BASIL'S PLOT AND "MRS. BAL"
I
Will the time come, I wonder, when I can calmly "work up" these things into a plot? If so, I foresee that I shall have to toss a coin to decide on the casting of my own part in the story. Heads, I am hero; tails, I am villain. But it has always been a theory of mine that ninety-nine out of a hundred novels are unjust toward some of their principal characters. Each (alleged) villain ought to have his motives and actions explained from his own point of view, not according to that of the (also alleged) hero and heroine whom he possibly tries (with success or failure) to separate. If this were done in books, villains qua villains would practically cease to exist; for it seems to me, in my experience of life as a man and a writer, that no normal, healthy villain is a villain in his own eyes. To understand all is to pardon all; and in analyzing his motives in order to justify himself to himself, he sees from every point of vantage, he knows how necessary certain actions are which appear evil to the limited view of the hero and heroine. They see him always obliquely, in profile; therefore they are prejudiced. And what is doubly unfair to the poor villain, the author of the book sympathizes with the others from first to last; whereas, if the villain were allowed to explain himself in his own way, not the author's, he would stand in the centre of the picture. Not being prejudiced against himself, he would have a chance of appealing to the readers' sense of justice.
Unfortunately for me, I have a way of seeing two sides of a question at once, even when my own interests and those of another are violently opposed. This is a kind of moral colour-blindness; for to be colour-blind means merely that your eyes give you an impression of red and green at the same tune, so that you can with difficulty tell which is which. Both kinds of colour-blindness, moral and physical, handicap you for success in life. On the whole, I think the moral sort is the more inconvenient of the two. If you saw nobody's motives but your own, you would be able honestly to detest your enemy and work against him. You would then be happy and successful, because of your complete self-confidence. It is seeing the enemy's point of view, and sympathizing in spite of yourself with him, which upsets you.
That has been my state of mind ever since I was a small and over-sensitive kid who wouldn't watch a terrier worry a rat because something made me put myself at once in the rat's place. Wiser boys called me a milksop and various other names, which I furiously resented yet inwardly recognized as just. Also they kicked me at times, and bashed me on the nose. I did my best in wild tempests of rage to kick and bash them in return, and now and then I gave them back as good or better than I had from them. But if I saw their blood flow, that same ridiculous Something which went out to the rat sickened within me, and was sorry.
I understand myself rather well, when I'm not in the grip of emotion; but at present my eyes are blinded. I feel so intensely for myself and for my sister that I'm not sure whether I act as I do more for her sake or my own. Probably, however, it is for my own. And, curiously enough, I dimly see past this brain-storm and heart-storm to some day of calmer weather when it may still be possible to make use of myself and her, and—the others, as "material." I don't know if I shall do this, yet it may happen; and sometimes, even now, these disturbing incidents take form in my mind as scenes for a future book. I suppose this shows that the writer in me stands in front of the man. Some day I shall see myself clearly again one way or the other.
It was going to be a pleasant little story, this Scotch romance Aline and I had planned. I knew all the people in it intimately, and was in a hurry to pick the lock of their prison with my pen, for they were impatient to get out and begin to live and move. I thought Aline was almost as much interested, though she never gets into such wild enthusiasm over a new book that she can hardly wait to write it. She's too well-balanced, and has too many outside interests, as a very pretty and popular young woman should have; whereas, since the joy of writing saved my life, it has always been first with me—until the other day.
With Aline, the mischief began on shipboard—or perhaps a little before, though I realized then for the first time what was happening.
I have great faith in Aline's charm. I've seen several clever and important men go down before it; but somehow I felt doubtful about Somerled. If Aline has a lack—I may admit it here—it is temperament. Possibly I have a touch of what she misses. And until I began to write, I often wished to be without it. Anyhow, I can see that, sweet and delightful as she is, a man of temperament might in exalted moments find a note flat in the music of companionship.
Somerled has, I should think, spent at least ten years in trying to bury his temperament under layers of hard common sense. But all the time it was there, like boiling hot lava under a cold crust; and when Aline told me how he valued their friendship, I wondered whether she were right, and just how deeply his admiration of her was rooted in his heart. I wondered if she were the type of woman he would want, not only for a friend, but by and by for his wife; and caring for Aline as I do, I worried about her affairs a good deal, apart from the influence they were likely to have on the book. Still, I confess I thought as much about the people in the story I had in mind as I did of my sister—if not more, at that time.
Then, the night Aline and I had our big talk about Somerled, the Girl came. And that was the end of the book for me too.
If some time I grow callous enough to write her into a romance (she'd fit into nothing else), I doubt if I could make clear the extraordinary and instantaneous effect of her on all those she approaches.
It isn't only her looks, though she's beautiful, as some blithe sprite met by chance in a forest. It isn't only her youth, for she is too absurdly young. A girl, to be taken seriously by a grown man, should be at least one-and-twenty. She is, I believe, on the lilied edge of eighteen. Ridiculous! Yet where she is, other women, also beautiful and also young, are dimmed like candles that have burned all night when a window is flung open in the face of sunrise. Something in her eyes, her smile, the turn of her head, the light on her lashes and the shadow under them, the way she catches in her breath when she laughs and looks at you, the curl of her hair and the colour and fragrance of it, call to the deeps in a man. I defy any man to resist her completely. I have watched men in the street as I walked with her, or in hotel dining-rooms as she came in. Be they old or young, weak or strong, grave or gay, intelligent or dull, at sight of her the same pagan light of romance springs into their eyes. Mysterious and irresistible as the lure of the Pied Piper is the lure of this child who knows nothing of her own power.
She is a true daughter of Nature, but—she is also the daughter of Mrs. Bal.
Can Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald have been such a one when she was eighteen? No, in spite of the haunting, almost impish likeness, I'm sure she cannot. But I think Somerled wonders, and that now and then the relationship and the resemblance creep between him and his instinctive perception of truth in the girl.
She came to us with Somerled on the night of our first sight of her, leading him as Una might have led her lion.
It was a blow to Aline, a blow over the heart, and I felt it for her on mine. She managed her affairs badly next day, but I didn't blame her. I couldn't. Somerled and I had already lost our heads.
I scarcely believe Somerled was in love with the girl then; perhaps he isn't even now. He merely felt the call of youth, and a strange beauty and a stranger vitality. His life needed this call. It waked up the sleeping youth in his own heart. It set his old enthusiasms singing like birds uncaged. It made him want to be again all the things he had decided not to be. It brought back beliefs in realities that he had feared were illusions. In other words, it freed the temperamental artist and dreamer from the spoilt and successful millionaire. But he could have let the bright vision go, perhaps, and have been pleasantly contented later to remember it, if—it hadn't been for Aline. Because she wanted to part them and make him forget the girl's existence, she took the very way to throw them together. Then, when she had done her worst, she turned to me for help.
I was horribly sorry for her, and the keen hurt of my sympathy made me fear for myself. The girl had got hold of me too, of course. When I found that she was going away from us with Somerled, I felt physically sick with the sense of loss. It was as if, with Barrie gone, everything was gone. I knew that poor Aline must be suffering exactly the same dumb tortures in regard to Somerled, whom she had thought so nearly hers. And that is why, when she begged me to help—somehow, anyhow—I wasn't sure whether I promised to please her or myself.
I was able to do very little toward keeping the promise, either way, until Edinburgh. It was there, really, that Aline and I first seriously took up the rôle of villains—if we are villains. But two persons less well cut out by Nature for such parts can hardly exist. We want to be good and happy, and we want each other to be happy, and all those whom we love to be happy; but we want them to be happy with us and through us. This is where Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald comes into the plot. Without her, nothing could have happened as it is happening.
I shall never forget that first scene between the girl and her mother. I knew it would not be recorded in that poor little "book" of Barrie's, which every day she was writing and hiding. I thought that the book, which had no doubt been leading up to this scene, would probably stop short at the last sentence breathing hope of it.
Not that I have seen what she wrote. It was I who put the idea of writing into her head; but, though she didn't guess it, that was only done to give myself the right of Mentor when I still supposed we should all start gayly off together for Edinburgh from Carlisle. I suggested that she and I should "collaborate." Ha, ha! I believe "ha, ha," by the way, is an ejaculation confined entirely to thwarted villains in stageland; but if I am a villain, I'm not thwarted yet.
Aline's attack of temper, which upset everything, upset that scheme among the rest; but it seems the impulse I gave, pushed Barrie on to achieve something literary. Only, she steadily refused to let me see a line she wrote. The sole pleasure I got out of her taking my advice was in Somerled's face when I teased the girl about her "work." If he had been teaching her to sketch and paint I should have felt the same.
He is afraid of himself, because she has captured his thoughts; and afraid of her, because she's Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald's daughter. When he sees her followed by a trail of young men, like a bright comet with a tail it's been busily collecting in a journey through space, he asks himself whether this is going to be Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald over again? He wonders if he dare believe in the kindness of Barrie's smiles for him, or whether his portion is no better than those she deals out gayly to the rest of us. At least, this is as I judge him, though from the first we've exchanged no confidences on the subject of "Mrs. Bal" or Barrie her daughter.
Somerled knew Mrs. Bal in America. I never made her acquaintance, but I saw her act in Montreal every night of her engagement there. I couldn't keep away—yet I didn't want to meet her. I thought perhaps if I did I should be ass enough to fall in love. That is the truth. A good many fellows of my acquaintance, and others I'd heard of, had fallen in love, and had been flirted with till the lady was sick and tired of them. After that they were very sorry for themselves. I never heard anything else against Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald, and I don't believe there's anything worse to hear, than that she's a spoiled, flattered, selfish, and self-centred beauty, who expects every man to fall down before her, and generally gets what she expects.
None of us talked much to Barrie about her mother, though at first she was continually bringing up the subject. We knew she thought of it constantly: that beneath all her joy in escape from bondage, in motoring, and in her adventures in beautiful, historic scenes, there was always that undertone—"When I meet my mother." And we too felt the strain of suspense, though in a different way—at least, Somerled and I felt it. I could see it often in the peculiar darkening of his face when anything happened to suggest the idea of the mother in the background. As for Aline, I suppose it was but natural her only interest in Mrs. Bal should be, "How will her reception of the girl affect me, if at all?"
Aline's arranging to pick up the Vannecks at Dumfries gave her the excuse she's been longing for ever since the quarrel, to get me into Somerled's car, though she didn't wish to seem as if she were forcing herself upon him. Perhaps he might have found some way of shuffling out of it, but in St. Michael's churchyard at Dumfries she asked if he didn't think the "little romance a very pretty one?" He inquired what she meant. She appeared amused at his denseness—"so like a man!"—and said, "Why, what could I mean except dear Basil and little Barrie? I didn't know any one could help seeing! But don't say anything, please. It might nip the orange-blossoms in the bud."
She told me this afterward, because I had to know if I were to "live up to it." And I'm afraid by that time I was ready to live up to it, whatever the consequences might be. That is enough to explain why Somerled without hesitation invited me to migrate into his car when Aline had filled up Blunderbore with a party of three guests. He might even then have kept Barrie in her place beside him, or have appointed me to it; but that wouldn't have been Somerled as I see him, saying to himself, "Let them have each other's society, since that's what they want. I don't know what I want, or whether it's best for her or me that I should want anything."
Right or wrong about his state of mind as I may be whatever it was, he surrendered to me with an air of grave kindness which put on again the several years he had thrown off in the last week. (Yes, it was only a week that had made these changes for all of us!) Sitting with Barrie and her good friend Mrs. James (great character, that little woman: must use her in a book sooner or later), I knew just how passionately the girl was looking forward to the "surprise" meeting with her mother. My nerves were as tense as hers—even more tense, it may be, for I was like one behind the scenes, knowing what she did not know. I felt so sure the "surprise" was going to turn out differently from what she pictured that I had a sense of guilt whenever I saw her smiling dreamily. I was continually wondering what would happen, and what she would do when it did happen. And I had the impression that Somerled constantly brooded over the same subject, asking himself the same questions. The happier the girl was, the sorrier we both were for her, silently, without telling each other, and the more we wished to save her from any suffering to come. I knew that I could read so far into Somerled's thoughts, where they kept to the same road as mine; but I doubt if he were conscious of any fellow-feeling with me. I was to him only the most deeply infatuated and the most seriously in earnest of Barrie MacDonald's rapidly accumulating string of ridiculous young men.
Sympathy and curiosity, tossed together in an indistinguishable mass, made a confused omelette of my emotions as we spun along that lovely wooded road past Galashiels and into Edinburgh. I wanted to witness the first meeting of mother and daughter, yet I dreaded it. I didn't see how I could decently contrive to be "on" in that scene, yet I felt it would be too bad to be true that it should be enacted in my absence—almost as monstrous as that the world should be able to get on with me out of it.
It was Somerled, of course, who settled that his Gray Dragon (Barrie's name for the car) should arrive at Edinburgh on Sunday morning instead of Monday. He didn't trouble himself with intricate explanations, merely remarking that a Scotch Sunday was a bad day for travellers, apart from their religious conventions. If they hadn't any, others had; and those others were the very ones with power to make backsliders uncomfortable. They could close abbeys and museums, and they could shut the doors of inns in hungry faces at meal-times. "Besides," he finished, without a smile, "I took over the job of guardian pro tem from Barrie's grandmother, and I'm sure Mrs. MacDonald would wish her granddaughter to go to church on Sunday."
Barrie opened her eyes at this speech. Probably she'd never heard any talk of theology from Somerled, and was puzzled by his sudden interest in her spiritual decorum. I guessed that he wanted to give her the brilliant spectacle at St. Giles as a surprise on his last day of guardianship, but it occurred to me also that there might be other reasons in his mind for cutting short the tour. He might be tired of me as a guest thrust upon him. He might be sick of the American boys, and the soldier, Barrie's latest collected specimen (the Douglas youth also is travelling en automobile), or he might have reflected that it would be well to find out in advance where Mrs. Bal meant to pass her Edinburgh week. He must have realized that such a spoiled pet of society was as likely to visit admiring friends as to put up at a hotel.
We left Melrose a little before eight o'clock, promising Aline and the Vannecks (who hate getting up early) to engage rooms for them at the Caledonian Hotel. We had forty-six miles before us, but the Gray Dragon bolts a mile as a dog bolts an oyster, and as it was too early for many other dragons of his kind to be on the march, Somerled did a little discreet scorching through the lovely green and gold and purple landscape, past Galashiels, Stow, and Heriot. This haste—which didn't mean less speed—gave us time for a detour of a few miles to Rosslyn Chapel, which it would have been a shame to miss.
I wish I knew more about architecture! I thought Rosslyn a gem, and should have described it as a thing of unique perfection; but Somerled, who knows all about such things, said no, it was far from right artistically, though beautiful in spite of faults. My description would briefly be: whole chapel like great carved jewel-casket for a queen; ornamentation simply dazzling in intricacy and delicate detail; extraordinary pale rose-flush in shadow on stone pillars, which have the rich cream tints of carved ivory. No two alike: Spanish spirit visible here. Reminded me of detail in Burgos Cathedral. Nice story about the Prentice's Pillar. I looked it up when I found we were going to Rosslyn, and told it to Barrie before Somerled had a chance to open his mouth. Showed her the sculptured head of presumptuous man who dared finish the column according to design of his own, while this master was unsuspectingly studying up ideas for it in Rome. She thought the pillar more beautiful than the "horrid master's" work, and almost cried to hear that the prentice had died from the mallet-stroke of the jealous avenger. Barrie with tears in her eyes is a danger to beholders. She was particularly adorable just then, as her hair was wet with rain (our first rain) and curled on her forehead in little tendrils. This rain, by the way, came on worse later, and was perhaps the original, if indirect, cause of what might be called our villainhood—Aline's and mine.
