When breakfast was over, Scarlett and Wise Jan were ordered to wash the dishes. This they proceeded to do, clattering the platters and rubbing them with their towels awkwardly, using their elbows ten times more than was necessary. Scarlett worked with grim delight, and Jan with many grumblings. Then, having seen them set to their tasks, Mistress Mehitabel made Wat lift a pair of wooden buckets, scrubbed very white, and accompany her to the spring. She went first along the narrow path to show him the way. She had taken off her cooking-smock, and was again in the neat kirtle of dark blue cloth, which showed her graceful young figure to advantage.
When they reached the well, Mehitabel appeared to be in no hurry to return. She sat down, and to all appearance lost herself in thought, leaning her chin upon her hand and looking into the water.
"There was a lass here but yester-morn, no furthergone," she said, "who believed in love. She gave me this, and bade me show it to the man that should come after her also believing in love."
She held out a small heart of wrought gold with letters graven upon it. Wat leaped forward and snatched it out of her hand.
"It is hers—Kate's. I have seen it a thousand times about her neck. She wore it ever upon the ribbon of blue."
And he pressed the token passionately to his lips. Mehitabel Smith looked on with an interested but entirely dispassionate expression.
"I wonder," she said, presently, "if it is as good to be in love as to sit in the tree-tops and eat pignuts?"
But Wat did not hear her; or, hearing, did not answer.
"It is Kate's—it is hers—hers. It has rested on her neck. She has sent it to me," he murmured. "She knew that I would surely compass the earth to seek her—that so long as life remained to me I should follow and seek her till I found her."
"Faith!" said Mehitabel, "I do believe this is the right man. He has the grip of it better than any I ever listened to. If he so kiss the gift, what would he not do to the giver?"
"Tell me," said Wat, looking eagerly and tremulously at her, "what said she when she gave you the token?—in what garb was she attired?—was her countenance sad?—were they that went with her kind?"
"Truly and truly this is right love, and no make-believe," said the girl, clapping her hands; "never did I credit the disease before, but ever laughed at them that came acourting with their breaking hearts and their silly, sighing ardors. But this fellow means it, every word. He has well learned his lover's hornbook. For he asks so many questions, and has them all tumbling over one another like pigs turned out of a clover pasture."
Wat made a little movement of impatience.
"I pray you be merciful, haste and tell me—for I have come far and suffered much!"
The pathetic ring in his voice moved the wayward daughter of Captain Smith of theSea Unicorn.
"I will tell you," she answered, more seriously, "but in my own way. It was, I think, this lass of yours that sat here in the house-place and talked with me but four-and-twenty hours agone. She looked not in ill health but pale and anxious, with dark rings about her eyes. Those that were about her were kind enough, but watched her closely day and night—for that was the order of their master. But I am sure that the Lowland woman who was with her would, in an evil case, prove a friend to your love."
"And whither have they taken her?" asked Wat, anxiously.
Mehitabel Smith looked carefully every way before she attempted to answer.
"The name of the place I cannot tell at present. It is an island, remote and lonely, in the country of the Hebridean Small Isles; but I heard my father say that it bore somewhere near where the Long Island hangs his tail down into the ocean."
"She has gone in your father's ship, then?" asked Wat.
"Aye, truly," said Mehitabel Smith; "but your lass is to be taken off theSea Unicornat some point on the voyage, and thence to her destination in a boat belonging to the islanders. I heard the head man of them so advising my father."
As the girl went on with her tale, Wat began to breathe a little more freely. He had feared things infinitely worse than any that had yet come to pass. He was now on the track, and, best of all, he had the token which Kate had sent to him, in her wonderful confidence thathe would never cease from seeking her while life lasted to him.
Mehitabel watched him quietly and earnestly. At last she said, a little wistfully, "I think, after all, it must be better than eating pignuts. I declare you are fonder of that lass than you are of yourself."
Wat laughed a lover's laugh of mellowest scorn. Mehitabel went on. "And I suppose you want to be with her all the time. You dream about her hair and the color of her eyes; you will kiss that bit of gold because she wore it about her neck. That is well enough for you. But to my thinking this love is but a sort of midsummer madness. For it is better to sleep sound than to dream; any golden guinea is worth more than that tiny heart on a ribbon, and would buy infinitely more cates—while it is best of all to sit heart-free among the topmost branches of the beeches and whistle catches while the sea-wind cradles you on the bough and the leaves rustle you to sleep like a lullaby. What, I pray you, is this love of yours to that?"
