The Marchesa passed through the door held open by the butler, across a little stone passage, into the dining room.
This room was in structure similar to the one she had just quitted, except for the two long windows cut through the south wall—flood gates for the sun. The table was laid with a white cloth almost to the floor. In the center of it was a single silver bowl, as great as a peck measure, filled with fruit, an old massive piece, shaped like the hull of a huge acorn, the surface crudely cut to resemble the outside of that first model for his cup, which the early man found under the oak tree. The worn rim marked the extreme antiquity of this bowl. Somewhere in the faint dawn of time, a smith, melting silver in a pot, had cast the clumsy outline of the piece in a primitive sand mold on the floor of his shop, and then sat down with his model—picked up in the forest—before him on his bench, to cut and hammer the outside as like to nature as he could get it with his tools—the labor of a long northern winter; and then, when that prodigious toil was ended, to grind the inside smooth with sand, rubbed laboriously over the rough surface. But his work remained to glorify his deftness ages after his patient hands were dust. It sat now on the center of the white cloth, the mottled spots, where the early smith had followed so carefully his acorn, worn smooth with the touching of innumerable fingers.
At the end of the room was a heavy rosewood sideboard, flanked at either corner by tall silver cups—trophies, doubtless, of this Duke of Dorset—bearing inscriptions not legible to the Marchesa at the distance. The luncheon set hastily for the unexpected guest was conspicuously simple. The butler, perhaps at the Duke's direction, did not follow into the dining room. The host helped the guest to the food set under covers on the sideboard. Cold grouse, a glass of claret, and later, from the huge acorn, a bunch of those delicious white grapes grown under glass in this north country.
The Duke, having helped the Marchesa to the grouse, sat down beyond her at the table, taking out of courtesy a glass of wine and a biscuit.
"You will pardon this hunter's luncheon," he said; "I did not know how much leisure you might have."
"I have quite an hour," replied the Marchesa; "I go on to Oban at twenty minutes past one."
The answer set the man to speculating on the object of this trip to Oban. He did not descend to the commonplace of such a query, but he lifted the gate for the Marchesa to enter if she liked.
"The bay of Oban," he said, "is thought to be one of the most beautiful in the world. I believe it is a meeting place for yachts at this season."
The Marchesa Soderrelli returned a bit of general explanation. "I believe that a great number of yachts come into the harbor for the Oban Gathering," she answered; "it is considered rather smart for a day or two then."
"I had forgotten the Oban Gathering for the moment," said the Duke. "Does it not seem rather incongruous to attend land games with a fleet of yachts? The Celt is not a person taking especially to water in any form but rain." The Marchesa laughed. "It is the rich wanderer who comes in with his yacht."
"I wonder why it is," replied the Duke, "that we take usually to the road in the extremes of wealth and poverty. The instinct of vagrancy seems to dominate a man when necessity emancipates him."
"I think it is because the great workshop is not fitted with a lounging room," said the Marchesa, "and, so, when one is paid off at the window, he can only go about and watch the fly wheels spin. If there is a little flurry anywhere in the great shop he hurries to it." Then she added, "Have you ever attended a Northern Gathering?"
"No," replied the Duke, "but I may possibly go to Oban for a day of it."
The answer seemed to bring some vital matter strikingly before the Marchesa Soderrelli.
She put down her fork idly on the plate. She took up her glass of claret and drank it slowly, her eyes fixed vacantly on the cloth. But she could have arisen and clapped her hands. The gods, sitting in their spheres, were with her. The moving object of her visit was to get this man to Oban. And he was coming of himself! Surely Providence was pleased at last to fill the slack sails of her fortune.
Then a sense of how little this man resembled the popular conception of him, thrust itself upon her like a thing not until this moment thought of. He was a stranger, almost wholly unknown in England, but the title was known. Next to that of the reigning house it was the greatest in the Empire. The story of its descent to this new Duke of Dorset was widely known. The romance of it had reached even to that Janet, toasting scones in the innkeeper's kitchen. The story, issuing from every press in Europe, was colored like a tale of treasure. But it was vague as to the personality of this incoming Duke. He had been drawn for the reader wholly from the fancy. In the great hubbub he had been painted—like that picture which she had examined in the innkeeper's dining room—young, handsome, a sort of fairy prince. The man, while the sensation ran its seven days, was hunting somewhere in the valley of the Saagdan on the Great Laba, inaccessible for weeks. The romance passed, turning many a pretty head with this new Prince Charlie, coming, as by some Arabian enchantment, to be the richest and the greatest peer in England. Other events succeeded to the public notice. The matter of the succession adjusted itself slowly under the cover of state portfolios, the steps of it coming out now and then in some brief notice. But the portrait of the new Duke remained, as the dreamers had created him, a swaggering, handsome, orphaned lad, moved back into an age of romance.