We were pretty well drenched getting from Dragon to Chapel and from Chapel to Dragon, though the distance was nothing, but the downpour severe. Then, we three passengers were safely housed in the closed car while Somerled and Vedder the chauffeur had the full benefit of the storm. They were protected by a glass screen, but the waterspouts seemed to find them out, and Mrs. James and Barrie were so sorry for the two men that I felt a "luxurious slave" to cringe in shelter while others soaked.
Vedder, by the way, interests me as a type. I thought Aline and I had used up nearly all possible types of chauffeurs, but he's a new one, and may prove valuable in case of future need. I understand that he was distinguished in his remote past as a prize-fighter, then as a Cockney coachman in London. Somerled rescued him from something or other—prison, probably, judging by the shape of his nose (think it must have been broken and mended in absent-minded moment by amateur) and the look he gives me occasionally from corner of eye—like vicious horse cowed by owner and dangerous to strangers. Barrie and Mrs. James think him such a "quiet, nice man." It is not their business to judge character, luckily for their illusions. My opinion of Vedder—who looks exactly like the frog footman in Tenniel's illustrations of "Alice in Wonderland"—is that he's a smouldering volcano. He never speaks unless absolutely necessary, then uses as few words as possible, but his thoughts seethe in language unfit for publication except where his worshipped master is concerned. He also, in his way, is a victim of Barrie MacDonald. He has mentally apportioned her to Somerled, as spoil of battle. His vicious wall-eyes regard with distrust and hatred other male creatures who dare to contend for the prize. If he could arrange an accident to the Dragon without injuring it (an idol only second in his heart to Somerled) or any one under its wing, except me and himself, I feel sure he would risk his own bones for the sake of cracking mine. As for my sister, he does not approve of her. In looking Aline-ward, his face seems to become perfectly flat, like a slab of stone, features almost disappearing, except his slit of a mouth. "Nice, quiet man! So contented with his uncomfortable perch at his master's feet!" But—when the slightest mishap befalls the Dragon, and his services are needed as doctor or surgeon, he lets bottled-up steam escape. Without a word, he sets to work like a demon, accomplishing what he has to do in about half the time our best chauffeurs have taken. I should not be surprised at any moment to see ears, eyes, and nose emit lambent flames. Chauffeurs are a strange race, and Vedder is the strangest of the lot.
Drawing near Edinburgh, and encountering the first tram lines, it was pretty to watch Barrie's excitement. To understand, one had to remember that this was by far the biggest town the child had ever seen, so that even the outskirts impressed her as something stupendous.
As if for her pleasure, the rain stopped. "The nice, quiet man" uncovered us pampered passengers, and as we went on again, Edinburgh the beautiful, lying before us like a shadowy blue and purple map, began to take shape as a city of spires and monuments and gardens, and reveal its unique marvels. At this moment, I had my uses. Though it was my first sight of the Athens of Great Britain, I've fagged it all up so faithfully for the book that I know what everything is and what most things mean. I ventured to point out the Salisbury Crags, and Arthur's Seat watching over the town and Castle like a guardian lion. It was all very well for Barrie to come to Edinburgh to find her mother, but I didn't want her to miss realizing that she was entering perhaps the most beautiful city in the world, and one of the most historic, after Rome. I knew if I didn't give her this impression Somerled would, and wickedly I wished her to be primed by me before he got his chance. The only trouble was that I hadn't enough time to make her see fully all the glorious contrasts which ought to strike the mind at first sight of Edinburgh, where Yesterday and To-day gaze at and criticise each other across a gulf material and imaginary. Even though Somerled brought the Dragon down to snail's pace, I couldn't do the subject justice, with my best eloquence snatched at random from notebooks. Mrs. James would keep interrupting with quotations from "the doctor's" famous unfinished MSS. I would almost have preferred the silent Vedder as a chaperon. But there was some comfort in the certainty that Somerled was envying me the place to which I'd been appointed by himself. As he was driving through traffic, and couldn't glance round, he was unable to see how Barrie's eyes wandered from the points I indicated to others which she selected for herself.
My dramatic announcement, that where now rises the solid gray mass of old Edinburgh once crouched the wattled houses of the first inhabitants, scarcely caught her attention. She would gaze dreamily at Arthur's Seat, because Mrs. James had just unfolded a meretricious legend to the effect that King Arthur used to sit there and watch his troops. And the dark crag of the Castle, with its thousand years of history, its crowning walls and towers, its chasms of purple shadow, riveted her fancy when I would have discoursed on the modern charm of Princes Street—that "half a street" so much more splendid than any whole street ever planned.
"The doctor told me, I remember," said Mrs. James, "that at the end of the eighteenth century, when they wanted to build the new Edinburgh, they had to bribe people by giving them large tracts of land in order to make them move out of the old town, or they wouldn't budge. Sometimes a quarter of what they presented to one man in those days is worth a hundred thousand pounds now."
In spite of the girl's excited admiration of the goddess-town, her first question on getting out of the car was to Somerled about her mother. "I think, if she stops at a hotel, she's likely to choose this one," he said. "That's why I've brought you here."
"Thank you," she answered. "Thank you for everything." Then it was my turn to envy him.
She was pale, her face drained of colour, and extraordinarily spiritual as she stood in the big hall, waiting to hear what Somerled would be told at the desk. He came back soon, and announced that Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald had engaged a suite at this hotel, but it was not known whether she would arrive that night or on Monday morning.
"Meanwhile, I've taken a room for you adjoining Mrs. James, as usual," Somerled said. "When your mother arrives and you have met, she can make any new arrangement for you she chooses."
"And you—will go on—with the others?" asked Barrie, catching her breath in that engaging way she has when she is excited and trying to control emotion.
"I shall go on—sooner or later," replied Somerled. "But—I shall have a look round Edinburgh first, and see what has happened to my old haunts."
I thought her face brightened.
"Aline and I must 'do' Edinburgh too, of course," said I.
She smiled, but as if she were thinking of something else. And it was then that suddenly, for the first time, I felt capable of developing into an able-bodied villain—in fact, committing any crime which could transfer from him to me the kind of look she had given Somerled.
"I must of course go back to Carlisle and my work, as soon as I have paid my respects to Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald," remarked Mrs. James.
"We'll talk of all that to-morrow," said Somerled, who, I suppose, engaged her at so much a thousand words—I mean, so much a day—as chaperon for his "ward." "Whatever happens, you must see Edinburgh while you're here. And besides, it's on the cards that I may be able to give you a pleasant little surprise before you leave Scotland. I rather hoped for details of it to-day; but there's nothing interesting in the mail they handed me at the desk" (he said this like a native-born American), "so we must have patience till to-morrow."
"A surprise!" echoed Mrs. James, looking quite pretty and young, as she surprisingly does sometimes. "Does Barrie know?"
"No," said Somerled. "Barrie doesn't know."
There was just time to go to our new rooms and make ourselves respectable for church, no light thing in Scotland. Aline and the Vannecks hadn't turned up yet, but, knowing them and knowing Blunderbore, I thought nothing strange of the delay. Aline's game was, of course, to make Somerled jealous of George Vanneck, her old and well-worn chattel, whom she at heart despises, and to seem not too eager for his (Somerled's) society, while I, attached to his party by special arrangement, could protect her interests—and my own.
Somerled had ordered Vedder to wait with the Dragon when the luggage had been taken down, and thus we saved ourselves some minutes which we should have lost in walking. We left the car as soon as possible, however, and plunged into the beauty and squalor of the High Street on foot. I annexed Barrie as a companion, and Somerled did not fight for her. Quietly he contented, or seemed to content, himself with Mrs. James, and my impression was confirmed that, whether he wanted Barrie or not, he was deliberately standing aside in my favour, giving me my "chance"—perhaps to test Barrie or me—or both. Who could tell? Not I. Somerled is hard to read, even for a professional character-vivisectionist.
"Are you too much excited, and taken up with thoughts of your mother, to care about all this?" I asked the girl.
She admitted that she was excited, and perhaps a little absent-minded; but "all this," as I called it, was too wonderful not to capture her interest in spite of everything.
"Think of Queen Mary and her four Maries, and Darnley, and Rizzio, and Bothwell, and John Knox passing along as we pass now, on their way up to Holyrood?" said I.
"Yes. Oh, yes! I do think of them," she answered obediently, her eyes straying into the shadows of wynd or close, or tracing out the detail of some carved gargoyle on an old façade.
"Only you think of yourself more——"
"Not myself exactly. But——"
"What then?"
"Well—one thinks of queer things in a place like this, full of romances and—and love stories. I was wondering——"
"Yes. Don't be afraid to tell me. We're fellow-authors, you know—brother and sister of the pen."
"That's it! Brother and sister, aren't we? How nice!"
"Of the pen," I amended hastily.
"Story writers must know all about love," she hesitated.
"We do," I encouraged her to go on.
"Then how, if you were writing a story (I'm thinking I may want to do one), would you make a girl sure whether she'd fallen in love with somebody?"
"I should make her," I answered cautiously, with an earthquake in my heart, "I should make her feel—er—a sort of electric thrill when he touched her, or looked into her eyes. I should make her feel that nothing was worth doing unless the man was with her."
"I know!" the girl murmured. "She would feel, wouldn't she, as if he must be there—as if she just couldn't go on living if he weren't."
"That's it," I said. "You've described it graphically."
She regarded me with sudden suspicion. "Thank you very much," she replied primly. "I'll take your advice and have it like that in my story, if I ever write it. What a wonderful old street this is! It's full of ghosts of kings and queens, and noblemen and great ladies, and soldiers and robbers, every one of them more important than the people we see."
I couldn't tempt her back to the dangerous subject and soon I prudently ceased to try. But she had given me what I've heard described as a "nasty jar." Barrie MacDonald wouldn't have appealed to Basil Norman for a definition of love if she'd thought of him as a man and not a brother! The side of me nearest my heart hated Somerled, marching on ahead, looking singularly attractive and gallant, much too interesting for a mere millionaire. And the side of me which has telephonic communication with my brain liked and approved of him, understanding how and why his personality made a strong appeal to most women. "You've had pretty well everything you've asked life to give you so far," I said to his back, "but this girl isn't your kind of girl. It's my sister you ought to want."
Suddenly, as we drew near to the crowned church of St. Giles—the old High Kirk—there came to our ears the skirling of pipes. Barrie started and stopped. Somerled glanced round quickly, his eyes keen. Would she prove her Highland blood? Would her heart beat for the pipes? That was the question in his look.
The girl was taken by surprise. We others knew what we had come for, and what to expect. She had no idea, except that she was being conducted decently to church.
At the first wail of the pipes the blood of her ancestors sprang to her face. She clasped her hands together, listening in silence to the barbaric music, her lips apart, her eyes aglow. And all this for the call of the pipes! Not yet had she caught her first glimpse of the pipers; but an instant later the tall figures came swinging proudly into sight, plaids swaying like tartan tassels, kilts moving with that wave-about-to-break rhythm given to their garments only by inspired pipers.
Even I felt a thrill as if each nerve in my body were a string drawn suddenly taut, but I was gloomily conscious that the Celtic souls of Somerled and Barrie felt more than I was capable of feeling, a mysterious something which drew the two together at this instant. Physically, I stood between them, but I knew that my body was no obstacle to the lightning flash between their spirits.
Not a word said one of us as the goodly company of soldiers swept by in a rich-coloured cloud of their own music. But when all had disappeared into the church, Somerled and Barrie looked at each other. His eyes praised her for a braw and bonnie lassie who had responded in fine style to her first-heard pipes, her first-seen kilt; yet his lips had nothing to say but, "Well, what do you think of them?"
"Think?" echoed Barrie. "I think it's perfectly unbelievable how any girl can ever marry a man who isn't a Highlander and has no right to the kilt!"
There was one for Somerled and one against me; but it only got my blood up. Many a girl says a certain thing, and does another when her time comes.
"If I were rich," she went on, "I'd live in a castle in the Highlands, and I'd have it full, simply swarming, with pipers, playing me awake in the morning and to sleep at night."
"I should like you to see your own castle of Dunelin at Dhrum. There are plenty of pipers there. I've kept them all on, meaning them to play for me some day," said Somerled, who had just then forgotten, I think, the existence of myself and Mrs. James, and failed to observe that in the distance all Miss Barribel MacDonald's missing young men were assembling, as if to the call of the blood—the soldier from Carlisle, who had collected a friend, and the American contingent of four.
"My own castle?" Barrie repeated.
"You know what I mean. It would be yours if you'd been a boy. As you aren't——"
"It's yours!" laughed she.
"Not by right of blood. Only by right of money."
"Well, that's the sovereign right," she insisted, pleased with her own pun.
Then the victims of our miniature Circe arrived in the foreground, shook hands, bandied jokes, and became the most prominent figures in the picture. For the first time I was glad to see them, nor did I bear the youths ill-will for separating me from our beneficent enchantress in the stately church with historic banners. They had separated her from Somerled as well.
After service was over, we stopped only for a look at the stones which mark in the pavement the old Heart of Midlothian, and then hurried back to the hotel, escaping the Americans, but clung to by Douglas and his cousin, another Douglas, who hospitably bade us all to visit him at all his houses. He mentioned several, dotted about in various parts of the country; but when he heard that Miss MacDonald was retiring from the party in a day or two, he ceased to press the general invitation.
There was news of Mrs. Bal at the Caledonian. A maid had arrived who thought that her mistress would not follow until the evening: Somerled asked Barrie, therefore—rather wistfully, I thought—if she would care to go out again in the afternoon. "It will make the time pass for you," he added. I sympathized with him against my will. It was to be his last day of "guardianship," yet he was generous enough to invite me; and not only that, but to let me sit in the car with Barrie and Mrs. James, on the way to Arthur's Seat. After this effort, however, human nature had its way, and he kept her to himself for the rest of the afternoon. It was the first time he had done this since I fastened myself upon the party. To-day, it was evidently by deliberate intention, not accident. It was as if he said to himself, "These last hours shall be mine." And I wondered if indeed he actually meant them to be last hours. For my part, I certainly meant nothing of the sort. Mrs. Bal, or no Mrs. Bal, Aline or no Aline, Book or no Book, I didn't intend to walk out of Barrie's life without trying to win a foothold in it for the future.
If I had an opinion on such matters, I should have said, up to a week ago, that I didn't approve of marriage for a girl under twenty, as she couldn't possibly know her own mind; but Barrie is the kind of exception to prove any rule. She ought to have a man to take care of her.
Before five we started back, for Mrs. James thought Barrie needed a nap. It appeared that she hadn't slept the night before, owing to the excitement of suspense; and now "her eyes must be bright for their first look at her mother."
Drawn up at the pavement in front of the hotel as we slowed down was a big blue car, and another smaller one close behind, both of the same make, and evidently belonging to the same people. We had to choose between waiting for them to disgorge passengers and unload luggage, or get out at a distance from the entrance. We took the latter course, but at the hotel door Barrie stopped us. She wore no veil; and though it was to Somerled, not me, she spoke, I could see that her face was pale, her eyes dilated.
"Do you think that can be my mother arriving?" she asked in a low voice.
