When he drifted back from the bliss of his oblivion, he lay a while like a child that makes its world afresh each morning from a few familiar surrounding things—the light, the shade, the feel of textures, and the sound of the cinder falling on the hearthstone. All his life came ranked before him in epochs that grew more vivid as his brain grew clear—the folly of youth, the vanity of manhood, the pride of his strength, the dour determination of his will; but he saw them all as virtues. Had he not prayed, and sat at the Communion? Had he not felt the gust of the Holy Spirit? Had he not repented?—nay, penitence had been denied him from his very birth, and without repentance well he knew there was no sin’s remission. Thus are the unelect at last condemned for a natural inability—terror they have and chagrin at results, but no regret for the essential wrong. There was a sound of some one moving in the house—the servant, who had been on a private escapade of her own, was now returned. Wanlock seized a walking-cane he kept beside the bedstead for the purpose, and he loudly rapped upon the wall. At first there was no answer; then he rapped again, and the woman entered, flushed with some spirit of adventure.
She had the radiant sleekness of the country’s girls,—a strapping, rosy healthfulness, a jaunty carriage, and a dancing and inviting eye: she seemed to Wanlock for a moment like a stranger, and she carried with her scents of the cool night winds.
For a moment she looked at him, astounded—he had so suddenly grown very old and his mouth so strangely twisted; then she gave a little cry, and hurried to his bedside, and he saw that the shawl she wore was pinned upon her shoulder by the luckless brooch!
It glowed portentous and commanding like a meteor; with the squeal of a netted hare he grasped at his walking-cane, and struck with fury at the object of his terror. The woman shrank before the blow; the rattan swept the candle from the table to the floor: a fountain of flame from the hell that is under life sprang up the bedstead curtains!
With an oath old Wanlock staggered from his bed in time to save himself, but the Manor-house was doomed—at dawn the bitter smell of woody ashes blew across the valley.
From the shabby lodge-house midway in the avenue he looked astonished at the girdling hills, to see them all so steadfast and indifferent: the sun came up and sailed across the heavens, heedless of the smouldering space among the pines, where turret and tower more lofty than themselves had seemed, a day ago, eternal. The rat squeaked as it burrowed for a new home under fallen lintels; the raven croaked upon the cooling hearth. And night came down on these charred relics, swiftly—night, the old conquering rider, ally of despair! It appeared to Wanlock like a thousand years since he had had a careless heart, yet the ruin of his home for the moment seemed less dreadful than its cause, and the new light it had thrown on his situation. Never before was he so desolate, so desolate!—forsaken of God and man. All night his flaming house had stained the clouds: the crackle of its timbers and the thunder of its falling walls appeared to fill the whole world’s ear, yet none had come to his assistance: as if abhorred by all, he was left to dree his weird alone among the ashes.
One thing only he had saved besides his life—a bottle of Bordeaux. He had seized upon it as the only friend from whom he could look for consolation. Even the maid and the dog had fled from him, but she returned at nightfall to the cheerless lodge to make it habitable.
“Where in the name of God got ye yon accursed thing?” he asked her, and she told him, flushing, she had got it from a lover.
“A lover!” quo’ Wanlock, regarding his helpless arm, remembering happier things. “Are there still folk loving?”
“It’s what he would like to be,” said the woman awkwardly; “but the man’s a dwarfish waif I daren’t hardly venture through the woods for; ye’ll have heard him screech for a month past. He haunts me like a bogle, comes from I kenna where—a crazy, crooked, gangrel body, worse than the Blednock brownie. He was squatted at the door last night when I got home, and he gave me the brooch,—I—I wish to the Lord I had never seen it.”
“Where is it now?” asked Wanlock.
“I—I have given it back,” the girl replied with some confusion.
“Ye were wise in that,” said her master. “Woe upon the owner of the havock brooch! for I have had it too, and the heart of me is withered in my bosom. No brooch, no human brooch, I’ll warrant! but a clot of the blood that dried on the spear of the Roman soldier. Ye have trafficked with the devil and have worn his seal. It has robbed me of my money and my home, my son, my daughter, and the power of my members—look at that blemished arm!”
She watched him for a moment, fascinated, seeing now his palsy; he beheld the pity in her eye, resenting it, and caught with his able hand at the bottle of Bordeaux which he poured with a splash into a tarnished goblet. He was about to drink it when he saw a look of fear and speculation come upon her face.
“May the Lord forgive me, Manor!” she exclaimed, “but I gave the brooch this morning to your son!”
“To my son!” he cried, incredulous. “How could you have seen him? He is far from here.”
“He never left the country,” cried the woman, weeping, “and I have known his hiding all the time. He saw the brooch upon me, was furious when he heard how I had got it, and made me give it up.”
“Furious,” said Wanlock curiously. “Had he the right?”
“None better,” said the woman, looking on the floor.
“I might have guessed,” said Wanlock bitterly. “‘Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.’ He has the brooch! Then are his footsteps dogged by the Accuser of the Brethren, for the gem is hell’s bell-wether!”
The night was tranquil, windless, frosty-cold; deep in the valley’s labyrinth lay the lodge-house, far from other dwellings, alien, apparently forgot, with the black plumes of the trees above it. In pauses of the conversation something troubled Wanlock like the fear of ambush; some absorbing sense of breathing shadows: silence itself took on a substance and stood listening at the threshold.
Suddenly there came a scratching at the door, and Wanlock blenched.
“God save us!” said the girl, and her face like sleet.
“I dare ye to open the door!” cried Wanlock, shaking.
“It is the dog,” she said—“the dog come back; I left it in the company of Stephen.”
“There is some compact here with things beyond me,” said her master. “Open—open the door and see.”
One glance only Wanlock gave at the grey dog trotting in, and fell to weeping when he saw a neckcloth pinned upon it with the brooch! He reeled a moment at the sight, then fumbled at the neckcloth and drew out the gem. With a curse he cast it in the heart of the burning peats, where it lay a little, blinking rubescent, then rolled among the cooler ashes. He moved expectant to the open door where the dog was leading: the girl took up the gem, which stung her like an asp upon the palm; she dropped it in the goblet where it hissed and cooled among the wine, and at that moment rose the cry of Stephen in the avenue.
With a snatch at the burning candles she ran out behind her master where he stood with head uplifted looking at the squadrons of the stars. She was the first to reach the figure lying on the ground, and putting down the candlesticks, she raised the lad, whose face was agonised and white like sapple of the sea. He had no eyes for them, but, trembling, searched with a fearful glance the cavern of the night made little by the candles burning in the breathless avenue.