"That you will know one day," said Wat, sagely nodding his head, "and it may not be long, for your eyes are looking for love, and in love what one looks for that one finds. Hearken, I have stood one against fifty for the sake of my love. Willingly and gladly I have left land, rank, friends, future; I have made them all no more than broken toys that I might win my love. I count my life itself but a little thing, scarce worth the offering, all for her sake!"
"And is it because you hope to be so happy with her that you do all these things?" asked Mehitabel, now perfectly sober and serious, and clearly anxious to comprehend the matter.
"Nay," answered Wat, in a low voice, "to be happy may indeed come to us—pray God it may, and speedily. But to prove one's love as a man proves the edge of hissword, to do somewhat great for the beloved, to be something worthier, higher, better, to make your love glad and proud that she loves you, and that she possesses your love—these are greater aims than merely selfishly to be happy."
Mehitabel sighed as she rose.
"I suppose it must be so," she said, "but it is a great and weary mystery. Moreover, I have yet to see the man I would choose before a plate of early strawberries. And, anyway, pignuts, dug out of the ground and eaten on the tree-tops, are right excellent good!"
There was one spot on Suliscanna, the island to which she had been brought, that Kate especially loved. It was where the great Lianacraig precipice, a thousand feet of hard rock, curiously streaked with the green of serpentine and the white of the breeding and roosting ocean birds, sank sheer into the foam-fringed emerald wash of the sea.
At the eastward end of the vast wall there began a beach of pure white sand, curving round in a clean sickle-sweep for a mile and a half to the mural face of the cliffs of Aoinaig, which served for its northern gateway.
To this wide strand, with its frowning guardian watch-towers of tall cliff on either side, Kate came every day, week in and week out, during the first months of her isolation. She took her way thither from the low, thatched hut of Mistress Alister McAlister, in which she dwelt in a cleanliness and comfort more reminiscent of Carrick than characteristic of the neighboring houses of Suliscanna. The cattle did not occupy the first apartment in the house of Mistress McAlister. The floor did not, as was commonly the case, rise gradually towards the roof upon a rich deposit of "peat-coom" and generaldébris, solidified by the spent water of the household and the trampling of many feet.
The house in which Kate dwelt on Suliscanna was paved with flags of slate, which Alister and his wife had put in position, to the great scandal of the entire island—includingthe minister of the Small Isles himself, who preached most powerfully against the practice as pampering to poor human vanity, and causing foolish people to grasp at worldly state and pomp, and so neglect the glories of another and a better world.
But Mistress McAlister had her answer ready to that.
"I am of opinion," she retorted, when the sermon was reported to her, "that Alister and me will no be left strange and friendless up yonder on the streets of gold, just because we happen to prefer clean stanes to dirty peat and fish-banes here below."
And for this pointed rejoinder Mistress McAlister was debarred the table of communion.
"I'm no carin'," she said. "There's guid and godly ministers in my ain country that has suffered mickle for godliness. What matters it if I do suffer a wee here for cleanliness? The one is sib to the other, they say. And wha kens but after all it may help one's eternal interest to bide away from sic a kirk as they have here?—no' a wiselike word nor a solemn reproof from the beginning to the end of the exercises!"
This bright morning Kate stood alone on the white fringe of sand. She shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked at the far blue hills of the main-land, and often she sighed heavily.
For weeks she had watched for a boat to come. She had cast every bottle she could obtain on the island into the race of the tide which passed Lianacraig, each with a message enclosed telling of her place of seclusion. Now she could only pace the shore and wait.
"Hewillcome," she said to herself, with a limitless faith. "I am sure he loves me, and that he will find me. Prison bars could not contain him, nor dangers daunt him. I know he will follow and find me. God make it soon—before the other comes."
Her mind went back to the cold, sinister eyes of myLord of Barra, and she shuddered even in the hot sunshine.
"Then would the danger begin," she said; "for though all these folks are kind to me, yet not even the minister nor Betsy Landsborough would stir a hand to save me from the chief. Such a marriage is customary. It is the way of the clan. The Lords of Barra have ever chosen their brides in this fashion, they say. I am here alone on an island without boats. The chief has ordered it so. None are allowed to approach or land on Suliscanna till the master comes to claim the captive and the slave."
The girl's wonderful dark eyes had mysterious depths in them as she went over in her heart the perils and difficulties of her unknown future.
"But never, while I live, will I be untrue to him whom I love. If I cannot be his, at least I shall never be another's. And if they try to force me to that which I loathe—thank God there is always a way out! Gladly would I die rather than that any other should take the place that is his alone—my king, my husband!"