The reality sat now before the Marchesa Soderrelli in striking contrast to this fancy. A man of five and thirty, hard as the deck of a whale ship; his hair sunburned; the marks of the wilderness, the desert, the great silent mountains stamped into his bronze face; his hands sinewy, callous; his eyes steady, with the calm of solitudes—an expression, common to the eye of every living thing dwelling in the waste places of the earth.
"You will come to Oban?" she said, putting down her cup and lifting her face, brightened with this pleasing news. "I am delighted. The Duke of Dorset will be a great figure at this little durbar. Perhaps on some afternoon there, when you are tired of bowing Highlanders, you will permit me to carry you off to an American yacht." She paused a moment, smiling. "Now, that you are a great personage in England, you should give a bit of notice to great personages in other lands. The peace of the world, and all that, depends, we are told, on such social intermixing. I promise you a cup of tea with a most important person." Then she laughed in a cheery note.
"You will pardon the way I run on. I do not really depend on the argument I am making. I ought rather to be quite frank; in fact, to say, simply, that an opportunity to present the Duke of Dorset to my friends will help me to make good a little feminine boasting. I confess to the weakness. When the romance of your succession to the greatest title in England was being blown about the world, I could not resist a little posing. I had seen you in various continental cities, now and then, and I boasted it a bit. I added, perhaps, a little color to your imaginary portrait. I stood out in the gay season at Biarritz as the only woman who actually knew this fairy prince. King Edward was there, and with him London and New York. You were the consuming topic, and this little distinction pleased my feminine vanity."
The Marchesa smiled again. "It seems infinitely little, doesn't it? And to a man it would be, but not so to a woman. A woman gets the pleasure of her life out of just such little things. You must not measure us in your big iron bushel. If you take away our little vanities, our flecks of egotism, our bits of fiction, you leave us with nothing by which we can manage to be happy. And so," she continued, lowering her eyes to the cloth and tapping the rim of the plate with her fingers, "if the Duke of Dorset appears in Oban and does not know me, I am conspicuously pilloried."
It was not possible to determine from the man's face with what internal comment he took this feminine confession. He arose, filled the Marchesa's glass, set the decanter on the table, and returned to his chair; then he answered.
"If I should attend this Gathering," he said, "I will certainly do myself the honor of looking you up."
The words rang on the Marchesa Soderrelli like a rebuke descended from the stars. She might have saved herself the doubtful effect of her ingenuous confession.
The man's face gave no sign. He was still talking—words which the Marchesa, engrossed with the various aspects of her error, did not closely follow. He was going on to explain that he was just setting out for Canada, but if he had a day or two he would likely come to Oban. He was curious to see a Highland Gathering. And if he came he would be charmed to know the Marchesa's friends—to see her again there, and so forth.
The Marchesa Soderrelli murmured some courteous platitudes, some vague apology, and arose from the table. The Duke held back the door for her to pass and then followed her into the next room. There the Marchesa, inquiring the hour, announced that she must go. She said the words with a bit of brightened color, with visible confusion, and remained standing, embarrassed, until the Duke should put into her hands the money which he had sent for. But he did not do it. He bade her a courteous adieu.
A certain sense of loss, of panic, enveloped her. This man had doubtless forgotten, but she could not remind him. She felt that such words rising now into her throat, would choke her. The butler stood there by the door. She walked over to it, bowed to the Duke remaining now by his table as he had been when she had first crossed the threshold; then she went out and slowly down the stone stairway, empty handed as she had come that morning up it. At every step, clicking under her foot, the panic deepened. She had not two sovereigns remaining in her bag. She was going down these steps to ruin.
As the butler, preceding her, threw open the iron door to the court, she saw, in the flood of light thus admitted, a footman standing at the bottom of the stairway, holding a silver tray, and lying on it a big blue envelope sealed with a splash of red wax.
The whine of innumerable sea gulls awoke the Marchesa Soderrelli. She arose and opened the white shutters of the window.
A flood of sun entered—the thin, brilliant, inspiring sun of the sub-Arctic. A sun to illumine, to bring out fantastic colors, to dye the sea, to paint the mountains, to lay forever on the human heart the mysterious lure of the North. A sun reaching, it would seem, to its farthest outpost. A faint sheet of the thinnest golden light, fading out into distant colors, as though here, finally, one came to the last shore of the world. Beyond the emerald rim of the distant water was utter darkness, or one knew not what twilight sea, sinister and mystic, undulating forever without the breaking of a wave crest, in eternal silence. Or beyond that blue, smoky haze holding back the sun, were to be found all those fabled countries for which the human heart has desired unceasingly, where every man, landing from his black ship, finds the thing for which he has longed, upward from the cradle; that one bereaved, the dead glorified, and that one coming hard in avarice, red and yellow gold.
The bay of Oban on such a morning, under such a sun, surpasses in striking beauty the bay of Naples. The colors of the sea seem to come from below upward. The Firth of Lorn is then the vat of some master alchemist, wherein lies every color and every shade of color, varying with the light, the angle of incidence, the traveling of clouds; and yet, always, the waters of that vat are green, viscous, sinister. The rocks, rising out of this sea, look old, wrinkled, drab. The mountains, hemming it in, seem in the first lights of the morning covered loosely with mantles of worn, gray velvet—soft, streaked with great splashes of pink powder, as though some careless beauty had spilled her cosmetic over the cover of her table.