“Stephen! Stephen! what has happened?” cried the girl, her lips upon his cheek.
“It—it caught me,” gasped the lad. “I ran from The Peel, and it caught me, clawed upon my thrapple, and left me here. I pinned my neckcloth on the dog.”
He leaned upon the woman, helpless in his terror. “Bring me the wine!” she bade her master, and old Wanlock stumbled back to fetch it.
“Oh, Stephen! Stephen! what were ye doing at The Peel?” she asked. “Ye know ye promised me—”
“I could not help myself,” he answered, “knowing what was in the well. ’Twas that that kept me in the country. I got it out and was making off with it when I heard the eerie laugh again. I dropped the plunder at the very door of Mellish when the de’il was on me. He was no bigger than a bairn, but he kept upon my heels till I got here, and then he leaped.”
“My Stephen! oh, my Stephen!” cried the woman, fondling him upon her breast, and he hung within her arms. A snarl came from the shadows: a creature smelling of mould and rotten leafage, clothed as in ragged lichens, contorted like a pollard willow, leaped at the throat of Stephen and crushed it like a paste, then fled with the bittern call.
Old Wanlock heard the woman shriek: he tottered with the goblet from the lodge and came within the circuit of the candles where she knelt beside her lover.
“He’s gone! he’s gone!” she cried, demented. “The devil has strangled him,” and at the moment passed the ghost of Stephen Wanlock.
“I knew it,” said the father—“very well I knew it: the sixth blow! There is no discharge in this war!” His head seemed filled with wool: his blood went curdling in its channels, and he staggered on his feet. Raising the goblet till it chattered on his teeth, he drained it at a draught, and the woman, heedless, straightened out the body of his son.
She heard her master choke: she turned to see his face convulsed, his eyeballs staring, and the empty flagon falling from his hand.
“The brooch! the brooch!” she screamed: a gleam of comprehension passed for a moment over Wanlock’s purpling visage: he raised his arms, and stumbling, fell across the body of his son!
THE FIRST-FOOT.
I.
The husband, with an eye of warm alacrity and a welcome manner that should have made his fortune in some livelier hostel than the dreary inn of Flanders Moss, regarded the stranger with compassion. The wife, an acrid peevish body, ill-content to be roused from bed at such an hour, plucked at the strings of her night-cap, loosened and fastened them half a dozen times as if they bridled a wroth that choked her, and looked with candid disapproval on the customer standing in the kitchen with the rain running from his wrap-rascal coat on the fresh-caumed flagstones of her floor.
“H’m!” she coughed; “it’s no’ a time o’ the year when we’re lookin’ for many visitors to the Flanders Moss.”
“But still-and-on ye’re welcome,” said the husband hastily, tender of the stranger’s feelings. “I think there’s an egg or twa, Jennet, isna there? And—and the hen; or—or yon ham?”
But Jennet tied her cap more tightly down upon her ears.
“I was making for the port o’ Menteith,” explained the stranger in a breath, compassing the chamber and the characters before him at a gled’s glance, feeling himself master of them both, flinging off the wrap-rascal and throwing his bonnet on the hearth to dry. It struck the stone with a sodden slap that would have made plain the kind of night from which he had escaped, even if the ear had not more eloquently indicated that the house was in the very throat of tempest.
“Ye’ll no hae pack nor powney?” said the dame sourly, with a pursed mouth, surveying the young man’s hose, the clinging knee-breeches, the stained red waistcoat, and the shabby green cutaway coat, but more intent upon the dissipation of his shaven boyish countenance, the disorder of his hair, and his reckless eye.
“Tut, tut! It’s no’ a nicht for a cadger’s dog, let alane a powney,” said the amiable host; and then, in a beseeching tone that told the nature of their partnery, “Am I richt or am I wrang, Jennet? At least there maun be an egg or twa.”
The wife scowled at her mate, and said emphatically that eggs were out of the question, and the hour was quite ridiculous.
“I’m no heedin’,” said the stranger; “I had a meal of a kind at Fintry. What I want’s a bed.”
“Ye’ll get that!” cried the landlord heartily, glad to be assured of a speedy return to his own blankets. “There’s a snug bed ben, and ye’ll hae a’ the better appetite for breakfast.”
“But what’s your security?” demanded madam, and the goodman sighed.
Her customer shrugged his shoulders, threw himself in a chair, and thrust his feet out to the fire of turf.
“God,” said he.
“Sir?” she queried.
“I said God was my security,” remarked the stranger.
“Ye couldna hae better!” cried the innkeeper, and drawing a chopin of ale for the pious gentleman, beat down by the very gust of his geniality the rising opposition of the woman’s manner.
Twenty minutes later Black Andy went to bed in the ben. He went with his boots on, for he had, in the very act of stooping to unlace them by the light of a tallow candle, seen that which led at the end to the rout of any thought of sleep. The candle, which he had placed on the floor the better to see his knots untied, threw a beam under a heavy oaken kist in the corner, and glinted on a ring of brass that oddly hung from the bottom of the box. He threw up the lid, to find no more than a pile of homespun blanketing; then turned the kist quietly on its side, to learn that the ring was on the latch of a secret bottom. He opened it: the shallow space between the false bottom and the real one seemed at first to hold no more than rags; but fumbling through them, he found a leather pouch with three-and-twenty guineas—madam’s private hoard! As he counted the money silently on the covering of the bed, the storm that held the Flanders Moss in its possession seemed for the while to hold its breath, as he did his own, so that he could hear the thud of his heart and each reluctant tick of the kitchen clock.
For an hour he lay in darkness, wide awake, with the pouch in his breast. The murmur of voices in the kitchen ceased, its light went out; the lonely inn on the edge of the moor was black, and wholly lost in the privacy of the night.
The innkeeper, easy man! turned his face to the box-bed wall in the kitchen, and counted sheep going through a dip-tank till the fleece of the last of them spread, and spread, and spread, like a magic counterpane, and fell on him at last, smothering him to sleep. It was his goodwife’s elbow. For she lay on her back, her hands hollowed behind her ears, her cap-strings loose, and listened for some other sound than the creak of the roof-cabars, the whistle of the thatch, and tempest’s all-pervading symphony. Ah! it would have been an easier night for her if she had had some chance to put her money elsewhere; it was her evil star that had surely brought this man to Flanders Moss on a Hogmanay, the very night when all honest bodies ought to be at their own fire-ends!
A sound in the room where he lay brought her sitting up in bed with every sense alert. A sash squeaked: she shook her husband out of the fleece of sleep, and they jumped together to the chamber door. It opened to a gale that blew right through it from an open window: their lodger was gone!