She spoke the last words very softly, but her eyes looked wistfully out towards the far hills beyond the sea, over which she waited for him to come. Then she blushed red from neck to brow at the sound of her own whisper. She even turned her about swiftly to see that none had heard, and that no bird of the air could carry the matter.
But only the sea-swallows circled widely above, along the black wet skerries the gulls wailed, and the silly moping guillemots sat in rows upon the rocks of Lianacraig. All were intent upon their own concerns that bright morning, and up among the tiny green crofts she saw Mistress McAlister, a lowland sunbonnet on her head, flashing in and out of her door in that lively and sprightly fashion which distinguished her movements from the solid sloth characteristic of even the busiest moments of the other good-wives of Suliscanna.
Kate paced the shore, and thought within herself the still assured thoughts of one whose mind is made up about the main issue, and who can afford quietly to consider concerning matters less important.
The sea was very still this day about Suliscanna. The white surf-rim round the great cliffs was hardly to be noted. The gap-toothed caves which pierce them were still. The roaring and hissing of the "bullers" were not heard. Only in front of the island to landward the tides swayed and ran like a mill-race, where the ledges rose black and dripping from the deep, and the currents from the ocean swirled onward, or sucked back through the narrows in dangerous whirlpools and strange leaping hillocks of sea-water.
Kate stood wondering at their beauty, without the least idea that these oily swirls and boiling hummocks of smooth green water were among the most dangerous sea perils to be met with all the way from Pentland to Solway.
Suddenly her eyes lit on a dark speck far away out upon the bright plain. It might have been the head of a swimming seal, or the black razor-edge of a large skerry showing over the rush of the tide. But, as she watched, the dot grew blacker and larger. A boat was certainly approaching the island. Kate stood trembling. For the issue meant life and death to her. It might be her tyrant come to claim his captive. It might be her saviour come to save.
Kate McGhie stood looking across the boiling, hillocky water of the Suck of Suliscanna in the direction of the boat, which moment by moment blackened and grew larger, rising steadily towards her out of the east. The day was so still, the tide so smooth as it swept inshore after passing the oily "bullers" of the roost, that she had no idea of the world of danger those in the adventurous bark had to pass before her prow could grate on the white sand of the landing-beach between the opposing headlands of Aionaig and Lianacraig.
Kate's heart beat strangely, almost painfully. It was wonderful, she thought, that men should undergo perils and cross a world's seas for a simple girl's sake. Yet there was pleasure, too, in the thought; for somehow she knew that those who approached loved her and came from far seeking her good.
"It is he—it is surely he!" so her soul chanted its glad triumph within her. "Did I not say that he could break prison-bands and come to find me—that he would overpass unruly seas only to look on my face? Has any maid in the world a lover true like mine? And he will break my prison also and take me away. And with him I am ready to go to the ends of the earth, fearlessly as though he had been my mother."
Poor lassie! Little she knew the long, weary travel she had before her ere it could come to that.
But even as she watched she became conscious of aquick stir and movement among the usually so indolent islanders behind her. Hardly she dared to lift her eyes from the approaching boat, which came on with a little square sail rigged on a temporary mast as long as the wind held, and then with flashing dips of rhythmic oars whenever the breeze dropped away.
The voices of the men of Suliscanna crying harshly to each other among the craig-heads and cliff-edges high above her sounded to Kate's ears like a louder brawling of the sea-fowl. The sound had an edge on it, shrill, keen, and bitter as the east wind in mid-January. Yet there was something in it, too, of new. The girl had heard the like of it before, at the kennels of Cumlodan, when the bloodhounds for the Whig-tracking were waiting to be fed, and springing up with their feet on the bars.
"Eh, sirs me! Guid help the poor souls that are in that boat; they will either gang doon bodily to feed the fish, or else be casten up in gobbets the size o' my neive upon the shore!" cried the voice of Mrs. McAlister at Kate's elbow.
"They can never weather it, and if they do they are naught advantaged, after all. For the men of the isle are that worked upon with the fear of my lord, and his threat to clean them off the isle of Suliscanna, like a count off a bairn's slate, if they let the lass escape, that they declare they will slay the poor lads so soon as ever they set foot on the land, if, indeed, they ever win as far."
In her agitated preoccupation the tall woman from Ayrshire had let her hair fall in a bushy mass over her back, as it was her habit to do in the evenings after supper when preparing for bed. She kept working at it nervously while she watched, twisting up its comely masses in order to fix them in their places with bone pins; and, anon, as the boat tacked shorter and shorterto avoid this hidden peril and that, pulling them out and letting it fall again in wavy coils, so overpowering had become her agitation.
