Her father was at the door when she went in. Now for the first time she knew the reason for his change of manner lately, for that bustle about trivial affairs when she was near, that averted eye when she was fond and humorous. She went past him, unable to speak more than an indifferent word, and great was his relief at that, for he had been standing there bracing his courage to consult her on what she must be told of sooner or later. He looked after her as she sped upstairs. “I wonder how she’ll take it?” he said to himself, greatly perplexed. “A father has some unco’ tasks to perform, and here’s a father not very well fitted by nature for the management of a daughter.” He took off his hat and dried a clammy brow that showed how much the duty postponed had been disturbing him. “It’s for the best, but it’s a vulgar business even then. If it was her uncle, now, he would wake her out of her sleep to tell her the news. Poor girl, poor girl! I wish she had her mother.”
He went into the barn, where corn was piling up, the straw filling the gloomy gable-ends with rustling gold. Loud he stormed among some workers there; loud he stormed, for him a thing unusual; and they bent silent to their work and looked at one another knowingly, sensible that he was ashamed of himself. Sitting dry-eyed on the edge of her bed, Nan reflected upon her next step. At a cast of her mind round all the countryside she could think of no woman to turn to in this trouble, and only with a woman could she share it. Her pride first, and then the fear of her father’s anger, left her only certain limits in which to operate. Her pride would not let her even show curiosity in the identity of the man who was to be her doom, nor confess to another that she did not know his name. And the whole parish, if it was acquainted with her sale (as now she deemed it), must be her enemy. Against any other outrage than this she would have gone straight to her father. He that she loved and caressed, on whose knees sometimes even yet she sat, would not be deaf to any ordinary plea or protest of hers. She would need but to nestle in his arms, and loose and tie the antique queue, and perhaps steal a kiss willingly surrendered, and all would be well But this, all her instincts, all her knowledge of her father told her, was no ordinary decision of his. He had gone too far to draw back. The world knew it; he feared to face her because for once to please her he could not cancel what was done. There was no hope, she told herself, in that direction; even if there was she would not have gone there, for the sordid horror of this transaction put a gulf between them. Feverishly she turned over her lowland letters, and there she found but records of easy heart and gaiety; no sacrificing friends were offering themselves in the pages she had mourned over in her moods of evening loneliness. And again she brought her mind back to her own country, and sitting still dry-eyed, with a burning skin, upon her bed, reviewed her relatives and friends, weighing which would be most like to help her.
She almost laughed when she found she had reduced all at last to one eligible—Elasaid, her old Skye nurse, and the mother of Black Duncan, who was in what was called the last of the shealings, by the lochs of Karnes. Many a time her mother had gone to the shealing a young matron for motherly counsel, but Nan herself had never been there, though Elasaid had come to Nan to nurse her when her mother died. In the shealing, she felt sure, there was not only counsel, but concealment if occasion demanded that.
But how was she to get there, lost as it was somewhere miles beyond the corner of the Salachary hill, in the wild red moors between the two big waters?
First she thought of Young Islay—first and with a gladness at the sense of his sufficiency in such an enterprise. His was the right nature for knight-errantry in a case like hers, but then she reflected that he was away from home—her father had casually let that drop in conversation at breakfast yesterday; and even if he had been at home, said cooler thought, she would hesitate to enlist him in so sordid a cause.
Then Gilian occurred—less well adapted, she felt, for the circumstances; but she could speak more freely to him than to any other, and he was out there in the hazel-wood, no doubt, still waiting for her. Gilian would do, Gilian would have to do. If he could have seen how unimpassioned she was in coming to this conclusion he would have been grieved.
She went out at once, leisurely and with her thoughts constrained upon some unimportant matter, so that her face might not betray her tribulation when she met him.
In the low fields her uncle was scanning the hills with his hands arched above his eyes to shield them from the glare of the westering sun, groaning for the senselessness of sheep that must go roaming on altitudes when they are wanted specially in the plains. She evaded his supercilious eyes by going round the hedges, and in ten minutes she came upon Gilian, waiting patiently for her to keep her own tryst. His first words showed her the way to a speedy explanation.
“Next week,” said he, “we’ll try Strongara; the place is as full of berries as the night is full of stars. Here they’re not so ripe as on the other side.”
“Next week the berries might be as numerous as that at the very door of Maam,” said she, “and I none the better for them.”
“What’s the matter?” he cried, appalled at the omen of her face.
“My father is going abroad at once,” she answered.
“Abroad?” he repeated. He had a branch of bramble in his hand, plucked for the crimson of its leafage. He drew it through his hands and the thorns bled the palms, but he never felt the pain. She was going too! She was going away from Maam! He might never see her again! These late days of tryst and happiness in the woods and on the hills were to be at an end, and he was again to be quite alone among his sheep with no voice to think on expectantly in slow-passing forenoons, and no light to shine like a friendly eye from Maam in evening dusks!
“Well,” she said, looking curiously at him. “My father is going abroad, have you heard?”
“I have not,” he answered; and she was relieved, for in that case he had not learned the full ignominy of her story.