He looked back at the lady who, at this instant, was springing from the blue car to the pavement, her hand in that of a man who offered unnecessary help. It was a tall figure in a long cloak the colour of a duck's egg, and it gave the effect of willowy slimness despite the disguising mantle. A close-fitting toque of greenish grayish blue covered the small head, and the face was practically invisible behind a thick veil of the same mystic colour; but as the lady turned her long throat for a look at the other car, there was a glimpse of banded red hair under the toque, and a curl or two at the nape of the neck.
The two women in the smaller car also had red hair. They were not veiled, and their neat black hats and jackets somehow advertised them unmistakably as ladies' maids. Neither was pretty, in spite of her flaming crown of glory; and neither was young.
The remembrance of an "interview" with Mrs. Bal which I had read in some paper flashed back to my mind. She had told the reporter that "only red-haired servants could understand the moods of a red-haired mistress," and that, after disastrous experiences with "dull creatures who had no temperament themselves, and couldn't live with any one who had," she decided to engage only red-haired maids.
Perhaps Somerled knew of this idiosyncrasy, or else he recognized the tall form in spite of its wrappings, for he said, "Yes, I think very likely it is your mother, Barrie. But we can't be sure; and in any case I strongly advise you not to try and speak to her here in the street."
"Oh, I won't till she gets her veil off," said Barrie breathlessly, "but I must wait and see her come into the hall. I——"
Somerled gently but firmly drew the girl into the hotel. Mrs. James and I followed. Evidently Somerled wanted to persuade Barrie that it would be better to keep out of the lady's way as she entered, and meet later, if indeed this were Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald; but the girl seemed hardly to hear his murmured arguments. She did yield far enough to let him lead her a little aside, but she took up her stand again where she could see the blue figure enter. She did not speak, or insist upon her own way, yet I think it would have been impossible to move her without using brute force. Somerled realized that nothing was to be done with the child for the moment, and accordingly did nothing, except to stand beside her. Mrs. James and I took our places mechanically on the girl's other side, though no word passed between us.
Never had I seen Barrie so beautiful. Though a brilliant colour burned on her cheeks, she looked curiously spiritual. Her lovely body seemed a crystal lamp through which shone the light of an eager soul.
A minute of this silent suspense, and the lady in the blue-gray cloak came in, followed by the two red-haired maids carrying such valued possessions as no hotel porter must be allowed to touch: little handbags, gold monogrammed; a long coat of blue Russian fox; silk-covered air cushions, and delicately bound books. Behind came employes of the hotel, bearing rugs and other luggage; but the big man who had helped the lady from the car did not appear. We had seen his back only, yet the impression lingered in my mind that he was no servant, but a gentleman, a personage of worldly as well as physical magnitude.
The lady went toward the desk, then paused, and with an imperious and impatient little gesture directed one of her maids to untie her thick blue veil. The knot was loosened with a skilful touch, and the face of Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald was revealed. For a moment or two we saw it only in profile, as she talked with the people at the desk, and bade the elder of her two women write in the visitors' book. Then, as she turned away to go to the lift, we were favoured with the full blaze of her celebrated beauty.
It is three years since I saw her last, in America, but she has not changed, unless to look younger. She might not be a day over twenty-five, and her figure is as slender, as spirited, and as graceful as a girl's. She advanced more or less in our direction, though without seeing us, and her walk was peculiarly attractive—slightly self-conscious and suggestive of the actress, perhaps, but light as a smoke wreath. If she makes up off the stage, she is so skilful that she beats Nature at Nature's own game. Her complexion, with the gray-blue veil flowing in folds on either side her face, looked pearly, and the rippling lines of her red hair glittered like new copper. It was impossible she should not know that every one in the big hall was gazing at her; but such was her self-control, gained in long experience as a beauty and popular favourite, that she seemed not to see any one. Hers was not a morose remoteness, however. That might have offended admirers and kept money out of the theatre. It was the radiant unawareness of a passing sunbeam.
A few more seconds and this charming figure, framed in floating clouds of chiffon, would have reached the door of the lift, to be wafted out of sight like a pantomime fairy. But Barrie could no longer be held within bounds, for the great moment of her life had come. She darted away from us, her figure as tall, more youthful, more willowy, and more charming than the other, though singularly like in movement and in outline. The resemblance between the beautiful woman and the beautiful girl produced the effect of contrast, and ruthlessly dug a chasm of years between them. Suddenly, as they stood face to face, Mrs. Bal—who had been young as morning—reached the rich maturity of summer noon.
The thing Somerled would have prevented had happened; but the reins were out of his hands, and it would do more harm than good to snatch at them. None of us moved, but we were nearer than any one else to the mother and daughter, near enough to hear every word they said to each other.
"Oh, mother, it's I—your daughter Barrie, come to find you," the girl faltered. "You know—Barribel. You named me. I've run away from Grandma——"
"My goodness—gracious!" gasped Mrs. Bal, her brown eyes immense. In her groping bewilderment, her blank amaze, she looked younger again, her rather full face very round, almost childish, her dimples deepening in the peachy flush of her cheeks. She stared at Barrie as if the girl were a doll come alive—an extremely complicated, elaborate, embarrassing doll, copied from herself and let loose upon the world. And Barrie did not take her eyes from the beautiful, surprised face for an instant. In her wistful suspense she scarcely breathed. "Oh, do love me—do be glad to see me!" her soul implored through its wide-open windows.
The silence, falling after Mrs. Bal's astonished gasp, lasted but an instant, though it seemed long to us who waited. To others at a distance, others who knew nothing of the story, whose sight and hearing were not morbidly sharpened, the little scene probably meant no more than a surprise meeting between the well-known actress and a very pretty girl enough like her to be a sister. But to us who did know the story—and something of Mrs. Bal—the pause was like the pause in court while the jury is absent.
Mrs. Bal was thinking, observing, making up her mind. Suddenly she broke out laughing—a nervous, yet impish laugh, and seized the girl by both hands. At the same time she bent forward—not down, for Barrie is as tall as she—kissed the girl on both cheeks, and whispered something.
It was a brief whisper. She could have said no more than half a dozen words, but they stupefied Barrie. She threw back her head, almost as if to avoid a blow. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she pressed her lips together in a spasmodic effort at self-control. The bright rose-red of excitement was drained from her face; but she did not draw away from her mother, who still held the girl's hands. All she did was to turn her head with a bird-like quickness and fling one glance at Somerled.
I don't know whether or not she meant it as a call. Probably she didn't herself know what she meant. Only, she was in need of help, of comfort, and involuntarily turned to the strongest, most dependable personality in her small world. I would have given all my faculty as a writer—my dearest possession—to have been in Somerled's place—to have had her appealing to me while her air-castle crumbled.
He went to her at once, and spoke to Mrs. Bal, who had not seen him till that instant. She blushed slightly at sight of him, I noticed; and I wondered whether she had flirted, or tried to flirt, in the past with the artist-millionaire. It was impossible to guess whether she were pleased or displeased, but evidently his appearance on the scene was ruffling in one way or another to the lady's emotions. "This is a surprise!" I heard her say, in a softer, fuller tone than she had had time to put into her first sharp exclamation at sight of Barrie.
Then both voices dropped. The two talked together while the girl stood by in silence, pale and expectant, depending on Somerled. Mrs. Bal said something which made Somerled laugh—one of his cynical laughs, such as I hadn't heard from him lately. Not once had he looked at Barrie. All his attention was for the mother. She asked a question. Answering it, he indicated Mrs. James and me.
"Oh, please introduce them!" Mrs. Bal commanded pleasantly.
This was a signal for us to approach.
"Mr. Basil Norman," she said. "You are the author, of course. How nice to meet you! Of course I read your books. And your sister who collaborates—where is she?"
"I don't know yet whether she's arrived or not," I explained. "I meant to ask at the desk——"
"I want to know her. Please tell her so. And this is Mrs. James. Why, yes, of course! I remember you—in the days of my captivity." She laughed a childlike, impish laugh. (Barrie has one rather like it, but more spontaneous, less effective.) "You haven't changed."
"Oh, thank you, dear Mrs. MacDonald," exclaimed the little woman, radiant with pleasure—for I've found out that her two great desires are to keep her youthful looks, and to be intellectually worthy of the vanished doctor. "I'm sure you are not in the least altered, though it must be seventeen years——"
"Oh, my dear Mrs. James, don't—please don't!" cried Mrs. Bal, laughing and dimpling, and holding up both gloved hands in mock prayer. "Don't mention the number of years. This is getting to be simply awful. Shock after shock!" She laughed again, glancing roguishly at Barrie. "I want you all to come to my sitting-room—this very minute—to hold a council of war. It's most necessary. You dear, pretty child"—this adorably to her daughter—"how much more mischief have you done already? How many people have you let into the ghastly secret?"
Barrie hung her head, and looked down. She must have known that sympathetic eyes were on her, and have wished to avoid them. "There's only Mrs. West and—and—I suppose her friends the Vannecks—and Mr. Douglas—a Lieutenant Douglas——"
"Horror! Their name is legion. What a scrape. Well, I must appeal to their mercy. Please come up with me, everybody, and we'll talk it over and see what's to be done. There isn't a moment to lose."
By this time I began to guess what she was driving at, though the dazed expression of Mrs. James told me that she was still in the dark.
We got into the lift and were shot up to the next floor, nothing being said on the way except a conventional word or two about the motoring weather. "I came in a friend's car—I'll tell you all about it," Mrs. Bal added as she led the way to her rooms.
The two maids had arrived on the scene already. Doors were open; luggage was being taken in under the direction of the red-haired ones; but in the large sitting-room there was no sign of confusion. Quantities of flowers adorned it, in tall glass vases and gilded baskets tied with ribbons. Signed photographs of royalties and generals and judges, the latest aviators and successful explorers, all in monogrammed silver frames, were scattered on mantel and tables and piano-top. There were plump cushions of old brocade on the several sofas and lounges. The largest table had a strip of rare Persian embroidery laid across it, and was graced rather than laden with novels, boxes of sweets, and silver bonbonnières. Evidently the maid who had come in advance had had her hands full!
"I must have pretty things to give me a home feeling. Touring would be too horrid without that," she laughed. (Mrs. Bal laughs often in private life; what clever woman with dimples does not?) "Now, sit down, and let us discuss this desperate situation. But first—come here, Barribel. I want to look at you."
Barrie came. Mrs. Bal caught the girl's hands, and held her out at arm's length.
"You pretty creature!" she exclaimed. "Oh!" and she threw an appeal to us. "To think I should be the mother of THAT! Isn't it simply appalling? But I can't be, you know. I can't be her mother. Now can I? I've told her already—I had to decide in a flash. I admire her immensely, and we're going to be fond of each other and the greatest chums. But we must be sisters."
Then I knew what she had whispered to make Barrie start and blanch. She had said, "I won't be your mother." And Barrie had turned involuntarily to Somerled because she had felt herself unwanted and her heart was breaking.
All this was preparing me for a career of villainy, though I must say in self-defence that it was Aline who lit the match. "The woman tempted me, and I did eat!"
"Come and sit by me, lovely doll," said Mrs. Bal, pulling the girl down beside her on the most cushiony and comfortable sofa. "So you are the baby! I haven't forgotten you. I've thought of you a lot—really a lot. But you never seemed mine, you know. They wouldn't let me feel you belonged to me. They were so good! Of course I had to leave you for—for them to take care of. They thought they knew everything about babies. I dare say they were right. I had to escape. I couldn't have lived with them another day, in that awful house. But I've been oh, so proper, and good, really. Even they could have hardly been shocked. And I've hired three red-haired watch-dogs. But it isn't only myself I want to talk about—it's you. I do think you're the prettiest thing I ever saw—though I oughtn't to say so, perhaps, because I believe we're alike. Aren't we, Somerled?"
"In some ways, not in others," dryly returned the gentleman addressed.
"Oh, I know the differences are in her favour—Diogenes! All the more reason why I can't possibly own her for a daughter. My yearly profits would go down a hundred per cent. And although she's perfectly darling, and I'm going to love her—as a sister—she couldn't have come to me at a worse moment."
"Oh—why?" pleaded Barrie, speaking for the first time.
"Because—you may as well hear this, all of you, since I've called you to a council of war. I want you to realize"—and she gave each of us a look in turn: a lovely, characteristic "Mrs. Bal" look—"that I'm on my knees to you. I've thrown myself on your mercy. You've got to help me out. The truth is"—she began taking off her gloves and looking down at her own hands, her rings sparkling as the pink and white fingers were bared—"the truth is, I'm a little—a tiny little bit—tired of acting. I'd like to leave the stage in a blaze of glory while everybody wants me and there's no one to take my place. There's only one trouble—I'm so horribly extravagant. I always have been. I'm afraid I always shall be. I make heaps of money, but I can't save. If I say good-bye to the theatre, I shall want millions. I don't feel I can rub along on less. So that means—I shall have to marry somebody else's millions, for I haven't got the ghost of one of my own."
As she explained her position she looked deliberately past Somerled and out at the window. This made me sure that a vague suspicion of mine was founded on fact. Mrs. Bal had angled for Somerled, and he had been one of her few failures. She couldn't be pleased at encountering him again as her daughter's self-appointed guardian and champion. It seemed to me that the situation complicated itself, to Somerled's disadvantage; therefore—it might be—to the advantage of the next nearest man, myself.
"There is some one," Mrs. Bal went on, with a slight but lessening constraint, "who—rather likes me, and I rather like him—better than I can remember liking anybody. He's got lots of money. His name is Morgan Bennett. Somerled—you know him."
"Yes," said Somerled. "I thought his back looked familiar."
So the big fellow who helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P. Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P. Bennett has made twenty millions out of tin—and unlimited cheek. He is so big that his pet name in Wall Street used to be "The Little Tin Soldier."
"He has been—dangling lately," Mrs. Bal went on. "Oh, nothing settled! I confess I wish it were. I mean to take him if he asks me, and I think he will. You wouldn't believe it, but he's a shy man with women. I do believe he's frightened to propose. He's bought a house in London, in my favourite square. And now he's taken a shooting-lodge in Forfarshire—such an amusing place: a huge round house with as many eyes as in a peacock's tail, all staring cheerfully, and high chimneys grouped together like bundles of asparagus. I've just been staying there with his sister, Mrs. Payne, whom I believe he imported from America on purpose to play gooseberry. You know—or perhaps you don't—I tried my new play for the first time in Dundee, just one night, and it went gorgeously. This house of his isn't far off, and I was motored back and forth for rehearsals and so on, while the company stayed in town. I simply fell in love with the place; and he's trying to buy it—to please me, I hope. There's a round porter's lodge and a round garage: and the round house stands on a round lawn with a round road running round it like a belt, so that it all seems the centre of a round world with the sun moving round it. He brought me from there to Edinburgh to-day, and two of my maids in another car. He won't stop here in the same hotel with me, of course, but he'll drop in now and then—naturally—and he's taken his box at the theatre for the whole week. We must arrange this sister business before he calls. I've confessed to him that I'm twenty-nine, and it's perfectly true. I've been twenty-nine for several years. But he'd hardly believe me so old. And what should I do—I ask you all—if a grown-up—oh, but an extremely grown-up—daughter suddenly loomed over my horizon? Even if I put back her clock to fifteen instead of—never mind!—I couldn't manage to be less than thirty-one, and that with the greatest difficulty. Now you see how I am placed."
"Shall I go away and—and save you all the bother?" asked Barrie, in a very small voice.
"Oh, no, no, dear child; nothing of the sort, of course," protested Mrs. Bal, patting the hands which Barrie held tightly clasped together in her lap. "You mustn't be naughty and misunderstand. I don't want to lose you like that, now you've taken all the trouble to find me—with the help of our good Somerled. But—will you be a sister to me?—as popular men have to say in Leap Year."