Suddenly startled by a peculiar wavering cry from the hill, she took Kate's hand and ran with her along the path which led to the rocks of Lianacraig.
"Ye will never be for thinking," Bess Landsborough said to the girl as they ran, "that this is him that likes ye—the lad ye left in the Tolbooth irons in Holland, gotten free and come after ye?"
But Kate only clasped her friend's hand tighter and answered nothing.
"Poor lass! poor lass!" she said. "Ye believe that your lad would do as muckle for you after a' that has come and gane between ye. But lads are not what they were in my young days! Pray God that ye may be mistaken, for gin this be your lad come seeking ye, I fear he is as good as dead either from the sharp rocks of Suliscanna or from the sharper knives of the wild McAlisters."
From the southern ridge of the headland of Lianacraig Kate and her companion could look almost directly down upon the gambols of the treacherous Suck of Suliscanna. The boat lay clear to their sight upon the surface of the sea—two men in her, one sitting with the rope of the sheet in his hand, and the other at the stern with an oar to turn her off from the hidden dangers, as the seething run of the tidal currents brought her head on to some sunken reef or dangerous skerry. Sometimes, ere the voyagers could tack or turn in their unsailorlike fashion, a white spurt of foam would suddenly spring up under their very bows as a swell from the Atlantic lumbered lazily in, or again a backdraw of the current would swirl upward from some submarine ledge and raise a great breaking pyramid of salt-water on a spot where a moment before there had been only the smooth hiss of water moving very swiftly.
The islanders, who alone realized the terrible danger of the two in the boat, lay for the most part wholly silent, some on the cliff's immediate edge, and others behind little sodded breastworks which had been erected, partly to keep the wind off, when, as now, they kept watch from their posts of observation, and partly for the drying of their winter's fuel.
Mistress McAlister indicated the eager gazers with her elbows.
"See the Heelantmen," she said; "they are a' up there! Lord, what Christians! The verra minister is amang them himsel'—they canna help it. The spirit is on them ever since langsyne the Spaniard's ship drave in, and brocht a' that peltry of mahogany aumries and wrought cupboards, and forbye the queer fashions of knitting that the sailor folk of the crew learned them after they wan ashore. But they learn little from them that's shipwrecked on Suliscanna noo. For them that's no deid corpses before they come to land get a bit clour wi' a stane that soon puts them oot o' conceit wi' a' this world o' sin and suffering."
Kate's face was white and drawn, but she hardly noticed the woman's fell prophecies.
For all the while the two men in the boat were laboring hard, fighting tensely for life, and every eye on the island was upon them. They had reached one of the smoothest and therefore most dangerous places, when suddenly the black back of a skip-jack dolphin curved over like a mill-wheel beside the boat, and a hoarse shout went up from the islanders of Suliscanna, who lay breathlessly waiting the event on the rocks of Lianacraig.
"It's a' by wi' the poor lads noo!" said Bess McAlister, "a' but the warsle in the water and the grip o' the saut in their thrapples! The deil's ain beast is doon there watching for them."
"THEN THE SWIRLING TIDE-RACE TOOK HOLD OF HER"
"THEN THE SWIRLING TIDE-RACE TOOK HOLD OF HER"
"God help my Wat!" sobbed Kate, half to herselfand half to the Divinity—who, as the Good Book says, can do wonders in the great waters.
"Aye, 'deed, lass, as ye say, God help him! He never had mair need. The dead-fish are louping for him and the other with him."
Just at this moment Kate uttered a cry and clasped her hands, for the boat was heaved up from the side nearest the cliffs on the summit of a toppling pyramid of water. The mast fell over, and the whole breadth of the sail hugged the surface of the sea. Then the swirling tide-race took hold of her and sucked her under. In a smooth sea, without a particle of wind, the two men went down within cry of the rocks of Suliscanna, and not a hand could be stretched out to save them. Only now and then something black, a wet, air-filled blob of the sail, the surge-tossed back of a man, or the angle of the boat, showed dark for a moment upon the surface of the pale water, and then was carried under, all racing northward in the grip of the angry tide current.
Kate McGhie had fallen on her knees.
"God forgive his sins and take me soon to him!" she said.
"Wheest, lass! Nae Papist prayers in my hearin'," said Mrs. McAlister in her ear. "Gin that be your lad, he's dead and gane. And that's a hantle better than dying on the gully-knives of the McAlisters."