“I kent it!” cried the woman furiously, and shrieked to realise, by a feel of the hand in the dark, that her hoard had been discovered.
“Dod, now, that’s droll!” said her husband, scratching his head. “And him had such good security!”
II.
Black Andy, with the pouch of guineas comforting the breast of him like liquor, so that he hardly missed his wrap-rascal or his bonnet that were drying by the kitchen fire, ran along the broken road for Kippen. It was like the bed of a burn, and like a rested monster rose the storm afresh from the Hieland hills. One glance he gave behind him at a step or two from the window whence he burst; so dark was the night that the inn in the womb of it was quite invisible. He looked over his shoulder for a second time, having run for a little, and saw the bobbing of a lanthorn. His amiable host was already on his track, and Kippen was plainly no place for Black Andy.
With an oath he quitted the road, ran down through a clump of hazel, and launched on the rushy moss that (as the story goes) had once been a part of the sea that threshed on Stirling rock.
Like many another man, this scamp, unskilled in thievery, had no sooner escaped the urgent danger of arrest than he rued his impulsive fall to the temptation of a bag of clinking coins. He had drunk through an idle youth, and others had paid the lawing; he had diced and cheated; he had borrowed and left unpaid; he had sold bad cattle and denied his warrandice; he had lived without labour—all of which is no more different from theft than tipsyness is different from drunkenness. But hitherto he had stopped on the verge of crime denominate, and it was his mother’s only glad reflection when the thought of his follies haunted her pillow. Had the temptation of the inn-wife’s gold come to him on another night, and elsewhere, he could have turned the broad of his back on it, and mustered conquering hosts of fear and of expedience to his support; the misfortune was that it found him in a desperate hour. For a week he had been in a most jovial company with some Campsie lairds; he had spent the price of his father’s horse to the last plack royally, as if he had been a bonnet-laird himself, and New Year’s Day should have seen him back at Blaruisken with the price of the horse, or else it meant disaster. Even that consideration scarcely would have made a thief of him (as he thought now), but for the wife in the Moss of Flanders inn; she had so little deserved to be the sole possessor of such gold. A comely wife, a civil wife, a reasonably hospitable wife (as he argued with himself), might have kept her money on the doorstep, and he would have been the last to meddle with it; but this one deserved some punishment, and he was, in a fashion, Heaven’s instrument. The husband—true, he was a kindly soul (and here the instrument of Heaven found his sophistry weak a little at the knees); but Black Andy had an intuition that the hoard was secret, even from the husband, and he guessed aright the wife would never report the actual nature of her loss.
He seemed the more contemptible a thief to himself, because in one particular he had blundered like a fool. For yonder, beiking before the innkeeper’s fire, were his wrap-rascal and his bonnet—the first, at least, a clue to his identity. There was not another wrap-rascal than his own in his native parish; the very name of the coat had seemed too sinister for his mother, and the garment made him kenspeckle over half the shire. Though the folk in the inn of the Flanders Moss might never before have cast an eye on him, they had but to hang that garment on a whin-bush at their door to learn his history from scores of passers-by.
Thinking thus—not any penitent in him, but the poltroon that is in all of us at the thought of discovery by the world of what we really are—the woman’s money coldly weighed upon his bosom like a divot. By God! a rotten bargain had he made—to swap the easy mind of innocence for three days’ drinking with numskull bonnet-lairds in a Campsie tavern.
But the thing was done, with no remedy; there was nothing for it but to tramp home and meet his obligation to his father.
So busily did his mind engage with these considerations that the increase of the tempest for a little never touched his comprehension. He came to himself with a start at a stumble in a hag whose water almost reached his knees, and realised that he was ignorant of the airt he moved to, and that the passion of the night was like to shake the world in tatters. The very moss below him seemed to quiver like a bog; no rush, no heather shrub, but had its shrieking share in the cacophony of that unco hour upon the curdled spaces of the ancient sea. Black Andy put out his cold-starved hand before his face, and peered for it in vain; it might have been a hand of ebony.
For hours he laboured through that windy desert, airting, as he judged by the wind, for the north, as far away as possible from the inn of his misdoing, and weariness seemed to turn his blood to spring-well water, and his flesh to wool, so that the earthy cushion of the hags in which he sometimes stumbled tempted him to lie and sleep. The last sheuch would have done his business if he had not, sitting on its edge, beheld a glimmer of light from a window. He dragged with an effort towards it, climbed a dry-stone dyke, and felt with his hands along the back of some dwelling which he took for a shepherd’s hut, until he came upon the door. Breathlessly he leaned his shoulder to it and loudly rapped.
“First-foot!” he heard a voice exclaim, and remembered it was the New Year’s Day as the bolt shot back and he fell in the arms—of the innkeeper!
“Ye’re back, my man!” cried the innkeeper’s wife, with a face as white as sleet. “It’ll be to pay your lodging?”
“Tut, tut! never mind the lawin’. It’s the New Year’s Day, and here’s your dram,” said the genial landlord. “But, man, yon was a bonny prank to play on us! We thought ye were awa’ wi’ the wife’s best blankets.”
“But a lodgin’s aye a lodgin’,” said the wife nervously; and Andy laughed, knowing her perturbation.
“Here’s the lawin’,” he exclaimed, and banged her pouch of guineas in her hand. “Ye’ll can count it later, and I’m awa’ to my bed again. Were ye really feared I was gaein’ to cheat ye?”
It was the innkeeper who answered; his wife was off with her hoardings.
“Not me!” he said. “I kent ye had Grand Security.”
ISLE OF ILLUSION.
I.
MacDonnell of Morar, on the summer of his marriage, and when the gladness of it was still in every vein, sailed his sloop among the Isles. He went from sound to sound, from loch to loch, anchoring wherever the fancy took his lady, and the two of them were seeking what no one ever found nor shall find—that last and swooning pang of pleasure the Isles in summer weather, either at dawn or dusk, seem always to promise to youth and love. At night they lay in bays in the dim light of the cool north stars, or in the flush of the sunken sun that made wine of the sea-waves, and the island cliffs or the sandy shores seemed populous with birds or singing fisher-people.
It was very well then with Morar.
