THE PRELUDE: AND THE PEOPLE
I
For the first time in her life, Barrie saw the door that led to the garret stairs standing ajar. It was always, always locked, as is correct, though irritating, for a door that leads to Fairyland.
In Barrie's Outer Life that her grandmother knew, and Miss Hepburn knew, and Mrs. Muir the housekeeper knew, there was—Heaven be praised!—no romance at all; for romance is an evil thing, still worse, a frivolous thing, which may be avoided for a well-brought-up girl though whopping-cough may not; and already this same evil had wrought vast damage among the MacDonalds of Dhrum. In the Inner Life of Barrie, however, there was nothing worth thinking about except romance; and the door of the garret stairs was one of the principal roads to the forbidden land.
She stopped in front of it. At first she could not believe her eyes. Her heart had given a glorious bound, which, only to have felt once in its full ecstasy, was worth the bother of being born into a family where there were no mothers or fathers, but only—ah, what an awesome only!—grim old Grandma MacDonald and Grandma MacDonald's grim old house where Carlisle ends and moorlands begin.
It is difficult to be sure of things when your heart is beating nineteen to the dozen, and the special thing, or mirage of a thing, seems—judging from all else that has happened in Outer Life—much too good to be true. Yet there it was, that streak of dull, mote-misted gold, painting what actually appeared to be a crack between the dark frame of the door and the dark old door itself—just such gold as Barrie had seen at least once a day ever since she could remember (except when mumps and measles kept her in bed) by applying an eye to the keyhole. "Fairy gold" she had named it.
The only person who ever went into the garret was Mrs. Muir, and though she had the air of making no secret of such expeditions, it had always struck Barrie as deliciously, thrillingly strange that invariably she turned the key of the stairway door upon herself the instant she was on the other side, and religiously performed the same ceremony on letting herself out. "Ceremony" really was the word, because the key was large, ancient, and important-looking, and squeaked sepulchrally while it turned. Barrie knew all this, because in spring and autumn, when Mrs. Muir paid her visits to fairylands forlorn beyond the oak door, Barrie lurked under cover of the convenient, thick, and well-placed shadow behind the grandfather clock on the landing.
It was not autumn now, which was part of the mystery, after these endless years of routine (they seemed endless to Barrie at eighteen), and she would certainly have missed the event had this not been her keyhole hour.
Somehow she had become aware—through heredity and race memory, no doubt—that looking through keyholes was caddish, a trick unworthy of any lady who was at heart a gentleman. But there are exceptions to all keyholes, and this was one, because, as none save ghosts and fairies lived or moved behind it in the garret, there was nobody to spy upon. You looked through to stimulate the romance in your starved soul and save it from death by inanition, because if romance died, then indeed the Outer Life at Hillard House would be no longer bearable.
Barrie paid her respects to the keyhole o' mornings, for two reasons. The first and commonplace reason was because Mrs. Muir was busy downstairs and had no eye to spare to see whether other eyes were glued to the wrong places. The second and more charming reason was because in the morning the golden haze floated behind the keyhole like shimmering water with the sun shining deep into it. By afternoon there was nothing left to peer into but cold gray shadow, which meant that the fairies and other inhabitants were not at home.
Mrs. Muir's motive for visiting the garret out of season was a simple one, but it was well that Barrie did not know this, for it was not at all interesting, and would have broken the music, thrown cold water on the thrill. Moths, no respecters of persons or judges of high religious reputations, had dared to nest in Mrs. MacDonald's best black cashmere dress, which had not been worn and would not be worn, except on great occasions, until next season, and had mechanically reduced it to the rate of second best. Moth-powder and moth-balls were exhausted in downstairs regions, but there was a store of both in the garret; and in her annoyance at having to ascend at an unprecedented time, and her vexation at an accident such as must happen in the best regulated families, Mrs. Muir had hurriedly returned with the wanted box, forgetting to lock the door.
Barrie could not be sure that the housekeeper was not even now in the garret; but she had to find out: and the awful thrill of uncertainty made her next step a high adventure, the adventure of her life. It was a step onto the garret stairs, and though it meant dangers of all sorts, she risked them every one, and closed the door behind her. You see, if she had not done this, any person passing along the landing—a person such as Grandma, or Janet Hepburn—would at once have seen the streak of gold, a mere yellow crack to them, and then and there would have arisen a clamour for the key.
Even with the door closed the risk remained in a lesser degree. Mrs. Muir, if she were not at this moment in the garret, might suddenly remember that she had left the door ajar, taking away the key; then she would rush back like a stout round whirlwind, and in a minute more Barrie would be a prisoner, almost like the fair bride in "The Mistletoe Bough," only there was more air in the garret than in the oak chest that shut with a spring. But Barrie was used to taking risks—risks insignificant compared with this, yet big enough to supply salt and sugar for the dry daily bread of existence.
The door shut softly, but—mercy, what creaks those steps had in them! They seemed to be vying with each other, the heartless brutes, as to which could shriek the loudest under a girl's light foot. Probably they had never seen a girl before, or if they had, it was so long ago they had forgotten. Fancy Grandma a girl! No wonder, if the steps remembered her, that they yelled——But by this time Barrie's head had arrived at the top of the steep stairs, and her eyes were peering cautiously through clouds of gold dust along the level of a floor, mountainous in its far horizon with piled chests, trunks, and furniture.
The gold poured through three very high, small dormer-windows which until now Barrie had known only from outside, staring up at the ivied house wall from the east garden. The dust lived in the garret air, and was different from, more wonderful and mysterious than, any other dust, except perhaps the dust far off in the distance at sunset, where motor-cars you could not see passed along a road invisible.
Barrie couldn't be quite certain at first whether the garret was empty of human life, or whether Mrs. Muir was likely to pounce upon her with reproaches from behind one of those immense oak posts which went up like trees to meet the high beamed roof. Or she might be concealed by an oasis of furniture. There were several such oases in the large wilderness of garret, which covered the whole upper story of the old house. But a lovely garret it was, a heavenly garret! even better than Barrie had dreamed it might be, with her eye at the keyhole of the stairway door. It was peopled with possibilities—glorious, echoing, beckoning possibilities—which made her heart beat as she could not remember its beating before.
She climbed the remaining steps regardless of squeaks, because she could not any longer bear the suspense concerning Mrs. Muir. Nothing moved in answer to the old wood's complainings, and there was no other sound, or rather there were no real sounds such as are made by people; but when Barrie reached the head of the stairs the whole garret was full, to her ears, of delicate rustlings and whisperings, sighs and footfalls and breathings, and scurryings out of sight.
No, Mrs. Muir was not here, or by this time she would be out in the open and scolding hard.
Barrie drew in deep breaths of the strange, still atmosphere which was like air that had been put to sleep years and years ago. It must have smelt exactly like this, she thought quietly, in the lost palace of La Belle Dormante when the Prince found his way in through barricading thickets. Barrie would hardly have been surprised if she had stumbled upon a Sleeping Beauty. If she had, she would have said to herself, "So that's the secret Mrs. Muir's been hiding, by keeping the door locked up. I told you so!"
The scent of the garret fascinated Barrie, and made her heart beat heavily, as if she were on the threshold of a mystery. It was made up of many odours: a faint, not unpleasant mustiness, the smell of dust, a perfume of old potpourri, and spices, cloves, and camphor for moths, a vague fragrance of rosewood and worm-eaten oak, a hint of beeswax, a tang of unaired leather and old books.
Barrie suddenly felt perfectly happy. For to-day this wonderful place with all its secrets was hers. She hardly knew what to explore first. All the really interesting things in the house seemed to have risen to the top, like cream on milk. Along a part of one wall opposite the stairs and under the east windows whence came the morning gold were ranged rough old bookcases, a kind of alms-house for indigent books, or a prison for condemned volumes. But what books! Barrie was drawn to them as by many magnets, and almost tremulously taking down one after another, she understood the reason of their banishment. Here were all the darling books which used to live down in the library, and had been exiled because she dipped into them, they being (according to Grandma and Miss Hepburn) "most unsuitable for nice-minded girls." Barrie had mourned her friends as dead, but they had been only sleeping. And there were others, apparently far more unsuitable for nice-minded girls—old leather-bound books with quaint wood engravings and thick yellow pages printed with old-fashioned "s's" like "f's." Barrie could have browsed among this company for hours, but there were so many things to see in the garret, so little time for seeing them, that she felt compelled merely to say "How do you do, and good-bye," to each allurement.
Her eyes, roaming like a pair of crusading knights in search of romance, lighted suddenly on a pile or group of furniture in a distant corner. There was other furniture in the garret, certainly more interesting to a connoisseur and hunter of antiquities; but Barrie was neither. She had contrived to seize upon a good deal of queer miscellaneous knowledge outside lesson hours, yet she did not know the difference between Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Chairs and sideboards and settees of Georgian days and earlier had been relegated to this vast pound of unwanted things, while their places were dishonourably filled downstairs by mid-Victorian monstrosities which Mrs. MacDonald instinctively approved, no doubt because they could offer no temptation to the eye. Barrie might have felt the beauty of the graceful lines if she had given her attention to these scattered relics of a past before there was a Grandma; but a group of very different furniture beckoned her curiosity.
The fact that there was a group, and that it seemed in the dimness to be alike in colour and design, suggested mystery of some sort; and, besides, it was almost impossible to imagine such furniture adorning this house.
Evidently it had been taken bodily out of one room. Why? As she asked herself this question Barrie threaded her way delicately along narrow paths between chairs, extraordinary leather or hairy cowhide trunks and thrilling bandboxes of enormous size, made quaintly beautiful with Chinese wall-paper. She wanted to examine the grouped furniture whose pale coverings and gilded wood glimmered attractively even in the darkest corner of the garret.
It certainly was the darkest and farthest. Was this a coincidence, or had there been a special reason for huddling these things out of sight? There was not even a clear path to them, though there seemed to have been method in planning most of the lanes that led from one luggage or furniture village to another. Nothing led to this village built against a wall. Its site was in a no-thoroughfare, and, perhaps by design, perhaps by accident, a barricade had been erected before it; not a very high barricade, but a wall or series of stumbling-blocks made up of useless litter. If there could be a special corner of disgrace in this land where all things were under decree of banishment, here was the corner.
By means of crawling over, under, and between numerous strangely assorted objects which formed the barricade, the intruder arrived, somewhat the worse for wear, at her destination. The furniture village was composed, she discovered, of a set of blue satin-covered chairs and sofas, with elaborately carved and gilded frames. There were tables to match, and an empty glass cabinet, two long mirrors with marble brackets underneath, also a highly ornamental chest of drawers and a bedstead of gilded cane and wood, with cupids holding garlands of carved roses.