At the sight of the disaster beneath them on the wrinkled face of the water, all the islanders had leaped suddenly erect behind their shelters and craggy hiding-places. Each man stood with his head thrown forward in an attitude of the most intent watchfulness. And once when the stern of the boat cocked up, and a man's arm rose like the fin of a fish beside it for a moment, every son of Alister expelled the long-withholden air from his lungs in a sonorous "Hough!" which indicated that in his opinion all was over. Instantly the islandersof Suliscanna collected here and there, at likely places along the shore, into quick-gathering knots and clusters which dissolved as quickly. They discussed the disaster from every point of view. The minister was specially active, going about from group to group.
"We must e'en submit," he was saying; "it is the will of God. And, after all, though both men and boat had been cast ashore, it is little likely that they would have had anything worth lifting on them. They were just poor bodies that by misadventure have been cast away in a fog, and would have no other gear about them save the clothes on their backs."
But Alister McAlister was of another mind.
"Work like this is enough to make an unbeliever out of a God-fearing man," he affirmed to his intimates, "to see what Providence will permit—a good fishing-boat with a mast and sail in the charge of two landward men that did not even know where to let her go to pieces, so that Christians and men of sense might get some good of her. For the fools let her sink plumb down in the Suck of Suliscanna, instead of driving her straight inshore against the hill of Aoinaig, whence she would have come safe as weed-drift to our very feet."
And there were more of Alister's opinion than of the minister's, whose spiritual consolation was discounted, at any rate, by the fact that he was officially compelled to speak well of Providence.
But before long there was another sound on the Isle of Suliscanna. Away on the edge of the bay, under the cliffs, a group of men was to be seen grappling some object which repeatedly slipped from their poles between two long shore-skirting reefs. It lay black and limp in the water, and again and again, breaking from their hands, it returned to the push of the tide in the narrow gut with a splash of flaccid weight.
"Lord, what's yon they hae gotten?" cried MistressMcAlister, as soon as she had seen the figures of the men collecting about the thing, like carrion-crows gathering about a dead sheep on the hill. "Thank God, my Alister loon is away south'ard on the heuchs of Lianacraig!"
She stood on tiptoe and looked for the flash of the killing knife or the dull crash of the stone with which commonly the wreckers insured silence and safety when any came alive ashore along with wreckage of price from the great waters.
The heads of the men were all bent inward, but Bess Landsborough saw no threatening movement of their arms nor yet any signs of a struggle.
She would have drawn Kate away from the scene, but the girl by her side suddenly wrenched herself free, and, plucking up her skirts in her hands, ran hot-foot for the northern shore.
Kate's sojourn on the island had given her back all her girlish spring of carriage and swift grace of movement. Fleet and light as a goat she sped over the short turf and threaded the sharp shark's fins of the black basaltic ridges, her eyes fixed upon the shifting groups on the shore.
Was her love lying there dead before her, or at least in utmost danger of his life? The men stood so close together, all looking inward and downward, that Kate was among them before any one saw her come. She cleft a way through the shouldering press, and there on the wet pebbles of the beach, dragged just a few yards from the shore on which a back-draught from the smooth glides and rattling currents of the tide-race of Suliscanna had cast him, lay the body of John Scarlett.
Kate gave a sharp cry, half of disappointment and half of relief. Her love it was not; but his friend it was. And if this were John Scarlett, where would Wat Gordon be by this time—of a surety lying deep in the green heave of some far-reaching "gloop," or battered against the cruel cliffs of the "goës," into which the surges swelled and thundered, throwing themselves in bootless assault upon the perpendicular cliffs, and fretting their pure green arches into delicatest gray lace of foam and little white cataracts which came pouring back into the gloomy depths along every crevice and over every ledge.
John Scarlett lay with his broad chest naked and uncovered, for his coat and waistcoat had already become centres of two separate quarrels, shrill and contentious as the bickerings of sparrows over the worm which they hold by either end and threaten to rend in pieces.
Patterns of muskets and sword-blades were wrought upon the veteran's breast in a fashion which was then common to all men of adventuring—land travellers and seafarers alike. The old soldier's arms and breast were a mass of scars and cicatrices, both from his many public campaigns and from his innumerable excursions upon the field of private honor.
"This has been a man indeed," said one of the men that stood by; "many a knife has been tried on that skin, and many, I warrant, gat deeper holes and deadlier cuts than these in the making of this pretty patchwork."
"He is an enemy of the chief, that is beyond a doubt," said another; "for he is not a man of the isles, and our Lord Murdo forbade the coming of any else. It will be safer to stick him with a gully-knife before he comes to, lest a worst thing happen us."
