A Princess of Thule

It was, in truth, one of those circular forts, the date of which has given rise to endless conjecture and discussion. Perched up on a hill, it overlooked a number of deep and narrow valleys that ran landward, while the other side of the hill sloped down to the sea-shore. It was a striking object, this tumbling mass of dark stones standing high over the green hollows and over the light plain of the sea. Was there not here material for another sketch for Sheila? While Lavender had gone away over the heights and hollows to choose his point of view a rough and ready luncheon had been spread out in the wagonette, and when he returned, perspiring and considerably blown, he found old Mackenzie measuring out equal portions of peat-water and whisky, Duncan flicking the enormous “clegs” from off the horses’ necks, Ingram trying to persuade Sheila to have some sherry out of a flask he carried, and everybody in very good spirits over such an exciting event as a roadside luncheon on a summer forenoon.

The King of Borva had by this time become excellent friends with the young stranger who had ventured into his dominions. When the old gentleman had sufficiently impressed on everybody that he had observed all necessary precautions in studying the character and inquiring into the antecedents of Lavender, he could not help confessing to a sense of lightness and vivacity that the young man seemed to bring with him and shed around him. Nor was this matter of the sketches the only thing that had particularly recommended Lavender to the old man. Mackenzie had a most distinct dislike to Gaelic songs. He could not bear the monotonous melancholy of them. When Sheila, sitting by herself, would sing these strange old ballads of an evening, he would suddenly enter the room, probably find her eyes filled with tears, and then he would in his inmost heart devote the whole of Gaelic minstrelsy and all its authors to the infernal gods. Why should people be forever maddening themselves with the stories of other folks’ misfortunes? It was bad enough for those poor people, but they had borne their sorrows and died, and were at peace. Surely it was better that we should have songs about ourselves – drinking or fighting, if you like – to keep up the spirits, to lighten the serious cares of life, and drown for a while the responsibility of looking after a whole population of poor, half-ignorant, unphilosophical creatures.

“Look now,” he would say, speaking of his own tongue, “look at this teffle of a language! It has no present tense to its verbs; the people they are always looking forward to a melancholy future or looking back to a melancholy past. In the name of Kott, hef we not got ourselves to live? This day we live in is better than any day that wass before or iss to come, bekass it is here we are alive. And I will hef no more of these songs about crying, and crying, and crying!”

Now Sheila and Lavender, in their musical mutual confidences, had at an early period discovered that each of them knew something of the older English duets, and forthwith they tried a few of them, to Mackenzie’s extreme delight. Here, at last, was a sort of music he could understand – none of your moanings of widows and cries of luckless girls to the sea, but good commonsense songs, in which the lads kissed the lasses with a will, and had a good drink afterward and a dance on the green on their homeward way. There was fun in those happy May-fields, and good health and briskness in the ale-house choruses, and throughout them all a prevailing cheerfulness and contentment with the conditions of life certain to recommend itself to the contemplative mind.

Mackenzie never grew tired of hearing those simple ditties. He grew confidential with the young man, and told him that those fine, commonsense songs recalled pleasant scenes to him. He, himself, knew something of English village life. When he had been up to see the great Exhibition, he had gone to visit a friend living in Brighton, and he had surveyed the country with an observant eye. He had remarked several village-greens, with the May-poles standing here and there in front of the cottages, emblazoned with beautiful banners. He had, it is true, fancied that the May-pole should be in the centre of the green; but the manner in which the waves of population swept here and there, swallowing up open spaces and so forth, would account to a philosophical person for the fact that the May-poles were now close to the village shops.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” hummed the King of Borva to himself as he sent the two little horses along the coast road on this warm Summer day. He had heard the song for the first time on the previous evening. He had no voice to speak of; he had missed the air, and these were all the words he remembered; but it was a notable compliment, all the same, to the young man who had brought these pleasant tunes to the island.

And so they drove on through the keen salt air, with the sea shining beside them and the sky shining over them; and in the afternoon they arrived at the small, remote and solitary inn of Barvas, placed near the confluence of several rivers that flow through Loch Barvas (or Barabbas) to the sea. Here they proposed to stop the night, so that Lavender, when his room had been assigned to him, begged to be left alone for an hour or two, that he might throw a little color into his sketch of Callernish. What was there to see at Barvas? Why, nothing but the channels of the brown streams, some pasture land and a few huts, then the unfrequented lake, and beyond that, some ridges of white sand standing over the shingly beach of the sea. He would join them at dinner. Mackenzie protested in a mild way; he really wanted to see how the island was to be illustrated by the stranger. There was a greater protest, mingled with compassion and regret, in Sheila’s eyes; but the young man was firm. So they let him have his way, and gave him full possession of the common sitting-room, while they set off to visit the school and the Free Church manse and what not in the neighborhood.