“Can you not say so little as ‘good luck’ to us?” she asked in her lightest manner.
“You—you are going with him, then?” said Gilian, and he delighted in the sharp torture of the thorns that bled his hands.
“No,” she answered, “it’s worse than that, for I stay. You have not heard? Then you are the only one in the parish, I am sure, so ignorant of my poor business. They’re—they’re looking for a man for me. Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?” She laughed with a bitterness that shocked him. “Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?” she went on. “I’m wondering they did not lead me on a halter round the country and take the best offer at a fair I It was throwing away good chances to give me to the first offerer, was it not, Gilian?”
“Who is it?” he asked, every nerve jarring at the story.
“Do you think I would ask?” she said sharply. “It does not matter who it is; and it is the last thing I would like to know, for then I would know who knew my price in the market.”
“Your father would never do it!”
“My father would not do but what he thought he must. He is poor, though I never thought him so poor as this; and I daresay he would like to see me settled before he goes. It is the black settling when I’m cried in the kirk before I’m courted.”
“They can never marry you against your will,” said Gilian in a dull, lifeless way, as if he had no great belief in what he laid forth.
“And that would be true,” she said, “if I had a friend in the whole countryside. I have not one except——”
He flushed and waited, and so did she expectantly, thinking he would make the fervent protest most lads would do under the same circumstances. But in the moment’s pause he could not find the words for his profound feeling.
“Except old Elasaid, the nurse on the Kames moor,” she continued.
“Oh, her!” said he lamely.
“There’s no one else I could think of.”
“Look at me,” he cried; “look at me; am I not your true friend? I will do anything in the world for you.” But he still went on torturing himself with his bramble branch, the most insensible of lovers.
She was annoyed at his want of the commonest courage or tact. “John Hielan’man! John Hielan’-man!” she said inwardly, trying a little coquetry of the downcast eyes to tempt him. For now she was desolate that she almost loved this gawky youth throbbing in sympathy with her tribulation.
“I believe you are my true friend, I believe you arc my true friend, and there is no one else,” she said, blushing now with no coquetry, and if he had not been a fool and his fate against him, he might at a hand’s movement or a word have had her in his arms. The word to say was sounding loud and strong within him; he took her (only, alas! in fancy) to his breast, but what was she the wiser?
“And I can do nothing?” he said pitifully. “Nothing!” said she; “you can do everything.” “Show me how, then,” he said eagerly. She had been gazing away from him with her eyes on Maam, that looked so sombre a home, and was certainly now so cruel a home, and she turned then, almost weeping, her breath rising and falling, audible to his ear, the sweetest of sounds.
“Will you take me away from here?” she asked in entreaty. “I must go away from here.”
“I will take you anywhere you wish,” said he.
He held out his hands in a gesture of sudden offering, and she felt a happiness as one who comes upon a familiar and kind face all unexpectedly in a strange country. Her face betrayed her gladness.
“I will take you, and who would be better pleased?” said Gilian.
She explained her intention briefly. She must leave Maam at the latest to-morrow night without being observed, and he must show her the way to Elasaid’s shealing.
“Ah! give me the right,” he said, “and I will take you to the world’s end.” He put out his hands and nigh encircled her, but shyness sent him back to a calmer distance.
“John Hielan’man!” she repeated to herself, annoyed at this tardiness, but she outwardly showed no knowledge of it.
They planned what only half in fun she called their elopement. He was to come across to Maam in the early morning.
He had ideas of his own as to how this enterprise should be conducted, but on Nan’s advice he had gone about it in the fashion of Marget Maclean’s novels, even to the ladder. It was not a rope ladder, but a common one of wood that Black Duncan was accustomed to use for ascent to his sleep in the loft.
Gilian, apprised by Nan of its exact situation, crept breathlessly into the barn, left his lantern at the door, and felt around with searching fingers. The place was all silent but for the seaman’s snores as he slept the sleep of a landsman upon his coarse pallet. Outside a cock crew; its sudden alarm brought the sweat to Gilian’s brow; he clutched with blind instinct, found what he wanted, turned and hastened from the dusty barn.
The house of Maam was jet-black among its trees, no light peeped even in Nan’s room.
Carefully he put the ladder against the wall beneath her window, and as he did so he fancied he heard a movement above. He stood with his hand on one of the rungs, dubious, hesitating. For the first time a sense of the risks of the adventure swept into that mind of his, always the monopoly of imagination and the actor. He was ashamed to find himself half-wishing she might not come. He tried to think it was all a dream, and he pinched his arm to try and waken himself. But the blank black walls of Maam confronted him; the river was crying in its reeds; it was a real adventure that must be gone on with.
He lit the lantern. Through the open door of it as he did so the flood of light revealed his face anxious and haggard, his eyes uncertain. He closed the lantern and looked around.