And it is likely that this amiable intention might have become the finding and conclusion of the meeting, but that at that moment Kate pierced the throng and threw herself down on the salt, clammy pebbles at John Scarlett's head. She put her hand upon his heart, but could not feel it beat. Before long she was reinforced by Mrs. McAlister, who arrived panting. She swept the men unceremoniously aside with her arm, and addressed them in their own tongue, in words which carried insult and railing in the very sound of them.
The two women had not worked long at the chill, sea-tossed body of the master-at-arms before John Scarlett opened his eyes and looked about him.
"Bess Landsborough!" he said, without manifestingthe least surprise, "what for did ye no' meet me at the kirk stile of Colmonel, where I trysted wi' ye?"
"John Scarlett!" cried Mrs. McAlister, "I declare in the name o' a' that's holy, Jack Scarlett, the King's Dragoon—what in the world has brocht ye here, lying bare and broadcast on the cauld stanes of Suliscanna?"
"I cam' seekin' you, Bess," said John Scarlett, easing himself up on his elbow with a grimace of pain. "I heard in Colmonel that ye had kilted your coats o' green satin and awa' wi' John Hielandman. So I e'en cam' round this gate to see if ye had tired o' him."
"And I see that, dead or alive, ye can lie as gleg as ever—certes, there never was a dragoon that was single-tongued, since Satan made the first o' that evil clan oot o' the red cinders of hell!" answered Mistress McAlister, vigorously.
"Weel, Bess, it skills little," replied Scarlett, rising slowly to a sitting posture. "But if ye would prevail on these honest men to withdraw a little and not glower at my nakedness, as if they had never in their lives before cast eyes on a man that has had a wash, it is greatly grateful I will be, and forgive you that little mislippen about the tryst."
As John Scarlett turned himself about, he pressed Kate's hand sharply to intimate that he desired her to pretend complete ignorance of his person and purpose. But the fear which now had become almost a certainty, that she had seen her lover go down in the tide-race of Suliscanna, dominated her heart. She was scarce conscious of the meeting of John Scarlett and his ancient sweetheart, but continued to gaze steadily and with straining eyes out upon the smooth and treacherous swirls of the Suck.
"Have ye a cloak or a plaid, Bess, that I may gird myself with it, and go decently to my quarters—unlessthese gentlemen still desire to finish me here?" asked Scarlett, calmly.
Whereat the wife of Alister drew a plaid of rough brown wool from the shoulders of the man nearest to her and cast it about him. By this time Scarlett had managed to stand upon his feet, and even to walk a few steps along the pebbles of the shore. All Suliscanna was now gathered about the new-comer, and on the skirts of the crowd the minister and Alister stood apart with bent brows in anxious consultation.
"It is the chief's order!" said the minister. "We will have to answer for it with our lives if we do not ward him safely."
"In the vaults of the tower will be the best and securest place," answered Alister.
Then, with no more words spoken, Alister McAlister stepped up to his wife, and, seizing her by the arm, said, "This is chief's business—do as I bid you, now!"
And Mrs. McAlister knew that the time had come for her to obey. For well as she could make the burlydhuine wassaildo her bidding when the business was his own or hers, Bess never put her general supremacy to the test by offering resistance to her husband's will when the clan or the chief were in question.
"Tell the Lowland man," said Alister, looking his wife straight in the eyes, "that it is the order of the chief that he be warded till we hear what is to be done with him. We did not ask him to come to Suliscanna, and we must see that he does not invite himself quietly away again now that he is here. He is to bide in the tower at our house-end, and ye can boil him Lowland brose as muckle as ever he can sup, since ye seem to be so well acquainted with his kind of folk."
When Mistress McAlister had interpreted this to John Scarlett, the old campaigner gave the brown plaid a twirlabout his shoulders, and crying, "Content—lead on!" accepted the situation with a soldier's philosophy.
The ancient tower of Suliscanna, in which Scarlett presently found himself, was no extensive castle, but simply a half-ruinous block-house constructed for defence by some former lords of the isle. The upper part was a mere shell in which Alister's wild goats were sometimes penned, when for some herdsman's purpose they had been collected in the vicinity of the huts by the expectation of the spare crystals of salt when the pans were drawn. But underneath there was a vaulted dungeon still strong and intact. This subterranean "strength" possessed a door of solid wood—a rare thing in Suliscanna—brought at some remote period from the main-land; for, save drif-twood, there is no plant thicker-stemmed than the blackberry to be found on all these outermost islands of the sea. This door was secured by a ponderous lock, the bolt of which ran into the stone for nearly two feet, while the wood of which it was composed was studded with great iron nails and covered with hide like a targe. It was the sole article of value which had been left in the ancient tower when my lord's new house was built farther up the hill.