Mackenzie had ordered dinner at eight, to show that he was familiar with the ways of civilized life; and when they returned at that hour, Lavender had two sketches finished.

“Yes, they are very good,” said Ingram, who was seldom enthusiastic about his friend’s work.

But old Mackenzie was so vastly pleased with the picture, which represented his native place in the brightest of sunshine and colors, that he forgot to assume a critical air. He said nothing against the rainy and desolate version of the scene that had been given to Sheila – it was good enough to please the child. But here was something brilliant, effective, cheerful; and he alarmed Lavender not a little by proposing to get one of the natives to carry this treasure, then and there, back to Borvapost. Both sketches were ultimately returned to his book, and then Sheila helped him to remove his artistic apparatus from the table on which their plain and homely meal was to be placed. As she was about to follow her father and Ingram, who had left the room, she paused for a moment, and said to Lavender, with a look of frank gratitude in her eyes: “It is very good of you to have pleased my papa so much. I know when he is pleased, though he does not speak of it; and it is not often he will be so much pleased.”

“And you, Sheila?” said the young man, unconscious of the familiarity he was using, and only remembering that she had scarcely thanked him for the other sketch.

“Well, there is nothing that will please me so much as to see him pleased,” she said, with a smile.

He was about to open the door for her, but he kept his hand on the handle, and said, earnestly enough: “But that is such a small matter – an hour’s work. If you only knew how gladly I would live all my life here if only I could do you some greater service – ”

She looked a little surprised, and then for one brief second reflected. English was not wholly familiar to her; perhaps she had failed to catch what he really meant. But at all events she said, gravely and simply: “You would soon tire of living here; it is not always a holiday.” And then, without lifting her eyes to his face, she turned to the door, and he opened it for her, and she was gone.

It was about ten o’clock when they went outside for their evening stroll, and all the world had grown enchanted since they had seen it in the colors of the sunset. There was no night, but a strange clearness over the sky and the earth, and down in the South the moon was rising over the Barvas hills. In the dark-green meadows the cattle were still grazing. Voices of children could be heard in the far distance, with the rumbling of a cart coming through the silence, and the murmur of the streams flowing down to the loch. The loch itself lay like a line of dusky yellow in a darkened hollow near the sea, having caught on its surface the pale glow of the Northern heavens, where the sun had gone down hours before. The air was warm, and yet fresh with the odors of the Atlantic, and there was a scent of Dutch clover coming across from the sandy pastures nearer the coast. The huts of the small hamlet could but faintly be made out beyond the dark and low-lying pastures, but a long, pale line of blue smoke lay in the motionless air, and the voices of the children told of open doors. Night after night this same picture, with slight variations of position, had been placed before the stranger who had come to view these solitudes, and night after night it seemed to him to grow more beautiful. He could put down on paper the outlines of an every-day landscape, and give them a dash of brilliant color to look well on a wall; but how to carry away, except in the memory, any impression of the strange, lambent darkness, the tender hues, the loneliness and the pathos of those Northern twilights?

They walked down by the side of one of the streams towards the sea. But Sheila was not his companion on this occasion. Her father laid hold of him, and was expounding to him the rights of capitalists and various other matters.

But by and by Lavender drew his companion on to talk of Sheila’s mother; and here, at least, Mackenzie was neither tedious nor ridiculous nor unnecessarily garrulous. It was with a strange interest the young man heard the elderly man talk of his courtship, his marriage, the character of his wife, and her goodness and beauty. Was it not like looking at a former Sheila? and would not this Sheila now walking before him go through the same tender experiences, and be admired and loved and petted by everybody as this other girl had been, who brought with her the charm of winning ways, and a gentle nature, into these rude wilds? It was the first time he had heard Mackenzie speak of his wife, and it turned out to be the last; but from that moment the older man had something of dignity in the eyes of this younger man, who had merely judged him by his little foibles and eccentricities, and would have been ready to dismiss him contemptuously as a buffoon. There was something, then, behind that powerful face, with its deep cut lines, its heavy eyebrows, and piercing and sometimes sad eyes, besides a mere liking for tricks of childish diplomacy? Lavender began to have some respect for Sheila’s father, and made a resolution to guard against the impertinence of humoring him too ostentatiously.

Was it not hard, though, that Ingram, who was so cold and unimpressionable, who smiled at the notion of marrying, and who was probably enjoying his pipe quite as much as Sheila’s familiar talk, should have the girl all to himself on this witching night? They reached the shores of the Atlantic. There was not a breath of wind coming in from that sea, but the air seemed even sweeter and cooler as they sat down on the great bank of shingle. Here and there birds were calling, and Sheila could distinguish each one of them. As the moon rose a faint golden light began to tremble here and there on the waves, as if some subterranean caverns were lit up and sending up to the surface faint and fitful rays of their splendor. Farther along the coast the tall banks of white sand grew white in the twilight, and the outlines of the dark pasture-land behind grew more distinct.