Through the myriad holes that pierced the tin, pin-points of fire lanced the night, streaming in all directions, throwing the front of the house at once into cold relief with a rasping, harled, lime surface. The bushes were big masses of shade; the trees, a little more remote, seemed to watch him with an irony that made him half ashamed. What an appalling night! Over him came the sentiments of the robber, the marauder, the murderer. As he held the lantern on his finger a faint wind swung it, and its lances of light danced rhythmic through the gloom. He put it under his plaid, and prepared to give the signal whistle. For the life of him he could not give it utterance; his lips seemed to have frozen, not with fear, for he was calm in that way, but with some commingling of emotions where fear was not at all. When he gave breath to his hesitating lips, it went through inaudible.
What he might have done then may only be guessed, for the opening of the window overhead brought an end to his hesitation.
“Is it you?” said Nan’s voice, just a little revealing her anxiety in its whisper. He could not see her now that his lantern was concealed, but he looked up and fancied her eyes were shining more lambent than his own lantern that smelled unpleasantly.
He wet his lips with his tongue. “The ladder is ready; it’s up against your window, don’t you see it?” he said, also whispering, but astounded at the volume of his voice.
“Tuts!” she exclaimed impatiently, “why don’t you show a light? How can I see it without a light?”
“Dare I?” he asked, astonished.
“Dare! dare! Oh dear!” she repeated. “Am I to do the daring and break my neck perhaps?”
Out flashed the lantern from beneath his plaid and he held it up to the window. Nan leant over and all his hesitation fled. He had never seen her more alluring. Her hair had become somehow unfastened, and, without untidiness, there lay a lock across her brow; all her blood was in her face, her eyes might indeed have been the flames he had fancied, for to the appeal of the lantern they flashed back from great and rolling depths of luminousness. Her lips seemed to have gathered up in sleep the wealth of a day of kissing. A screen of tartan that she had placed about her shoulders had slipped aside in her movement at the window and showed her neck, ivory pale and pulsing.
“Come along, come along!” he cried in an eager whisper, and he put up his arms, lantern and all, as if she were to jump. Something in his first look made her pause.
“Do you really want to go?” he asked, and she was drawing her screen by instinct across her form. An observer, if there had been such, might well have been amused to see an elopement so conducted. There was still no sound in the night, except that the cock crew at intervals over in the cottars. The morning was heavy with dew; the scent of bog-myrtle drugged the air.
“Do I really want?” she repeated. “Mercy! what a question. It seems to me that yesterday would have been the best time to ask it. Are you rueing your bargain?” She looked at him with great dissatisfaction as he stood at the foot of the ladder, by no means a handsome cavalier, as he carried his plaid clumsily. He was made all the more eager by her coldness.
“Come, come!” he cried; “the house will be awake before you are ready, and I cannot be keeping this lantern lighted for fear some one sees it.”
“We are safe for an hour yet, if we cared to waste the time,” she said composedly, “and if you’re sure you want it——”
“Want you, Nan,” he corrected, “That’s a little more like it,” she said to herself, and she dropped the customary bundle at his feet He picked it up gingerly, as if it were a church relic; that it was a possession of hers, apparel apparently, made him feel a slight intoxication. No swithering now; he would carry out the adventure if it led to the end of the world! He hugged the bundle under his arm, as if it were a woman, and felt a fictional glow from the touch of it. “Well?” said she impatiently, for he was no longer looking at her, no longer, indeed, conceding her so little as the light of the lantern, which he had placed on the ground, so that its light was dissipated around, while none of it reached the top of the ladder.
“Well,” she repeated sharply, for he had not answered.
He looked up with a start. “Are you not coming?” he said, with a tone to suggest that he was waiting impatiently.
She had the window wide open now; she leaned out on her arms ready to descend; the last rung of the ladder was a foot lower than the sill of the window; she looked in perplexity at her cavalier, for it was impossible to put much of grace into an emergence and a descent like this.
“I am just coming,” she said, but still she made no other move, and he held up the lantern for her to sec the better.
“Well, be careful!” he advised, and he thought how delightful it was to have the right to say so much.
“O Gilian!” she said helplessly, “you are far from gleg.”
He gazed ludicrously uncomprehending at her, and in his sense of almost conjugal right to the girl failed to realise her delicacy.
“Go round to the barn and make sure that Duncan is not moving; he’s the only one I fear,” she said. “Leave the lantern.”
He did as he was told; he put the lantern on the ground; he went round again to the barn, put his head in, and satisfied himself that his seaman was still musical aloft. Then he hurried back. He found the lantern swinging on Nan’s finger, and her composed upon the ground, to which she had made a speedy descent whenever he had disappeared.
“Oh! I wanted to help you,” said he.
“Did you?” said she, looking for a sign of the humorist, but he was as solemn as a sermon.
They might have been extremely sedate in Miss Simpson’s school in Edinburgh, but at that moment Miss Nan would have forgiven some apparent appreciation of her cleverness in getting him out of the way while she came feet first through a window. They stood for a moment in expectancy, as if something was going to happen, she still holding the lantern, trembling a little, as it might be with the cold, he with her bundle under his arm pressed affectionately.
“And—and—do we just go on?” she asked suggestively.
“The quicker the better,” said he, but he made no movement to depart, for his mind was in the house of Maam, and he felt the father’s sorrow and alarm at an empty bed, a daughter gone.