To the Marchesa Soderrelli, on this morning, the beauties of this north outpost of the world were wholly lost. The whining of the gulls, of all sounds in the heaven above the most unutterably dreary, had brought her to the window, and there a white yacht, lying in the bay, held exclusively her attention. It was big, with two oval stacks; the burger of the Royal Highland Yacht Club floated from its foremast and the American flag from its jack staff. From its topmast was a variegated line of fluttering signals. Beyond, crowding the bay, were yachts of every prominent club in the world, from the airy, thin sailing craft with its delicate lines to the steamer with its funnels.
The woman, looking from this window, studied the triangular bits of silk descending from the topmast, like one turning about a puzzle which he used to understand. For a time the signal eluded her, then suddenly, as from some hidden angle, she caught the meaning. She laughed, closed the window, and began hurriedly with those rites by which a woman is transformed from the toilet of Godiva to one somewhat safer to the eye. When that work was ended she went down to the clerk's window, gave a direction about her luggage, and walked out of the hotel along the sea wall to the beach. There the yacht's boat with two sailors lay beside a little temporary wooden pier, merely a plank or two on wooden horses. She returned the salute of the two men with a nod, stepped over the side, and was taken, under the flocks of gulls maneuvering like an army, to the yacht. But before they reached it the Mar-chesa Soderrelli put her hand into the water and dropped the silver case, that had been, heretofore, so great a consolation. It fled downward gleaming through the green water. She was a resolute woman, who could throttle a habit when there was need.
On the yacht deck a maid led the Marchesa down the stairway through a tiny salon fitted exquisitely, opened a white door, and ushered her into the adjoining apartment. This apartment consisted of two rooms and a third for the bath. The first which the Marchesa now entered was a dressing room, finished in white enamel, polished dull like ivory—old faintly colored ivory—an effect to be got only by rubbing down innumerable coats of paint laboriously. The floor was covered with a silk oriental rug glistening like frost, lying as close to the planks as a skin. A beautiful dressing table was set into the wall below a pivot mirror; on this table were toilet articles in gold, carved with dryads, fauns, cupids, and piping satyrs in relief. A second table stood in the center of the room, covered with a cloth. Two mirrors, extending from the ceiling to the floor, were set into the walls, one opposite to the other. These walls were paneled in delicate rose-colored brocade.
The second room was a bedchamber, covered with a second of those rugs, upon which innumerable human fingers had labored, under a tropic sun, until age doubled them into their withered palms. The nap of this rug was like the deepest yielding velvet, and the colors bright and alluring. The first rug, with its shimmering surface, was evidently woven for a temple, a thing to pray on; but this second had been designed for domestic uses, under a sultan's eye, with nice discrimination, for a cherished foot.
This room contained a bedstead of inlaid brass and hangings of exquisite silk. The ripple and splash of the bath told how the occupant of this dainty apartment was engaged—in green sea water like that Aphrodite of imperishable legend. Water, warmed by the trackless currents of the gulf, cooled by wandering ice floes; of mightier alchemy to preserve the gloss of firm white shoulders, and the alluring hues of bright, red blood glowing under a satin skin, than the milk of she asses, or the scented tubbings of Egypt.
The Marchesa Soderrelli entering was greeted by a merry voice issuing from the bath of splashing waters.
"Good morning," said the voice, "could you read my signal?"
"With some difficulty," replied the Marchesa; "one does not often see an invitation to breakfast dangling from a topmast."
The voice laughed among the rippling waters.
"Old Martin was utterly scandalized when I ordered him to run it up, but Uncle had gone ashore somewhere, and I remained First Lord of the Admiralty, so he could not mutiny. It was obey or go to the yardarm. For rigorous unyielding etiquette, give me an English butler or an American yacht captain."
"It was rather unconventional," replied the Marchesa.
"Quite so," the voice assented, "but at the same time it was a most practical way of getting you here promptly to breakfast with me. This place is crowded with hotels. I did not know in which of them you were housed, and it would have taken Martin half a day to present himself formally to all the hall porters in Oban."
Then the voice added, "I am breaking every convention this morning. I invite you to breakfast by signal, and I receive you in my bath."
"This latter is upon old and established authority, I think," replied the Marchesa. "It was a custom of the ancient ladies of Versailles, only you do not follow it quite to the letter. The bath door is closed."
"I am coming out," declared the voice.
"If you do," replied the Marchesa, "I shall not close my eyes, even if they shrivel like those of that inquisitive burgher of poetic memory." The voice laughed and the door opened.