His wife was still a girl. In the mornings, when she came on deck with her hair streaming and the breeze making a banner of her gown, her gaiety surging to her breast in song, she seemed to him and to his men like one of the olden sea princesses told about in Gaelic stories, born from foam for the happiness and hurt of the hearts of men. She was lovely, tender, and good, and he himself, with those that knew him best, was notable for every manly part. One thing only he had a fear of in his bride—that, as had happened with others before, and perhaps with himself, a day might come to him when the riddle of her would be read, her maidenly sweet mystery revealed; when he could guess with certainty what was in the deep dark wells of her eyes, and understand, without a word, the cause for every throb of her bosom. To have her for ever with a part to baffle and allure, as does the sea in its outer caves, and as do the dawns in Highland glens—that was the wish of Morar.
The captain of the yacht, who, having no passion for her, knew her, some ways, better than her husband, perhaps, said she had what, westward in the Barra Isle he hailed from, they call the Seven Gifts for Women—content and gentleness, looks and liking, truth, simplicity, and the fear of God. To him and to his men—gallant fellows from Skye, and somewhat jealous of her that she was not of the isles herself, but a stranger—she was at least without a flaw. One time they thought it might be temper was her weakness, for she walked the deck with pride and had a noble carriage of the head, but the tiniest cloud of temper never crossed her honeymoon. Indeed, it was well with Morar.
And it seemed that summer as if the very clime befriended him, for there never blew but the finest breezes, and the sun was almost constant in the sky. Round all the remoter isles they sailed—even Harris and the Uists, and the countless lesser isles that lie to the west of Scotland,—an archipelago where still are dwelling the ancient Gaelic gods, whereto at least they come at sunset and sit upon the sands communing, so that sailors knowing the language, and having the happy ear, can sometimes catch far off at sea deep murmurs of the olden world that others take for the plash of waters.
Morar’s wife put the yacht into every creek. She loved the little creeks, she doted on the burns going mourning through the darkness, and on the sound of tides on shallow shores; it was her great delight sometimes to sleep on land below a canvas shelter, bathe at morning in the inner pools, walk barefooted on the sand, or stand on rocky promontories facing the rising sun, with her hair tumultuous. Her first breakfast then was the wild berry, her morning drink the water from island wells.
“I could live on the berries,” she would say to her husband. “Oh, I love them!”
“Doubtless, mochree,” would he answer her, laughing. “Faith! it’s my notion they have been growing all these years in the islands waiting just for you; their bloom is on your cheek; it’s the berry stain that was on your lips since ever I knew you. But for a common person like myself there is a certain seduction in a sea-trout or a herring. Madam, I wish you joy of your wild berries, and indeed I love the taste of them—on your lips,—but let me press on you a simple cabin-biscuit, though it suffers from having been baked by the hand of man.”
“And the berry comes straight from God,” would be her answer. “It’s the fruiting of the clean wild wind; I sometimes think that if I could eat it always I should live for ever.”
“Then, faith, I’ll grow it in Morar garden by the pole, and you shall eat berries at every meal,” said her husband. “Perhaps I’ll acquire the taste myself. Meanwhile, let me recommend the plain prose of our cooking galley.”
“And I declare that I can find in pure water something as intoxicating as wine and far more subtle on the palate.”
“A noble beverage, at least they tell me so, as the piper says in the story,” said Morar, “yet God forbid that a too exclusive diet of berries and water should send Macdonnell back a widower to Morar! I take leave to help you to another egg,” and so saying he would laugh at her again, and she would laugh also, for the truth was that she never brought to the cabin table but a yachtsman’s appetite.
One thing she missed in all these island voyagings was the green companionship of trees. She came from a land of trees, and sailing day after day past isles that gave no harbour to so little as a sapling, she fretted sometimes for the shady deeps of thicket and the sway of boughs. Often she sat on deck at nightfall and imagined what the isles must have been before disaster overtook them.
“Can you think of us wandering in the avenues, sitting in the glades? Barefoot or sandal, loose light garments, berries and water, the bland sea air, shade from the sun and shelter from the shower, and the two of us always young and always the same to each other”—it was a picture she put before him many times, half entranced, as if she once had known a life like that before far back in another age and climate than in Scotland of the storms. Kissing her lips, wet from some mountain well, her husband got to look on her now and then as some Greek girl of the books, and himself as an eternal lover who had heard the wind blowing through boughs in Arcady.
Loving trees as she did, it was strange that so long they should have failed to visit Island Faoineas, for often in their voyagings it lay before them on the sea—green, gracious, and inviting, its single hill luxuriant with hazel-grown eas or corrie, its little glen adorned with old plantations. It lies behind Bernera, south of Harris, hiding coy among other isles and out of the track of vessels, and for reasons of his own the captain of the yacht sailed always at a distance from it, keeping it in the sun’s eye so that its trees should seem like black tall cliffs with the white waves churning at their feet. But one day Morar and his wife came to him with the chart. “This island here,” they said together. “We have not seen it close at hand; let us go there to-night.”
The captain’s face changed; he made many excuses. “A shabby, small place,” he told them, “with a poor anchorage. And the wind is going westward with the sun. I think myself Lochmaddy better for an anchoring this night than Ealan Faoineas.”
“What does the name mean—this Ealan Faoineas?” asked Morar’s wife, looking out toward the island that was too distant yet to show its trees.
“It means,” said Morar, “the Isle of Seeming—that is to say, the Isle of Illusion.”
“What a dear name!” she cried, clapping her hands. “I should love to see it. Are there trees?” Her eyes were on the captain’s face: he dared not lie.
“What you might be calling a sort of trees,” he grudgingly admitted. “Oh yes, I will not be saying but what there are two or three trees, or maybe more, for I have not paid much attention to Ealan Faoineas myself.”
“Indeed!” said she. “Then it is time you were amending your knowledge of it. I think we will risk the anchorage for the sake of the trees.”
It was her own hand put down the helm and herself who called the men to the sheets, for the captain had a sudden slackness in his office and was forward murmuring with his crew.
“What ails him?” the lady asked her husband.
“You have me there!” he answered her, as puzzled as herself. “I think it is likely there may be some superstition about the island; the name suggests as much, and now that I come to think of it, I remember I once heard as a boy that sailors never cared to land on one or two of the Outer Isles, believing them the domain of witchcraft. We must have passed that island frequently and the captain always kept us wide of it. I will ask him what its story is that makes him frightened for it.”
He went forward by-and-by and talked with the captain.
“I am a plain man; I have not the education except for boats,” said the seaman, “and I would not set foot on Faoineas for the wide world. You will not get a man in all the Outer Islands, from Barra Head to the Butt of Lewis, who would step on Faoineas if the deck of his skiff was coming asunder in staves below the very feet of him. I am brave myself—oh yes! I come of people exceeding brave and notable for deeds, but there is not that much gold in all the Hebrides, no, nor in the realm of Scotland, would buy my landing in that place yonder.”