She put out an arm, flushing in the dark as she did so, as if to place it on his neck, but drew back and put the lantern fast behind her, lest her fervour had been noticed by the ironic and jealous night. He, she saw, could not notice; the thing was not in his mind.
“In the stories they just move off, then?” said she shyly. “There was the meeting, the meeting—no more, and they just went away?”
“And the sooner the better,” said he, again leading the way at last, after taking the lantern from her, and “John Hielan’man, John Hielan’man!” she cried vexatiously within.
She followed, pouting her lips in the darkness. “It’s quite different from what I expected,” she said, whispering as they passed the front door and down by the burn.
“And with me too,” he confessed. “I had it made up in my mind all otherwise. There should have been moonlight and a horse, and many other things.” “It seems to me you are not making so much as you might of what there is,” she suggested. “Are you sure it is not a trouble to carry the lantern and the bundle too?”
“Oh! no, no!” he cried softly, but eagerly, every chivalric sentiment roused lest she should deprive him of the pleasure of doing all he could for her. She sighed.
“Are you vexed you have come?” he asked, stopping and turning on her his yet wan face full of regret and of dubiety too.
“The thing is done,” she answered abruptly, and they were stepping carefully over the burn that ran about its boulders in the dark, gurgling. “Are you sure you are not sorry yourself?”
“I am not a bit sorry,” he said, “but—but——”
“Your ‘buts’ are too late, Gilian,” she went on firmly. “If you rued the enterprise now, I would go myself.” But she relaxed some of the coldness of her mood as he shifted his lantern to the other hand and put a bashful but firm and supporting hand below her arm to secure her footing in the rough ascent. This was a little more like what she had expected, she told herself, though she missed something of warmth in the action. How could she tell that the hand that held her was trembling with passion, that her shawl fringe as it was blown across his face by the breeze was something he could have kissed rapturously?
And now they were well up the hillside. The house of Maam, the garden, the plantings, the noisy river, were down in the valley, all surrendered to the night. Their lantern, swinging on the lad’s finger, threw a path of light before them, showing the short cropped grass, the rushy patches, or the gall they trod odorously, or the heather in its rare clumps. No sound came louder than the tumbling waters; their voices, as they spoke even yet guardedly as people will in enterprises the most solitary when their consciences are unresting, seemed strange and unfamiliar to each other.
Soon they were on the summit of the hill range and below them lay the two glens, and the first breath of the morning came behind from Strone, where dawn threw a wan grey flag across the world. They plunged into the caldine trees of Strongara, sped fast across Aray at Three Bridges, and the dawn was on Balantyre, where the farm-touns high and low lay like thatched forts, grey, cold, unwelcoming in the morning, with here and there a stream of peat reek from the greasach of the night’s fires. They became, as it might be, children again as they hastened through the country. He lost all his diffident dubiety and was anew the bold adventurer, treading loverlike upon the very stars. A passion of affection was on him; he would take her unresisting hand and lead her as though she were his, really, and before them was their moated castle. And Nan forgot herself in the fresh zest of the dewy morning that now was setting the birds to their singing in the dens that hang above the banks of the Balantyre burn.
A rosy flush came to the hills where on the upper edges spread the antlers of deer sniffing the wind, rejoicing in the magnificence of the fine highland country in its autumn time. Nan hummed and broke into a strain of the verse of Donacha Ban that chants the praise of day and deer-hunting; she charmed her comrade; he felt the passion of the possessor and stopped and turned upon her and made to kiss. She laughed temptingly, drew back, warding her lips with the screen that now she had arranged in a new and pleasing fashion on her shoulders so that she looked some Gaelic huntress of the wilds. “So, so, Gilian!” said she, “you have found that there might be more in the books than simply to take the girl away with not so much as ‘Have you a mouth?’ when she stepped out at the window.”
“What a fool I was!” he cried. “I was thinking of it all the time, but did not dare.” But awakened to the actuality of what he now had dared, he was ashamed to go further.
Nan laughed. He looked odd indeed standing facing her with the lantern burning yet in his hand though the day was almost wide-awake. He was a poet bearing his own light about the world extravagantly while the sun was shining for common mortals.
“Out with your light!” said she. And then she added: “If you dared not do it in the dark when you met me first, you cannot do it now,” and he was dashed exceedingly. He puffed out the flame.
“That’s aye me!” he said as they resumed their journey up the second hill of their morning escapade. “I am too often a day behind the fair. I was—I was—kissing you a score of times in fancy and all the time you were willing in the actual fact.”
“Was I indeed?” she retorted shortly, with a movement to bring her shawl more closely round her. “Do not be so flattering. I like you little over-blate, Gilian, but I like you less over-bold. If you could see yourself you would know which suits you best.”
He had no answer. He must face his brae with lacerated feelings, now a step removed from the girl who walked with him. But only for a little was he depressed. She saw she had vexed him, and soon she was humming again, and again they were children of illusion and content.