"I'll do whatever you want me to do," Barrie answered in the same little voice, like that of a chidden child. "Am I—would you like me to stay with you here, or——"
"Why, I suppose"—Mrs. Bal showed that she was startled—"I suppose we must fix up a place for you—for a few days. But I don't see how you can go with me on tour. It wouldn't be good for you at all. The best way is for us to have a nice little visit together, and get acquainted with each other, and then perhaps I'd better send you to—er—to my flat in London, or—to boarding-school, or somewhere. I quite understand you wouldn't go back to your grandmother at any price, would you?"
"I'd rather do that than be a trouble to you," said Barrie. "Only, I don't think she'd take me back. But I could try——"
"Certainly Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald won't hear of your going back to live in Carlisle, I'm sure," said Somerled, looking somehow formidable to reckon with as his eyes met Mrs. Bal's. Then, to the girl's mother: "I am connected with her father's family in a way, you know, and I took advantage of the connection to make Mrs. MacDonald's acquaintance at Hillard House, after I'd met—her granddaughter. The arrangement between us was that I should play guardian pro tem. So if you want any advice about—Miss MacDonald's future, perhaps you'll be good enough to let me help you."
"Thanks, oh, thanks! I accept gratefully," replied Mrs. Bal, who had no doubt already heard downstairs some few words explaining Barrie's presence with our party in Scotland. "And you'll tell everybody she's my sister, won't you?"
"I'll not say anything to the contrary," he promised grimly.
"And you, Mr. Norman? You, dear Mrs. James?"
"I'll protect the secret with my life," said I, laughing. If I were a woman, I should have been hysterical by this time.
"I'll keep my mouth shut," replied Mrs. James, with pitying eyes that said to the girl, "If I were your mother, dear child, young as I like to look, I'd be proud to own you!"
"What about your American victims?" I inquired of Barrie.
Mrs. Bal pricked up her ears. "What victims?" she asked before her daughter had time to speak.
"Four young men who have prostrated themselves under Miss MacDonald's chariot," I explained. "All who see her do this." In adding the little tribute I meant well; but I saw in an instant that I'd been tactless. Mrs. Bal regarded the girl reflectively; and that uncomfortable faculty I have for reading people's thoughts told me she was repeating to herself, "Ah, so all the men who see this child fall in love with her, do they? H'm!"
"They—I never talked to them about—about having a—mother," Barrie stammered.
"And this Mr. Douglas?" Mrs. Bal asked. "Is he too a 'victim?'"
"He appears to be something of the sort," I was obliged to answer, as she appealed to me. "The Douglas Heart, you know! And he has a cousin with whom he's staying——"
"Oh, do, dear Mr. Norman, like an angel of mercy 'square' them for me, will you, and all the others who know?" Mrs. Bal implored, ostentatiously ignoring Somerled, who had too evidently gone over to the younger generation. "Your sister, too—and her friends? Will you go and see if they have come, and if they have, bring them here—or plead my cause eloquently, or something?"
"I'll go at once," I agreed, rising. On principle, I disliked and despised the gorgeous, selfish creature; but there was that in me which longed to please her, and delighted in being chosen as her defender, over the head of Somerled, so to speak. I was not sorry to escape from the scene which Barrie's pale face and o'er-bright eyes made very trying; also I was really anxious to find out if Aline had come. If she had not, I should begin to worry about her and the poor old car—to say nothing of the tribe of Vanneck.
As I went out, I heard Mrs. Bal exclaim, "Oh, by the way, if she's to be my sister, she can't be a MacDonald, She'll have to take the name of Ballantree. It was my maiden name, you know."
A disagreeable surprise awaited me outside. I learned that, while we'd been out after luncheon, my sister and the Vannecks had come, but that Aline had had a mishap. She'd been wearing a motor-mask veil, according to her custom, in order to protect her complexion. The talc front over her face had been damaged in the morning's storm, and somehow her eyes were injured. I should have received the news sooner had I gone to the desk instead of following Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald upstairs.
Off I hurried to Aline's room, where I found Mrs. Vanneck with my sister, and an oculist whom George had hurried out to fetch. The poor girl was suffering, and a good deal frightened, though we tried to console her. As she went to the window to be examined by the specialist, I could see that her face and hair and lilac silk blouse were covered with a powder of talc, which sparkled like diamond dust. Her eyes and lids were full of the stuff, it proved, and she cried with nervousness and pain as the oculist proceeded to get it all out.
It was impossible to speak to her of Barrie and Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald, but I told Maud Vanneck, who, though mildly horrified, promised for herself and her brothers that the secret should not be revealed.
When I returned to Mrs. Bal's sitting-room, I found Somerled and Mrs. James gone. Barrie was alone with her newly found—sister, and a more forlorn little figure than our young goddess it would be hard to imagine. Andromeda chained to her rock could not have looked more dismally deserted by her friends. A room had been taken for her, and she was now transformed into Miss Barribel Ballantree. "What a good thing I wouldn't let her be called Barbara after me," said Mrs. Bal. "We should have had to change her whole name, and that would have been really awkward!"
I should have retired at once, when my errand was done, but Mrs. Bal would not let me go. I think, for one thing, she wasn't at ease with Barrie alone; and for another, she wanted to see if I too were a victim of this young person who might perhaps turn out a formidable rival as well as an inconvenient daughter. Barrie evidently wished me to stay; and I made no effort to conceal my real feeling for the girl from either of them. I thought that now was the time to let myself go. Barrie was inwardly yearning for comfort and love, and I opened the door of my heart for her to see that it and all within were hers. I was on the spot, and Somerled wasn't; so I hoped that Barrie might be thankful even for her "brother of the pen." Mrs. Bal's bright, observant eyes saw and understood.
Presently she announced that she was rather tired, and would lie down, as there would be rehearsing to-morrow in the theatre; and though she'd opened in Dundee, she would be almost as nervous in Edinburgh as on a first night. Her maid was rung for. The eldest and reddest one came. Barrie and I went out together, I longing for a few words in the corridor, or at least a friendly pressure of the hand. But I saw that she was in no condition to be spoken to. The reaction was coming on, and I let her go at once. She almost ran down the passage to a room not far away, and slammed the door.
Neither Mrs. Bal nor Barrie appeared again that evening. Presumably they had dinner together in Mrs. Bal's quarters; and the heather moon shone as through a glass darkly for the rest of us. Aline was ordered to keep her room for the next few days, which settled our plans—or hers, at all events. And we were a party of men dining that night, the two Vannecks and Somerled and I, for Mrs. James "had a headache," and Maud kept Aline company.
The great Somerled was reflective if not morose. I wondered what his schemes were concerning Barrie, for I imagined uneasily that he was working with some idea; and if I didn't mean to sit still and let him cage the dove while it fluttered homeless and forlorn, I must come out of my corner into the open to fight for it.
After dinner Aline sent for me, and her message included Somerled, if he could "spare her a few minutes." He could and did with a good grace. We went together to the small sitting-room, which looked dull compared with Mrs. Bal's decorated background, though George Vanneck and I had done our best, on an Edinburgh Sunday, in the way of roses. Somerled had forgotten to incarnate his sympathy in flower form, and I read remorse in his eyes as they fell upon Aline, piteous and prostrate.
Electric light was not permitted, and the room was lit only by a few green-shaded candles which made the invalid ethereally pale. She reclined on a sofa and wore her best tea-gown, or whatever women call those loose classic-looking robes nowadays. It was white, and becoming. She had built up a wall of cushions, against which she leaned, and her hair was done in two long plaits under a fetching lace cap which gave her a Marie Antoinette effect. This hair-arrangement interested me scientifically, because when I breakfast with Aline in our private sitting-room at a hotel, she often has her hair hanging down, and it has never looked so long nor so thick as it did on this occasion. She must have had some clever way of plumping it out. Her eyes being tender and inflamed had temporarily lost their beauty, so she had tied over them a folded lace handkerchief or small scarf.
"You look like a model for a classic figure of Justice," said Somerled—"all but your smart Paris cap."
"Why, was Justice blind? I thought that was Love," said Maud Vanneck, gayly airing her ignorance. I couldn't help thinking—nor could Somerled, I'm sure—that Aline looked more like Love-in-a-mist than stern Justice; but I feared that he had definitely ceased to regard her from the love point of view, if ever he'd inclined to it.
Aline, who had heard nothing yet about Mrs. Bal, was anxious for the story. I saw that Somerled desired me to speak, but I threw the responsibility on him. I wanted to know how he would tell the story; but I might have guessed that he would be as laconic, as non-committal as possible, and that, much as he might yearn to do so, he would not criticise Barrie's mother.
"I think she admired her daughter," he said quietly, "but being what she is, and looking no more than twenty-five, what can one expect? Of course the sister fraud will be found out sooner or later; but the important thing in Mrs. Bal's mind seems to be that it shall be later."
"Is it right for us to help her deceive poor Mr. Bennett?" asked Maud Vanneck, who is a person of earnest convictions.
I chuckled at hearing the big chap called "poor," perhaps for the first time in his life; and even Somerled smiled.
"None of us are pledging ourselves to lie for the lady," said he. "We simply hold our tongues. If Bennett asks Mrs. Bal to be his wife, he's not the sharp man of affairs he's supposed to be if he expects to find her a mirror of truth. When he discovers that she has a grown-up daughter he'll shrug his shoulders, and perhaps never even let her know she's been found out. I'm not very well acquainted with Bennett, but I've met him a few times, and his most agreeable social quality seems to me his strong, rather rough sense of humour. I expect he'll see the funny side of being hoodwinked by Mrs. Bal. And a few years more or less on her age—what do they matter to him? He's forty-five; and on the whole he couldn't get a wife to suit him better."
"I have a sneaking sympathy with Mrs. Bal," confessed Aline, in her gentlest voice. "She's conquered all of you men, and has no further fear of you; but I feel that she's trembling in her shoes because of Maud and me. I should love to reassure her and let her know that we're not cats."
"Shall I take her a message?" I suggested, trying not to seem too eager. "I'm sure she'd like to get it."
Aline smiled indulgently. "Poor boy, doesn't he want me to say 'yes?' It's too late this evening, I'm afraid; but call on her and Barrie early to-morrow morning, and ask if she'd care to drop in on the poor invalid, on her way to rehearsal. I'd better see Mrs. Bal alone. She may want to say things she wouldn't wish Barrie to hear—don't you think so, Mr. Somerled? And, by the way, now your little ward is—more or less—safe in other hands, have you settled your future plans?"
"I expect to have something mapped out to-morrow," Somerled answered.
"You'll go on with your trip—your rest cure—I suppose, as you meant to when we—that is, before you were saddled with all this responsibility?"
"I've been looking forward to Edinburgh, from the first," said he, evasively.
Aline saw that she would get no more satisfaction, and ceased to risk irritating him; but after her guests had bidden her good-night, she kept me for a talk.
Of course she made me describe the scene between Barrie and her mother, but she was more interested to know how Somerled had looked, what he had said and done, than in my opinion of Mrs. Bal.
"What do you think he means to do?" she appealed to me, desperately. "Do you think he's so infatuated with Barrie that he'll offer to take the girl off her mother's hands and marry her?"
"I've been studying Somerled for both our sakes," I said. "What I think is, he's been telling himself the girl is too young and all that, and ought to have a chance to meet a lot of other men. Yet he's seen how she unconsciously attracts every male creature who comes along, and that it's a danger for her if——"
"Unconsciously attracts! But I forgot, you're infatuated too. And she doesn't attract everybody. George Vanneck hardly considers her pretty. He can't bear this rising generation of long-legged young colts, he says; and he calls her hair carrots."
"We'll cross George off the list. It's long enough without him, and increasing with leaps and bounds. There'll probably be more names on it by to-morrow night" (evidently I have a prophetic soul). "But to go back to Somerled. Of course he foresaw something of what happened to-day: but Barrie's face when Mrs. Bal suggested being a sister to her was enough to turn a man of marble into a man of fire; and I don't think Somerled's resolutions up to that point were as hard even as sandstone. He must see now, as I do, that there'll be no place for the poor child with her mother, whether Mrs. Bal marries a millionaire or goes gayly on with her career as an actress. What is to become of a girl like Barrie, left to her own devices, with every man—well, let's say every second man—who passes, stopping to flirt if not to propose? My fear is that Somerled's resolutions are turning round the other way, and that he's contemplating himself as permanent guardian—if Barrie'll take him."
"Take him! She'll snap at him. She shows her feelings in the most disgusting way. Oh, my dear boy! I apologize. But I have feelings too—as you know only too well."
"I'm afraid she is getting to like him," I said, "but I persuade myself, anyhow, that she's more in love with love in general than with Somerled in particular. She's under the influence of the heather moon."
"I'm not going to let her have Somerled!" Aline cried out sharply. "I can't bear it. Can you?"
"I'm an idiot about the girl," I admitted. "I get worse every day. The more flies that collect round the honey the more I want it myself. I didn't know I was that sort of person, but I am. The worst of it is, she calls me her brother, which is fatal."
"No, it isn't. It shan't be," said Aline. "I shall get her for you."
"Thank you very much," said I.
"I'm not joking. An idea is on its way to me. I've been seeing it dimly for days, but its success depended a good deal on Mrs. Bal. Now, her being afraid of me makes it easier. I can't lie here idle, with all this going on—yet I can't let him see me as I am. My eyes look hideous. They're pink, like an albino's. Otherwise I wouldn't listen to the oculist. But I must do something. I begin to see what I can do, if you'll go on helping me and yourself, and not be a fool."
"I won't be more of a fool than Nature made me," I assured her, "though I may be a fool to love that girl."
"No, for you can make her care. Of course you can. She's hardly more than a child."
"You were married at eighteen," I reminded my sister. "At least you always tell people you were."
"If you were a woman, you'd be a thorough cat! It's true—I wasn't much more, but I was mature in mind. I'd seen the world. Barrie MacDonald will make you happy. You'll play together all your lives, and she can take my place, helping you to write stories. It will be quite a romance for the newspapers. And when she's out of sight, out of mind with Ian Somerled, he'll realize that she wasn't the right one. He'll come back to me, and see that I was always meant for him."
"A woman's instinct is often right. Also many a heart is caught in the rebound," said I, falling back on proverbs. And in this way, with the talc that entered Aline's eyes, malice entered our hearts. Thus we took up our parts of (alleged) villain and villainess.
Next morning, as early as I dared, I sent to ask if I might give Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald a message from my sister. Word came back that she would see me at once. Five minutes later I was knocking at the door of her sitting-room, and, obeying her "Come in," found myself in the presence of a Vision. She was in one of those tea-gown arrangements like Aline's, only more so. She had a cap which, I fear, would have made Aline's look, as they expressively say on the other side, "like thirty cents." And if Morgan P. Bennett had seen the beautiful Barbara then, he would have proposed without hesitating another second. That is, he would have done so if Barrie hadn't come in before he began. She did come while I was giving Aline's message to Mrs. Bal, and though she looked as if she hadn't slept, to me she was more lovable than ever. I tried to convince myself that Aline was right; that this girl and I were made for each other; that, if I could take her away from Somerled, she and I were bound to be happy together forever after.
Mrs. Bal explained that she was later than usual because she had not had a good night, and her chief maid, in reality a trained nurse, had been giving her electric massage.