“Come! come! what is wrong with the island that you should have such a fear of it?” asked Morar, astounded at so strong a feeling.
“It is bad for men, and it is worse for women,” said the Captain.
“Is it something to hurt the body?”
“If it was but the body I would be the first ashore! I have not so much money put past me that I have any need to be afraid for my life,” said the captain.
“Are there ghosts there, then?” said Morar, determined to be at the root of the mystery.
“Ghosts!” cried the captain. “Where are they not, these gentlemen?”
By this time the sloop that Morar’s wife was steering had drawn closer on the island, breaking her way among the billows striving into Harris Sound; and to the gaze of Morar’s wife, and to her great bewilderment, she saw the little glen with its bushes climbing high on either side of it, and the tall, great, dark old Highland trees beyond, and thickets like gardens to the south, and under all the deep cool dusk of shadows she had longed for all those days that she and her husband had sought for the last pang of pleasure in their honeymoon among the Outer Isles. She leaned upon the tiller and stared entranced and unbelieving, for it seemed a fairy isle, such as grows fast in dreams and sinks to the sea-depths again when dawn is on the window. Only when she saw rooks rise with cawings from the branches, and heard the song of birds unknown on the treeless islands, was she altogether convinced of its reality.
“Darling,” she cried to her husband, “look! Were we not right? Here’s a forgotten paradise.”
“If paradise it be, then may you have your share of it,” said the captain as he put them ashore. “Myself, I would not risk it so long as this world has so many pleasant things to be going on with. All I can tell you of Island Faoineas is that, paradise or purgatory, it depends on what one eats and drinks there. I heard it from a priest in Eriskay, a noble and namely man through all the islands of the West. Once he had landed here and known some wonders. He died in Arisaig, and in his dying blessed with the seven blessings one well upon this island, but which of all that run there I never learned.”
That night Morar and his bride slept out in the shelter of hazel-bushes and shelisters. They built a fire and drank out of the same glass from a burn that sang through the shelisters, and as they slept there were many wells that ran merrily through their dreams, but one particularly that rose from a hillock beside them, and tinkled more sweetly than golden jewels streaming down a golden stair.
II.
She was the first to waken in the morning, and stealing softly from him, she left the embers of their fire among the rushes and went wandering among the trees, so that when he rose he saw her figure, airy and white, among their columns. She seemed the spirit of the trees to his doting eye, as though ’twas there among them she had always dwelt; the wood was furnished and completed by her presence.
“There is not in the world a sweeter place,” she cried, “and I have never seen such berries! Look, I have brought you some, Sir Sluggard, that we might taste them first together.” She put a spray of the berries between her teeth and let him sweeten the fruit with a kiss as he took his share from her lips with his own.
“The woman tempted me, and I did eat,” said Morar, laughing, and culled the berries with his arms around her. They burst on his palate with a savour sharp and heady. He was about to ask for more when he saw her change. The smile had suddenly gone from her face at his words; for the first time he saw that her eyes were capable of anger.
“Upon my word,” said she in an impatient voice, “I think it a poor compliment to me after my trouble in getting the berries for you that you should have such a thought in your head about me.”
“There you go,” he answered quickly, an unreasonable vexation sweeping through him in a gust. “Did ever any one hear the like, that because I am indifferent to your silly berries you should snarl like a cat?”
“A cat!” she cried, furious.
“Just a cat,” he repeated deliberately. “For God’s sake give me peace, and get your hair up before the men come ashore for us. It is time we were home; I am heart-sick of this sailing. And it ill becomes a woman of your years to play-act the child and run barefoot about island sands.”
The berries she still held in her hand she crushed between her palms till the juice of them stained her gown and ran like blood between her fingers. The perfume rose to her nostrils and seemed to fill her head with a pungent vapour.
“Well? Well?” he said with irritation at her staring. She covered her eyes with her hands and burst into tears.
He only whistled. Someway she appeared a sloven in dress, awkward in gesture, and a figure of insincerity. If he had not a sudden new conviction that she was everything she should not be, there was the accent of her voice, the evidence of his eyesight. For when, in wild exasperation at his manner, she took her hands from her face, she showed a visage stained and sour, tempestuous eyes, and lips grown thin and pallid.
“I hate you! I hate you!” she cried, and stamped with her bare feet on the sand. “I cannot for my life understand what I ever saw in you that I should have married you. Any one with her senses might have hesitated to tie herself for life to a man with so much evil in his countenance.”
“Yours would be none the worse for washing,” said Morar remorselessly, with an eye on her berry-stained face.
“There’s a gentleman!” she cried. “Oh, my grief, that I should have spoiled my life!”
“You knew what I was when you took me,” said Morar. “Lord knows, I made no pretence at angelic virtues, and ’twas there, by my faith, I was different from yourself!”
“And there’s the coward and liar too!” cried his wife. “You were far too cunning to show me what you really were, and it must have been a woeful ignorance of the world that made me take you on your own estimate.”
“Well, then, the mistake has been on both sides,” said Morar. “There’s no one could be more astonished than myself that my real wife should be so different from what till this hour I had imagined her. Madam, you need not be so noisy; if you scream a little louder the crew will be let into a pretty secret. It is like enough they know you already, for I have been singularly blind.”
He put up what seemed to her for the first time an unlovely hand to stifle a forced yawn: she saw an appalling cruelty in the mouth that had so often kissed her and called her sweet names; his very attitude expressed contempt for her.
“What have I done?” she asked, distracted.
“It is not what you have done,” he said with a coarse deliberation, “’tis what you are and what you cannot help being. The repentance must lie with me. I would give, gaily, ten years of my life to obliterate the past six months.”
“Faith, ’tis a man of grace and character says so to his newly-married wife.”
At these words Morar started slightly, and looked for a moment confused. “Newly married!” he said; “Lord help us! so we are. Some way, I fancied we had been married for years. Well, we have not taken long to discover each other, and will have the more leisure to repent. I understand you, madam, into the very core; there is not a vein of your body hides a secret from me. I was mistaken; I thought your beauty something more than a pink cheek; I thought you generous till I saw how generous you could be at my expense, and how much the rent-roll of Morar weighed with you in your decision to marry me. I thought you humble and unaffected, and now I see you posing about this business of bare feet on the sand, the morning breeze in your gown, breakfasts of berries and water.”
“Pray go on,” cried the lady. “Pray go on. Every word you say confirms the character I now see in your face.”