The tower stood at the summit of the first ascent of the island, close beside the cottage of Alister McAlister—of which, indeed, very characteristically and economically, it formed the gable-end. Heather bloomed close up to the door of it, and looked into the dungeon at every narrow peep-hole, so that when Scarlett set his head to one of these he found himself staring into a fairy forest of rose and green, in which the muir-fowl crouched and the grasshoppers chirred.
John Scarlett found that during the time he had been conferring with the representative of the Lord of the Small Isles and his wife Bess upon the pebbles of the beach, a bed of fragrant heather tops had been made forhim by the clansmen in this arched and airy sleeping-place. Alister went in with him, glanced comprehensively around, and nodded.
"Now you will be comfortable and make yourself at home," the action said. And John Scarlett smiled back at his taciturn jailer. For indeed, except the stone seat which ran round the vault, and the new-laid bed of heather tops in the corner, the available accommodations of the Tower of Suliscanna consisted exclusively of an uneven area of hard-beaten earthen floor made visible by the light of half a dozen narrow port-holes, which looked in different directions out upon the moor and through the gable against the dark wall of Bess Landsborough's house.
Alister locked the dungeon door by turning the huge key with a spar of driftwood thrust through the head of it like the bar of a capstan. Then he called to him a shaggy gillie and bade him watch the door on the peril of his head. Whereupon the red-headed Gael grinned obediently, pulled himself an armful of heather, and effectually double-locked the door by stretching himself across the entrance with his hand on his dirk and his sword naked by his side.
But there were two men in the ill-fated boat when she so heedlessly rushed into the strange and dangerous outer defences of my Lord Barra's warded Isle of Suliscanna. What had become of the other?
Wat Gordon of Lochinvar was not drowned—it is hardly necessary to say so much. For had his body been lying in some eddy of the swirling waters about the outer reef of the Aoinaig narrows, this narrative of his history could not have been written. And of his life with its chequered good and bad, its fine instincts, clear intents, and halting performances, there would have been left no more than a little swarded mound in the bone-yard of dead and forgotten mariners.
When their boat overset among the whirlpools and treacherous water volcanoes of the Suck of Suliscanna, Wat Gordon had been sculling at the stern. And when the water swallowed him, pulling him down as though he had been jerked through a trap-door by the arm of some invisible giant—or, more exactly, drawn slowly under by the tentacle of the dread Kraken of these Northern seas—he kept a tight grip on the oar with which he had been alternately steering and propelling the boat, as Jack Scarlett cried him his orders from the bows.
Wat Gordon had been born in the old tower of Lochinvar, in the midst of that strange, weird, far-withdrawn moorland loch, set amid its scanty pasture-meadows of sour bent-grass and its leagues of ambient heather. Asa boy he had more often gone ashore by diving from his window or paddling out from the little stone terrace than by the more legitimate method of unhooking the boat from its iron lintel and pulling himself across to the main-land. But this was a different kind of swimming, for here in the tumble and tumultuous swirl of angry waters Wat was no more than a plaything tossed about, to be tantalized with the blue sky and the summer sea, and then again to be pulled under and smothered in the seething hiss of the Suck of Suliscanna.
Nevertheless, Wat found space to breathe occasionally, and as he was driven swiftly towards the north along the face of the great Lianacraig precipices and close under them he clutched his oar tighter, holding it under his arm and leaning his chest upon it. So close to the land was he that he voyaged quite unseen by the watchers on the cliffs above, who supposed that he had gone down with the boat. But the current had seized him in its mid-strength, and after first sweeping him close inshore it was now hurrying him northward and westward of the isle, under the vast face of the mural precipice in which the cliffs of Lianacraig culminated. The boat had cleared itself of its mast and sail, and Wat could see that she floated, upturned indeed, but still becking and bowing safely on the humps and swirls of the fierce tidal current which swept both master and vessel along, equally derelict and at its mercy.
The whole northern aspect of the Isle of Suliscanna is stern and forbidding. Here the cliffs of Lianacraig break suddenly down to the sea in one great face of rock many hundreds of feet in height. So precipitous are they that only the cragsmen or the gatherer of seabirds' eggs can scale their crests of serrated rock even from the south, or look down upon the little island of Fiara, the tall southern cliffs of which correspond humbly to the mightier uprising of the precipices of Lianacraig upon the larger isle.But Fiara has for ages been set in the whirl of the backwater which speeds past its greater neighbor on either side, and has taken advantage of its position to thrive upon the waste of its rival. For the tide-race of the Suck, which sets past Suliscanna with such consuming fury, sweeps its prey, snatched in anger from the cliffs and beaches of Suliscanna, and spreads it in mud and sand along the lower northern rocks of Fiara. So that this latter island, instead of frowning out grimly towards the Pole, extends green and pastoral on the other side of the deep strait and behind its frowning southward front of rocks.