"Now I feel equal," she added, "to tackling the world, the flesh, et le diable. Mrs. West is the world. Morgan Bennett's the flesh(he weighs two hundred pounds!) and—I shall be the devil. I always am at a rehearsal. But the mood shan't come on while I'm with your sister. Now I must go and get dressed. I'll not be fifteen minutes. Really! You don't know what I can do in the flying line, when I choose. You may stay and amuse—my little sister."
I knew better than to ask questions. If the girl wanted sympathy she could find it in my eyes, but she would resent pity. I praised Mrs. Bal, and found that I'd struck the right note.
"Yes!" Barrie exclaimed. "Isn't mother—I mean Barbara—gloriously beautiful? She wants me to call her Barbara, and I shall love it. I shall love to do whatever she wants me to do, I'm sure, because she's such a darling. Everybody must want to do what she wants them to do, whether it's right or wrong—though she wouldn't want anything she thought wrong, of course. Just fancy, she's given me heaps of pretty things. I begged her not, but she would make me take them—a string of pearls, and this ring—my very first!" (How I wish that I had put her "very first" ring—or kiss—on the finger she displayed!) "And two bangles—and she's going to pay back Sir S.—I mean Mr. Somerled" (so she has her own name for him!)—"the money he lent me for my father's brooch. Barbara doesn't want the brooch. I'm to keep it. And she says she'll give me an allowance—but she expects Grandma to leave me everything in her will. I don't—and I'd rather not, though moth——Barbara thinks I shall some day be quite well off. I fancied we were very poor, but Barbara says Grandma must have got back nearly all that was lost, by saving."
I guess that the girl was making talk to show me how well satisfied she was with everything; but whenever she met my eyes she looked away, to interest herself in some photograph or ornament.
In less than the promised fifteen minutes Mrs. Bal appeared again, very lovely and ridiculously young in a short blue serge dress, with a turned down collar that showed her firm white throat. I was allowed to remain with Barrie while "Barbara" went up to see my sister; and the ice being broken between us, we chatted comfortably of everyday things, I unreasonably happy because I had got in ahead of Somerled for once. It began to seem like a game of chess between us; I—directed by Aline—playing against Somerled. If Aline upstairs were at this minute making the move she planned, it would be check to his queen, Barrie of course being queen.
The only questions I ventured to ask the girl, and those in a casual way, were, "Had she heard from or seen Somerled since yesterday afternoon? And what was the programme for her, during this week of the new play in Edinburgh?"
Her answers were that she had neither seen nor heard from Somerled, and that she didn't know what she was to do during the week. She hoped to see something of Edinburgh. She supposed we—and Mr. Somerled—would soon be leaving for the west or north. But she had written Mr. Douglas, by Barbara's request, and he was very nice. He might be counted on to show her things. He was invited to call this afternoon with his cousin. Jack Morrison had written asking to come too, and Barbara said that he might do so—bringing his three friends. She—Barrie—must be very, very careful always to say "Barbara" and never—the other. She could quite understand now how the darling felt, though it had seemed queer at first.
By and by Mrs. Bal returned, and I saw by the light in her eyes and the colour on her cheeks that the conversation with Aline had been interesting. Hardly had she arrived and begun demanding from her various maids various things wanted at the theatre, when Somerled sent up to beg a moment's talk with her.
"Tell the gentleman I shall be delighted," she said to the hotel servant: and I saw that she was smiling the impish smile which Barrie has inherited.
"So glad you came before I got away!" she exclaimed, shaking hands with Somerled. "Five minutes more and I should have missed you. I'm due at the theatre now. The poor wretches are rehearsing without me, but I must turn up for a scene, at eleven!"
"I won't keep you five minutes," said Somerled, quietly. "I only want to ask if you'll let Barrie—provided she'd like it—" he glanced at the girl, whose eyes brightened—"take a few excursions with her friend Mrs. James and me, in my car this week. You'll be busy and——"
"I should have been delighted, and I'm sure Barrie would," broke in Mrs. Bal, "but you're just too late. A new thing for you, isn't it? I've been having the most charming visit with Mrs. West, who is better, but must keep to her rooms for two or three days. Her car will be eating its head off unless it's used, and I've promised that her friends the Vannecks—such nice people! I met them in Mrs. West's sitting-room—and Mr. Norman shall have Barrie for—probably—the very excursions you have in mind. Too bad! But first come, first served! You've all been so good to this girl, one hardly knows how to choose between you. But I thought Mrs. James was going home at once? I understood from Barrie that she said so last night?"
"She has decided to stay until the little surprise I'm trying to arrange for her, comes off—or on. She doesn't know what it is, but she pays me the compliment of taking it on trust. She'll be disappointed at having to give up the motor runs she was looking forward to with Barrie."
"You've plenty of old friends in Edinburgh, I'm sure," suggested Mrs. Bal, "and you can make up a party to console dear Mrs. James for the loss of Barrie."
"I don't believe Mrs. James can be induced to take any excursions without Barrie," said Somerled: which meant that he didn't intend to leave Edinburgh while the girl was in it and at the mercy of her erratic parent. I thought he was anxious Barrie should understand that he was not going to desert her. Perhaps she did understand, for she is quick in penetration; but her own pride, and loyalty to Mrs. Bal, kept her from showing that she felt need of protection, or even that she supposed Somerled to be offering it. She did show, however, that it grieved her to refuse his invitation. She took the "tip" he gave and put it all upon Mrs. James: how sorry she was not to do any more sight-seeing with dear Mrs. James. But I knew that the name in her heart was not the name on her tongue.
Aline had scored. I wanted to know just how, and how far, but I determined not to leave Barrie with Somerled. I needn't have worried, however, for Mrs. Bal and I had the same thought. She asked if Barrie would like to go to the theatre with her and watch a rehearsal. Naturally, Barrie said yes, and Somerled and I saw them off in the smaller of the two motor-cars which Morgan Bennett had placed at Mrs. Bal's service for the Edinburgh week. As for Bennett himself, he was apparently "lying low," by her wish or his own; but I expected to see him at the theatre that night. Of course, we were all going to turn out in full force for "The Nelly Affair." Somerled had taken a box, he told me, and proceeded to invite the whole party; but there also Aline had got in ahead. During Mrs. Bal's call upon her, they had arranged that the Vannecks and I should sit with Barrie in stalls offered by the Star. Mrs. Bal had (she assured us fluently, before starting off in her car) intended asking Somerled and Mrs. James too, and stalls were provided for them. But as he had already engaged a box, she would give the seats to the two Douglases. Perhaps he—Somerled—would have room in his box for those nice American boys, of whom Barrie seemed so fond?
Aline was eagerly waiting for me to come back and congratulate her upon her great success. She wanted to tell me everything; but her desire to talk was nothing compared with my yearning to hear.
"It's all right," she began. "I've made a bargain with Mrs. Bal. I told her you were in love with Barrie. That's the way I broke the ice, after I'd paid her compliments and she'd sympathized about my eyes. I said I'd keep her secret, and answer for the Vannecks, if she'd give you a chance with Barrie."
"By Jove!" I grumbled. "You didn't mince matters between you! Anything said about Somerled?"
"Why, I told her that the child was fancying herself in love with Ian, and behaving rather foolishly. And I said that Ian was naturally flattered, but that he was the last man to marry a baby like Barrie; and if we didn't act quickly, the poor little girl might suffer. You must have noticed, Basil, that Mrs. Bal doesn't like Ian Somerled."
"I've noticed that she takes an impish delight in thwarting him."
"That's because he once thwarted her. She admitted as much. Or, at least she said she asked him to paint her portrait, and he did paint it. When the picture was finished, he gave it to her, and didn't even make himself a copy."
"Well," I replied, puzzled, "I don't see anything in that to upset her. Even for a beauty like Mrs. Bal it's a compliment to be painted by Somerled. And surely it was a mark of regard to make her a present of the picture, when he can get from a thousand to five thousand pounds for anything he chooses to do."
"Oh, you man," exclaimed Aline. "And you pretend to be a student of women's characters! Of course Mrs. Bal was furious because he didn't beg to do her portrait and then make two, one for her, and one for himself. Fancy my having to explain! And besides, there must have been more than that in the affair. She wouldn't have asked him to paint the picture if she hadn't wanted to see him often alone, and make him fall in love with her. His giving her the portrait was a kind of defiance, to show her that he didn't care that for the original."
"Oh, well, if you think so!" said I.
"Mrs. Bal thinks so. And she's enchanted to get her revenge. Not that she'd have chosen this way, because, of course, it's a sickening thing to have Ian and all these men know that she's old enough to be the mother of a grown-up daughter—and to be obliged to throw herself on their mercy to help her out of the scrape. She laughs and pretends it's a joke, but she simply hates it. I hinted to her that if you married the girl there'd be no talk ever about Barrie being Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald's daughter. That should be forgotten, I said, though they could correspond with each other and be good friends. Barrie would live in Canada with you, and be out of Mrs. Bal's life altogether. And I impressed it upon her that your ideal existence was a quiet country place. It was the same as telling her that she'd be rid of Barrie by giving her to you. Whereas, if the girl should marry Ian, Somerled's wife would always be before the public eye, and everybody would be sure to find out all about her. Mrs. Bal caught my meaning, you may be sure; and she promised me that Barrie should go everywhere with us, or rather, with you and the Vannecks, till I can get about. Anyhow, nowhere with Ian. Now, you see, I've done all I can for you."
"And for yourself," I was mean enough to add, for the thought of what we were doing together was not a good thought, and it brought out the worst of me.
"I haven't any one to work for my interests. You have," she retorted; and as I'd no mind for further recrimination I begged her pardon, thanked her gratefully, and proceeded to tell all that had happened in Mrs. Bal's room. It was not pleasant for Aline to hear how prompt Somerled had been in trying to relieve Mrs. Bal of her burden; but there was consolation in his disappointment.
"Do I look very horrid?" she questioned anxiously, "or do you think I might ask him to take pity on me for a little while this afternoon, and sit here when you're all out sight-seeing?"
I reassured her, saying that her eyes looked no worse than if she'd been indulging in a "good cry." She decided, however, that if Somerled came she would bandage them again and continue to resemble Justice. I didn't ruffle her feelings by remarking that morally the resemblance would be a parody.
When Maud Vanneck and I went, soon after luncheon, to ask if Barrie would walk in Princes Street, with perhaps a stroll along the High Street, and on to Holyrood or the Castle, I found Mrs. James in Mrs. Bal's sitting-room with the two Douglases and the four Americans. The mother and daughter had returned late from rehearsal, and had just finished luncheon. Mrs. Bal had a letter in her hand, which had evidently arrived with a box of orchids, probably a tribute from Bennett; and the lady's desire to get us out of the way suggested the imminent arrival of a caller worth keeping to herself.
Finally, it was arranged that we should all go out together, the Douglases assuring the rest of us that they could open doors which would be shut to strangers.
"Where's Somerled?" I asked Mrs. James, in case he were condescending to lie in wait somewhere.
"When I saw him last," she replied, "he'd got an immense pile of foreign letters, and several cablegrams. It looked as if he'd enough to occupy him the whole afternoon. Important business I suppose; yet in spite of all, I believe he's been concerning himself with some surprise for me. He may perhaps have news I shall like to hear when I get back. I expect he's been telling some friend about those Stuart chairs I want to sell, and thinks he's got me a buyer."
The Douglases took us to see the Scotsman building, and the secret, inner workings of a great newspaper. We descended from marble halls to vast underground regions, the lair of a monster immeasurably more powerful than the Minotaur who ramped and raved under the Palace of Crete. The roar of this modern Minotaur was as the noise of Niagara broken by stormy bursts of thunder. It stunned the intelligence; it shrivelled the organs of speech like a dried kernel rattling impotently in an old nutshell. It filled the world and made human happenings, such as individual lives and deaths, seem of no more importance than the snapping of thumb and finger in front of a cataract. I couldn't have lived in the tumult long and kept my wits; but we heard of an employé who, when some tooth or nail in the enormous monster smote him, could not bear to stop away long enough to complete his cure, because he was unable to bear the "awful stillness" of the hospital. Persons of impregnable nerve-power let us deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, showing us the dragon's brood, and his terrible wife whose business it is not only to print the newspaper, but to cut its sheets, and eventually to lay them like eggs, at the rate of thousands a minute: a most appalling creature she, who so battered my brain with her accomplishments and the wild cackle she made over them, that weakly I let Barrie be snatched from me by Donald Douglas.
In the roar and rush and riot I was incapable of caring, though vaguely I recalled the fact that I had come out with the sole object of annexing the girl's society. Vaguely too, though only vaguely, I resented the Douglas method; but I had my revenge almost before I recovered sense enough to want it. There came, I know not why or how (perhaps one of the masters decreed it, to strike our ears with the contrast), a sudden unexpected lull. It was only a comparative lull, and it lasted no more than a few seconds; but there was time enough to hear Douglas yell into Barrie's ear, "I must have you for my own."
The next instant he was purple through his soldier-tan. He knew the dragon and the dragon's wicked wife had betrayed him, as he took advantage of their domestic clamour to speak in a crowd as though he were alone with his love in the desert. What Barrie answered, or if she had breath to answer, none of us could guess, though all, especially the four Americans, were bursting with anxiety to know. Later, however, when we went up to the Castle (anything but the Castle, with its thousand years of history, would have been an anticlimax after that wonderful dragon cave), Donald Douglas walked meekly with his cousin, leaving Barrie to Jack Morrison. As for me, I had temporarily lost my individuality, and with that roar still echoing through my brain, vibrating through my nerves, I was glad to crawl along, talking to nobody, and picking up dropped or untied bits of myself as I went. For the moment, frankly I didn't care how many men proposed to Barrie, or whether she accepted them all. But afterward, it was different. It occurred to me that Jack Morrison was not only a handsome and gallant fellow, but said to be very rich, at least as rich as Somerled, and ten years younger. Aline and I might be mistaken about the girl's feelings for Ian. Very likely it was no more than a romantic sort of gratitude; and though I absolved the child from the smallest taint of mercenary motive, it was almost impossible that a sleepless night had not given her some wise counsel. She was too sensitive and quick-witted a girl, I reflected, not to have seen that she could not go on living with her mother, and that it was a necessity to find a niche somewhere. All these young men saw this also, though they knew no more than the fact that they were prayed to consider Mrs. Bal an elder sister of "Miss Ballantree," therefore they were hastening to offer her sheltering niches, more or less desirable. In other circumstances, they would have waited a few days, long enough at least for Barrie to know which was which, and get their features and some of their characteristics ticketed with the right labels; but as it was, each saw he had no time to waste if he didn't want his friend or foe to get in ahead of him. While we were at the Castle, looking at Mons Meg (which recalled Thrieve) and the banqueting-hall of armour with its faded banners and fadeless memories; gaping at the mysterious place over the entrance door where, in a bricked-up alcove, a baby skeleton was found wrapped in cloth of gold embroidered with a royal monogram; walking through the wainscoted room where Mary of Guise died; gazing at the long mislaid crown of Bruce ("the Honours of Scotland"); seeing sweet Queen Margaret's Chapel where the Black Rood lay till it went in state down the hill to make Holyrood holy; peering at the wall-stairway down which the Douglas boys were dragged after the "black dinner"; admiring the kilted soldiers; and drinking in the view over hill and valley and mountains, towns and nestling villages, the vast, colourful checkerboard of beautiful Mary Stuart's journeys, flights and fightings: while beholding treasures and splendours which are as the red drops of Scotland's heart's blood, man after man took his place at Barrie's side and became her cicerone. Each talked with her awhile, and after a few brief minutes allowed a change of partners, the discarded one humbly retiring to Mrs. James's side. It was really funny; or at least so it seemed until enough self-assertion came back to admit of my entering the lists. Then I promptly lost my sense of humour, and had no wish to look for it. I wanted only to look at Barrie, who was unusually flushed and bright of eye.