It is quite as well perhaps that photography was unknown to the ancients; that the fame of reputed beauties rests solely upon certain descriptive generalities; words of indefinite and illusive meaning; various large and comprehensive phrases, into which one's imagination can fill such detail as it likes. If they stood before us uncovered to the eye, youth, always beautiful, would in every decade shame them with comparison. The historical detective, following his clew here and there among forgotten manuscripts, has stripped them already of innumerable illusions. We are told that Helen was forty when she eloped to Ilium, and, one fears, rather fat into the bargain; that Cleopatra at her heyday was a middle-aged mother; that Catherine of Russia was pitted with the smallpox; and, upon the authority of a certain celebrated Englishman, that every oriental beauty cooing in Bagdad was a load for a camel.
It is then the idea of perennial youth, associated by legend with these names, that so mightily affects us. As these beauties are called, it is always the slim figure of Daphne, of Ariadne, of Nicolette, as under the piping of Prospero, that rises to the eye—fresh color, slender limbs, breasts like apples—daughters of immortal morning, coming forth at dawn untouched as from the silver chamber of a chrysalis. It is youth that the gods love!
And it was youth, fresh, incomparable youth, that came now through the bath door. A girl packed yet into the bud; slender, a little tall, a little of authority, perhaps in the carriage of the head, a bit of hauteur maybe in the lifting of the chin—but gloriously young. Her hair, long, heavy, in two wrist-thick plaits, fell on either side of her face to her knees over a rose-colored bath robe of quilted satin. This hair was black; blue against the exquisite whiteness of the skin; purple against the dark-rose-colored quiltings. Her eyes, too, were black; but they were wide apart, open, and thereby escaped any suggestion of that shimmering, beady blackness of Castilian women. Their very size made this feature perhaps too prominent in the girl's face. It is a thing often to be noticed, as though the eye came first to its maturity, and disturbed a little the harmony of features not yet wholly filled in. But it is a beauty to be had only from the cradle, and for that reason priceless.
"Oh, Caroline," cried the Marchesa, rising, "you are so splendidly, so gloriously young!" The girl laughed. "It is a misfortune, Marchesa, from which I am certain to recover."
"Oh," continued the woman, drinking in the girl from her dainty feet, incased in quaint Japanese sandals, to the delicate contour of her bosom, showing above the open collar of the robe. "If only one could be always young, then one could, indeed, be always beautiful; but each year is sold to us, as it goes out it takes with it some bit of our priceless treasure, like evil fairies, stealing sovereigns from a chest, piece by piece, until the treasure is wholly gone."
She paused, as though caught on the instant by some returning memory of a day long vanished, when she saw, reflected from a glass, on such a morning, a counterpart of this splendid picture, only that girl's hair was gold, and her eyes gray, but she was slim, too, and brilliantly colored and alluring.
Then she continued: "The bit taken seems a very little, a strand of hair, a touch of color, the almost imperceptible lessening of a perfect contour, but in the end we are hags."
"Then," replied the girl, smiling, "I beg that I may become, in the end, such a hag as the Marchesa Soderrelli."
"Child," said the woman, still speaking as though moved by the inspiration of that picture, "beg only for youth, in your prayers, as the Apostle would say it, unceasingly. If you should be given a wish by the fairies, or three wishes, let them all be youth. Women arriving at middle life adhere to the Christian religion upon the promise of a resurrection of the body. Were that promise wanting, we should be, to the last one, pagans."
"But, Marchesa," replied the girl, "old, wise men tell us that the mind is always young."
There was something adverse to this wisdom in the girl's soft voice; a voice low, lingering, peculiar to the deliberate peoples of the South.
The Marchesa made a depreciating gesture. "My dear," she said, "what man ever loved a woman for her mind! What Prince Charming ever rode down from his enchanted palace to wed a learned prig, doing calculus behind her spectacles! The sight would set the sides of every god in his sphere shaking. It is always the lily lass, the dainty maiden of red blood and dreams, the slim youngling of gloss and porcelain that the Prince takes up, after adventures, into his saddle. Every man born into this world is at heart a Greek. Learning, cleverness, and wisdom he may greatly, he may extravagantly, admire, but it is beauty only that he loves. He may deny this with a certain heat, with well-turned and tripping phrases, with specious arguments to the ear sound, but, believe me for a wise old woman, it is a seizure of unconscionable lying."
A soft hand put for a moment into that of the Marchesa, a wet cheek touched a moment to her face, brought her lecture abruptly to a close.
"I refuse," replied the girl, laughing, "to do lessons before breakfast even under so charming a teacher as the Marchesa Soderrelli."
Then she went into the bedchamber of the apartment, and sent a maid to order breakfast laid on the Buhl table in the dressing room. The maid returned, removed the cover, placed a felt pad over the exquisite face of the table, and on that a linen cloth with a clock center, and borders of Venetian point lace. Upon this the breakfast, brought in by a second maid, was set under silver covers. While these preparations went swiftly forward, the young woman, concerned with the details of her toilet, maintained a running conversation with the Marchesa Soderrelli.
"Did you find that fairy person, the Duke of Dorset?"