Barrie began talking to herself half aloud, according to long-established habit. "Good gracious me!" she exclaimed so inelegantly that it was well Miss Hepburn could not hear. "What things to find in this house! They're like—like canary birds in an ironmonger's shop. Who could have owned them?"
Suddenly the answer flashed into her head, and sent the blood to her face as if she had received a stinging slap such as Grandma used to give: "These things were my mother's!"
How insulting that these traces of the vanished one should have been hustled into a dingy hole where no self-righteous eyes could be offended by the sight of them! How frivolous and daintily young they looked, even in their dusty and (Barrie was furiously sure) undeserved disgrace! This was the secret of the locked garret!
The girl occasionally had moments of hatred for Grandma: moments when she thought it would have delighted her to see the grim old Puritan scoffed at and humiliated, or even tortured. At the picture of torture, however, Barrie's heart invariably failed, and in fancy she rescued the victim. But never had she hated Mrs. MacDonald so actively as now.
"My mother!" she said again. "How dared the wicked old creature be such a brute to her!"
For Barrie was certain that these were relics of her mother's presence in the house. She knew the history of every other woman who had ever lived here since the place was built in the seventeenth century by an Alexander Hillard, an ancestor of Grandma's. A forbidding old prig he must have been, judging from the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, a worthy forbear of Ann Hillard, who had married Barrie's grandfather, John MacDonald of Dhrum. Barrie often said to herself that she did not feel related to Grandma. She wanted to be all MacDonald and—whatever her mother had been. But it was just that which she did not know, and not a soul would tell. This was her grievance, the great and ever-burning grievance as well as mystery of her otherwise commonplace existence; a conspiracy of silence which kept the secret under lock and key.
Because of Mrs. MacDonald's "taboo," Barrie's mother had become her ideal. The girl felt that whatever Grandma disapproved must be beautiful and lovable; and there had been enough said, as well as enough left unsaid whenever dumbness could mean condemnation, to prove that the old woman had detested her daughter-in-law.
All Barrie knew about the immediate past of her family was that her father's people had once been rich, and as important as their name implied. They were the MacDonalds of Dhrum, an island not far from Skye, but they had lost their money; and while old Mrs. MacDonald was still a young married woman (it seemed incredible that she could have been young!) she and her husband, with their one boy, had come to her old home near Carlisle. This one boy had grown up to marry—Somebody, or, according to the standards of Grandma, Nobody, a creature beyond the pale. The bride must have died soon, for even Barrie's elastic memory, which could recall first steps taken alone and first words spoken unprompted, had no niche in it for a mother's image, though father's portrait was almost painfully distinct. It presented a young man very tall, very thin, very sad, very dark. The frame for this portrait was the black oak of the library wainscoting, picked out with the faded gold on backs of books in a uniform binding of brown leather. Once a day Barrie had been escorted by her nurse to the door of the library and left to the tender mercies of this sad young man, who raised his eyes resignedly from reading or writing to emit a "How do you do?" as if she were a grown-up stranger. After this question and a suitable reply, not much conversation followed, for neither could think of anything to say. After an interval of strained politeness, the child was dismissed to play or lessons—generally lessons, even from the first, for play had never been considered of importance in Hillard House. It was nobler, in the estimation of Grandma, and perhaps of father, to learn how to spell "the fat cat sat on the black rug," rather than to sprawl personally on the black rug, sporting in company with the fat cat.
One day, Barrie remembered, she had been told that father was ill and she could not bid him good morning. She had been treacherously glad, for father was depressing; but when days passed and she was still kept from him, it occurred to her that after all father was much, much nicer than Grandma, and that his eyes, though sad, were kind. The next and last time she ever saw him, the kind sad eyes were shut, and he was lying in a queer bed, like a box. He was white as a doll made of porcelain which he had once given her, and Grandma, who led the child into his room, said that he was dead. The sleeping figure in the box was only the body, and the soul had gone to heaven. Heaven, according to Grandma, who wore black and had red rims round her eyes, was a place high up above the sky where if you were a sheep you played constantly on a harp and sang songs. If you were a goat, you did not get there at all, which might have been preferable, except for the fact that being a goat doomed you to burn in everlasting fire. Sheep were saved, goats were damned; and, of course, the sheep must be deserving and clever if they had learned to sing and play on harps.
Barrie thought she could have been no more than three when her father died, but she never cared to question Grandma concerning the episode, after a day when Mrs. MacDonald said in an icy voice, "Your mother was before God guilty of your father's death." That was years ago now, but Barrie had not forgotten the shock, or the hateful, thwarted feeling, almost like suffocation, when Grandma had answered an outbreak of hers with the words, "The less you know about your mother the better for you. And the less like her you grow up, the more chance you will have of escaping punishment in this world and the next."
Barrie believed that her mother's hair must have been red, for once she had heard nurse say to Mrs. Muir, "No wonder the sight of the child's a daily eyesore to the mistress; what with them identical dimples, and hair of the selfsame shade, it must be a living reminder of what we'd all be glad to forget." Barrie's hair was extremely red; and it had been intimated to her that no red-haired girl could have cause for vanity, because to such unfortunates beauty was denied; but loyalty to the unknown mother forbade the child to hate her copper-coloured locks.
In a room decorated with pale blue satin, red hair might perhaps simulate gold. The furniture was quite new-looking and unless there had been some special reason, no mere change of taste would have induced economical Grandma to make a clean sweep of these practically unused things.
A tall mirror with its wooden back turned outward helped to screen the furniture; and deep under the dusty surface of the glass Barrie saw her own figure dimly reflected, like a form moving stealthily in water beneath thin ice. It half frightened her, like seeing a spirit, and she brought the gliding ghost to life by polishing the glass. This gave her back suddenly the only friend she had, herself, and she was glad of the companionship. Close to the huddled furniture stood a large trunk, a Noah's Ark of a trunk. Perhaps it was old-fashioned, but compared to other luggage stored here in the garret it was new and defiantly smart. It had a rounded top, and was made of gray painted wood clamped with iron.
Too good to be true that it should not be locked! And yes, locked it was, of course. But tied to the iron handle on one end was a key. It seemed as if some one had thought that the trunk might be sent for, and therefore the key must be kept handy. The knot was easily undone. The key fitted the lock. Her heart beating fast, Barrie lifted the lid, and up to her nostrils floated a faint fragrance. She had never smelled any perfume quite like it before. The nearest thing was the scent of a certain rose in the garden when its petals were dried, as she dried them sometimes for a bowl in her own room.
It was deep twilight in this corner, but Barrie's eyes were accustoming themselves to the gloom. In the tray of the big trunk there were hats, and masses of something fluffy and soft, yet crisp like gauze. "My mother's things!" she said to herself in a very little voice, with a catch of the breath at the word "mother." And gently she lifted out the tray, to carry it nearer the light. There was a cartwheel of a Leghorn hat in it, wreathed with cornflowers; another hat of white tulle trimmed with a single waterlily, and a queer little bonnet made of forget-me-nots. The fluffy stuff was a large blue scarf spangled with pinkish sequins.
Barrie rested the tray on a marble-topped table, and dipped deep into the trunk for other treasures. There were several dresses, of delicate materials and pale shades, or else of daring colours elaborately trimmed. There was a gown of coral-tinted satin embroidered with gold, and this was of Empire fashion, so like the styles which Barrie saw in illustrated papers that it might have been made yesterday. Could a red-haired woman have chosen to wear such a colour? For a moment the girl doubted that these had been her mother's possessions; but when she held the folds of satin under her own chin, she was startled by the picture in the mirror. Why, coral was far more becoming than blue, which Miss Hepburn always said was the only colour to go with red hair. It even occurred to Barrie that she might perhaps be—well, almost pretty.
"What if I am pretty, after all?" she asked herself; for she worshipped beauty, and it had been sad to feel that to her it was denied forever—that never could she be like one of those lovely beings in books with whom men fall desperately in love, and for whom they gladly die.
In great excitement she took off her short, badly made blue serge, and put on the coral satin, which was low in the neck, and had tiny puffed sleeves. The dress fastened at the back, but Barrie had grown clever in "doing up" her own frocks without help, and she easily managed the few hooks and eyes. The satin was creased, but in the dim light it looked fresh and beautiful as the petals of some gorgeous flower, and the long, straight-hanging gown with magic suddenness turned the childlike girl into a young woman. The two massive tails of hair, which fell over Barrie's shoulders, ending in thick curls at her waist, now offended her sense of fitness. They were not "grown up" enough to suit the wearer of this fairy robe; and crossing the braids at the back of her head, she brought them round it over her ears, tying the two curls together in a sort of bow at the top.
"I'm like Cinderella dressed for the ball," she thought, "all except the glass slippers," and she glanced down distastefully at the thick, serviceable boots whose toes pointed out from under a line of gold embroidery.
There must once have been shoes to match this dress. Perhaps they were at the bottom of the big trunk, whose depths she had not yet reached. Bending down for another search, she caught sight of something in the background which she had not seen—a large picture with its face against the wall.
Instantly Barrie forgot the shoes. Her heart jumped as it had jumped when she first saw the key in the door of the garret stairs. Would they have turned to the wall in this dark corner any picture save one? The girl knew that in another moment she would be looking at the portrait of her mother.
To get at it, she had to shut the trunk and climb on the rounded lid, for the big wooden Noah's Ark was too heavy to lift, and too firmly wedged in among large pieces of furniture to be pushed out of the way. Kneeling on the trunk, regardless of her finery, Barrie grasped the picture frame with both hands and pulled it up from its narrow hiding-place. Then, scrambling down, she backed out into a space clear enough to permit of turning the picture, round. Then she could not help giving a little cry, for it seemed that she was beholding a miracle. Her own face, her own figure, the very dress she wore, and the odd way she had looped up her red braids, were repeated on the dusty canvas.
It seemed too wonderful to be true, yet it was true that she had chosen to put on the gown in which its owner had long ago stood for her portrait. And the knotted curls just above the picture-forehead were like little ruddy leaping flames.
Just at first glance Barrie thought that she was exactly like the picture; but when she had wiped the dust off the canvas, and saw the painting clearly, she began to realize and count the differences. The portrait was that of a young woman, not a girl still almost a child. Knowledge and love of the world glittered in the great dark eyes which turned up ever so slightly at their outer corners in a curiously bewitching way. Barrie's eyes were dark too, but they were hazel, and could look gray or even greenish yellow in a bright light; but the eyes in the picture were almost black, and full of a triumphing consciousness of their own fascination. The artist had hinted at dimples, and these Barrie's cheeks repeated; but the girl's face was in shape a delicate oval, though the chin was as firm as if a loving thumb and finger had pinched it into prominence. The face on the canvas was fuller, shorter, squarer, and its chin was cleft in the middle. The mouth was smaller and more pouting—a self-conscious, petulant mouth; but Barrie thought it beautiful, with its flowerlike, half-smiling red lips.