They reached the pass that led to the lochs, and now Gilian had to confess himself in a strange country, but he did not reveal the fact to his companion. They talked of their coming sojourn in these lovely wilds that her mother had known and loved. The sun would shine constantly for them; the lakes—the little and numerous lakes—would be fringed with dreams and delight, starshine would find them innocent among the heather, remitted to the days of old when they were happy and careless, when no trouble marred their sky. Only now and then, as they sped on their way, Gilian wished fervently he knew more of where he was going, and was certain that life in the wilds would be so pleasant and easy as they pictured it.
When they came at last upon the slope of Cruach-an-Lochain that revealed the great valley of the lakes, they stood raptured by the spectacle before them. Far off, the great hollow among the hills was hazy and mysterious, but spread before them was the moor, tangled with grass and heather, all vacant in the morning dream. A tremor of wind was in the grass about their feet, a little mist tarried about the warm side of Ben Bhreac, caught among the juniper bushes the hunters had put there for shelter. All over brooded calm, a land forgetful of its stormy elements, of the dripping nights, the hail-beat, shrewd ost and hurricane. They could not, the pair of them, flying from a world of anxieties, but stop and look at the spectacle, when they came on the face of the Cruach. For a little they did not speak.
“My God!” said Gilian at last, a lump somewhere at his throat. “It seems as if this place had been waiting on us tenantless since the start of time. Where have we been to be so long and so far away from it? Mo chridhe, mo chridhe!”
“Now that I see it,” said she doubtfully, “it seems melancholy enough. I wish——” She hung upon her sentence, with a rueful gaze out of her eyes at the scene.
“Melancholy!” he repeated. “Of course, of course,” he quickly came to her reflection, “what could it be but melancholy with all the past unrecoverable behind it? It must be brooding for its people gone. Empty, empty, but I see all the old peoples roaming in bands over it, the sun smiting them, the rain drenching, I cannot but be thinking of shealing huts that spotted the levels, of bairns crying about the doors, of nights of ceilidh round peat fires dead and cold now, but yet with the smoke of them hanging somewhere round the universe.”
He stopped, and turned away from her, concealing his perturbation.
She shivered at the thought and partly from weariness and hunger, with a little sucking in of the breath his ear caught, and he turned, a different man.
“You are tired; will we rest before we go further?” “Is it far?” she asked.
He reddened. He cast a fast glance round the country as if to look for some familiar landmark, but all was strange to him.
“I do not know,” he confessed humbly. “I was never on the moor before.”
“Mercy!” she said. “I thought there was never a lad from town but had fished here.”
“But I was different,” he replied. “The woods and waters about the door were enough for me. But we’ll get to Elasaid’s very soon, I’m sure, and find fire, food, and rest.”
She bit her nether lip in annoyance at a courtier so ill-prepared for their adventure. She turned to look back to the familiar country they were leaving behind them, and for a moment wished she had never come.
“I wish we could have them now,” she said at last; the words drawn from her by her weariness.
“And so we can,” said he eagerly, with a delight at a reflection that sprung into his mind like a revelation. “We can go down to the water there and build a fire, and rest and eat. It will be like what I fancied, a real adventure of hunters, and I will be the valet, and you will be the—the queen.”
So they went down to the lake side. Heathery braes rose about it, reflected in its dark water; an islet overgrown with scrub lay in the middle of it, the very haunt of possible romance; Gilian straight inhabited the same with memories and exploits. Nan sat her down on the springy heather that swept its scents about her, she leaned a tired shoulder on it, and the bells of the ling blushed as they swayed against her cheek. Gilian put down his lantern, a ludicrous companion in broad sunshine, and was dashed by the sudden recollection that though he had talked of something to eat, he had really no means of providing it!
The girl observed his perturbation and shrewdly guessed the reason.
“Well?” she said maliciously, without a smile; “and where are we to get the food you so nicely spoke of?”
He stood stupefied, and so dolorous a spectacle that she could not but laugh.
“You have got none at all, but imagined our feast—as usual,” she said, unfolding her bundle. “It was well I did not depend on your forethought, Gilian,” and she took a flask of milk and some bread from within. He was as much vexed at the spoiling of his illusion about the contents of the bundle as at the discovery of his thoughtlessness. What he had been so fervently caressing against his side had been no more romantic than bread and cheese and some more substantial augmentation for the poor table of the old woman they were going to meet!
The side of the loch bristled with dry heather roots; he plucked them and placed them on the side of a boulder beside Nan, and set fire to them, and soon a cheerful blaze competed with the tardy morning chill. They sat beside it singularly uplifted by this domestic hearth among the wilds; he felt himself a sort of householder, and to share as he did the fare of the girl was a huge delight. Her single cup passed between them; at first he was shy to touch at all the object her lips had kissed; he showed the feeling in his face, and she laughed again.
He joined in the merriment, quite comprehending. Next time the cup came his way he boldly turned it about so that where last she had sipped came to his lips, and there he lingered—just a shade too long for the look of the thing. What at first she but blushed and smiled at, she frowned upon at last with a sparkle of the eye her Uncle Jamie used to call in the Gaelic the torch of temper. Gilian missed it; that touch of his lip upon her cup had recalled the warmth of her hand upon the flowers he had gathered when she had let them fall in the Duke’s garden, but this was closer and more stirring. As he knelt on the heather he felt himself a worshipper of ancient days, and her the goddess of long-lost times. An uplifting was in his eyes; it would have been great and beautiful to any one that could have understood, but her it only vexed. When he handed back the cup she tossed it from her. It broke—sad omen!—on their first hearthstone. “That’ll do,” said she shortly, “it’s time we were going.” And she gathered hastily the remains of their breakfast and made for a departure.