By this time there wasn't much left to tell her about the Castle or the Castle Rock. When I began to work off my erudition by mentioning the name of Edwin, for whom Edinburgh was named, and who made it a royal borough in the eleventh century, she said:
"Oh, Mr. Douglas's cousin, the other Douglas, told me that!"
When I related the tale of that gallant Francis who was able to lead Sir Thomas Randolph and thirty soldiers up the perilous rocks to surprise the Castle at night, having learned the way when sweethearting down in the Grass-market, Barrie confessed that she had heard the story already. Jack Morrison had found it in some old book he had bought at the shop under John Knox's house, in the High Street. There was no use trying to work up or classify historic thrills for her in this vast heart of Scotland; she had been given them all, with generous additional thrills from private hearts, Scottish and American.
"Has every single one of those chaps proposed to you?" I flung the question in her face. "You might tell your Mentor."
"Oh, not Donald Douglas's cousin!" she answered hastily. "He's engaged to some one in the Highlands."
"Good heavens, then all the rest have done it, in a bunch!"
"I think you're horrid!" she said indignantly. "I've always heard that girls don't tell such things to any one."
"They do to their brothers—of the pen, if they have any such. Besides, you don't need to tell. I'm a regular Sherlock Holmes where people I—like, are concerned, and I know what's been happening to you this afternoon. A manna-rain of proposals, in the wilderness of Edinburgh Castle. Many girls would have accepted them all, and then sorted them out to see which they liked best; but I have a shrewd idea from the look of the gentlemen's backs that they are now one and all your adopted brethren."
"It's almost wicked to joke on such a subject," Barrie reproached me, trying not to laugh, "and it's not nice of you to make fun of them, just because you consider yourself superior, as an author who is always analyzing people's minds and motives. It's not as if they were so much in love with me that they had to propose in a hurry for their own sakes. It's not that at all; but only because they thought it wouldn't be very convenient for—Barbara to have me live with her, travelling about so much, or if she should marry. So they felt as if something ought to be done for me, you know, as soon as possible."
"Sainted, unselfish young men!" I murmured. "But I don't consider myself superior, as it happens. I'd do the same thing in a minute if I thought there were the faintest chance of your giving me an answer different from theirs. Is there?"
"Don't talk nonsense!" she exclaimed. "But of course, I'm happy to say, I know you don't mean it."
"Well, if you're happy to say that, I'll leave you your fond illusions for the present," I returned. "But, as girl to man, tell me; don't you rather like being proposed to?"
"It's very exciting," she admitted. "I never expected, somehow, that such a thing could happen to me."
"Oh, didn't you? Why not?"
"Well, there's my red hair, which I always thought was fatal, until I saw my mother's portrait—and heard Mr. Somerled say he liked painting red-haired women."
"Red hair can be fatal, though not in the way you appear to mean," said I. "Which thrilled you more, the Castle or the proposals?"
"Oh, the Castle, of course!" she answered scornfully. "After the first one or two, they seemed like interruptions."
All five of my rivals (there might have been six, had it not been for the girl in the Highlands) having had their medicine, I was allowed almost as much as I wanted of Barrie's society during the walk down from the Castle Rock, and to Holyrood. Together she and I walked through that most romantic royal house of all the world; and long as I may live, never shall I forget those hours. Chestnut-tressed Mary herself could not have been lovelier than the red-haired girl who walked beside me, and when the royal beauty came on a day of chill, northern haar, to her Scottish realm, she was only a year older than this child we all love but think too young for love. Yet already, at nineteen, Mary was a King's widow, and had been Queen of France.
It was of Barrie's romance, Barrie's future, I thought most, as we wandered side by side through the haunted rooms where Mary danced and loved and suffered, where her grandson Charles I of England came, and left his ruby Coronation ring for remembrance, and where Prince Charlie, her far-off descendant, made hearts flutter at the great ball given in his honour. But it was the past which had all Barrie's thoughts, unless she sent a few to the man who had stayed at home reading his letters, instead of following in her train.
We looked at Queen Mary's bed with its tattered splendour of brocade: the box filled with relics of her short reign in Holyrood: her neat embroideries, her tear bottle, and Darnley's glove, which Barrie thought Mary would not like to have kept with the other things: and then, having saved the best for the last, I took the girl up to the little supper-room where Rizzio was murdered. Barrie gazed at everything in silence: and now we could both be silent when we liked, for the chastened ones had meekly trooped off to show Mrs. James the Abbey, or Royal Chapel, where Mary and Darnley were married, and where a hundred things had happened, things connected with others whose romances were as poignant if less well remembered here, than hers.
We had come up the secret stairway in the wall, because I wanted Barrie to miss no thrill this place could give; but it was not the thought of the murder-scene which most caught her imagination. She listened to my dramatic version of the tragedy of the room, and of the dark closet where Rizzio tried to hide, and shuddered a little; but soon she was drawn, as if beckoned by an unseen hand, to the bevelled mirror with scalloped edge, which Mary brought with her to Scotland from France, a dim oval full of memories, may be, of dear, dead days at Amboise and Chenonceaux.
"What does that poor piece of blurred glass make you think of so intently?" I asked, when Barrie had stood silently staring down the veiled vista of mystery for many minutes. "You look like a young modern Cassandra, crystal gazing."
"So I am!" the girl almost whispered. "I'm trying to see something in the mirror—the things she saw in it—or to see her eyes looking into mine. If anything can be haunted, it is this mirror. Think of what has passed before it. But do you know, I don't believe it has ever really intelligently seen anything since the day Queen Mary went away from Holyrood. I feel she ran here, to take one last look into her mirror, and to bid it farewell as she bade farewell to France, gazing and gazing as the land faded from her sight forever. Then, when she'd gone, the glass she loved grew dim as it is now, and blind because it could no longer give back the brightness of her eyes. There's nothing left in it now but sad dreams and memories of the past."
"Did you ever," I asked, "go down into the cellar at midnight on All Hallow E'en with a candle and a mirror and wish to see the face of your future husband?"
"No, indeed," Barrie answered emphatically; "we had no such tricks at Hillard House."
"Now, in this mirror, if any in the world, you might be able to see such a vision, not only at midnight, but on an ordinary afternoon, like this for instance," said I. "Suppose you stop thinking of Queen Mary for a minute and concentrate on yourself. Wish with all your heart for the face of the man you'll love, the man you'll marry, to appear under this clouded surface of glass."
Barrie looked somewhat impressed by my mysterious tone as well as the overwhelming romance of her surroundings. She put her face close to the mirror, and I was about to profit by the situation I'd led up to when some one stepped between us and looked over the girl's shoulder. It was Somerled, who must have come in just in time to overhear my advice, and take advantage of it for himself. But he could not wholly blot me out of the mirror. Both our faces were there, to be seen by Barrie, "as in a glass darkly." She gave a little cry of surprise, and wheeled round to smile at Somerled.
"You came after all!" she exclaimed, forgetting or pretending to forget the solemn rite which had engaged us. But I must admit I was in a mood to be almost superstitious about it. I had prophesied to the girl that she would see reflected the face of the man she was destined to love and marry. An instant later she had seen two faces, Somerled's and mine. Would she love one man, and marry the other? Or would only one of these two men count in her life?
Perhaps Queen Mary's mirror knew. It looked capable of knowing—and keeping—any secret of the human heart.
That night—oh, my prophetic soul!—Morgan Bennett saw Barrie at the theatre, and looked at her through his opera-glasses almost as often as he looked at Mrs. Bal in her gay, exciting comedy-drama, "The Nelly Affair." The play had been written for the actress and suited her exactly. In fact its whole success was made by her magnetic personality, her beauty, and her dresses. She scarcely left the stage, and had something to do or say every minute, yet I noticed that she found opportunities to observe where Bennett's eyes were straying. As for Barrie, she saw nothing, heard nothing, thought of nothing, but her mother, glorious Barbara, who for this evening was Nelly Blake, a girl of eighteen, seeming not a day older. Barrie, in a white dress, with her hair in two long braids (Mrs. Bal thought she was too young to wear it done up), sat among us in an ecstasy. Was ever any one so beautiful, so clever, so altogether marvellous as darling Barbara? This was as it should be; and we who knew the girl, knowing that she had never before seen a play, nor the inside of a theatre, thought her pathetic; but Morgan Bennett, who did not know her, merely thought her pretty and wondered how he could get to know her. The very flash of his opera-glasses was interested and eager; and when I proudly took the girl behind the scenes to compliment Mrs. Bal after the first act, I was far from surprised to see Bennett appear almost immediately in the same mystic region. Barrie and I were with Barbara in a little room which she intended to use as a boudoir for the week of her engagement; and when an employé of the theatre announced Mr. Bennett, she looked annoyed. For an instant she hesitated visibly; but as he was probably aware that she had visitors, there was no good excuse for sending him away. Part of Mrs. Bal's success with men consists in knowing what kind of snubs they will meekly endure from a lovely spoiled woman, what kind they neither forget nor forgive. She sent word to Mr. Bennett that he might come in.
He accepted the invitation promptly, and Barbara, with quick presence of mind, introduced him to her little "sister Barribel."
"Barribel! That's a pretty name," he said, shaking hands with Barrie, his eyes on her face. "Miss Barribel Ballantree, I suppose."
"You may suppose so!" returned Mrs. Bal, laughing.
"I saw this young lady sitting out in front," he went on, instead of congratulating the actress at once on the success of the first act, which had "gone" splendidly with the large audience. "I said to myself there must be a relationship between you two: and I was wondering."
"Well, you needn't bother to wonder any more," broke in Mrs. Bal, very gay but slightly shrill. "I must have spoken to you about Barrie?"
"'Barrie' is what you call her?" said he, smiling at the girl. "That's a very nice pet name, and suits her, somehow. You surely never spoke of your sister to me. I shouldn't have forgotten." He added the last words with a look intended as a compliment for Barrie; and any woman wishing to monopolize his attention exclusively might have been pardoned for thinking that he had looked at her more than often enough in the circumstances. In his big way he is attractive, to certain types of women, very attractive indeed, and I could understand that his millions might not be his only charm for Mrs. Bal. He has eyes which can be fierce as an eagle's; the strong, almost cruel jaw of the predestined millionaire who will mount to success at any cost; a pleasure-loving mouth, and—when he is pleased—a boyish smile. When he is severely displeased, I shouldn't care to be there to see him, especially if he were displeased with me. But I suspect Mrs. Bal to be one of those women who could not love a man unless she were afraid of him. In that may have lain the secret of Somerled's former fascination for her, if it existed.
"If I've forgotten to mention Barrie, it's because I'm always talking about you, when we're together," Mrs. Bal excused herself with dainty impertinence of the sort Bennett will stand from her. "If it isn't about you, it's about your motors—or some affair of yours."
"I thought you, and your affairs were generally the subject of our conversations," retorted the big man, still looking more at the young girl than at the woman. "Miss Ballantree is your affair——"
"She has only just become so," Barbara hurried to explain. "Her grandmother, who thoroughly disapproves of me and all actresses, has kept the child shut up in a moated grange all her life. It's a wonder I didn't forget her existence! She had begun to seem like a sort of dream-sister, until she suddenly dropped in on me yesterday, and announced that she'd run away from home. I'm simply enchanted to have the darling with me, for my own sake, or I should be if I hadn't such a beautiful, unselfish nature that I find I worry myself into fits about her when she's out of my sight. To-night I couldn't half act, because I was thinking about her all the time, and wondering what on earth I could do to make her happy. I foresee I shan't be able to study or rehearse or anything, while she's getting into mischief in a big hotel. I shall send her away though to-morrow, for a few days, with some very dear friends of hers, who will give her a good time until I settle down and feel at home with this new play—in which, by the way, you don't seem to take the slightest interest. You haven't said a word about it, or how it went, or how I acted."
"You know better than that——" Bennett was beginning when Barrie (to whom, despite his size, he was a figure of no importance) broke in without being aware that he was speaking.
"Oh, Barbara, you won't make me go to-morrow; You promised——"
"If she promised, we must make her stick to her promise," said Bennett, forgiving the interruption, and perhaps willing to tease Mrs. Bal.
The beautiful Barbara, however, had gathered together her scattered wits, and was too wise to show that she was being teased. "I know, I meant to keep you with me this Edinburgh week anyhow," she answered the girl. "But, sweetest, you won't want to hold me to the promise, no matter what Mr. Bennett or any one else says, if I tell you that I'm worrying over your being here? I don't feel it's the right thing for you. And it's certain Grandma will change her will if she hears you're living with me. It's a miracle I didn't dry up in my part to-night from sheer anxiety and absent-mindedness. You'd hate me to fail through you, dear one, I know."
"Oh, yes—anything but that," Barrie exclaimed, tears in her eyes.
Alas, if only some other name than that of M. P. Bennett had added itself to her list of admirers, all might have been well for Barrie with sister Barbara, at least for a little while! As it was, the girl's fate was sealed. So much the better for me: yet my fool of a heart ached for her disappointment, instead of leaping for joy at my own good luck.
Mrs. Bal looked at the girl with an odd expression on her charming face, painted for the stage. There was compunction, if not remorse, in the big brown eyes, but there was no relenting. She liked Barrie and enjoyed her childish adoration, but she loved herself, and she wanted to "land" Morgan Bennett. The girl would have to be sacrificed; still, those rising tears gave Barbara pain to see. She would really have been glad to make Barrie happy, if the creature's youth and beauty had not been an hourly peril for her.
"Don't look so disconsolate, dear," she said. "You're going to have a glorious time. And if wet eyelashes are a compliment to me, they're just the opposite to Mr. Norman."
"Is it Mr. Norman the novelist?" Bennett wanted to know.
"Yes. And he's going to let Barrie help him with a story—or else he's putting her into one, I'm not quite sure which."
Barbara threw him this bit of information with a sweetly casual air, but it was one of the cleverest things she ever did, on the stage or off. Somehow, with a smile that flashed over us all with a special meaning for each—affection for Barrie, a benediction for me, and a secret understanding for Bennett—she contrived to convey to him the idea that her little sister was already bespoken. No use his being led away by rosebud innocence! It was engaged, and if he were wise he would be true to his love for the full-blown rose.
"Just think, pet, what an honour to be taken about by such famous people as Basil Norman and Aline West," she went on, "and to have them for your best friends. You'd have had a horrid dull time with them gone, for I should have had to leave you alone a lot. And next week, when they bring you back to me at Glasgow, your future will be all beautifully arranged."
"But Mrs. West isn't well enough to go to-morrow——" Barrie pleaded.
"No. But Mrs. Vanneck will chaperon you for a few days. You ought to be frightfully happy, seeing Scotland with those you love while your poor Barbara works for her daily bread. And now you must go out in front again with Mr. Norman, if you don't want to miss the beginning of the second act. Mr. Bennett has seen it, so he can stop with me five minutes if he likes, till my call."