At this time Fiara was wholly without inhabitant, and remained as it had come from the shaping hand of the tides and waves. And so mainly it abides to this day. The islanders of Suliscanna had indeed a few sheep and goats upon it, the increase of which they used to harvest when my Lord of Barra's factor came once a year in his boat to take his tithes of the scanty produce of their barren fortress isle.
It was, then, upon the northern shore of this islet of Fiara that Wat, exhausted with the stress and the rough, deadly horseplay of the waves, was cast ashore still grasping his oar. He landed upon a long spit of sand which stretched out at an obtuse angle into the scour of the race, forming a bar which was perpetually being added to by the tide and swept away again when the winds and the waters fought over it their duels to the death in the time of storm.
Thus Wat Gordon found himself destitute and without helper upon this barren isle of Fiara. His companion he had seen sink beneath the waves, and he well knew that it was far out of the power of the soldier Scarlett to reach the shore by swimming. Also he had seen him entangled in the cordage of the sail. So Wat heaved a sigh for the good comrade whom he had broughtaway from the solvent paymasters and the excellently complaisant landladies of Amersfort, to lay his bones for his sake upon the inhospitable shores of Suliscanna—and, what was worse, without advantage to the quest upon which they had ventured forth with so much recklessness.
Wat knew certainly that his love was upon that island of Suliscanna. For months he had carefully traced her northward. With the aid of Madcap Mehitabel he had been able to identify the spot at which the chief's boat had taken off Captain Smith's passenger, and a long series of trials and failures had at last designated Suliscanna as the only possible prison of his love.
So soon as he was certain of this he had come straight to the spot with the reckless confidence of youth, only to see his hopes shattered upon the natural defences of the isle, before ever he had a chance to encounter the other enemies whom, he doubted not, Barra had set to guard the prison of Kate of the Dark Lashes.
But even in his sad and apparently hopeless plight the knowledge that his love was near by stimulated Wat's desire to make the best of his circumstances.
First of all he set himself the task of exploring the islet, and of discovering if there was any way by which he could reach that other island, past which he had been carried by the current of the race, and on which he hoped to find his love.
From the summit of the south-looking crags of Fiara which he ascended, he could look up at a perpendicular face of vast and gloomy cliffs. Lianacraig fronted him, solid and unbroken on either side as far as he could see. That lower part of it on which the surf fretted and the swell thundered was broken by caves and openings—none of them, save one, of any great size.
But that one made a somewhat notable exception. It was a gateway, wide and high, squarely cut in the blackfront of the precipice, into which one might have driven two carriages, with all their horses and attendants, abreast, and yet have left room to spare on either side. The swell which pulsed along the narrow strait between Fiara and Suliscanna, regular as the beating of a strong man's heart, was lost within its wide maw, and did not as elsewhere come pouring back again in tessellated foam, white as milk curdled in a churn. The square tunnel to which this was the imposing entrance evidently penetrated far into the rock, and communicated with some larger cavity deep within.
The rest of the isle, which had so unexpectedly become Wat's prison-house, was cut on its northerly aspect into green flats of sparse grass, terminating in sweet sickle-sweeps of yellow sand, over which the cool, green luxury of the sea lapped with a gliding motion. And as Wat looked down upon them from above he saw lights wavering and swaying over the clean-rippled floor, and could fancy that he discerned the fishes wheeling and steering among the bent rays and wandering shadows that flickered and danced like sunshine through thick leaves.
So Wat stood a long time still upon the topmost crest of Fiara, printing its possibilities upon his heart.
Two hundred yards across the smooth, unvexed strait, which slept between its two mighty walls of rock, rose the giant cliffs of Lianacraig, with the ocean-swell passing evenly along their base from end to end—smooth, green steeps of water, dimpled everywhere into knolls and valleys. Seabirds nested up there by thousands. Gillemots sat solemnly in rows like piebald bottles of black and white. Cormorants stood on the lower skerries, shaking their wings for hours together as if they had been performing a religious rite. And here with his gorgeous beak, like a mummer's mask drawn over his ears for sport, waddled the puffin—the bird whose sad fate it is, according to the rhyme, to be forever incapableof amorous dalliance. For have not half a dozen generations been told in rhyme how