"Yes," replied the Marchesa, "at Doune in Perthshire."
"Charming! Will he come to Oban?"
"He will come," answered the Marchesa.
"How lovely!" And then a volley of queries upon that alluring picture which the press of Europe had drawn in fancy of this mysterious Duke—queries which the inquisitive young woman herself interrupted by coming, at that moment, through the door. She now wore slippers and a dressing gown of silk, in hunters' pink, embroidered with Japanese designs, but her hair in its two splendid plaits still hung on either side of her face, over the red folds of the gown, as they had done over the quiltings of the bath robe. She sat down opposite the Marchesa at the table, in the subdued light of this sumptuous apartment.
The picture thus richly colored, set under a yacht's deck in the bay of Oban, belonged rather behind a casement window, opening above a blue sea, in some Arabian story. The beauty of the girl, the barbaric richness of the dressing gown, her dark, level eyebrows, the hair in its two plaits, were the distinctive properties of those first women of the earth glorified by fable. But the girl responding visibly to these ancient extravagances, was, in mental structure, aptly fitted to her time. The wisdom of the débutante lay in her mouth.
"And now, Marchesa," she said, balancing her fork on the tips of her fingers, "tell me all about him."
The Highland Gathering is a sort of northern durbar, and of an antiquity equaling those of India.
The custom of the Scottish clans to meet for a day of games, piping and parade, had its origin anterior to the running of the Gaelic memory. A durbar it may be called, and yet a contrast in that word cannot be laid here alongside the gorgeous pageant of Delhi. The word may stand, albeit, in either case equally descriptive. Both are Gatherings. The distinction lies not in the essential and moving motive of the function, but in the diametric differences of the races. The Orient contrasted against the North. The rajah in his cape of diamonds, attended by his retinue, stripped of: his Eastern splendor, is but a chief accompanied by his "tail." The roll of skin drums is a music of no greater mystery to the stranger than the whine of pipes. The fakirs, the jugglers of India, disclose the effeminate nature of the East, while the games of the Highland disclose equally the hardy nature of the North.
Here under this cis-Arctic sun can be displayed no vestige of that dazzling splendor, making the oriental gathering a saturnalia of gems and color. But one will find in lieu of it hardy exhibitions of the strength, the courage, the endurance, the indomitable unflagging spirit that came finally to set an English Resident in every state of India.
The games of the Oban Gathering are in a way those to be seen at Fort William, Inverness, and elsewhere in the North; the simple sturdy contests of the first men, observed by Homer, and to be found in a varying degree among all peoples not fallen to decadence. Wrestling as it was done, doubtless, before Agamemnon; the long jump; the putting of the stone; the tossing of the caber, a section of a fir tree, and to be cast so mightily that it turns end over in the air, a feat of strength possible only to fingers thick as the coupling pins of a cart and sinews of iron; the high vault, not that theatrical feat of a college class day, but a thing of tremendous daring, learned among the ice ledges of Buachaill-Etive, when the man's life depended on the strength lying in his tendons. Contests, also, of agility, unknown to any south country of the world; the famous sword dance, demanding incredible swiftness and precision; the Sean Triubhais; the Highland fling, a Gaelic dance requiring limbs oiled with rangoon and strung with silk, a dance resembling in no heavy detail its almost universal imitation; a thing, light, fantastic, airy, learned from the elfin daughters dancing in the haunted glens of the Garry, from the kelpie women shaking their white limbs in the boiling pools of the Coe.
But it is not for these field sports that butterflies swarm into the bay of Oban. A certain etiquette requires, however, that one should go for half an hour to these games; an etiquette, doubtless, after that taking the indolent noble, once upon a time, to the Circus Maximus; having its origin in the custom of the feudal chiefs, to lend the splendor of their presence to these animal contests. One finds, then, on such a day, streams of fashionable persons strolling out to the field in which these games are held, and returning leisurely along the road to Oban. Adequate carriages cannot be had, and one goes afoot. The sun, the bright heaven, the gala air of the bedecked city, the color and distinctive dresses of the North, lend to the scene the fantastic charm of a masquerade.
At noon, on the second day of the Gathering, the Duke of Dorset came through the turnstile of the field into this road, following, at some paces, two persons everywhere conspicuously noticed. The two were of so strikingly a relation that few eyes failed to notice that fitness. The observers' interest arose at it wondering. In the fantastic gala mood of such a day, one came easily to see, passing here, in life, under his eye, that perfect sample of youth and age—that king and that king's daughter—of which the legend has descended to us through the medium of stories told in the corner by the fire. Those two running through every tale of mystery, coming now, unknown, as if by some enchantment. The girl, dark eyed, dark haired, smiling. Her white cloth gown fitting to her figure; her drooping hat loaded with flowers of a delicate blossom. The man, old, but unbent and unwithered, and walking beside her with a step that remained firm and elastic. He was three inches less in stature than the Duke of Dorset, but he looked quite as tall. He was old—eighty! But his hair was only streaked with white, and his body was unshrunken, save for the rising veins showing in his hands and throat. He might have appeared obedient to some legend; his face fitted to the requirements of such a fancy. Here was the bony, crooked nose of the tyrant, the eyes of the dreamer—of one who imagines largely and vastly—and under that face, like an iron plowshare, sat the jaw that carries out the dream. And from the whole body of the man, moving here in the twilight of his life, vitality radiated.