Barrie had been at rehearsal, and would no doubt have been quite willing to miss any part of the play not graced by Mrs. Bal's presence on the stage; but short as was the time since she made her mother's acquaintance, she had learned to know the lady well enough to realize when she was not wanted. She went with me like a lamb resigned to the slaughter; and so, I was sure, would she start with us next day. But just here, I think, is the place to write down what had meanwhile happened to Mrs. James. If it hadn't been for that happening, perhaps we should not, after all, have snatched the girl away so easily from Somerled. And the funny thing was—for it had its funny side, as even he must have seen—the funny thing was, that all was his own fault. When he planned that wonderful surprise for Mrs. James, he little thought it would be the means of stealing his trump card from him. Generous he may be, and is, I must admit; but it's not likely that he would have been unselfish enough to put himself in a hole for Mrs. James's happiness, especially as he could have got just as much credit from Barrie by waiting a few weeks—say, until the end of the "heather moon."
To have brought in the "surprise" in its proper order, I should have worked it into my notes between our sight-seeing expedition in the afternoon, and the theatre in the evening, for it was common property by that time. We all knew (from Mrs. James, not from himself), what a noble, magnificent, wonderful, glorious, altogether pluperfect fellow Somerled was, to have interested himself in her behalf, and to have given her such happiness as all her friends had thought her mad to dream of through the dreary years.
Always, it seems, she believed that her husband, who disappeared seventeen years ago, was alive, and only waiting for success to crown his ambitions, before returning to her. Everybody else thought he had drowned himself, because of some professional trouble. But Mrs. James's faith has been the great romance of her life; and Barrie (or the little woman herself, I don't know which) told Somerled the story the day they left Carlisle in his car. Some details caught his attention, and made him wonder if Mrs. James's instinct were not more right than other people's reason.
When Somerled went to America as a boy, he travelled in the steerage. On board the same ship was a man calling himself James Richard, a man of something over thirty, in whom Somerled became interested. They made friends, though they gave each other no intimate confidences; and James Richard made one or two remarks which suggested that he had been a doctor. Evidently he was a man of culture, interested in many things, including chemistry and Scottish history. After landing in New York the two met occasionally by appointment, and the older man spoke of an invention which, if he could get the help of some millionaire to perfect it, ought to make his fame and fortune, and revolutionize anaesthetics; but Somerled had thought little of this at the time. So many men he met in those days had queer fads by means of which they hoped to achieve glory. Soon, even before he himself reached success, Somerled and James Richard drifted apart. The rising artist forgot the ship-acquaintance with whom, owing to the difference in their ages and interests, he had never had more than casual acquaintance. It was not until he heard the story of Mrs. James's husband, the clever doctor who loved Scottish history and had invented a new anaesthetic just before disappearing seventeen years ago, that he remembered his shipmate, James Richard. Then he recalled his appearance; and the descriptions tallied. A scar on the forehead was a distinguishing mark with the man supposed to have drowned himself and the man who had travelled to America in the steerage. Somerled cabled at once to New York, instructing a firm of private detectives to trace James Richard, an Englishman, probably a doctor, who had landed in New York from a certain ship on a certain date.
The first reply was not very encouraging. The man had left New York many years ago, and no one knew where he had gone. But the next cablegram brought news that James Richard, or some one answering to the name and description had been tracked to Chicago. There he had practised as a doctor with some success, but had fallen seriously ill, had given up his business, and had again disappeared. The detective "on the job" was going to Colorado to look for him, as the climate of that state had been recommended to Richard by a fellow practitioner.
On the Monday morning after our arrival in Edinburgh, a third message had come. This announced that the doctor had left Colorado and gone to California, where he was now living at Riverside, with a rising practice; but that he was considered a "crank," because he constantly besieged rich men to start a laboratory in which to work out his theories. Two or three had half promised their help, but for some reason or other the financial schemes had fallen through. Still the man never appeared to lose hope. Having received this news, Somerled wired direct to the doctor, offering him as much money as he needed, if, before anything further was settled, he would come over to Scotland and reveal himself to his wife.
Up to this time, Somerled had said nothing to Mrs. James, except that he hoped to give her a pleasant surprise; and told her even this only because she planned to go back to Carlisle, now that Barrie was with her mother. Naturally Somerled had several important reasons for wishing the little woman to stay; but the one, he alleged, was his desire to see what she thought of the "surprise" when it came.
He, of course, must have had visions of keeping this useful queen of spades up his sleeve, that he might be ready to trump one of our knavish tricks with her, at any moment; but the gods fought against him for once. Just before theatre-time, arrived a long cablegram from James Richard, alias Richard James. He thanked Somerled enthusiastically (Mrs. James showed the message to me, and to every one of us), accepted his loan, believing that eventually it could be repaid, and was more than happy to hear news of his wife, whom he had left only for her own good, because at that tune he considered himself disgraced and ruined. He had intended suicide, but the thought of his invention had changed his mind and plans at the last moment. He had gone to the new world to find what the old had denied him, and after a hundred disappointments he was to be rewarded, through Somerled. He asked now for nothing better than to return, but only for long enough to see his wife, and take her back to California with him. To his deep regret, however, he could not start at once, as he had broken his leg and would not be able to travel for several weeks at least. Would she come to him as soon as she could settle her affairs?
I imagine Somerled must have been sorely tempted not to show this message, for it would rob him of Mrs. James and leave him where he had been after his quarrel with Aline, minus a chaperon for Barrie, if he could contrive to snatch the girl from Mrs. Bal. But he had said too much about the "surprise" to suppress developments now. Besides, it would have been almost inhuman to delay the meeting of the husband and wife, so long parted. Neither would have forgiven him if he had coolly kept them apart for his own convenience; but so grateful, so adoring to her hero was Mrs. James, that if "the doctor" had not been ill and needing her, I think of her own free will she would have offered to stop in Edinburgh for a few days to "see what happened." As it was, there was no question of her staying. She and Somerled arranged that she should leave for Carlisle by the first train possible in the morning. At home she was to settle her few affairs temporarily, and catch a quick ship for New York, whence she would hurry on to California.
Somerled gave her advice for the journey (and perhaps something more substantial), but he must have seen that, though virtue might be its own reward, he was unlikely to get any other. Mrs. Bal had lent Barrie to us, and without a woman to aid and abet him, it seemed to me that he was powerless. Such chaperons as Mrs. James don't grow on blackberry bushes even in Scotland, where blackberries, if not gooseberries, are the best in the world. Somerled had done for himself.
Oh, there was no doubt of it this time! Not only had we, in the game of chess we were quietly playing with him, got his little white queen in check; we had swept her off the board.
Happenings began thick and fast the morning after.
The first thing I heard was, from Aline, that at the theatre last night (probably just after she sent us away) Mrs. Bal had told Morgan Bennett in so many words that Barrie was practically engaged to me. After a week's trip in my society it was to be expected that she would arrive in Glasgow to ask her elder sister's blessing.
This, Aline thought, necessitated our getting off at once, lest Bennett should contrive to meet the girl alone somehow, and question her. If he did this, the "fat would be in the fire" for Mrs. Bal, and perhaps for me too.
"The sooner the better," said I; for I was impatient to spirit the girl away from Somerled, and turn her thoughts from him to me. If I prayed to the heather moon for help, I felt that I ought to succeed; for the man who can have a girl of eighteen to himself (not counting a few chaperons lying about loose) in a motor-car for a week, passing through the loveliest country in the world, and can't make her forget for his sake some other fellow she's known only a few hours longer, must be a born duffer. This I dinned into my consciousness.
It was to be my first real chance with Barrie; and though never in my life before have I made serious love to any flesh-and-blood girl, I've made so much with my pen to the most difficult and diverse heroines, that I had a certain belief in my own powers, once they had free play.
The second thing that happened this morning of happenings, however, was a slight setback, just enough of a setback to let me see that the heather moon is a goddess who exacts more wooing from her votaries than I had given. Or else, that she has her favourites, and is more ready to look with a kindly eye on a man born to the heather than one who comes from afar to write it up.
Barrie, it appeared, had had a "scene" with Barbara. She had insisted with tears and (according to Mrs. Bal) stampings of foot, that she would go to the Waverley station with Mrs. James and see her off for Carlisle.
Mrs. James was to be taken to the train by Somerled, in his car; and as no one but Barrie had been invited, this meant that the girl would return with him alone. To be sure, it would not take five minutes for the Gray Dragon to slip from the Waverley end of Princes Street back to the Caledonian. On the other hand, it was evident that Mrs. James must have a special reason for choosing the Waverley station, when she could just as well have gone from our own; and Aline and I could see only one. Somerled wanted to snatch five minutes alone with Barrie; and he was not the man to waste a single one of the five. The question was, what use did he intend to make of his time? None of us could guess, for Somerled is a puzzle too hard to read. Not even Aline (who was so nervous that, figuratively speaking, she started at every sound in the enemy's camp) believed that Somerled would try to run away with the girl. I soothed her by saying that I thought it very doubtful whether Somerled would ask the girl to marry him, even if everything were in his favour. I still tried to believe that in his opinion she was too young and had seen too little of life to settle down as a married woman. He might be in love with her—to me it was beginning to seem impossible that a man could know her and not be in love—but with a strong, self-controlled man of Somerled's calibre, falling in love and marrying need not be the same thing.
Mrs. Bal, after the "scene" (in which she too, apparently, played a stormy part) had angrily consented to give Barrie her own way, but only on the girl's threat to decline making the trip with us, if thwarted. Something in Barrie's eyes had warned the lady not to go too far, and on her promise to return directly Mrs. James had gone, Mrs. Bal sulkily waived her objections.
"Why don't you, too, see Mrs. James off?" suggested Aline. "You've been great friends. She ought to be complimented. And you might take her some flowers. That would please Barrie, who is now worshipping Ian as a tin saint on wheels because he has found Mrs. James's husband and offered to finance him to success. You ought to do something."
I thought this a good idea, and on the top of it had one of my own, which I didn't mention to Aline, lest it should fail. Not only did I buy flowers, the prettiest and most expensive I could find (worthy of Barrie or Mrs. Bal), but a box of sweets, another of Scotch shortbread, a few cairngorm brooches, and amethyst and silver thistles picked up at random, and a copy of Aline's and my last book which I found (well displayed) on the station book-stall. When Aline sees only one copy she will not buy it, as she thinks it a pity the book should disappear from public view; but this was an occasion of importance, and I didn't hesitate to pluck the last fruit from the bough.
When Mrs. James, Barrie, and Somerled arrived (Vedder being left in charge of the car) there was I waiting, laden with offerings. I stuck to the party till the end, waving my farewell as the train slowly moved out, and then I summoned up courage (or impudence, depending on the point of view) to ask if Somerled would take me back. "I walked here," I said, "so as to do my little shopping for Mrs. James, and I came so fast I've hardly got my breath back."
I was prepared for some excuse to keep me out of the car; but I wronged Somerled. If any one looked disappointed it was Barrie, not he. He said, "Certainly; with pleasure," and there was nothing in his voice to contradict the courtesy of his words.
Thus, with surprising ease, I robbed him of the five minutes alone with Barrie which he had planned. And though she sat in front with him—as she had come, perhaps—and I was alone in my glory behind, they could have no private conversation.
When I went up to bid Aline good-bye (we were starting soon for Linlithgow and Stirling), I told her of my small triumph; but it gave her no great pleasure.
"How do we know what he said to the girl going to the train?" she asked suspiciously. "If there's anything up, it's certain that James woman is in it. I'm sure she's warned Ian against you and me as well as Mrs. Bal. She's as shrewd as a gimlet in her own funny way. You've remarked that yourself. And she worships Ian, and thinks Barrie a little angel abandoned in a wicked world. So if Ian wanted to talk, he wouldn't mind Mrs. James. You'd better keep your eyes open this week, and notice whether the girl seems dreamy and absent-minded, as if she expected something to happen—something they may have arranged between them this morning."
I assured Aline that I needed no urging to keep my eyes on Barrie. She then told me for the second time that she intended joining our party as soon as Somerled left Edinburgh to follow us, as—she thought—he surely would. "He wouldn't have gone a step while that girl was here with Mrs. Bal," she exclaimed, almost fiercely, "but in spite of all he's said about seeing old landmarks and looking up old friends, he'll be off after you when you've taken Barrie away. Anyhow, I'm going to see something of him while he's here if I can, for we are friends! He's supposed to have forgiven me, and he can't refuse to come and cheer up the invalid. I shall do the very best I can for myself—and when I find he means to be off I shall mention casually, as a kind of coincidence, that I'm going too, the same day, to join you; that you've wired or something, and that Maud Vanneck and her husband have accepted an invitation from Morgan Bennett to visit his sister, at that Round House Mrs. Bal talked of. Perhaps Ian will offer to take me with him. I do hope so. But I can't ask."
As a matter of fact, poor Aline had racked her brains how to dispose of the married Vannecks when she should be ready to take her place in Blunderbore. As for George, she wished to keep and play with him, of course, partly for her own amusement, partly for the moral effect upon Somerled; but she didn't want to offend his brother and sister-in-law. Still, they had to be got rid of eventually, as Blunderbore, with all the faults of Noah's ark, has not the ark's accommodation for man and beast. It was a happy thought to angle for an invitation, through Mrs. Bal, for a few days at the Round House, as Maud Vanneck particularly desired to see "Scottish life in a private family"; and it didn't occur to her that a shooting-lodge hired by an American millionaire would not be the ideal way of accomplishing her object.
Mrs. Bal was not out of her room when we were ready to start, at eleven, so I did not see her again; but the plainest, oldest, and carrotiest of the three red-headed maids primly accompanied Barrie to the hotel door with hand-luggage. By this time Blunderbore was puffing heavily in feigned eagerness to be off, and Salomon, its owner and chauffeur, shabby and sulky as usual, was giving the car a few last oily caresses which should have been bestowed long ago in the privacy of the garage. Have I forgotten to mention in these rambling notes that Somerled's Vedder regards our Salomon with a silent yet plainly visible contempt, akin to nausea? Whenever they happen to be thrown together for a few minutes I see the smart-liveried Vedder criticizing with his mysterious eyes the mean features of the weedy Salomon; his weak face with the curious, splay mouth that falls far apart in speaking, almost as if the jaw were broken; his old cloth cap, and his thin, short figure loosely wrapped in a long, linen dust coat. Neither Aline nor I have had the courage to remonstrate with Salomon on his get up, but when Vedder regards him I burn with the desire to discharge the creature and his car, despite our contract for a month.
Barrie and I being on the spot, we could have got off, if the Vannecks—invariably late—had not been missing. In desperation I dashed into the hotel to look for them, and returned to find Somerled deep in conversation with Barrie, who was in the car. I had left her standing in the hotel doorway, with Mrs. Bal's maid: so Somerled in some way must have caused that maid to disappear, and had then forestalled me by helping Barrie into my car, tucking her comfortably in with the prettier of my two rugs.
I was just in time to hear him say "we shall meet"—but where and when the meeting was to be, I did not know. That was the last of him for the moment, however, as I had secured the two Vannecks, and we lumbered off along the good, clear road to Linlithgow. Now it was "up to me" to make my running with Barrie.
I like driving, though in traffic I am secretly nervous; but as Blunderbore provides no convenient perch for the chauffeur, and as Salomon trusts no man except himself, he took the wheel, and I was free to sit behind with my three guests.
I'd been wondering what Barrie's mood would be, for I felt in my bones that she was coming with us much against her will. She had not wanted to leave Edinburgh, and I was sure that she could only have resigned herself to doing so with Somerled and his Gray Dragon. I asked myself whether she guessed, or whether Mrs. James had put it into her head, that Aline and I had combined against what the girl no doubt believed to be her "interests." I thought it not improbable that she would openly show her distaste for the trip. As we went on, however, I began to realize that Barrie had changed subtly in the days since meeting her mother. She seemed suddenly to have grown up, to have become a woman.