"Mother—mother!" she said, "darling, lovely mother! Oh, if you could only talk to me! If you could only tell me all about yourself!"
As she spoke aloud something moved in the garret: a board creaked, a struck chair or table scraped along the uneven floor, and Mrs. Muir appeared round a corner of the piled furniture. Barrie stiffened herself, standing up straight and tall and defiant, ready for battle, holding the portrait as if it were a shield. But she was not prepared to see Mrs. Muir start back, stumbling against something which fell with a sharp crash, nor to hear her give vent to a squeal of terror. It was anger the girl had expected to rouse, not fear, and she faced the old housekeeper from her distance in blank astonishment.
They stood staring at each other across the shadows lit by floating motes of gold; and Mrs. Muir's large, pallid face looked, Barrie thought, as if it had been turned to gray stone, the gray stone of the carved monuments in the family burial-ground. For a moment neither spoke, but at last some words seemed to drop from the old woman's mouth, rather than be deliberately uttered:
"May God have mercy on me!"
"What is the matter?" Barrie exclaimed, the strange spell broken; but instead of answering, Mrs. Muir gasped, and then broke out crying, a queer gurgly sort of crying which frightened the girl. She did not dislike the housekeeper, and she was so genuinely distressed as well as surprised at this strange exhibition, that she would have set down the portrait to run to Mrs. Muir's succour if at that moment the stillness of the garret had not been wakened by the tap, tap of a stick. Somebody was coming up the stairs, hobbling, limping, yet hurrying with extraordinary energy.
There was only one person in the house, or maybe in the world, whose coming made that noise, that mingled hobble, rush, and tap: Grandma.
Barrie and Mrs. Muir continued to stare at one another, but their expression had changed. The approach of a danger to be shared in common had made the enemies friends. "This is going to be awful. What shall we do?" the old eyes said to the young and the young eyes said to the old. Mrs. Muir had forgotten her burning wish and intention to scold Miss Barribel; nevertheless, the housekeeper was not to be trusted as an ally. Under the lash of Mrs. MacDonald's tongue she would defend herself, and Barrie would go to the wall. But the spirit of the martyr was in the girl, and when the first dread thrill of the tap, tap on the garret stairs had subsided in her nerves, she remembered her wrongs and her mother's wrongs, and was not afraid of Grandma. She girded herself for war.
The tapping came nearer. Mrs. MacDonald was grievously crippled with rheumatism. Only a strong incentive could have urged her up the steep straight stairway, with its high steps; but Grandma was indomitable. Lurching like a ship in a heavy sea, she swept round the corner and brought herself to anchor by planting her stick with a crash on the wavy oak floor. There she stood, the grim and hard old craft that had weathered a hundred storms and refused to be dismayed by any. She must have been alarmed by the housekeeper's scream and the crash of falling furniture, and the figure in the coral satin dress was at least as startling for her as for her old servant; but she gave no cry, and her face looked as it always looked, hard, and stern, and passionless, as her gray eyes travelled from granddaughter to housekeeper, from housekeeper to granddaughter.
"What is the meaning of this?" she inquired in her worst voice, which Barrie always thought like the turning of a key in an unoiled lock.
"This, ma'am?" quavered Mrs. Muir, unused to the pangs of guilty fear, and bitterly ashamed of them. "Why, I'd been up here getting some more moth-balls out of the chemist's store-box, and while I was gone Miss Barribel——"
"You must have left the stairway door unlocked, woman."
"For the first time in my life, ma'am, I did." The answer was an appeal for justice if not mercy. It was an awful thing to be called "woman" by the mistress, and to be impaled on that sharp gray gaze never sheathed behind spectacles. Mrs. Muir was not one to quail easily, but she had been at fault, and she realized how her small sin of omission was leading up to consequences more momentous than anything which had happened in this house for seventeen years. In a flash she remembered, too, that it was just seventeen years ago this month of August since the first wearer of the coral satin had gone forever.
"That is no excuse," said Mrs. MacDonald. "There are some things it is a sin to forget. Locking the garret door is one, you well know why. Now the mischief is done."
"Who'd ha' dreamed, ma'am, that Miss Barribel would ha' bin on the watch like a cat for a mouse——"
"It's no question of dreaming, but experience. You ought to know as well as I do that unfortunately the girl is always on the watch for anything she ought not to see or do. It is in her blood. These many years I have struggled to crush down inherited tendencies, and keep her on the straight path I would have her father's daughter tread. Yet how have I succeeded? Every day shows how little. This is only one instance among many."
The pale cold eyes, having chilled Mrs. Muir's blood, turned to do their work of icing Barrie into subjection; but the girl's veins ran fire. For once, Grandma was powerless to make her feel a frozen worm.
"I wish I'd known before that my mother's things were here," she said, in a clear, loud voice. "I'd have broken down the door to get to them. They're mine—all mine. I will have them."
"You will not," Mrs. MacDonald answered. "Set that portrait back where you found it with its face to the wall. Take off that immodest, outrageous dress, and put on your own decent one. Fold up the scarlet abomination and lay it in the trunk with the rest of the brood."
Somehow that word "brood" in connection with her lost mother's gay, pretty garments made Barrie see her grandmother through a red haze. "It's the things you say, not mother's lovely clothes, that are exactly like a brood of horrid, ugly imps!" she cried. "Always you've kept everything about her a secret from me, but you can't go on doing it now. I've seen her beautiful picture. I know it's hers without any telling. Nothing can make me believe it isn't, no matter what you say, either of you. So you may as well tell me all about her. I won't move till you do."
"So be it, then," said Mrs. MacDonald in an iron voice. "The time had to come some day. Let it be to-day, though for your father's sake I would have spared you the knowledge until you reached your twenty-first year. Do not flatter yourself that your threat 'not to move' has the smallest effect on me. It has none. If I chose, I could force you to obey me this instant, and put those reminders of sin out of my sight. But if you have any sense of shame in you, any affection for your father's memory, it will be the severest punishment I can inflict to tell you the truth while you are wearing that dress and looking at the face of that portrait."
Despite her inward flame of fury, which did not wane, the girl was struck into silence by her grandmother's tone and manner. She stood very still and white in the coral satin.
"You can go now, Muir," said Mrs. MacDonald. "What is to come must be between me and my son's child."
Without a word the housekeeper turned and went away. Perhaps she was glad to escape. And now that her own scolding was over, there was sympathy in the last look she threw the girl.
There was a certain vague and very dim sense of gratitude in Barrie's heart toward Mrs. MacDonald for what she had just done. For Barrie did not want other ears to hear evil words spoken of her mother, and she was sure that they would be spoken.
Not until the stairs had ceased to creak under the departing feet did Grandma again open her lips. She had seemed to be thinking intently, as if making up her mind how to begin. Perhaps she was praying for guidance, Barrie told herself; but the morning and evening prayers in the dining-room with a few servants assembled were like harangues or didactic instructions to Heaven rather than supplications. Barrie thought that her grandmother had created a God for herself in her own image, and considered that she had a right, therefore, to tell Him what to do. Why should an all-good, all-wise God create a disagreeable, unkind person like Grandma? It didn't stand to reason. And Miss Hepburn was of opinion that God was indeed beneficent, in spite of those eternal fires in which she, almost equally with Grandma, fervently believed.
When there was no further sound of the housekeeper, Mrs. MacDonald began to speak, slowly and very deliberately.
"My son married against my will. His father was dead, and a woman's authority was not enough, for he was stubborn, though a good son until she got hold of him with her witcheries and her false charms. He met her in London, and took her out of the theatre, where he had no business to go; and if he never had gone, all our troubles would have been saved. The woman was a play-actress—a light, frivolous creature with no more sense of moral responsibility than a butterfly."
"Butterflies are beautiful!" Barrie broke in. "God made them, I suppose, just as much as He made ants, and I'm sure He loves them heaps better." She thought of her grandmother as a big black ant, hoarding disagreeable crumbs in a gloomy hole.
Mrs. MacDonald went on as if she had not heard.
"The woman married my son because he had money, and when she had spent all she could lay her hands on—spent it on dresses and hats and every kind of sinful vanity—she left him and his home, left her baby a year old, to return to the theatre, I suppose. I thank God that I still had influence with Robert my son to keep him from running after her like a love-sick fool, and trying to bring her back to the decent home she had disgraced. But his heart was broken by her wicked folly. Two years they'd had together under this roof and the disappointments she had made the boy suffer undermined his health. Two years more he was spared to me, and then he was taken. Never once did your mother write to him or to me, not so much as to ask whether her husband and child were alive or dead. While Robert lived, her things remained in her room just as she had left them the night she stole away like a thief, carrying only a handbag. There was the furniture the poor bewitched man had bought because he thought nothing in his mother's house was fit for his wonderful bride. There were her clothes—the very dress you have on, made on purpose to show off her brazen looks in a portrait she induced my son to order from a painting man. There was everything, except her jewels, which she was careful to take—jewels more fit for an empress of a heathen nation than a self-respecting Englishwoman: and that is where the root of the mischief lay. She wasn't English. I warned my son in the beginning when he wrote of his infatuation. I said, 'It is bad enough that she should be a play-actress; but the daughter of an Irish father and an American mother, that is fatal!' He would not listen, and he was punished for his obstinacy. You were no comfort to him, for, as I pointed out many a time, you were bound to grow up the living image of the woman who had betrayed us. I told him if he lived he'd have it all to go over again in you—maybe worse, if that could be possible, for the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even to the third and fourth——"
"But I thought it was my mother I was like," Barrie flung at her.
"Figuratively speaking, it is the same thing, as you well understand, unless you are a fool. Your father was not strong enough to bear the burden which his own mistakes had bound on his shoulders. He left the responsibility of bringing up that woman's daughter to me, and under Heaven I have done my best. I have kept you away from vanities, hoping that in spite of all you might remain unspotted from the world. But blood will tell. To-day I find that, as your mother before you stole like a thief out of the house, so you have stolen into this place, which was forbidden you, to gratify your curiosity and your vanity. I find you as bold as brass parading in that low-necked red dress, which I told your mother was a shame to any woman when I saw her flaunting in it. Now you know what she was, and what you are and are like to be. I tell you again, take off that gown as you would tear off a poisoned toad from your flesh; then go down to your own room and spend the rest of the day in prayer and meditation."
It was a triumph for Grandma that Barrie did not throw at her an insolent answer. For a moment the girl did not reply at all. Then she said, in a singularly quiet way, that she would take off the dress and put it back in the trunk, but not unless her grandmother would leave her alone to do it. Afterward, she would ask nothing better than to go to her own room and stay there. "I want to think," she added; "I have a lot to think about. But I shall think only good things of my mother. What you have told me has made me very, very happy. I believed that my mother was dead. Now I know she's in the same world with me, I could almost die of joy."