“I thought you truthful, so you are—in the letter and the word; but the flattery you have for those you would conciliate, the insincerity of your laugh in the presence of those you would please, the unscrupulousness of your excuses for the omission of duties unpleasant to you—what are these but lies of the worst kind?”
“Oh heavens,” she cried, “I was not always so! If I am so now I must be what you made me. I remember—” she drew her hand across her brow; “I seem to remember some one else I thought was me, that loved you, and could not be too good and pure for you even in her imagination. You seemed a king to that poor foolish girl’s imagination; she loved you so—she loved you so, she was so happy!”
“Just so!” said Morar. “You had, seemingly, well deceived yourself. And now I can tell you that you may cry your eyes out, for I know what a woman gets her tears so readily for. It is that when she is crying and lamenting she may not betray her chagrin and ill-temper in her face. Have done with it, and let us get out of this! I see the men put out the boat; they will be with us in a moment; for Heaven’s sake let us have no more theatricals. The fate of us both is sealed, and we must, I suppose, live the rest of our lives together like the other married fools we know—putting as fair a face as we can on a ghastly business.”
She was standing beside tall blades of shelister—the iris of the isles—and when he spoke like this to her she suddenly plucked a handful and began to tear them wantonly with her fingers.
“I assure you that you have seen the last of my tears,” said she. “I would not cry out if you struck me! There is something almost as sweet as love, and that is hate, and I seem to have come from a race that must have either. I have a feeling in me that I could have loved eternally if I had found the proper object, but now I know that I can always be sure you will keep me hating, and I am not sorry. Yes, yes, you have said it, Morar, a ghastly business; but I will not put any fair face on it to deceive the world, I assure you! It could not be deceived: blind would it be, indeed, if it could not see the sneer in your face, and hear the coward in your voice.”
“Silence, you fool; the men are coming!” he said, clutching at her wrist and twisting it cruelly.
She gave a little shriek of pain, and caught at her breast with the other hand that held the broken blades of shelisters.
“Oh, you have struck me!” she cried. “That is the end of my shame, and I shall make you suffer.”
He saw a poignard glint momentarily in the morning sun that was turning Isle Faoineas’ sands to gold, and before he could prevent her she had plunged the weapon in her bosom. She fell with a cry at his feet, her hair in the ashes of the fire they had last night sat by. The blood came bubbling to her mouth and welled out on her bosom where the poignard rose and fell with her moaning.
For a moment, instead of pity and remorse, there was a feeling of release. Behind him sounded the plash of oars; he turned hastily and saw the men had left the sloop and were approaching land. “Oh Dhia!” he said to himself, “here’s a bonny business to explain!” and then ’twas very far from well with Morar, for he heard the woman moan her wish for water, and he knew she shared the agony of that inward fire that scorched his throat as if the berries he had swallowed had been beads of heated metal. At his feet was the glass they had drunk from on the last night of their happiness; he picked it up and ran to the well that tinkled on the hillock, then hurried to her side and raised her up to let her drink.
The draught, it seemed, revived her; she shuddered and sighed, and turned in his arms; then his own torment mastered him, and he drank too.
Through his whole flesh went a pleasant chill; a gladness danced in him, and he saw a thing miraculous in his bride—the flush come back to her cheek, and all her wild sweet beauty, and her smile, as she leaned against his shoulder like one new waked from sleep, so that he looked into her face and saw himself reflected in her eyes. The berry stains were on her lips, the bosom of her gown was reddened with their juices, and in between her breasts lay the blade of the shelister, sparkling with dew, and glinting in the sunshine as it rose and fell in time with her heart’s pulsations.
“Oh, love!” she said, and put her arms about his neck, “I dreamt—I dreamt a dreadful dream!”
“And I, sweetheart,” said Morar, looking aghast at the berry stains, and the mark of his fingers on her wrist, and on the iris blade that were evidence it had been no dream. “I dreamt, too, love—my God! such dreaming! I do not wonder now the world holds far aloof from this Island of Illusion. God bless the well, the holy well; but the curse of curses on the berries of Ealan Faoineas!”
Together, hand in hand, they fled to the shore and waded out on the sandy shallow to meet the boat; the sloop shook out her sails like some proud eager bird; from her deck, together waist-encircled, they saw the blue tide rise on the yellow sands, the trees nod, the birds flit among the thickets of the glen, and heard the tinkle of the well in Ealan Faoineas.
THE TUDOR CUP.
When the Tudor Cup was sold at Sotheby’s in the year 18– for the sum of £7000, the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer echoed round the world—at all events, round the world of men who gather bibelots. There were only three such treasures in existence—this one now destined for America, which was understood to have come from Holland; another in the national collection in Paris; and a third in Scotland, the property of Sir Gilbert Quair, whose ancestor had acquired it one hundred and fifty years before by winning a game of cards in a London coffee-house.
Among those people who were profoundly moved by this record price for a quite unimpressive-looking battered silver tankard was the firm of Harris and Hirsch, the Bond Street art-dealers; and two days after the sale in London, Mr Harris hastened up to Scotland, quartered himself at an inn in Peebles, and pushed some discreet inquiries. Sir Gilbert Quair, he discovered, was in a state approaching penury, living an almost hermit life in the House of Quair beside the Tweed, with a deaf old housekeeper, a half-daft maid who never came out of doors, and an equally recluse man whose duty it was to act as guide to the numerous tourists who flocked to the house for the sake of its place in Ballad Ministrelsy and its antiquarian collection. If the gossips of Peebles could be trusted, the baronet lived upon the shilling fees his guide exacted from the visitors, dodging, himself, from room to room of his mansion for fear of encountering Americans and English, whom he hated—resenting their intrusion on his privacy, but counting their numbers eagerly as from his window he watched them coming up the long yew avenue.
Harris, the Bond Street dealer, modestly bent on hiding his own importance in the commercial world of art—for the nonce a simple English gentleman with a taste for miniatures—called next day at the House of Quair, whose crenellated tower looked arrogantly over ancient woods and fields where lambs were bleating piteously and men were walking along the furrows scattering seed.
The avenue of yews, which led from the highway into Peebles through neglected and dishevelled grounds, brought the Bond Street dealer to the forlorn façade of the mansion and the great main door. He rapped upon the iron knocker; the sound reverberated as through a vault, with hollow echoes such as come from vacant chambers. Far back in the dwelling’s core there was a clatter of something fallen, but no one answered to the summons of the visitor; and having rapped in vain again, he ventured round the westward wing, to find himself confronted by a door on the side of which was hung the evidence that this was properly his entrance. It was a painted board, with the legend—
QUAIR COLLECTION.