He surveyed her dubiously, wondering why she so abruptly checked the advances he could swear she had challenged.
“I am sorry I vexed you,” he stammered. She brought down her brows questioningly. There was something pleasant and tempting though queenlike and severe in her straightened figure standing over him curved and strong and full, her screen fallen to her waist, a strand of her hair blown about her cheek by a saucy wind.
“Vexed?” she queried, and then smiled indifferent. “What would I be vexed at? We are finished, are we not? Must we be burdening ourselves unnecessarily going on a road you neither know the length or nature of?”
And without a word more they proceeded towards the shealing that was to be the end of their adventure.
Old Elasaid met them at the door. She was a woman with eyes profound and piercing under hanging brows, a woman grey even to the colour of her cheeks and the checks of the gown that hung loosely on her gaunt figure. It was with no shealing welcome, no kind memory of the old nurse even, she met them, but stood under her lintel looking as it were through them to the airt of the country whence they had come. She passed the time of day as if they had been strangers, puckering her mouth with a sort of unexpressed disapproval. They stood before her very much put out at a reception so different from what they had looked for, and Gilian knew that there must be something decisive to say but could not find it in his head.
“Well,” said the old woman at last, “this’ll be the good man, I’m thinking?” But still she had that in her tone, a sour dissatisfaction that showed she had her doubts.
Gilian was not unhappy at the assumption, but felt warm, and Nan reddened.
“Not at all,” she answered with some difficulty. “It’s just a friend who convoyed me up.”
“Well I kent it,” said the old woman, who spoke English to show she was displeased, and there was in her voice a tone of satisfaction with her own shrewdness. “When I saw you coming up the way there I thought there was something very unlike the thing about this person with you. The other one would have been a little closer on your elbow, and a lantern’s a very queer contrivance to be stravaiging with on a summer day.”
All her contempt seemed to be for Gilian, and he felt mightily uncomfortable.
“Tell me this,” she went on, suddenly taking Nan by the arm and bending a most condemnatory face on her; “tell mc this: did you run away from the other one?”
“Mercy on me!” cried the girl. “Is the story up here already?”
“Oh, we’re not so far back,” said the dame, who did not add that her son the seaman had told her the news on his last weekly visit.
“Then I’ll need the less excuse for being here,” said Nan, trying to find in the hard and unapproving visage any trace of the woman who in happier days used to be so kind a nurse.
“No excuse at all!” said old Elasaid. “If it’s your father’s wish you’re flying from, you need not come here.” She stepped within the house, pulled out the wattle door and between it and the fir post stuck a disapproving face.
“Go away! go away!” she cried harshly, “I have no room for a baggage of that kind.” Then she shut the door in their faces; they could hear the bar run to in the staples.
For a minute or two they stood aghast and silent, and Nan was plainly close on tears. But the humour of the thing struck her quick enough—sooner than Gilian saw it—and she broke into laughter, subdued so that it might not reach the woman righteous within, and her ear maybe at the door chink. It was not perhaps of the heartiest merriment, but it inspired her companion with respect for her spirit in a moment so trying. She was pale, partly with weariness, partly with distress at this unlooked-for reception; but her lips, red and luscious, smiled for his encouragement.
“Must we go back?” he asked, irresolute, as they made some slow steps away from the door.
“Back!” said Nan, her eyes flashing. “Am I mad? Are you speaking for yourself? If it must be back for you let me not be keeping you. After all you bargained for no more than to take me to old Elasaid’s, and now that I’m here and there’s none of the Elasaid I expected to meet me, I’ll make the rest of my way somewhere myself.” But her gaze upon that rolling and bleak moorland was far less confident than her words.
Gilian made no reply. He only looked at her reproaching for her bitterness, and humbly took up step by her side as she walked quickly away from the scene of the cold reception.
They had gone some distance when Elasaid opened her door again and came out to look after them. She saw a most touching helplessness in the manner of their uncertain walk across the heather, with no fixed mind as to which direction was the best, stopping and debating, moving now a little to the east, now a little to the west, but always further into the region of the lochs. She began to blame herself for her hastiness. She had expected that, face to face with her disapproval, the foolish young people would have gone back the road they came; but here they were going further than ever away from the father in whose interest she had loyally refused her hospitality. She cried loudly after them with a short-breathed Gaelic halloo, too much like an animal’s cry to attract their attention. Nan did not hear it at all; Gilian but dreamed it, as it were, and though he took it for the call of a moor-fowl, found it in his ready fancy alarmingly like the summons of an irate father. But now he dared betray no hesitancy; he did not even turn to look behind him.
Elasaid cried again, but still in vain. She concluded they were deliberately deaf to her, and “Let them go!” she said crabbedly, flaunting an eloquent arm to the winds, comforting herself with the thought that there was no other house in all that dreary country to give them the shelter she had denied.