"It is like her daughter to feel that," Mrs. MacDonald returned bitterly. "If you are not downstairs in ten minutes, I will have the door locked and keep you in the garret without food or drink or light for twenty-four hours."
"I should love that!" exclaimed Barrie suddenly, in the manner of her old self. Nevertheless, she descended and advertised her return to the prosaic world by closing the door loudly in less than ten minutes after Mrs. MacDonald had gone.
She walked straight into her own room and bolted herself in. If Grandma had seen her then, she could not have helped admitting that there was as much of Robert MacDonald in the lines of the girl's face as of the guileful Barbara Ballantree.
II
No notice was taken of Barrie until half-past eight o'clock that night—half-past eight being considered night in Mrs. MacDonald's house-hold. At that time, just as the hour was announced by an old friend, the grandfather clock on the landing, who had seen the girl go into the garret, Miss Janet Hepburn knocked at Barrie's door.
"Barribel," she called, as always pronouncing the fanciful name with a certain reluctance, partly on principle, partly because it was known to have been chosen by "that woman." "Barribel, by your grandmother's permission, I've brought you some supper. Open your door and take in the tray."
A voice answered from behind the panel, "I'll open the door if you will bring in the tray yourself."
Miss Hepburn hesitated for a moment. In the dun gaslight of the corridor her sharp profile looked eager as the face of a hungry bird. She thought quickly. Mrs. MacDonald had not yet finished her own supper. No such frivolity as evening dinner was known at Hillard House. Soup after dark except for an invalid would have been considered a pitfall; but the old lady liked to linger alone over the last meal of the day, reading a religious volume by the light of a lamp placed on the table at the left of her plate. When Miss Hepburn and Barrie finished they always, as a matter of form, asked to be excused, though they both knew, and Mrs. MacDonald knew that they knew, how more than willing she was to be left alone with her book. At a quarter past nine the servants were called, they having already supped on bread and cheese. A chapter, preferably from the Old Testament, was read, a prayer offered up, and at nine-thirty precisely the family was ready to go to bed. Miss Hepburn had reason to believe that for three quarters of an hour she was free to do as she wished, and she wished as ardently as she was able to wish anything, to see Barrie. She had heard next to nothing of the day's events from Mrs. MacDonald, whose companion she was supposed to be now that the girl no longer needed her whole morning's services as governess. And from Mrs. Muir, into whose room she had slipped at tea-time, very little had been dragged out. Yet it was certain that something tremendous had happened. If she wanted to know what, her one hope lay with Barrie.
"Very well," she said, with the proper mingling of kindness and dignity, "I will bring in the tray."
The door immediately opened, and closed again after the flat figure of Miss Hepburn. Barrie thought that if the good Janet had been born a fish she would have been a skate, or at roundest a sole. Even her profile was flat, as if the two sides of her face had been pressed firmly together by a strong pair of hands. She wore her hair very flat on her head, which was flat behind; and just at the nape of the neck was a flat drab-tinted knot, of almost the same grayish-yellowish brown as her complexion. On her flat breast was a flat brooch with a braid of pale hair as a background. Even her voice sounded flat in its effort at meekness and self-repression, calculated to appease Mrs. MacDonald in trying circumstances. Miss Hepburn looked about forty-five; but she had always looked forty-five for the last twelve years, and Barrie could hardly have believed that she had ever been younger.
"Your grandmother thinks that you have now been sufficiently punished," she announced, "and you are to come down as usual to prayers."
"Oh, am I?" echoed Barrie. "We'll see about that. As for punishment, if it pleases Grandma to think she's punished me, she may. I don't care. She couldn't have made me come out of my room to-day if she tried. But I don't bear you any grudge, Heppie. I'm very glad to see you. I want you to tell me things."
"What things?" inquired Miss Hepburn. "I didn't come to talk. I am here simply to see you begin your supper. You must be—er—very hungry."
"I've had plenty of food all day," said Barrie—"food for thought." She cleared a place on the one table by pushing a few school-books out of the way. She had been sitting in the twilight, for she was not allowed to have matches. Their possession might have tempted her to burn gas after ten o'clock, when at latest all lights had to be out. Now, Janet Hepburn brought a box of matches on the tray; and the gas, when lit, showed the sparsely furnished room with its gray-painted, pictureless wall, against which Barrie's red hair glowed like a flame. Outside the open window the old ivy and the young peeping roses, which had been green and pink and gold in the twilight, lost their colour as the gas flared up, and evening out of doors darkened into night.
"I've brought you bread and cheese with a slice of cold beef," announced Miss Hepburn, "and Mrs. Muir has baked you a potato, but I am not sure whether your grandmother would approve of that. She distinctly said a cold supper."
"Will you please thank Mrs. Muir for me?" Barrie asked.
"You can thank her to-morrow."
"I mayn't have a chance. Do thank her for me to-night. Say I wanted you to."
"Why are you in such a hurry?"
"Oh—just because. Will you?"
"Yes, I will try, after prayers, when she is shutting up the house. Now, eat your supper."
"I don't want to, yet. Please, Heppie, dear Heppie, tell me what you know about my mother. You weren't here when she was, but you're a kind of cousin of Grandma's, and you must have heard all about her."
"If I had, that would not give me the right to tell you," replied Miss Hepburn, clinging desperately to her stiff dignity, despite the pleading voice and the "dear, dear Heppie," against which, being one third human, she was not quite proof. It was always difficult not to be beguiled by Barrie.
"I've only you I can come to," said the girl. "You're the one person in the house except me who isn't old and dried-up."
This was a stroke of genius, but the genius of instinct, for Barrie had no experience in the art of cajolery. "Was I named after my mother?"
"Only partly. She was a Miss Ballantree, and her first name was Barbara, I believe; but she disliked it, and when her husband wished to have the child christened the same, she insisted on Barribel. It seems that is an old Scottish name also, or Celtic perhaps, for she was Irish, though I know nothing of her family. But Barribel has always sounded frivolous to me."
"Yet you would never call me Barrie when I begged you to. I wonder if there ever was another girl who had to make up her own pet name, and then had nobody who would use it except herself? When I talk to myself I always say 'Barrie,' in different tones of voice, to hear how it sounds. I try to say it as if I loved myself, because no one else loves me—unless maybe you do; just a tiny, tiny bit. Do you, Heppie?"
"Of course I have an affection for you," Miss Hepburn returned decorously, half alarmed at so pronounced a betrayal of her inner emotions, "and naturally your grandmother——"
"Let's not talk about her now," Barrie pleaded. "Was my mother young when she was married?"
"Quite young, I understand—about nineteen."
"Only nineteen—not very much older than I am. And she stood two years of Grandma and this house!"
"Barribel, you forget yourself."
"If I do, it's because I'm thinking about my mother. Twenty—twenty-one; that's what she was when she—went away!"
"She must have been. Of course, it is not my place to——"
"No, dear Heppie, I know it isn't, so don't, please. Could even you blame her for wanting to run away from this awful house, and she an Irish girl?"
"She was half American, I have heard."
"Perhaps, for all I know about Americans, that made it even harder for her to stand Grandma—and everything else. Anyhow, I don't blame her—not one bit."
"What! not for deserting her loving husband and her helpless child?"
"All day I've been wondering if father knew how to show his love for her. He didn't to me. I can remember that. I used to be afraid of him and glad to escape. Perhaps he made her feel like that too—oh, without meaning it. I'm sure he was good. But so is Grandma good—horribly good. There's something about this house that spoils goodness, and turns it to a kind of poison. It must have been awfully depressing to be married to father if one had any fun in one, and loved to laugh. As for the 'helpless child,' I dare say I was a horrid little squalling brat with scarlet hair and a crimson face and a vile temper, that no one could possibly love."
"It is a mother's duty to love her child, in spite of its appearance; and if it has a bad temper, all the more should she endeavour by prayer and example to eradicate its faults in bringing it up. At least, so I have always been taught. Personally, of course," Heppie hastened to add, "I know nothing of motherhood and its duties."
"Then you never played dolls," said Barrie gravely. "I never had but one doll—the porcelain-headed darling father gave me. Grandma let me keep it because it came from him, and I did love it dearly! I do still. I learned just how to be a mother, playing with it. I know I shall be a perfectly sweet mother when I have a child."
"Barribel, you should not say such things. It is most unmaidenly."
"I don't see why," Barrie argued. "Perhaps my mother's people wouldn't let her say such things when she was a young girl, and then she began to be an actress, and was so busy she never had time to learn much about children and duty and that sort of thing. But I won't be unmaidenly any more, dear Heppie—at least, if I can help it—if you'll only do me one great favour."
"What is it?" Miss Hepburn inquired cautiously.
"Tell me what's become of my mother. Oh, you needn't be afraid! Grandma let it out that she's alive. She's not even old yet—not so very old. You must tell me what's happened to her."
"Nothing creditable, I fear," replied Janet, finding a certain sad pleasure in the sins of another, so different from her own good self. "She has, I believe, continued to act on the stage."
"I'm sure she must be the greatest success!" exclaimed Barrie.
"As to that, I have no means of knowing. I always skip news of the theatre in reading the papers aloud to Mrs. MacDonald."
"Oh, just to think that any day I might have seen things about my mother in the newspapers, and perhaps even her pictures! I wish I'd known! I'd have got at the papers somehow before they were cremated. Now I understand why Grandma tries to keep them out of my hands."
"There were many reasons for that," said Miss Hepburn, loyal to her employer's convictions and her own pallid copies of those convictions. "No really nice girl ever reads the newspapers, or would wish to do so. They are full of wickedness. There is much I have to miss out."
"Do you think my mother has kept her married name for the stage?" Barrie wanted to know.
"That," answered Miss Hepburn almost eagerly, "has been poor Mrs. MacDonald's greatest trial—except your father's death. To think that the name of her son—the name of his great ancestors—should be bandied about in the theatres!"
"Then she does call herself MacDonald!"
"I fear that is the case. But now it will be useless asking me any more questions, for I shall not answer them. Will you let me see you begin your supper?"
"No, dear Heppie, for I'm not hungry; and I want to think. Thank you so much for talking to me, and being so kind. I believe you'd often like to be kind when you daren't."
Miss Hepburn looked slightly surprised. She had expected to be teased for further information, rather than thanked cordially for that already doled out. "I try to do my duty both to your grandmother and you," she returned. "I really must go now, and I shall not have to lock your door again, as Mrs. MacDonald considers the punishment over. You must be careful to come down the minute you hear the bell, and not be late for prayers."
"Good-bye, if you must go," said Barrie, following the small, stiff figure to the door. "I—I wish you'd kiss me, Heppie."