The two, mated thus picturesquely, caught and stimulated the fancy of the crowds of natives thronging the road to Oban. Little children, holding wisps of purple heather tied with bits of tartan ribbon, ran beside them, and forgot, in their admiration, to offer the bouquets for a sixpence; a dowager duchess, old and important, looked after the pair through the jeweled rims of her lorgnette; she was gouty and stout now, but once upon a time, slim like that girl, she had held a ribbon dancing with the exquisite prince sitting now splendidly above the land, and the picture recalled by this youth, this beauty, was a memory priceless. Once a soldier of some northern regiment saluted, moved by a deference which he gave himself no trouble to define; and once a Fort William piper, touched somewhere in the region of his fancies, struck up one of those haunting airs inspired by the Pretender—=
```"Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing.
````'Onward!' the sailors cry.
```Carry the lad that was born to be King
````Over the sea to Skye—-"=
preserving forever in the memory the weird cry of gulls, the long rhythmic wash of the sea, and the loneliness of Scotland.
But the impression that seized and dominated the Duke of Dorset was that he knew these two persons. Not as living people—never in his life had he seen either of them as living people. But in some other way, as, for example, pictures out of some nursery story book come to life. And yet, not quite that. The knowledge of them seemed to emerge from that mysterious period of childhood, existing anterior to the running of the human memory. And he tried to recall them as a child tries to recall the language of the birds which he seems once to have understood, or the meaning of the pictures which the frost etches on the window pane—things he had once known, but had somehow forgotten.
The idea was bizarre and fantastic, but it was strangely compelling, and he followed along the road, obsessed by the mood of it.
Presently, as the old man now and then looked about him, his bearing, the contrasts in his face, the strange blend of big dominating qualities, suggested something to the Duke of Dorset which he seemed recently to have known—a relation—an illusive parallel, which, for a time, he was unable definitely to fix. Then, as though the hidden idea stepped abruptly from behind a curtain, he got it.
On certain ruins in Asia, one finds again and again, cut in stone, a figure with a lion body, eagle wings, and a human face—that mysterious symbol formulated by the ancients to represent the authority that dominates the energies of the world.
But it was the other, this girl with the dark eyes, the dark hair, the slender, supple body, that particularly disturbed him. He could not analyze this feeling. But he knew that if he were a child, without knowing why, without trying to know why, he would have gone to her and said, "I am so glad you have come." And he would have been filled with the wonder of it. So it would have been with him before the years stripped him of that first wisdom; and yet, now at maturity, stripped of it, the impulse and the wonder remained.
The Duke of Dorset continued to walk slowly, at a dozen paces, behind these two persons. He wore the dress usual to a north-country gentleman—a knickerbocker suit of homespun tweed, with woolen stockings and the low Norwegian shoes, with thin double seam running around the top of the foot. This costume set in relief the man's sinewy figure. Among those contesting in the field, which they were now leaving, there was hardly to be found, in physique, one the equal of this Duke. Thicker shoulders and bigger muscles were to be seen there, but they belonged to men slow and heavy like the Clydesdale draft horse. The height, the symmetry, the even proportions of the Duke of Dorset were not to be equaled. Moreover, the man was lean, compact and hard, like a hunter put by grooms, with unending care, into condition.
This he had got from following the spoor of beasts into the desolation of wood and desert; from the clean air of forests, drawn into lungs sobbing with fatigue; from the sun hardening fiber into iron, leaching out fat, binding muscles with sheathings of copper; from bread, often black and dry; meat roasted over embers, and the crystal water of springs. It was that gain above rubies, with which Nature rewards those walking with her in the waste places of the earth.
Ordinarily, such a person would have claimed the attention of the crowds along the road to Oban, but here, behind this old man and this girl, he was unnoticed.
The day was perfect. From the sea came the thin, weird cry of gulls, from the field behind him, the wail of pipes. Presently the two persons whom he followed stopped to speak with some one in a shop, and he overtook them on the road.
At this moment the Marchesa Soderrelli came through the shop door.
The Duke of Dorset had gone to tea on the American yacht. It was a thing which he had not intended to do when he came to Oban. The general conception of that nation current on the Continent of Europe had not impressed him with the excellence of its people. The United States of America was thought to be a sort of Spanish Main, full of adventurers, where no one of the old, sure, established laws of civilization ran. A sort of "house of refuge" for the revolutionary middle class of the world—the valet who would be a gentleman, the maid who would he a lady. It was a country of pretenders, posers, actors. Those who came out of it with their vast, incredible fortunes were, after all, only rich shopkeepers. They were clever, unusually clever, but they were masqueraders.