The sun by this time was pouring into the moor from a sky without a speck of cloud. Compared with the brown and purple of the moor and the dull colour of Ben Bhreac—the mount away to the southeast—the heavens were uncommonly blue, paling gradual to their dip. In another hour than this distressed and perplexed one, our wanderers would have felt some jocund influence in a forenoon so benign and handsome.
And now, too, the country began to show more of its true character. Its little lochs—a great chain of them—dashed upon their vision in patches of blue or grey or yellow. The valley was speckled with the tarns. Gilian forgot the hazards of the enterprise and the discomforts to be faced; he had no time to think of what was to be done next for them in their flight, so full was he with the romance of those multitudinous lakelets lost in the empty and sunny wilds, some with isle, all with shelving heathery braes beside them, or golden bights where the little wave lapped. He turned to his companion with an ecstasy.
“Did you ask me if I rued it?” he said. “Give me no better than to stay here for ever—with you to share it.”
She met his ardour with coolness. “I wish you had been so certain of that a little ago,” she said; “you seem very much on the swither. Have you thought of what’s to be done next? It is all very well to be putting our backs to the angry Elasaid behind us there, but all the time I’m wondering what’s to be the outcome.”
He confessed himself at a loss. She eyed him without satisfaction. This young gentleman, who seemed so enchanting in circumstances where no readiness of purpose was needed, looked very inadequate in the actual stress of things, in the broad daylight, his flat bonnet far back on his brow, his face wan, his plaid awry. And there was something in his carriage of the ridiculous lantern that made her annoyed at herself for some reason.
She stopped, and they hung hesitating, with the lapwings crying about them, and no other sound in the air.
“I’m going back,” said she, as if she meant it. His face fell. This time there was no mistaking his distress.
“No, no, you cannot, Nan,” he said. “We will get out of it somehow; you cannot return, and what of me? It would be ill to explain.”
“We’re neither whaup nor deer,” said she, shrugging her shoulders, “to live here wild the rest of our days.”
Gilian looked about him rather helplessly, and he started at the sight of a gable wall, with what in a shealing might pass for a window in it, and he knew it for a relic of the old days, when the moor in its levels here would be spotted with happy summer homes, when the people of Lochow came from the shores below and gave their cattle the juicy grazing of these untamed pastures, themselves living the ancient life, with singing and spinning in the open, gathering at nights for song or dance and tale in the fine weather.
“There’s something of shelter at least,” he said, pointing to it. She looked dubiously at the dry-stone walls almost tumbling, the cabars of what had been a byre fallen over half the interior, and at the rank nettles—head-high almost—about the rotten door.
“Is this home-coming?” she said whimsically, forcing a smile, but she was glad to see it. By this time she was master of her companion’s mind, and could guess that it would be to him a palace for them both. But they went up towards the abandoned hut, glad enough, both of them, to see an edifice, even in decay, showing man had once been there, where now the world about seemed given over to vacant sunshine or the wild winds of heaven, the rains, and doleful birds. It stood between two lochs that were separated from each other by but a hundred yards of heather and rush, its back-end to one of the lochs, the door to Ben Bhreac.
Gilian went first and trod down the nettles, making a path that she might the more comfortably reach this sanctuary so melancholy. She gathered up her gown close round her, dreading the touch of these kind plants that hide the shame of fallen lintels and the sorrow of cold hearths, and timidly went to the door, her shawl fallen from one of her shoulders and dragging at the other. She put her head within, and as she did so, the lad caught the shawl, unseen by her, and kissed the fringe, wishing he could do so to her lips.
A cold damp air was in the dwelling, that had no light but from the half open door and the vent in the middle of the roof.
She drew back shuddering in spite of herself, though her whole desire was to seem content with any refuge now that she had brought him so far on what looked like a gowk’s errand.
He ventured an assuring arm around her waist and they went slowly in together, and stood silent in the middle of the floor where the long-dead fire had been, saying nothing at all till their eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom.
What she felt beyond timidity she betrayed not, but Gilian peopled the house at an instant with all its bygone tenants, seeing the peats ruddy on the stones, the smoke curling up among the shining cabars, hearing ghosts gossiping in muffled Gaelic round the fire.
Yet soon they found even in this relic of old long-gone people the air of domesticity; it was like a shelter even though so poor a one; it was some sort of an end to her quest for a refuge, though the more she looked at its dim interior the more content she was with the outside of it. Where doubtless many children had played, on the knowe below a single shrub of fir-wood beside the loch, Nan spread out the remains of her breakfast again and they prepared to make a meal. Gilian gathered the dry heather tufts, happy in his usefulness, thinking her quite content too, while all the time she was puzzling as to what was next to be done. Never seemed a bleak piece of country so lovely to him as now. As he rose from bending over the heather and looked around, seeing the moor in its many colours stretch in swelling waves far into the distance, the lochans winking to the day and over all a kind soft sky, he was thrilling with his delight.