Janet actually started, and a blush produced itself in a way peculiar to her face, appearing mostly upon the nose, where it lingered rosily at the end. Kisses were not exchanged under Mrs. MacDonald's roof. Barrie's was a most disquieting suggestion, and sounded as if she had a presentiment that she was about to die or, at the best, be very ill. Still, there was no real impropriety in an ex-governess kissing her late pupil; and possibly the desire revealed a spirit of repentance and meekness on the part of Barribel, which deserved to be encouraged. Without spoken questions, therefore, Miss Hepburn pecked with her unkissed virgin lips the firm pink satin of Barrie's cheek. The deed seemed curiously epoch-making, and stirred her oddly. She was ashamed of the feeling she had, rather like a bird waking up from sleep and fluttering its wings in her breast. Her nose burned; and she hastened her departure lest Barribel should notice some undignified difference in manner or expression.
"I shall see you again downstairs in a few minutes," she said hurriedly.
Barrie did not answer, and Miss Hepburn softly shut the door.
Instantly the girl began making a sandwich of the bread and cheese, which she wrapped up in a clean handkerchief. She would not take the napkin, because that belonged to Grandma. Hanging up in the wardrobe was a long cloak of the MacDonald hunting tartan, which looked as if it had been fashioned out of a man's plaid. On each side was a pocket; and into one of these Barrie slipped her little package. Already made up and lying on the floor of the wardrobe was another parcel, very much bigger, rolled in dark green baize which might have been a small table cover. From a shelf Barrie snatched a tam-o'-shanter, also a dark green in colour. Absent-mindedly she pulled it over her head, and the green brightened the copper red of her hair. Slipping her arms into the sleeves of the queer cloak, she caught up her bundle, turned down the gas, and peeped cautiously out into the corridor. No one was there. The house was very still. Grandma's bell for reading and prayer would not ring yet for twenty minutes or more. The girl tiptoed out, locked the door behind her, and slipped the key into the pocket with the sandwiches. If any one came to call her to prayers, it would appear that she had shut herself in and was refusing to answer.
III
"Car-l-i-s-l-e!" The Caruso voice of a gifted railway porter intoned the word in two swelling syllables, so alluring in their suggestion to passengers that it was strange the whole train did not empty itself upon the platform. So far from this being the case, however, not more than six men and half as many women, one with two sleepy, whimpering children, obeyed the siren call.
Five of the men looked for porters, and eventually culled them, like stiff-stemmed wayside plants; but the sixth man had not set his foot on the platform before he was accosted by two would-be helpers.
What there was about him so different from, and so superior to, his fellow-travellers that it was visible to the naked eye at night, in a not too brilliantly lighted railway station, could be explained only by experts in the art of deciding at a glance where the best financial results are to be obtained.
The man was not richly dressed, was not decked out with watch-chains and scarf-pins and rings, nor had he a shape to hint that the possession of millions had led to self-indulgence. Many people would have passed him by with a glance, thinking him exactly like other men of decent birth and life who knew how to wear their clothes; but railway porters and romantic women (are there other women?) have a special instinct about men. The two female passengers unhampered by howling babies looked at him as they went by, and they would instinctively have known, though even they could not have explained, why the porters unhesitatingly selected this man as prey.
He was not very tall, and not very handsome, and he was not conspicuous in any way: but if he had been an actor, a deaf and blind audience would somehow have felt with a thrill that he had come upon the stage. The secret was not intricate: only something of which people talk a dozen times a day without knowing technically what they mean—personal magnetism. He was rather dark and rather thin, rather like a conquering soldier in his simple yet authoritative way of giving orders for what he wanted done. He had eyes which were of an almost startling blueness in his sunburned face: a peculiarity that made strangers look twice at him sometimes. If his features hardened into a certain cynical grimness when he thought about things that really mattered, his smile for things that didn't matter was singularly pleasant.
He did not smile at the porters as he pointed out that, besides his suit-case, he had only one small piece of luggage in the van, to be taken to his automobile; and there were other passengers who looked much jollier and more amenable than he: yet it was to him that a girl spoke as he was about to walk past her, after his chosen porter.
"Oh! Will you please be so very kind as to wait a minute!" she exclaimed.
Her "Oh!" was like a barrier suddenly thrown down in front of him. Of course he stopped; and if he were not greatly astonished it was only because so many odd things had happened to him in life, in railway stations and drawing rooms and in all sorts of other places, that it took a great deal to make him feel surprise, and still more to make him show it.
He was roused to alertness, however, when he saw what manner of girl invited him to "wait a minute." He had never seen one like her before. And yet, of whose face did hers piquantly remind him? He had a dim impression that it was quite a celebrated face, and no wonder, if it were like this one. The only odd thing was that he could not remember whose the first face had been, for such features could never let themselves be wiped off memory's slate.
The girl was almost a child, apparently, for her hair hung in two long bright red braids over her extraordinary cloak; and her big eyes were child's eyes. What her figure was like, except that she was a tall, long-legged, upstanding young creature, no one could judge, not even an anatomist, because of that weird wrap. As a cloak it was a shocking production—a hideous, unbelievable contribution to cloakhood from the hands of a mantle-making vandal—but it caught the man's interest, because before his eyes danced the hunting tartan of the MacDonalds of Dhrum. Once that particular combination of green, blue, red, brown, purple, and white had flashed to his heart a signal of warm human love, daring and high romance; but he believed that long ago his heart had shut against such deceiving signals. Across the way in, he had printed in big letters "NO THOROUGHFARE," and was unconsciously well pleased with himself because he had done this, thinking it a proof of mature wisdom, keen insight into his brother man—especially perhaps his sister woman—and a general tendency toward scientific, bomb-proof modernity, the triumph of intellect over emotion. And in truth his experiences had been of a kind to change the enthusiastic boy he once had been into the cynical, hard-headed man he was now. Nevertheless, as he looked at the girl in the tartan cloak, he heard within himself the war-cry of the clan MacDonald, "Fraoch Eilean!" and he smelt the heather of the purple isle of Dhrum.
It was many years since he had seen that strangely formed island-shape cut in amethyst against the gold of sunset sky and sea; but the purple and the gold were unforgettable, even for one who thought he had forgotten and lost the magic long ago.
She was a beautiful girl in spite of the ugly tam and the bag of a cloak. Her eyes had the deep light of clear streams that have never reflected other things than trees, shadowing banks of wild flowers, and skies arching above. There was something quaintly arresting about her, apart from the odd clothes.
The man stopped. His porter lumbered on sturdily; but that was just as well. The girl had asked him to wait: so he waited in silence to hear what she would say.
"Will you please look at a thing I want very much to sell?" she began. "Perhaps you'll like to buy it. Nobody else will—but," she added hastily, "I think you'll admire it."
He looked her steadily in the eyes for a few seconds, and she returned the look, in spite of herself rather than because she was determined to give him gaze for gaze.
"Why do you ask me to buy what you have to sell?" he answered by a question. "Is it for charity or the cause of the Suffragettes?"
"Oh, no, it's not for charity!" the girl exclaimed. "And I don't know what you mean by Suffragettes."
The man laughed. "Where have you lived?" he questioned her.
She blushed for an ignorance which evidently struck strangers as fantastic. "Near Carlisle with my grandmother," she explained; "but she's never let me have friends, or make visits, or read the papers. I've just left her house now, and I want to go to London. I must go to London, but I haven't any money, and they won't trust me to pay them for my ticket when I get some. So I tried to sell a piece of jewellery I have, and nobody would buy it. I thought when I saw you come out of the train that maybe you would. I don't know why—but you're different. You look as if you'd know all about valuable things—and whether they're real; and as if you'd be—not stupid, or like these other people."
"Thank you," he returned, and smiled his pleasant smile. If another man had described such a meeting with a pretty and apparently ingenuous girl in a railway station at ten o'clock at night, he would still have smiled, but not the same smile. He would have been sure that the girl was a minx, and the man a fool. He recognized this unreasonableness in himself; nevertheless, he had no doubt that his own instinct about the girl was right. She was genuine of her sort, whatever her strange sort might be; and though he laughed at himself for the impulse, he could not help wanting to do something for her, in an elder-brother way. For an instant his thoughts went to the woman who was waiting for and expecting him, the train being late. But quickly the curtain was drawn before her portrait in his mind.
"You say your grandmother never let you make friends," he said, "yet you seem to believe in your own knowledge of human nature."
"Because, what you aren't allowed to see or do, you think of a great deal more. Knowledge jumps into your head in such an interesting way," the girl answered, with an apologetic air, as a witness might if wishing to conciliate a cross-questioning counsel. "Here's the jewellery I want to sell. It was my father's, and belonged to his father and grandfather."
She opened her ungloved right hand to reveal a bonnet brooch of beautiful and very ancient workmanship showing the crest of the MacDonalds of Dhrum set with a fine cairngorm and some exquisite old paste. It must have come down through many fathers to many sons, for it was at least two hundred years old.
"You would sell this?" the man exclaimed.
"Well, I must get to London," she excused herself, "and it's the only thing I have worth selling. I knew you'd see it was good. The others would hardly look at it, except one quite horrid man who squeezed my hand when I was showing him the brooch, and that made me behave so rudely to him he went away at once."
"Was your father a MacDonald of Dhrum?" asked the man who had not squeezed her hand, and exhibited no wish to do so, though his eyes never left her face.
"Yes. Why, do you know our tartan and crest?"
"I—thought I recognized them." For an instant he was tempted to add an item of information concerning himself, but he beat down the impulse. "If you want money, you can raise something on this without selling it," he went on. "It would be a pity to part with an heirloom."
"I didn't know I could do that," said the girl. "Of course it would be better. I'm going to London to find somebody—my mother," she continued, in a different tone. "When I get to her, she'll give me money, of course, and I can pay you back, if you'll lend me enough now to buy my ticket—and perhaps a little, a very little, more, because I mayn't find her at once. I may have to go on somewhere else after London, though I hope not. Will you lend me some money and keep the brooch till I pay?"
"I might be prepared to do that," said the man slowly. "But you surely don't mean to start off for London alone, in the night."
"Why not?" she argued. "There's no danger in railway trains, is there? I've never been in one yet, but I've read lots about them in books, and I think I shall love travelling."
"You've never been in a train!"
"No, because I was born at Grandma's house, and she never travels anywhere, and I've always lived with her. If my father hadn't died, and my mother hadn't—hadn't been obliged to go away when I was a baby, probably I should have been just like other girls. But now I suppose I must be very different, and seem stupid and queer. Every one stared as if I were a wild animal when I was asking my way to the railway station. But you will lend me the money, won't you, if you think the brooch is worth it, because one of the porters told me there'd be a train for London soon?"
"When people are making up their minds to lend money to strangers, they always put a number of questions first," answered the man gravely, "so I must ask you to excuse me if I catechize you a little before I engage myself to do anything. Do you expect any one to meet you in London, Miss MacDonald?"