Open to the Public Tuesdays and Thursdays.
ADMISSION ONE SHILLING.
Now this was neither a Tuesday nor a Thursday, and Harris swore softly. He was just on the point of making his retreat when a footstep sounded on the gravel of a little walk that led to a bower upon the terrace, and turning, he found himself face to face with Sir Gilbert Quair.
“The collection is not on view to-day, sir,” said the baronet, an elderly thickset gentleman wearing a shabby suit of tweed.
Mr Harris took off his hat—not to the wearer of the shabby tweed suit, but to the owner of the Tudor Cup.
“I am most unfortunate,” he stammered. “I was not aware that the collection was only on view on certain days, and, unhappily, I must return to England this evening. It happens that I am something of an amateur in miniatures, fortunate in the possession of a few choice examples, and, being in this neighbourhood, I could not resist the temptation to see the celebrated collection of Sir Gilbert Quair, which is rich in miniatures.”
He passed the baronet his card, to which the name of a well-known London club contributed the proper degree of uncommercial importance. Sir Gilbert turned it over in his fingers with a little hesitation, shot a shy glance of the keenest scrutiny from under his bushy eyebrows at the visitor.
“In the circumstances—” he began, and taking a key from his pocket, unlocked the door which led to the collection, but before he let his visitor through he held out to him a little wooden box with a slit in the lid of it. “In the absence of the usual guide,” said he, “I’ll collect your shilling for him, Mr Harris.”
Five minutes later Harris was manifesting the most rapturous appreciation of Sir Gilbert’s miniatures, which in truth were nothing wonderful; but at every opportunity, when unobserved by his host, his eyes went ranging in search of the Tudor Cup. It was his host who finally called attention to it under glass in a corner cupboard.
“If you had been interested in old English silver, Mr Harris, this piece might have had some attraction,” said Sir Gilbert, drenching his flaring nostrils with a pinch of snuff from a tiny ivory spoon. “I’m no great judge myself, but my father highly prized it.”
The Bond Street dealer, with a thudding heart, peered through the glass at the very counterpart of that tarnished goblet which had fetched £7000 in Sotheby’s. He was wondering if the dry, old, shabby gentleman looking over his shoulder, and odorous with macconba, was aware that this was a Tudor Cup, or if he had read the newspapers carefully and knew what Tudor Cups were worth in Sotheby’s.
II.
“But Himmel! did you not make him an offer?” demanded Hirsch next day in the Bond Street shop—they called it gallery—to which his partner had returned from Tweedside with the profound depression a man might have who had for a fleeting moment seen the only woman he could ever love and then had lost her in a panic.
“Offer, Joel!” he replied in accents of despair. “I offered him five thousand, and he only chuckled. He would not even take it from the cupboard. ‘No, no, Mr Harris,’ he said with his head to the side, flicking up his abominable snuff; ‘it is an heirloom older than any here, and I am not selling.’ And the galling thing is that he doesn’t even know he has a Tudor Cup, nor what a Tudor Cup can fetch in Sotheby’s.”
“Ah, you should have had the money with you, Harris,” said his partner. “Always show the money, I say; it talks for you through a speaking-trumpet. By heavens, I will go myself to Scotland and have that Tudor Cup, if I have to steal it!”
III.
A spirit of romance and a solemn homily on mutability were in the scene when Hirsch walked into the grounds of Quair, though he was not the man to understand. Six hundred years of history cried from the old bastion; still in its shelter men sowed oats, and their shabby dwellings clustered, no way changed, to look at, since the Borderland was vexed with wars and Quair was lord and warden; but vassals no more, save to that grim seigneur Commerce, who took from them triple-tithes and children instead of the service of the sword, which was all the old lords claimed. A valley of peace, and nights untroubled, and the old bold fighting Quairs in their resting graves, and their troopers’ dust at the roots of English pastures; surely at eve in the woods of Quair, or riding spirit horses through the passes of the hills, a thousand ghosts went seeking lost passions, old delights.
It was Thursday afternoon. Hirsch stepped in at the door which led to the Quair Collection, to find the man in charge of it had all the customary cicerone’s dull loquacity. He dribbled dates and gushed details of family history as if he were a gargoyle who had never got refreshment from the currents pouring through him. Thick-set, short, and rasped upon the chin from too-close shaving, he looked the very figure of a man to fill one of the empty suits of mail that flanked the entrance to the gallery, and even to the shopman’s eye of Hirsch he had an air of truculence that somehow seemed to accord with the situation.
“You do not appear to have many visitors to-day,” said the picture-dealer, having looked perfunctorily at dingy tapestry and pictures, and now with eyes, in which the fires of covetousness were with difficulty restrained, upon the tarnished Tudor Cup in its corner cupboard.
“Ye’re the first this week,” said the guide with acerbity, as if the shilling feed were a more personal matter than the gossips of the countryside believed; and Hirsch the dealer, rubbing his hook-nose to conceal the tremulous avidity of his mouth, saw that disappointed avarice was in this creature’s eyes.
“I should like, a little later on, to see Sir Gilbert,” said the dealer, who had five thousand pounds in his pocket, and a Jew’s conviction that an impecunious Scot could never resist the delicious crackle of English notes.
“Ye canna; he’s from home,” explained the guide. “He’s awa’ to Edinburgh for a month.”
A thought came there and then to the dealer which made him pale. Avarice and cunning were in the old man’s face; his shillings plainly meant a lot to him; his clothing was in poor accord with the guardianship of treasure.
“Look here,” said Hirsch in a confidential whisper. “If your master is to be away for a month, there is no reason why the matter I meant to arrange with him should not be arranged with you, and put a handsome sum of money in your pocket. I have taken a fancy to this silver jug, and though I know Sir Gilbert will not part with it, I thought he might at least agree to let me have it copied. It’s a thing that is often done, Mr—”
“Meldrum,” said the guide with a promising air of equanimity.
“In two or three weeks I could have my copy made in Paris, and this cup returned to you in safety, and no one else except ourselves need be a bit the wiser, Mr Meldrum.”
The guide gave a laugh that was half a sneer, and checked it suddenly with a hand upon his mouth. “It’s a maist singular proposition,” he remarked reflectively. “In the four-and-twenty years I have been showin’ folk the Quair Collection I havena heard the like of it. And it comes from a total stranger!”
“I represent one of the most reputable firms in London,” Hirsch hastened to explain, with the simultaneous production of his business card.