But, somehow, he could not attach either the one or the other of these two persons to this conception of the United States of America.
He did not stop to consider whether this curious old man, whose face, whose body, whose big, dominant manner recalled in suggestion those stone figures covered with vines forgotten in Asia, was a mere powerful bourgeois, grown rich by some idiosyncrasy of chance, a mere trader taking over with a large hand the avenues of commerce, a mere, big tropical product of a country, in wealth-producing resources itself big and tropical; or one of another order who had drawn this nation of middle class exiles under him, as in romances some hardy marquis had made himself the king of outlaws.
Nor did he stop to consider whether this girl was a new order of woman evolved out of the exquisite blend of some choice alien bloods.
The thing that moved him was the dominion of that mood already on him when the Marchesa Soderrelli came so opportunely through the shop door.
Let us explain that sensation as we like. One of those innumerable hypnotic suggestions of Nature drawing us to her purpose, or a trick of the mind, or some vagrant memory antedating the experiences of life. The answer is to seek. The philosopher of Dantzic was of the first opinion, our universities of the second, and the ancients of the third. One may stand as he pleases in this distinguished company. Certain it is, that, when human reason was in its clearest luster, old, wise men, desperately set on getting at the truth, were of the opinion that some shadowy memories entered with us through the door of life.
Caroline Childers poured the tea and the Duke of Dorset sat with his eyes on her. He seemed to see before him in this girl two qualities which he had not believed it possible to combine: The first delicate sheen of things newly created, as, for instance, the first blossom of the wild brier, that falls to pieces under the human hand, and an experience of life. This young girl, who, at such an age in any drawingroom of Europe, would be merely a white fragment in a corner, was here easily and without concern taking the first place. The little party was, in a sense, a thing of fragments.
Cyrus Childers was talking. The Duke was watching the young girl, and replying when he must. The Marchesa Soderrelli sat with her hands idly in her lap and her eyes narrowed, looking out at something in the harbor.
It was an afternoon slipped somehow through the door of heaven. The sea dimpled under a sheet of sun. The bay was covered with every manner of craft, streaming with pennants, yachts from every country of Europe in gala trimmings. It was as though the world had met here for a festival. Crews from rival yacht clubs were rowing. The bay was full of music, laughter, color, if one looked straight out toward Loch Lynne, but, if off toward the open water, following the Marchesa's eyes, he saw on the edge of all this music, these lights, this color, this swimming fête, the gray looming bulk of a warship, with her long, lean steel back, and her dingy turrets, lying low in the sea, as though she had this moment emerged from the blue water—as though she were some deep-sea monster come up unnoticed on the border of this festival.
The Marchesa interrupted the conversation.
"Do you know what that reminds me of?" she said, indicating the warship. "It reminds me of the silentIroquoisthat used always to attend the Puritan May Days."
Cyrus Childers replied in his big voice.
"Are you seeing the yellow peril, Marchesa?" he said.
"I don't like it," she replied. "It seems out of place. Every other nation that we know is here, dancing in its ribbons around the May pole, and there stands the silentIroquoisin his war paint."
"Perhaps," said Caroline Childers, "the little brown man came in the only clothes he had."
"I think Miss Childers has it right," said the Duke of Dorset. "I think the brown man came in the only clothes he had, and he has possessed these clothes only for a fortnight."
"Is it a new cruiser, then?" said Mr. Childers.
"It was built on the Clyde for Chile, I think," replied the Duke, "and the Japanese Government bought it on the day it was launched."
"How like the Oriental," said the Marchesa, "to keep the purchase a secret until the very day the warship went into the sea. Other nations build their ships in the open; this one in the dark. She pretends to be poor; she shows us her threadbare coat; she takes our ministers to look into her empty treasury, but she buys a warship. How true it is that the Anglo-Saxon never knows what is in the 'back' of the oriental mind."
"Perhaps," said Caroline Childers, "we are quite as puzzling to the Oriental."
"That is the very point of it," replied the Marchesa. "They do not understand each other and they never will. They are oil and water; they will not mix. They can only be friends in make-believe, and therefore they must be enemies in reality. Why do we deceive ourselves? In the end the world must be either white, or it must be yellow."
"Such a conclusion," said the Duke of Dorset, "seems to me to be quite wrong. Certain portions of the earth are adapted to certain races. Why should not these races retain them, and when they have approached a standard of civilization, why should they not be admitted into the confederacy of nations?"
"I do not know a doctrine," replied the Mar-chesa, "more remote from the colonial policy of England."
"Do you always quite understand England?" said the Duke. "Here, for instance, is a new and enlightened nation, arising in the East. We do not set ourselves to beat it down and possess its islands. We welcome it; we open the door to it."