"Dear me, no!" and she could not help laughing to hear herself called "Miss MacDonald," a dignity never bestowed on her before. "I don't know any one in London—unless my mother's there."
"Oh, indeed! But London's quite a big place, bigger a good deal than Carlisle, you know, so you may have some difficulty in finding your mother if you aren't sure of the address."
"She hasn't an address—I mean, I don't know it. But she's an actress on the stage. I think she must be so beautiful and splendid that almost every one will have heard of her, so all I will have to say is, 'Please tell me whether Mrs. MacDonald the actress is in London?'"
"Not Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald!" This time he did look surprised.
"Ballantree was her name before she was married," the girl admitted. "And her Christian name's Barbara. Do you know her?"
"I do, slightly," replied the man. "But I had no idea that she——" He broke off abruptly, looking more closely than ever at the vivid face under the knitted tam.
"I suppose, if you don't know her very well, she never spoke to you about having a daughter?" Barrie asked.
"No, she never spoke of it. But look here, Miss MacDonald, as I happen to be an acquaintance—I daren't call myself a friend—of your mother's, you'd better let me advise you a little, without thinking that I'm taking a liberty. From what you say, I have the idea that you've not had time to write Mrs. Bal—I mean, Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald that you're coming to pay her a visit."
"No, I only made up my mind to-day," said Barrie carefully. "Grandma and she aren't good friends, so my mother and I—don't write to each other. Grandma doesn't like the stage, and as you know mother, I don't mind telling you she's been perfectly horrid—Grandma, I mean. She let me believe that mother was dead—just because she's an actress, which I think must be splendid. That's why I'm running away, and wild horses couldn't drag me back."
"I see. Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald will be taken by surprise when you turn up."
"Yes. It will be like things I've dreamed about and invented to make into story-books—really interesting story-books such as Grandma wouldn't let me read, for she approves only of Hannah More. Won't mother be delighted?"
"Just at first her surprise may overcome her natural joy," said the man. "And here is where my advice comes in. It's this: Let the news be broken to your mother before you try to see her. That would be the wisest thing. Besides, she mayn't be in London now—probably isn't. It's past the season there; and Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald is one of those beautiful and successful people, you know, who are generally found at places in the most fashionable time of the year. If she's acting, it will be easy to find out where she is from one of the stage papers. She could be written to, and——"
"No, I want to surprise her!" Barrie persisted. "I want first to see her, for I know she must be a darling and perfectly lovely; and then I want to say, 'Mother, here's your daughter Barribel, that you named yourself, come to love you and live with you always.'"
"Er—yes. It sounds charming," replied the man, gazing at a large advertisement of a new food with quite an odd look in his eyes. "If your heart's set on that scene I've no right to try and dissuade you; but anyhow, the thing to do is to find out where she is before you start, for you might get to London only to have to turn round and come back. In August she's more likely to be in Scotland than in London."
"Oh, is she?" Barrie's face told all her doubt and disappointment. "But I can't wait. I must go somewhere. If I don't take a train, Mrs. Muir our housekeeper and perhaps Miss Hepburn may come here looking for me from Hillard House. I'm afraid they found out at prayer-time that I'd gone, and when they've searched all over the house and garden, they——"
"So you make no bones about running away from home, Miss MacDonald?"
"Neither would you in my place if you and your mother were insulted."
"Perhaps not," the man admitted. "I did something more or less of the sort when I was a year or two older than you—about seventeen——"
"But I'm over seventeen already," Barrie hastened to boast. "I'm eighteen."
The man smiled at her, his nicest smile. "Eighteen! That's very old, and it's only living the retired life you have that's kept you young. Still, there it is! You have lived a retired life, and it's—er—it's left its mark on you. It will take at least some months to efface it, even under your mother's wing. That means you're a bit handicapped among a lot of people who haven't lived retired lives. I don't advise you to go back to your grandmother's house, because you wouldn't anyhow—and besides, you know your own business better than I do; only, of course, you'll have to write to her. As an acquaintance of your mother's, I'd like to put you with some kind people for to-night until we can find out for you just where Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald is. Don't you see that this would be a sensible arrangement, if the people were all right, instead of starting off on a wild-goose chase?"
"Ye-es, perhaps. And it's very kind of you to take an interest for my mother's sake," said Barrie, trying not to show her disappointment ungraciously.
"Of course, for your mother's sake," he repeated, with an expressionless expression. "I call myself Somerled," he added, watching her face as he made his announcement.
She caught him up quickly. "Why, that was the name of the great leader from the North who founded the Clan MacDonald!"
"You know about him, do you—in spite of the retired life?"
"Not to know would disgrace a MacDonald. And just because I have led a retired life I've had more time to learn than girls in the world. I know a good deal—really I do. I've read—heaps of things, behind Grandma's back. Somerled of the Isles is a hero of mine. I didn't know any one had a right to his name nowadays."
"I dare to bear it, like a Standard, with or without right, though unworthily. Somerled of the Isles was my hero too."
"Then you're Scottish, like me," said Barrie. "I don't feel related to Grandma's people, and I don't know anything about mother's. But if you're going to be my friend for her sake, I'm glad your name is Somerled. It's splendid!"
"Yes, it's splendid to be called Somerled," the man agreed, faintly emphasizing the substituted word. "And I'm proud to be a Scot, though I've lived half my life in America, and they think of me there as an American. I've been thinking of myself that way too for seventeen years. But blood's a good deal thicker than water, and I was born on the island of Dhrum."
"Our island!" exclaimed Barrie. "That makes it seem as if we were related."
"I hoped it would, because a Somerled has a right to the trust of a MacDonald. Will you trust me to motor you to my friend Mrs. West, who's stopping just now with her brother in a nice little house just outside Carlisle? It's named Moorhill Farm, and belongs to a Mrs. Keeling, who has lent it to Mrs. West. I'm going there, and they'll be glad to keep you until we can learn where you ought to meet your mother. Perhaps you know of Mrs. Keeling and her house?"
Barrie glanced at him half longingly, half doubtfully. She had been looking forward to the adventure of travelling to London; but if there were less chance of her mother being there than elsewhere, London was wiped off the map. Still Barrie was loth to abandon her plan. To do so was like admitting failure—in spite of the motor, which she would love to try. She had never been within two yards of a motor-car.
"I've seen Mrs. Keeling in church," she said. "She has stick-out teeth. Grandma bows to her. But how can you tell that Mrs. West will be glad to have me?"
"I'll answer for her hospitality," came Somerled's assurance. "You'll like Mrs. West. She's a widow, and a sweet woman. Her brother's as nice as she is—Basil Norman. Perhaps you've heard of them? They write books together—stories about travel and love and motor-cars."
"No," Barrie confessed. "I don't know any authors later than Dickens, unless I see their names in book-sellers' windows, when I come into town with Heppie—Miss Hepburn. If you don't mind, I think I'd rather not go to Mrs. West's. I'm afraid of strangers."
"Are you afraid of me, then?"
"No-o. But you're a man. I'm afraid of women. They stare at your clothes, and I know mine are horrid."
"Mrs. West won't stare. She'll help you buy pretty things to wear when you go to your mother."
"Will she? But how shall I buy them? I haven't any money."
"You'll have money from your father's brooch. Now—will you trust me and come to Mrs. Keeling's house, as your grandmother bows to her?"
"I'd rather go to a hotel, thank you."
"Nonsense. You can't go alone to a hotel."
"Why?"
"It wouldn't be proper for Miss MacDonald of Dhrum."
"Now you talk like Grandma!"
"I talk common sense. I'll lend you no money to spend in a hotel."
"Then take me to Mrs. West," the girl said, as she might have said, "Take me to the scaffold."
Somerled laughed with amusement and triumph. He was astonishingly interested in his adventure, astonishingly pleased at the prospect of continuing it. Surely this girl was unique! He believed in comparatively few things, but he believed in her: for not to do so would have been indeed ungrateful, as she was ready to prove her implicit belief in him.
"A daughter of Mrs. Bal!" he said to himself as he led Mrs. Bal's daughter to his motor-car.
Poor Barrie would have believed in almost any man who owned a motor.
IV
Aline West and her brother, Basil Norman, were walking slowly up and down the garden path in front of the old-fashioned manor farmhouse lent to them for ten days by an admiring friend. They were waiting for Somerled, who had expressed a desire not to be met at the station; and listening for the teuf-teuf of motors along the distant road prevented Mrs. West from attending to her brother's suggestions. He had had an inspiration for the new novel they were planning together, and was explaining it eagerly, for Basil was a born story-teller. Only, he had never found time for story-telling until lately. He was tremendously happy in his new way of life, although only a terrible illness which had closed others paths of success had opened this door for him. It did not matter in the least that Aline got the credit. Not only was he glad that she should have praise, but he was convinced that it ought to be hers. If she had not thought of asking him to try his hand at helping her four years ago, when the incentive to live seemed gone, he might have been driven to put himself out of the way. It was to her, therefore, that he owed everything; and though success as an author had never come to Aline until after the first book they wrote together, that, to Basil Norman's mind, was no more than a coincidence, and he had never ceased to feel that she was generous in letting his name appear with hers on their title pages.
"I wonder if anything can have happened to him!" Aline murmured.
"Which, Dick or Claud?" her brother asked, puzzled. Dick was to be their hero, Claud the villain. Basil had been engaged in outlining the two characters for his sister's approval.
"No. Ian Somerled," she explained almost crossly, though her voice was sweet, because it was never otherwise than sweet. "Either the train's late or——"
"I'd have met him with pleasure," Basil reminded her.
"It would be fatal to do anything he didn't wish," she answered. "He's a man who knows exactly what he wants, and hates to have people go against his directions in the smallest things."
Norman looked at her rather anxiously through the soft summer darkness that was hardly darkness. She was walking beside him with her hands clasped behind her back and her head bent. He thought her extremely pretty, and wondered if Somerled thought so too. But he wished that she did not care quite so much what Somerled thought. And he was not sure whether she were right about what Somerled liked.
"I wonder if we understand Somerled?" he asked, as if he were questioning himself aloud. "After all, we don't know him very well."
"I do," Aline said. "I know him like a book. He's bored to death with everything nearly. Only I—we—haven't bored him yet. And we must take care not to."
"You could never bore anybody," Basil assured her loyally. "But—I wish you'd tell me something honestly, old girl."
"Not if you call me that!" She laughed a little. "It wouldn't matter if I were twenty-five instead of—never mind! I don't want people to think, when they hear you, 'Many a true word spoken in jest.'"
"Somerled's older than you are, anyhow," Basil consoled her.
"I should think so—ages! Don't forget, dear, I'm only just thirty. I don't look more, do I—truly?"
"Not a day over twenty-eight."