Was it the heart-breaking disappointment Mrs. Bal's reception had given her? Or was it the five proposals of marriage flung at her head by those mad young men who were now—thank goodness!—being left behind us, to "dree their own wierds?" Or was it something quite different—something which she and the heather moon alone knew?
In any case, she was quiet, even dignified in her youthful way, very polite and agreeable to the Vannecks and to me. I might have flattered myself that she was happy enough, and glad of my society, if I hadn't reflected that to sulk visibly would have been to blame Mrs. Bal. Already I knew that loyalty was one of Barrie's everyday virtues. Barbara could do no wrong!
While the road (though good, and historic every step of the way) remained unalluring to the eye, we chatted about Edinburgh, Barrie rejoicing in having seen as much as she had before leaving the town. She had browsed a little among the thrilling shops of Princes Street. With one eye, so to speak, cocked up at the towering Castle Rock, with the other she had scanned the gardens, Scott's monument, and everything else worth seeing; then, with a sudden pounce, she had concentrated her gaze on immense plate glass windows displaying Scottish jewellery, Scottish books, Scottish cakes, and (to her) irrelevant Scottish tartans. Even without need of them, their witching attraction had hypnotized her to buy many of these things.
"I don't know exactly what I shall do with them," she said; "but I'm glad I've got them all, and I wish I had more!"
It was Mrs. James who had been with her in her triumphal progress through Princes Street; but it was I who had escorted her the whole wonderful, sordid, glorious, pitiful length of the old High Street, the Royal Mile of gorgeous ghosts. I had been there to see her face as she caught glimpses of dark wynds where long ago men had fought to the death and helped make history, where now colourful yet faded rags hang like ancient banners, from iron frames, giving a fantastic likeness to side streets of Naples: I had pointed out to her the stones which marked the place where famous ones had murdered or been murdered, or had sought sanctuary from murder. I had taken her all over the house of John Knox. Together we had admired the oak carving in the room where he ate his simple meals; and together we looked from the little window whence he had poured his burning floods of eloquence upon the heads of the crowd below. In the curiosity shop downstairs I had bought her a silver Heart of Midlothian. She had stared into the rich dark shadows whence start out, spirit-like, faces of old oil pictures, faces of old clocks, faces of old marble busts; and she had been so charmed by the soft voice of the young saleswoman, whose flute-like tones would lure gold from a miser's pocket, that she would have collected half the things in the shop if she had had the money. I wanted to give her bits of old jewellery and miniatures of Queen Mary and Prince Charlie which she fancied, but she would accept only the silver Heart of Midlothian, which cost no more than a few shillings; and to-day, as I took her away from Edinburgh, she was not wearing the little ornament, as I had hoped she might.
As the road grew prettier, we tore our thoughts away from Edinburgh, and gave them to the highway illumined by history. At least, Barrie gave hers, while I lent as many of mine as I could spare from her. And I had to keep my wits about me, if I were to live up to the regulation of Know-All I'd evidently attained in her eyes.
In Linlithgow we expected to see at once the famous palace where Queen Mary was born, but nothing was visible in what the French would call the place, except the Town House, a new statue, and a graceful copy of an old fountain. We had to turn up an unpromising side street to find at last a beautiful little gateway between dumpy octagonal towers, such as the old masters loved to put in the background of their pictures. Passing through was like walking into one of those pictures, getting round the hidden corner as one always longs to do on canvas. Before our eyes rose majestically the colossal shell of a palace, with carved golden walls, a vast courtyard, cyclopean round towers, and wonderful windows full of sky and dreams. Close by was the noble church where James IV had his vision warning him not to go to war with England.
Somerled had talked to Barrie about Linlithgow, doubtless in the hope of making her think of him when there. He had called it the "finest domestic architectural ruin in all Scotland," and told her of Lord Rosebery's suggestion to restore and make of it a great national museum. I was glad for every reason that Somerled wasn't with us, and, for one, because he would have overshadowed me entirely with his knowledge of architecture, which he contrives to use picturesquely, not ponderously. All I could do was to rhapsodize in a way Barrie likes well enough when she can get nothing better, painting for her a rough word-picture of the palace in days when rich gilding still glittered on the quaint wall statues, when crystal jets spouted from the lovely fountain, green with moss now as with thick verdigris—when knights in armour rode into the quadrangle to be welcomed by fair ladies, while varlets led tired horses to distant stables. Those were the days when the Livingstons were keepers of the palace for the King, long before they lost their lands and titles for love of Prince Charlie; days when the memory of Will Binnock was honoured still, that "stout earle" who helped wrest Linlithgow from English Edward's men by smuggling soldiers into the palace precincts, concealed in a load of hay.
We wandered almost sadly through the splendid rooms where Queen Mary first saw the light, the week her father died: through "the King's room," with its secret staircase under a trap door, and its view over a blue lake where swans floated like winged water-lilies. Then, when we had bought a specially bound copy of "Marmion" (which ought to be read at Linlithgow), and post cards and souvenirs that seemed important at the moment and useless afterward, we took the road to Stirling.
There was no time to stop in Falkirk (when is there ever time to stop in motoring?), for the car was running unusually well for Blunderbore. So instead of pausing to meditate over battle scenes, as Vanneck pretended he wished to do, we sailed through the long, straight street which seems practically to constitute the town. Here we had almost our first glimpse of industrial Scotland as opposed to picturesque Scotland, which was in these August days becoming the playground of Britain and America. Falkirk is a coalfield as well as a battlefield, and the murk of collieries and iron works darkens the sky as once did the smoke of gunpowder: but the place holds its old interest for the mind; and not far off we came to the Wallace Monument; then to Bannockburn. Because of Barrie's love for the Bruce, we got out and walked to the Bore Stone where he stood to direct the battle so fatal to the English. After this we were close to St. Ninian's, and to Stirling, though the day was still young; but there was lots to see, and I wanted to go on before dusk, to spend the night in Crieff. We lunched at one of those nice old-fashioned hotels whose heraldic names alone are worth the money; and as we started on foot to walk through the ancient town and mount to its high crown, the Castle, I began to appreciate Aline's arrangements for my benefit.
Maud Vanneck being a model of wifely jealousy, kept Fred to herself, and Barrie was my companion. This was delightful. No such good thing had come to me since making her acquaintance. On the way up the quaint, steep street, there came a shower of rain, and I had to shelter her with my umbrella. It was an umbrella of blessedly mean proportions, which meant that she must keep close to my side, and I said, "Come what may I shall have this and a few other things to remember!"
Up in the Castle, we two decided that we had after all made a mistake in calling Edinburgh Castle Scotland's heart. Here was that organ, and we could almost feel it throbbing under our feet. We forgot that we had selected several other hearts for Scotland. Here was the right one at last!
What a view to look out upon, with the One Girl by your side! Over our heads and far away, clouds turned the rolling mountains to snowpeaks that dazzled in the sun, and under our eyes seemed to lie all Scotland, spread out like a vast brocaded mantle of many colours: the plain of the Forth, the Ochil hills and the hills of Fife; the purple peaks round Loch Lomond, and here and there a glitter of water like broken glass on a floor of gold. Ten counties we could see, and eight great battlefields which helped to make Scotland what it is. The horizon was carved in shapes of azure—strange, wild, mountainous shapes; and the noble heads of Ben Lomond, Ben Ledi, and Ben A'an were laurelled and jewelled for us by memories of Scott.
Sitting where Queen Mary sat on her velvet cushions, and looking through her peephole in the thick stone wall, I was almost irresistibly tempted to make love to Barrie. My heart so went out to her that it seemed she must respond: and the Vannecks had wandered to another part of the battlements; but she kept me to my task of cicerone. I had to answer a dozen questions. I had to tell her about Agricola forging his chain of forts across the narrow land between the Clyde, and the Forth "that bridles the wild Highlander." She would be satisfied with nothing less than the unabridged stories of Edward I's siege of this "gray bulwark of the North," the murder of the powerful Douglas by his treacherous host King James II; the building of and the mysterious curse upon Mar's Work, and twenty other human documents not half so moving, had she but known it, as the story of Basil Norman's first and only love. Once or twice I thought she guessed that I wished to speak of myself and her, and that she deliberately held me at arm's length, like a young person of the world dealing with an ineligible at the end of her second season. I almost hated King Edward, and more especially Agricola!
Then, worst of all, before we had half finished our tour of the Castle and its wonders, rain began to fall out of one cloud stationed directly over our heads in the midst of a sun-bright sky. I could almost have believed that Somerled in spite had sent it after us, like a wet blood-hound to track us down. We took shelter in the room where the Douglas was murdered; and who could make love against such a background? Not I: though perhaps gay King James V might have been equal to it. One does not hear that any ghost dogged his footsteps as he crept joyously in disguise out from that dark little chamber into the subterranean passage, which led the "Guid man of Ballangeich" to his Haroun Al-raschid adventures in the night.
The next few days live in my memory as dreams live. They were beautiful. They would have been more beautiful if I could have flattered myself that Barrie was learning to care for me in the way she might have cared for Somerled, if we had left them in peace. But she was always the same—except that, as the world grew more enchanting in beauty and poetic associations, she blossomed into a sweet expansiveness, losing the reserve in which she had been veiled when first we started.
It ought to have been ideal, this moving from scene to scene with the one girl I ever wanted for my own, since I was thirteen and worshipped a tank mermaid in green spangles. That was the hard part! It ought to have been ideal and—it wasn't. I should think a rather well meaning Saracen chieftain who had captured a Christian maiden might have felt somewhat as I felt from day to day. He had got her. She couldn't escape from him and his fortress; but, even with her hand in his, she contrived to elude him.
So it was with me. Old Blunderbore went well on the whole, not counting a few minor ailments of second childhood which attacked him occasionally when he saw a stiff hill ahead, or when he had heard me say I was in a hurry. The Vannecks were perfection as chaperons, not through supernatural tact and unselfishness, but because Maud feared the effect upon Fred of too much Barrie. She laid herself out to charm her husband. Never an "I told you so!" Never a nagging word or look. She chatted to Fred in the car, and saw sights with him out of the car. This, she said, was almost like a second honeymoon. But of the heather moon she had never heard. It was ours—Barrie's and mine: yet I could not induce the girl to speak of it. For all she would say, she might have forgotten its existence. Always, especially when the heather moon tried to give us its golden blessing, an invisible presence seemed to stand between us, as if Somerled had sent his astral body to keep us apart.
As to Somerled in the flesh, there was a mystery at this time. To me at Perth came a telegram from Aline saying:
"S. has left his car and chauffeur here and gone away without a word to any one. Has he come after you? Wire immediately."
I obeyed, replying:
"Seen and heard nothing of S. Will let you have all news. Hope you will do the same by me. Am sending you our route, but suppose you will arrive in few days."
Her answer came to St. Andrews, at a jolly, golfing sort of hotel where I ought to have been as happy as the day was long.
"As S. has not joined you prefer stop on here. Eyes not well yet. Mr. Bennett's sister has influenza. She would prefer Maud and Fred visit Round House later—say toward end of next week."
I had no faith in that attack of influenza. The microbe was probably hatched in conversation between Aline and Mrs. Bal, who had by this time become tremendous allies. My theory was that Aline, knowing Somerled not to be near Barrie, had settled down to enjoy the fleeting moment. She might not be happy, but I could understand that the society of Mrs. Bal (who evidently wanted her) was preferable to motoring with a brother, and a girl of whom she was jealous.
The same day came a long expensive wire to Barrie from her mother:
"So sorry darling but unfortunately must put you off. Don't come first of Glasgow week. Wait till Saturday, arriving late afternoon or evening. Mrs. West says her friends and brother will like keeping you till then so you needn't worry. We can have nice visit together later and settle everything for you in some delightful way. Making plans now. Don't forget you for a moment. Best reasons for delay. Will explain when we meet. Sending you letter with little present of money. Don't stint yourself. Write often. Tell me all that interests you. Ever your loving Barbara."
"Why do you suppose she can't have me the first of the week?" Barrie asked piteously, when she had shown this message.
"I can't say, I'm sure," I cautiously replied. This was literally true. I could not say: but I could guess. And a letter from Aline which came two or three days later, confirmed my Sherlockian deductions.
"My dear old Boy" [she wrote]: "I was so glad to get your telegram, and meant to have written at once, but waited on second thoughts to have a little more news. It is a relief to know that Ian hasn't followed that girl. Of course I feel it as much for your sake as my own, for he is a dangerous rival to any man. It is odd where he can have gone; though he may turn up here again any day, as he has left his car and chauffeur. If he had wanted to be nice, he might have offered me the use of both while he was away; but I suppose he blames me for lending myself to Mrs. Bal's wishes about Barrie. Very unreasonable of him, as you have a perfect right to do what you like with the car you've hired, and if Mrs. Bal didn't want her daughter to see too much of him, what fault is it of mine?
"I try to amuse myself as well as I can and forget my worries, however, and Mrs. Bal and Morgan Bennett are being very nice. I don't think he's proposed yet, or she would have told me, for we're great friends; but she's pretty sure to land him before he leaves for America, as he is to do the end of her Glasgow week, for a short business trip. I expect to be asked to congratulate them the night before he sails! What a good thing for her and every one that the Vannecks can stand by you longer than we planned. I think, unless you wire me that Ian has appeared upon the scene, I'll stay with Mrs. Bal for her Glasgow week, as she has invited me, and then, when the Vannecks go to the Round House, you can bring Barrie back to her mother."
This explained Mrs. Bal's "best of reasons."
Days went on, and Somerled did not come to our part of the world, which was by this time the heart of the Highlands; but I felt in my bones that Barrie was hearing from him, writing to him; that she knew what I did not know, the mystery of his absence. Of course I could have found out if she were receiving letters from him, for Somerled's handwriting is unmistakable; but villain or no villain, I had to draw the line somewhere, and I drew it at spying upon her.
Aline did go to Glasgow with Mrs. Bal. She wrote to tell me how, with Morgan Bennett in his biggest motor-car, "much higher powered and smarter than poor Ian's," she and Mrs. Bal and George Vanneck had sped away from Edinburgh on Sunday morning early, had a look at their rooms in Glasgow, and dashed on to Arrochar, where they all stopped till Monday afternoon.
"Such an exquisite road!" [said Aline]. "You would have loved it. High green bank on one side, with cataracts of bracken delicate as maidenhair; dark rocks, wrapped in velvet moss. Trees holding up screens of green lace between your eyes and the blue water of the loch. Pebbles white and round as pearls, or silver coins dropped by fairies in a big "flit." That's one of your similes! Grass running down to the edge of the water, and full of bluebells. Water the colour of drowned wallflowers. I don't believe your Highland lochs can be prettier or more idyllic, though this is so close to Glasgow.
"We have had a day going through the Kyles of Bute, too—the same party: and a marvellous run along the shores of the Clyde to Skelmorlie. Such red rocks there, and even the sand red. There was a pink haze over everything, like a perpetual sunset. I'm not sure which was better, that, or a trip to Crinan. The dearest little place at the end of the Crinan canal—just a flower-draped hotel, and a sea-wall and a lighthouse, with a distant murmur of 'Corrievrechan's tortured roar,' mingled with the crying of gulls. What a place for you and Barrie to spend your honeymoon! You see, I speak as if it were certain. Anyhow, I'm sure it all depends on yourself. Courage, mon brave!"
But that is exactly the quality which the villain of the piece lacks at present.