"And it will enter and possess the house," said the Marchesa. "What the white man is now doing with his hand open, he must, later on, undo with his hand closed. Look already how arrogant this oriental nation has become since she has got England at her back. It was a master play, this alliance. The white man had all but possessed the world when this wily Oriental slipped in and divided the two great English-speaking people. He was not misled by any such sophistry as a brotherhood of nations. He knew that one or the other of the two races must dominate, must exterminate the other. He could not attack the white man's camp unless he could first divide it. Now, he has got it divided, and he is getting ready to attack. Can one doubt the menace to the United States?"
Cyrus Childers laughed. "Oh," he said, "the United States is in no danger. Japan is not going to try a war with us. It is all oriental bravado."
"But he is creeping in on the Pacific Coast already," said the Marchesa. "He is getting a footing; he is establishing a base; he is planting a colony to rise when he requires it; so that when he makes his great move to thrust the white man's frontier from the coast back into the desert, there will already be Japanese colonies planted on the soil. You have, yourself, told me that they are always arriving and spreading themselves imperceptibly along the coast."
"My dear Marchesa," said Mr. Childers, "the little Japanese is only looking for employment. He has none of your big designs. His instincts are all those of the servant." He looked at the Duke of Dorset. "If Japan," he continued, "wishes to extend her territory, she will wish to extend it in that part of the world which the Oriental now inhabits. If there is really any menace, my dear Marchesa, it is a menace to England, and not to us. If Japan had a great design to dominate the world, would she not undertake to weld all the oriental races into a nation of which she would be the head? Would she not go about it as Bismarck went about the creation of Germany? That, it seems to me, would be the only feasible plan for such an enterprise."
"And do you think for a moment," said the Marchesa, "that she has not this very plan?"
"I do not believe that Japan has any such plan," replied the Duke of Dorset.
"And you," said the Marchesa, "who have lived in the East, who have assisted England to make this alliance, do you, who know the Oriental, believe that he does not dream of overrunning the world?"
"Dream!" replied the Duke of Dorset. "Perhaps he dreams. I was speaking of a plan, and a plan means a policy that one may carry out. Japan cannot move in India because there is England in India."
"Not yet," said the Marchesa, "but when she shall have made the white men enemies; when she shall have grown stronger under English friendship. She cannot yet depend on these oriental states. They are still afraid of the white man. She has encouraged them by her victory over Russia, but not enough. She must give them another proof that the yellow race is not the inferior of the white one. If she can crush the white man in North America, the yellow man will rise in Asia. Then the dream becomes a plan; then the plan becomes a reality."
"My dear Marchesa," said Caroline, "you must not so berate the little yellow brother in the house of his friends."
"Different races are never friends," replied the Marchesa. "I know because I am a woman, and have lived among them. The Latin does not like the Teuton, nor either of them the Saxon, and yet, all these are of the Caucasian race. Add to this the inherent physical repugnance which exists between the colored races and the white, and this natural dislike becomes a racial hatred. It is no mere question of inclination; it is an organic antipathy running in the blood. Ministers who draw treaties may not know this, but every woman knows it."
"Then," said Caroline, "there can be no danger to us in England's treaty with Japan."
"And why is there no danger?" said the Marchesa.
"Dear me," said the girl, "if I could only remember how Socrates managed arguments." She took a pose of mock gravity. "I think he would begin like this:
"You hold, Marchesa, that the hatred of one race for another increases with the difference between them?"
"I do," replied the Marchesa.
"Then, Marchesa, you ought also to hold that the love between nations increases as that difference disappears."
"I do hold that, too, Socrates," said the Marchesa.
"Also, Marchesa, it is your opinion that of all races the oriental is least like us?"
"It is."
"And of all races, the Briton is most like us?"
"Yes."
"Then the Jap ought to hate us with all his heart?"
"He ought, Socrates," said the Marchesa. "And," continued the girl, making a little courtesy to the Duke of Dorset, "the Briton ought to love us with all his heart?"
The Marchesa laughed. "I leave the Duke of Dorset to answer for his people."
The Duke put down his cup. "With all our heart," he said.
But the Marchesa was not to be diverted. "I think," she said, "you are sounding deeper waters than you suspect. We know how General Ian Hamilton said he felt when he saw the first white prisoners taken by the Japanese in Manchuria; and we know that Canada has had the same trouble on her Pacific Coast as the United States. This family feeling of the white man for the white man may prove stronger than any state policy." She turned to the Duke of Dorset. "The riots in Vancouver," she said, "are the flying straws."
"Both nations," said the Duke of Dorset, "ought firmly to suppress these outbreaks. Vancouver ought no more to be permitted to jeopardize the policy of England than California or Oregon ought to be permitted to involve the foreign policy of the United States. I am going out to Canada to look a little into this question for myself."
"And you will find," said the Marchesa, "what any woman could tell you, that these outbursts are only the manifestations of a deep-seated racial antipathy; an instinctive resistance of all the English-speaking-people alike to having the frontier of the white man's dominion thrust back by the Asiatic."
Caroline Childers interrupted. "You are a hopeless Jingo, my dear Marchesa," she said. "Let us go and see the regattas."