But when they rose to go back to Barvas the moonlight had grown full and clear, and the long and narrow loch had a pathway of gold across, stretching from the reeds and sedges of the one side to the reeds and sedges of the other. And now Ingram had gone on to join Mackenzie, and Sheila walked behind with Lavender, and her face was pale and beautiful in the moonlight.

“I shall be very sorry when I have to leave Lewis,” he said, as they walked along the path leading through the sand and the clover; and there could be no doubt that he felt the regret expressed in the words.

“But it is no use to speak of leaving us yet,” said Sheila, cheerfully; “it is a long time before you will go away from the Lewis.”

“And I fancy I shall always think of the island just as it is now – with the moonlight over there, and a loch near, and you walking through the stillness. We have had so many evening walks like this.”

“You will make us very vain of our island,” said the girl with a smile, “if you will speak like that always to us. Is there no moonlight in England? I have pictures of English scenery that will be far more beautiful than any we have here; and if there is the moon here, it will be there too. Think of the pictures of the river Thames that my papa showed you last night – ”

“Oh, but there is nothing like this in the South,” said the young man impetuously. “I do not believe there is in the world anything so beautiful as this. Sheila, what would you say if I resolved to come and live here always?”

“I should like that very much – more than you would like it, perhaps,” she said, with a bright laugh.

“That would please you better than for you to go always and live in England, would it not?”

“But that is impossible,” she said. “My papa would never think of living in England.”

For some time after he was silent. The two figures in front of them walked steadily on, an occasional roar of laughter from the deep chest of Mackenzie startling the night air, and telling of Ingram’s being in a communicative mood. At last Lavender said: “It seems to me a great pity that you should live in this remote place, and have so little amusement, and see so few people of tastes and education like your own. Your papa is so much occupied – he is so much older than you, too – that you must be left to yourself so much; whereas if you had a companion of your own age, who could have the right to talk frankly to you, and go about with you and take care of you.”

By this time they had reached the little wooden bridge crossing the stream, and Mackenzie and Ingram had got to the inn, where they stood in front of the door in the moonlight. Before ascending the steps of the bridge, Lavender, without pausing in his speech, took Sheila’s hand and said suddenly: “Now, don’t let me alarm you, Sheila, but suppose at some distant day – as far away as you please – I came and asked you to let me be your companion then and always, wouldn’t you try?”

She looked up with a startled glance of fear in her eyes, and withdrew her hand from him.

“No, don’t be frightened,” he said, quite gently. “I don’t ask you for any promise. Sheila, you must know I love you – you must have seen it. Will you not let me come to you at some future time – a long way off – that you may tell me then? Won’t you try to do that?”

There was more in the tone of his voice than in his words. The girl stood irresolute for a second or two, regarding him with a strange, wistful, earnest look; and then a great gentleness came into her eyes, and she put out her hand to him and said in a low voice, “perhaps.”

But there was something so grave and simple about her manner at this moment that he dared not somehow receive it as a lover receives the first admission of love from the lips of a maiden. There had been something of a strange inquiry in her face as she regarded him for a second or two; and now that her eyes were bent on the ground, it seemed to him that she was trying to realize the full effect of the concession she had made. He would not let her think. He took her hand and raised it respectfully to his lips, and then he led her forward to the bridge. Not a word was spoken between them while they crossed the shining space of moonlight to the shadow of the house; and as they went in-doors he caught but one glimpse of her eyes, and they were friendly and kind toward him, but evidently troubled. He saw no more that night.

So he had asked Sheila to be his wife, and she had given him some timid encouragement as to the future. Many a time within these last few days had he sketched out an imaginative picture of the scene. He was familiar with the passionate rapture of lovers on the stage, in books, and in pictures; and he had described himself (to himself) as intoxicated with joy, anxious to let the whole world know of his good fortune, and above all to confide the tidings of his happiness to his constant friend and companion. But now, as he sat in one corner of the room, he almost feared to be spoken to by the two men who sat at the table with steaming glasses before them. He dared not tell Ingram: he had no wish to tell him, even if he had got him alone. And as he sat there and recalled the incident that had just occurred by the side of the little bridge, he could not wholly understand its meaning. There had been none of the eagerness, the coyness, the tumult of joy he had expected; all he could remember clearly was the long look that the large, earnest, troubled eyes had fixed upon him, while the girl’s face, grown pale in the moonlight, seemed somehow ghost-like and strange.