She was disappointed that he did not say less. She had been twenty-nine for years, and had just begun, for a change, to state frankly that she was thirty. She had never been able to forgive Basil for being younger than she, but she could trust him not to advertise his advantage. He really was a dear! She hated herself for being jealous of him sometimes. There were things he could do, there were thoughts that came to him as easily as homing birds, which were with her only a pretence: but she pretended eagerly, sincerely, even with prayer. She really yearned to be at heart all that she tried to make Somerled and other people believe her to be. And if she tried hard to be genuine all through, surely in time——
"What I want you to tell me is," Basil was going on, "are you in l—how much do you really care about this man?"
"'This man?'" she repeated. "How serious that sounds; like 'Do you take this man for better, for worse?' Well, I confess that I should, if he asked me."
"Then you must be in love," her brother concluded. "Because you don't need his money. We make as many thousands as we used to make hundreds; and it's all yours, really, or ought to be."
She was ashamed of not contradicting him, yet she did not contradict. She could not bear to put in words what in her heart she knew to be the truth: that their success was due to Basil, the dreamer of dreams; that her little smartnesses and pretty trivialities could never have carried them to the place where they now stood together. The worst part of her wanted Basil to think, wanted every one to think, that she was the important partner, that she was actually all in the partnership. And it was too miserably easy to produce this impression. Basil was so unassuming, thought so poorly of himself, realized so little how she leaned upon him in their work, admired her so loyally!
"Ian Somerled is more of a man than any other man I ever met," she said. "I like him for his strength and for his indifference. Everything about him appeals to me—even his money; for making it in the way he did was one expression of his power. Just because they say he'll never marry, I want——"
"I can understand how a woman may feel about him," Basil said gently, when she suddenly broke off.
"I thought I was perfectly happy the day he asked us to tour Scotland with him in his car; and when he promised to spend a few days with us here, after he'd got through his business in London," Aline went on, "it was like honey to hear him say that he didn't want to come if any one else was to be here. He'd enjoy it only with you and me alone. But ever since I saw him I've been worrying until I'm quite wretched."
"Worrying about what?"
"Whether he suspects anything."
"Why, what is there to suspect?"
"Then you don't? I'm glad, for you're both men. If you don't suspect, why should he?"
"You'll have to tell me what you're driving at. I shan't have an easy minute till you do—and that means I can't write. You know I won't give you away."
"A woman wouldn't need telling. That's why I like men! You never guessed, then, that I've been doing it all? I was the power behind the throne. I made him invite us, and——"
"The deuce you did! Why, I heard him ask you. It was on board ship, and——"
"And before he asked, unless you were deaf, you heard me say I couldn't work up any enthusiasm about the next book we'd promised our publisher to write because we'd sold our last car and hadn't time to make up our minds about a new one, and we had no friends to give us good 'tips' about the country. It was then he asked me what country we wanted to write about, and I said Scotland."
"Well, yes, I suppose I heard you say all that, now you remind me of it. But it wasn't hinting, because you didn't know he was going to Scotland for his rest cure."
"Oh, yes, I did. I read it in the New York Sun before we sailed. And when I said we'd accept his invitation if he'd accept ours, Mrs. Keeling hadn't offered me this house."
"You said she had."
"I was sure she would, because she told me I had only to ask. She was dying to lend it. She wanted to be able to tell everybody that Aline West and Basil Norman lived in her house for a fortnight in August. It's a great feather in her cap; and Ian Somerled coming to visit us here is something she'll never get over as long as she lives. I marconied her an hour after he'd said that he would come to us after London, and we'd begin our motor tour from Carlisle. 'Twas only taking Time by the forelock to tell him we had been invited. It was bad luck poor Mrs. Keeling being ill when she got my wire, and she really was a trump to turn out and go to a nursing home."
"Good heavens, is that what she did? I didn't know——"
"Of course not. But you needn't mind so dreadfully. She's much more comfortable in the nursing home with the best attention than in her own. And, as a reward, we'll dedicate the book to her."
Aline said this as a queen might have suggested lending her crown to a loyal servitor. Basil laughed, rather uncomfortably, and his sister looked up hastily into his face, to see if he were making fun of her. Just then they were drawing near the open windows of the drawing-room, and the lamplight shone out so brightly through the old-fashioned embroidered lace curtains that she could see his profile. Hers too was clearly outlined as she lifted her chin anxiously.
The brother and sister were both good to look at, in ways so different that the two made a striking contrast. Aline knew that in appearance they were a romantic pair of travelling companions. Every one stared at them when they were together, for he was very tall and dark, more like an Italian or a Spaniard than an Englishman, and she was gracefully slender and fair, dressing with a subtle appreciation of herself and all her points. Aline West's and Basil Norman's photographs, taken together or apart, for newspapers and magazines, were extremely effective, and were considered by publishers to help the sale of their books. Norman might have sat for Titian's Portrait of a Gentleman: and there were those who thought Mrs. West not unlike Lady Hamilton. Since the first expression of this opinion in print, she had changed the fashion of her hair, and at fancy-dress balls, of which she was fond, she generally appeared as the beautiful Emma. Certainly the cast of her features and the cutting of her lips faintly recalled those of Romney's ideal; but Mrs. West's pretty pale face had only two expressions: the one when she smiled—always the same delicate curving of the lips which lit no beam in the deep-set forget-me-not eyes; the one when she was grave and wistfully intellectual. She had a beautiful round white throat which she never hid with a high collar. Her hair was of that sun-in-a-mist gold that eventually fades almost imperceptibly into gray—if left to itself. But in Aline's case it was improbable that it would be left to itself. Every morning when dressing she examined it anxiously, even fearfully, to see whether it was becoming thinner or losing its misty glints of gold. Yet she knew that her fears were likely to advance the day she dreaded, and tried to shut them out of her mind.
"Why do you laugh?" she inquired almost irritably, for she was secretly afraid always of missing something that was seen by others to be amusing. She talked constantly of a sense of humour, pitying those not blessed with it, but there were moments when she wondered bleakly if she had it herself. "Have I said anything funny?"
"Only you seem so sure that the dedication will be a panacea for every wound."
"So it will be for Mrs. Keeling."
"I thought you had the idea of dedicating it to Somerled, as he'll be taking us through Scotland in his car."
"I had. But I feel now it would be a mistake. He couldn't refuse, and one wouldn't be sure he was pleased. He's so horribly important, you know. I don't mean in his own eyes, but in the eyes of the world; so nothing we could do for him would really confer an honour. And the reason he's cynical and bored is because people have fussed over him so sickeningly, more and more every year, since he began to rise to what he is."
"Yet I don't think he's conceited."
"Not in the ordinary way. But he can't help knowing that he's some one in particular. He began to like us because we didn't fuss over him, or seem to go out of our way to please him. That's where I've been clever; for oh, Basil, I'd do anything short of disfiguring myself to win him."
"My poor girl!" Norman exclaimed.
She caught him up hastily. "Why do you call me 'poor?' Do you think I shan't succeed? Do you think he'll never care?"
"You're a far better judge than I am," her brother answered evasively. "Women feel such things. We——"
"You feel things, too. You know you do, Basil."
"In an abstract way—not when they're just in front of my eyes."
"He has told me a lot about himself, anyhow." Aline took up a new line of argument, out of her own thoughts. "That's a good sign. He is so reserved with almost everybody—and he was even with me till our last evening on shipboard. I was telling him about Jim dying in India and leaving me alone there, almost a girl; and how there was no money; and how I took up writing and made a success. Then from that we drifted into talk about success in general; and he told me his whole story—much more than I'd ever heard from gossip, and a good deal of it quite different. I took it as the greatest compliment that he should open his heart to me—and a splendid sign."
"Yes, I suppose it was both," Norman agreed; and Aline had retired too far within the rose-bower of happy memories to catch a suggestion of doubt in his voice.
"I read once in a newspaper that he'd been a bootblack in Glasgow before he emigrated," Mrs. West said, as they turned away from the house again in their walk, and set their faces toward the distant gate. "It wasn't true. His father was a crofter on a little island somewhere near Skye. I think it's called Dhrum. I never heard of it before; and he had to excuse my ignorance, because I'm Canadian! It seems that a branch of the MacDonald family own the whole place and are great people there—lords of the isle. His name was MacDonald too, though his family were only peasants—clan connections, or whatever they call that sort of thing. I don't understand a bit, and I didn't like asking him to explain. It was too delicate a subject, though he appeared to be rather proud of his origin. Scotch peasants are apparently quite different from other peasants. You'll have to study up the differences and make lots of notes for the book. I'm no good at anything with dialect, or character sort of parts. You wouldn't think now, though, that Ian Somerled had ever been a peasant would you? He talked a lot about his father and mother—evidently he adored them. He said they'd be miracles anywhere out of Scotland, but there were many like them there. According to him there was nothing they hadn't read or couldn't quote by the yard, from Burns and Scott back to Shakespeare. That was the way he was brought up, and instead of wanting him to go on crofting like themselves, they were enchanted because he drew pictures on their unpainted doors and their whitewashed walls. They saved all their pennies to have him educated as an artist, and encouraged him—quite different from peasant parents in books. One day the 'meenister' called, and saw the boy's pictures. He thought them something out of the ordinary—pictures of castles and cathedrals they were, with people going in and coming out, and portraits of friends, and historical characters. After that he took a great interest in Ian, and taught him Latin and the few other things his wonderful parents didn't happen to know. When Ian was about thirteen or fourteen, the 'meenister' tried to get help for the little MacDonald from the great MacDonald, a disagreeable, cranky old man with one daughter. They thought they owned the whole world instead of one tiny island, and the man wouldn't do anything for the child. He simply poured contempt on 'clan ties.'"
"That doesn't sound like the great folk of Scotland," said Basil, who for weeks had been reading little else but Scottish history, Scottish fiction, and Scottish poetry, in order to get himself in the right frame of mind for writing "the book." "I haven't come across a single instance of their being purse-proud or snobbish."