She summoned him in a little to eat. He looked at her scanty provender, and there was as much of truth as self-sacrifice in his words as he said: “I do not care for eating; I am just satisfied with seeing you there and the world so fine.” And still exulting in that rare solitude of two he went farther off by Little Fox Loch and sought for white heather, symbol of luck and love, as rare to find among the red as true love is among illusion. Searching the braes he could hear, after a little, Nan sing at the shealing hut. A faint breeze brought the strain to him faintly so that it might be the melody of fairydom heard at eves on grassy hillocks by the gifted ear, the melody of the gentle other world, had he not known that it had the words of “The Rover.” Nan was singing it to keep up her heart, far from cheerful, tortured indeed with doubt and fear, and yet the listener found in the notes content and hope. When he came back with his spray of white heather he was so uplifted with the song that he ran up to her for once with no restraint and made to fasten it at her neck. She was surprised at his new freedom but noway displeased. A little less self-consciousness as he fumbled at the riband on her neck would have satisfied her more, but even that disappeared when he felt her breath upon his hair and an unconscious touch of her hand on his arm as he fastened the flower. She let her eyes drop before his bold rapture, he could have kissed her there and then and welcome. But he only went halfway. When the heather was fastened, he took her hand and lifted it to his lips, remembering some inadequate tale in the books of Margot Maclean.
“John Hielan’man! John Hielan’man!” she said within herself, and suddenly she tore the white spray from her bosom and threw it passionately at her feet, while tears of vexation ran to her eyes.
“Forgive me, forgive me, I have vexed you again,” said Gilian, contrite. “I should not be so bold.”
She could not but smile through her tears.
“If you will take my heather again and say nothing of it, I will never take the liberty again,” he went on, eager to make up for his error.
“Then I will not take it,” she answered.
“It was stupid of me,” said he.
“It is,” she corrected meaningly.
“I never had any acquaintance with—with—girls,” he added, trying to find some excuse for himself.
“That is plain enough,” she agreed cordially, and she followed it with a sigh.
For a minute they stood thus irresolute and then the lad bent and lifted the ill-used heather. He held it in his hand for a moment tenderly as if it was a thing that lived, and sighed over it, and then, fearing that, too, might seem absurd to her and vexatious, he made an effort and twirled it between a finger and thumb by its stem like any casual wild-flower culled without reflection.
“What are you going to do with it now?” she asked him, affecting indifference, but eyeing it with interest; and he made no answer, for how could he tell her he meant to keep it always for remembrance? “Give it to me,” she said suddenly, and took it from his fingers. She ran into the house and placed it in the only fragment of earthenware left by the departed tenants. “It will do very well there,” she said.
“But I meant it for you,” said Gilian ruefully, “It is a sign of good luck.”
“It is a sign of more than that, I’ve heard many a time,” she replied, and he became very red indeed, for he knew that as well as she, though he had not said it. “I’ll take it for the luck,” she went on.
“And for mine too,” said Gilian.
“That’s not so blate, John Hielan’man!” said she again to herself. “And for yours too,” she conceded, smiling. “When you find that I have taken it away from there you will know it is for your luck too.”
“And it will be at your breast then?” he cried eagerly.
She laughed and blushed and laughed again, most sweetly and most merrily. “It will be at—at—at my heart,” she said.
“Ah,” said he, in an instinct of fear that quelled his rapture; “ah, if they take you from me!”
“When I take your heather,” said she, “it will be for ever at my heart.”
Oh! then that savage moorland was Paradise for the dreamer, and he was a coquette’s slave, fettered by a compliment. The afternoon passed, for him at least, in a delirium of joy; she, though she never revealed it, was never at a moment’s rest from her plans of escape from her folly. Late in the afternoon she came to a lame conclusion.
“You will go down to the town to-night,” she said, “and——”
“And you!” he cried, alarmed at the notion of severance.
“I’ll stay here, of course. You’ll tell Miss Mary that we—that I am here, and she will tell you what we—what I, must do.”
“But—but—” he stammered, dubious of the plan.
“Of course I can go home again to Maam now,” she broke in coldly, and she was vexed for the alarm and grief he showed at the alternative.
“I will go; I will go at once,” he cried, but first he went far down on Blaraghour for wood for a fire to cheer her loneliness, and the dusk was down on them before he left her.
She gave him her hand at the door, a hand for once with helpless dependence in the clinging and the confidence of it, and he held it long without dissent from her. Never before had she seemed so beautiful or so affable, so necessary to his life. Her trials had paled the colour of her face and her eyes had a hint of tears. Over his shoulder she would now and then cast a glance of apprehension at the falling night and check a shudder of her frame.
“Good-night!” he said.
“Good-night!” she answered, and yet she did not loose her prisoned hand.
He sighed, and brought, in spite of her, an echo from her heart.
Then he drew her suddenly to his arms and scorched her face with lips of fire.
Nan released herself and fled within. The door closed; she dared not make her trial the more intense by seeing the night swallow up her only living link with the human world beyond the vague selvedge of the moor.
And Gilian, till the dawn came over Cruach-an-Lochain, walked by the side of Little Fox Loch, within view of the hut that held his heart.