Meldrum looked at it with interest. “Harris & Hirsch. I take it that you are Mr Hirsch? There was a Mr Harris calling on Sir Gilbert, I was tell’t, some days ago.”
“Exactly,” answered Hirsch. “My partner. He had almost completed negotiations for the loan of the cup for the purpose I have mentioned. But really there seems no need for us to be troubling Sir Gilbert. The cup will be back before his return from Edinburgh, and—”
“Just that!” said Meldrum dryly. “And what about my security?”
Delighted with such apparent pliability, Hirsch produced his English notes, which brought a very passion of greed to Meldrum’s eyes.
“Let us not be calling it security, Mr Meldrum,” he remarked insidiously. “If a hundred pounds—”
Again the guide ironically chuckled. “If I could trust ye for a hundred pounds, Mr Hirsch, I could trust ye mair for ten times that,” he said. “I take your word for’t that we needna ca’t security: if I’m to risk my job and my reputation, the cost of three weeks loan o’ that siller tankard is exactly a thousand pounds!”
. . . . .
Three weeks later, the Quair Cup and its duplicate came back from Tregastel of Paris, so much alike that Hirsch would have been beat to see a difference had it not been that he found on one a private microscopic mark he had put on it himself.
But it was not the cup so marked that he returned to the accommodating Meldrum.
Two months more, and the curio world was shaken once again by the intimation of another Tudor Cup for sale at Sotheby’s. Amongst the host of possible bidders who examined the precious piece of tarnished metal taken out impressively from Sotheby’s strongest safe some days before the sale, was Barraclough, the expert who had bought its fellow earlier in the season for his client in America.
“A brilliant forgery,” he exclaimed on careful scrutiny—“one of Jules Tregastel’s charming reproductions,” and departed.
Harris and Hirsch were sent for by the auctioneer. “Nonsense!” they protested—and Hirsch satisfied himself again that the microscopic mark of the veritable cup from Quair was there. “Tregastel never had a tool on it.”
“Hadn’t you better ask?” said the auctioneer, and they asked by telegram, with astounding consequences.
“The cup you sent was a copy made a year ago by myself for another client. I thought you knew,” replied Tregastel.
“Mein Gott!” cried Harris, appalled. “Tregastel has made so cunning a job of it he has even copied your private mark, and you have sent the original back to Quair.”
“I will not believe it! I will not believe it!” said his partner, almost weeping with chagrin.
That night the two of them went to Scotland, and in the morning Harris went out from Peebles to the House of Quair to see Sir Gilbert.
“Might I have another look at the cup?” he asked without periphrasis, and the baronet snuffed and chuckled.
“It seems to have wonderfully taken your fancy, Mr Harris,” he remarked with an ironic cough. “Again you are unfortunate in the day you call, for this is Wednesday. And in any case I thought I made it clear that the cup was bound to stay here in spite of your most tempting offers.”
“I know,” replied the dealer; “but I should like to see it—that is all.”
“Ah! you mad collectors!” said Sir Gilbert humorously. “Ye can be as crazy over a bashed old siller cup as I might have been mysel’ at one time over a bonny lassie! Well, come your ways in and you shall see it. It is aye another shillin’!”
Harris not only saw the cup, but this time got it into his hands. In a fever of apprehension he turned it up and down and sought for a microscopic mark like that which Hirsch had pointed out upon the other,—it was not there!
At the sight of the blank look on his face Sir Gilbert chuckled and took snuff. “I see you have discovered, Mr Harris,” he remarked with his eyebrows twitching. “You connoisseurs are not to be deceived so easily!”
“Then—then you know it is a forgery!” cried Harris with amazement.
“I would not use that word for it exactly, Mr Harris,” said the baronet with a gesture of distaste. “A copy—and a wonderful copy too, by Tregastel of Paris. The truth is, I sold the original some months ago in London, having first had this one made. You see my possession of a Tudor Cup is notorious, and if it got about that the Quair Collection was being in any way depleted, where would our shillin’s come from, Mr Harris?” and he jocosely poked his visitor in the ribs.
Harris flew back to the inn at Peebles, an object of unutterable despair.
“Mein Gott! these Scotch!” cried Hirsch, wringing his hands. “But I will have my money back from that Meldrum man if I have to take him to the courts.”
“Harris and Hirsch would cut a funny figure in the courts in the circumstances, Joel,” said his partner. “It is better that we go out together to-morrow, when your Meldrum’s place is open, and compromise.”
The entrance to the Quair Collection had been hardly opened on the morrow when the dealers tried to push their way within. Harris was perturbed when he saw who checked them on the threshold—Sir Gilbert Quair himself, who greeted him with a crafty smile, only a little shabbier in dress than when he had seen him hitherto, and with the box for the admission shillings hanging round his neck.
“It might be the flowin’ bowl, Mr Harris,” he exclaimed ironically. “Ye come back so often to it.”
“I want a word or two with you,” said Mr Hirsch peremptorily, finding the old man barred their further passage. “Did you know that cup you lent me was an imitation?”
“I could hardly fail to be aware of it,” said the baronet. “You surely didna think a paltry thousand pounds would be security for a genuine Tudor Cup, and a’ the world sae keen on them at Sotheby’s.”
“I have been deceived; I must have my money back!” said Hirsch, and the old man shrugged his shoulders and took snuff.
“Na, na!” he said. “A bargain’s aye a bargain, and ye canna get your money back. The best I can dae for ye is to swop the cup ye sent for the one I lent ye.”
“Look here, Meldrum—” Hirsch began, and Harris, with surprise, corrected him.
“Not Meldrum,” he remarked. “Sir Gilbert Quair.”
“Ye’re both of ye right, and ye’re both of ye wrang,” said the old man with a chuckle. “For twa years back I’ve been guide to my own collection; it’s the only way to keep an eye upon the shillin’s.”
“You d—d old rogue!” exclaimed the partners simultaneously, and he grinned at them, with his stout old breast across the doorway like a cliff. For a little he gloated on their fury, then took them by the arms and led them out upon the terrace.
“You see this land,” he said, and indicated all the hills and valleys, verdant woods and furrowed fields, and the river sounding at the bend below the mansion. “The greed of English thieves brought them here marauding for good six hundred years, and it seems ye’re no done yet! My forefolk fought you with the sword, but Gilbert Meldrum Quair must fight you with his wits!”
“But, Gott in Himmel! we are not English; we are Hebrews!” protested Hirsch with his hands palm upwards and his neck contracted.
“That is worse,” replied Sir Gilbert, making for his door. “We Scots are still at feud wi’ the Jews for what they did out yonder in Jerusalem.”