"These weren't purse-proud, because their purses had nothing in them to be proud of," Aline explained. "Their branch of the MacDonalds had lost its money and its love of Scotland. Old Duncan MacDonald was the uncle of the last lord of Dhrum, who had to go away from his island for good and let his castle to 'aliens'—English people. When the nephew died later, Duncan inherited, but never lived at Dhrum. He only came there once in a while to visit the tenants who'd hired the castle from him, if they happened to be people he knew, and would 'do' him well. He and his daughter were mostly in London, where they had a flat, and prided themselves on knowing no Gaelic. They took pains to show that they considered the crofter's son a common brat, and resented the meenister's' expecting them to do anything for his future, just because his name happened to be MacDonald, and he lived in a hut on a remote point of their island. Ian didn't lose courage, though; and soon after the great snub he contrived to work his way somehow to Edinburgh. He wouldn't take the money his father and mother had saved up for him, because they were old and had been ill, and needed it themselves. But he did all kinds of queer jobs, and at last walked into the studio of a celebrated artist, saying he wanted to pay for some lessons. At first the man only laughed, but when he saw Ian's drawings, he was interested at once. He gave him lessons for nothing, and boasted of his protégé to other artists. It seems that a talent for both portraiture and architecture is very rare. When Ian was sixteen he won a big prize for the design of an important building which a lot of prominent architects had been trying for. Presently it came out that he was only a boy, a boy who could do wonderful portraits, too, and everybody began taking notice of him and writing enthusiastic praise in the papers. Some interviewer falsely reported that he'd called himself a cousin of the MacDonald of Dhrum, and disagreeable Duncan denied the relationship indignantly. He spoke to some one of Ian's father, who had just then died, as 'an ignorant old hay-cutter,' and the speech was repeated far and wide. You can imagine Ian Somerled forgetting an insult to his adored father! He dropped the name of MacDonald from that day, calling himself Somerled; and as he was all alone in the world—his mother was dead, too, and had never seen his success—he resolved to make a reputation in another country. Of course that was very young of him. He sees that now. He crossed to New York in the steerage, and vowed he'd never set foot in Scotland again, or take back his name of MacDonald, until old Duncan not only openly claimed him as a cousin, but begged him as a personal favour to return to Scotland."
"That must have seemed like sentencing himself to perpetual banishment," said Basil.
"I don't know. He appears to have had a kind of prophetic faith in his own powers of success. And he was right in every way. Duncan began to grovel years ago."
In talking of Somerled, Aline had forgotten to listen for sounds of his approach. She was interested in the story she was telling—more interested than she was usually in the development of her own plots. But luckily Basil saw to the plot-making nowadays, and she hadn't to worry. "It's funny," she went on, "that a man who laughs at romance should be one of the most romantic figures in the world. If you and I wrote up his story, and took him for the hero, all the critics would say 'how impossible!' But critics will never believe that anything highly romantic or sensational can happen really. I don't know what their own lives must be like—or what they can think of the incidents they must see every day in the newspapers! Somerled says the only romantic thing he ever did was to annex the name of Somerled: but almost every phase of his life would make a story. Take his success in America, for instance. He wasn't eighteen when he landed as an immigrant, with nothing in his pocket except what was left of the architectural prize. Most of that money had gone in giving his father a few last comforts, and putting up some wonderful, extravagant sort of monuments for both his parents, which Ian designed himself. But he hadn't been two months in New York when he won a still bigger prize, which came just as he was on the point of starving! A handful of oatmeal and an apple a day I should call starvation, but he says it was grand for his health. In six years, at twenty-four, he was not only the greatest portrait-painter in America, but one of the most successful architects, an extraordinary combination which has made him unique in modern times. And before he was twenty-eight came that big 'coup' of his, which he calls a 'mere accident that might have happened to any fool'—the buying of a site for a new town in Nevada, where he meant to build up a little city of beautiful houses, and finding a silver mine. Of course, it wasn't an 'accident.' It was the spirit of prophecy in him which has always carried him on to success—that, and his grit and daring and enterprise and general cleverness. Oh, Basil, if you could have heard him telling me these things that last night on the Olympic—leaning back in his deck-chair, smoking cigarette after cigarette (I was smoking too. I hate it; but I think he likes a woman to smoke and be a man's pal), the moonlight shining on his face, showing his eyes half shut, and talking in his quietest way, as if he were dreaming it all over again, or speaking to himself! I hardly breathed, till he broke off suddenly and laughed in quite a shy sort of way, ashamed of being 'egotistical,' though he hadn't praised himself at all. The flowery things I've said are mine. He even apologized! I felt I'd never had so great a compliment in my life. It seemed too good to be true that such a man should have opened his heart to me. But when his invitation for Scotland came, it—it set the seal of reality on the rest. Do you know, I can't help believing he made more than he need of his business in London; that the real truth was he wanted to stay there without us, and see how much he missed me. Now he's coming to accept our invitation, a day sooner than he meant to at first. Something tells me the reason why. I shall know for sure to-night, when I see him. He didn't want us to meet him at the station. But that was perhaps because—I couldn't have gone very well without you, and maybe——"
"I see! I'm to make myself scarce and leave you alone in the garden!"
"Not yet, dear. Only when we hear the car actually stopping at the gate. There'll be plenty of time then. And if you don't mind——"
"Of course, I don't mind," said Basil. He felt that he was blushing under the cover of darkness, and was thankful Aline could not see. Why the blush, he could not have explained. Was it for his sister, because she was managing her love affairs with a famous man in this energetic, businesslike way, and jumping eagerly at conclusions? Or was it for himself, because he was selfish and jealous of the new interest in Aline's life, which would—if it ended as she hoped—take her away from him and break their partnership?
He almost wished to accept the latter explanation. He would rather be disappointed in himself than think meanly—oh, ever so little meanly—of Aline.
Their partnership, begun when he was in the depths, regarding his life as practically finished, had given him the greatest happiness he had ever known. Memory flashed away at lightning speed over their travels together, their adventures. Somerled's wife would not write novels. And deep in his heart Basil knew that Aline's soul was not in the books, as his was. He would not acknowledge this difference between them, but he knew it was there. In old days, when Aline had written alone, she had always chosen some subject that loomed large in public interest at the moment, whether she herself cared about it or not, hoping to "come in on the wave." Just because she had not really cared her scheme of work had not given her success. So it had been with the idea of their first book written together. Aline had wanted to plan out something to do with motoring, about which every one was keen just then. She had proposed to combine business with a cure for her brother; and when she had failed to think of a "good plot on the right lines," he had made a suggestion which flashed into his head. The joy of motoring, the wonder of travel, both new to Basil, had intoxicated him. He wrote as one inspired, for the sheer love of writing and telling what he had seen and felt. And the world, catching the thrill of his joy, had shared it.
He did not say this to himself now, did not realize the truth of it, and did not even believe that he could go on writing stories and succeeding without Aline. Only, he knew that he loved his work for itself, and she did not. That the light of his life would be gone without it, whereas she would be glad to stop working and be idle as the admired wife of a celebrity and a millionaire. In this he felt a vague injustice of fate which depressed him—a rare state of mind for Basil Norman, to whom for four years the world had been a happy and magically beautiful dwelling-place.
"I hear a car now!" he exclaimed.
"It's his!" she answered. "I heard the siren when his chauffeur sounded it going out of the garage. It's different from any others that pass along this road. Good-bye for a little while, dear. You're so kind to me! Wish me luck."
"I wish Somerled luck," he said, trying to laugh, as he turned and marched quickly off toward the house.
Aline quite understood. He meant that Somerled would be lucky to get her. That was nice of him, and like him, too, for Basil was as gallant and chivalrous to his sister as a lover. Yet—she was sorry that he hadn't wished her luck in so many words.
She walked toward the gate. The car had stopped.
V
Mrs. Keeling's place, lent to her much-admired authors, had a very pretty gate. It was approached from the garden way, through an arbour thickly hung with roses and honeysuckle. It seemed to Aline West, as she went alone to meet Somerled, that night distilled a special perfume in the dew-filled cups of the flowers, sweet as unspoken love. She felt that she was on the threshold of happiness. It was the first step that counted. If she met Somerled in the right spirit, with the right word and the right look ... in this perfumed star-dusk and stillness, when they had not seen each other for days ... and he knew she had been waiting here for him, thinking of him ... and he saw that she had put on the dress he liked so much on shipboard, the one she had worn the last night, when he told her his life-story ... might not the thing that she desired happen? She encouraged herself by saying, "Why not?" and reminding herself that she was an attractive woman. Lots of men had been in love with her—not the right ones, but that was a detail. Why not Ian Somerled? He was a man, after all, like others.
He was at the gate already ... she almost ran.
"Hail, the conquering hero!" she cried to him, laughing.
He opened the gate. But it was not he who came in. He was opening it for some one else—a woman, a girl, something tall and feminine, anyhow. It was wrapped in a cloak. It had a flat pancake on its head for a hat. What could it be, and mean? The idea darted into Aline's mind that there had been an accident on the way here from the station; that perhaps Somerled had nearly or quite run over this creature—or her dog—or something.
"Hello, Mrs. West!" he answered her cheerfully. "I've got to you at last, and I've brought a visitor for the night. I've given my guarantee that you'll make her welcome."
The light of Aline's joy went out like a ray of moonlight swallowed up by a marauding cloud. She did not in the least understand what had happened, or what were the obligations to which he had committed her; but in any case the lute she had tuned had a rift in it, a big, bad rift, and it could make no music to-night. She felt suddenly at her worst instead of her best, as if she had tumbled off a bank of flowers in her prettiest frock into a bog. She longed to be cold and snappy and disagreeable, as a wife may safely be to a husband when he has blundered, and as she had often been to Jim in his brief day; but Somerled was not her husband, and certainly never would be unless she minded her "p's and q's" like a good and very clever little angel with unmeltable butter in its smiling mouth. So she shrieked, "Hang it!" and even worse, with her whole heart, and said with her lips, in a charming voice, "Why, of course! I shall be delighted to welcome any friend of yours, and so will Basil. I love surprises."
It was a short arbour, and as they all three came out of it, Mrs. West and Somerled and the wrapped-up thing with the pancake hat—the chauffeur following with a suit-case—Aline's eyes made the most of the starlight, that she might read the mystery and know the worst. The worst was very bad. Under the stars the girl looked a radiant beauty, and so young, so young! How was the man going to account for her? Was there still hope?
"I told you what Mrs. West would say!" exclaimed Somerled. "This is Miss MacDonald, a daughter of Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald."
"Oh!" said Aline. "How interesting! I'm delighted to meet her." She held out her hand, and the girl, who had not yet spoken a word, put hers into it.
There was no real reason why "I'm delighted to meet her" wasn't precisely the nicest thing to say in the circumstances, but somehow as a greeting it hadn't quite the right ring, Aline herself felt. And she was sorry, because she wanted to be entirely satisfactory to Somerled in every way, in all situations, no matter how trying, and thus perhaps save the ship. Why not? Many men of thirty-four were bored with girls, and Somerled must have been bored by them already in their thousands. Still, something that lay deep down within herself was sad and anxious. A daughter of the beautiful and almost notorious Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald! If he weren't in love with the girl, perhaps he had had a desperate love affair with the mother.
"I'd no idea that Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald had any children," Aline went on, as she shook a supple, satiny hand which wore no glove.
"She's only got me," said the girl, "and she doesn't know she's got me yet. At least, she may have forgotten."
Somerled broke out laughing. "You'll puzzle Mrs. West," he said, with a good-natured, amused, and proprietary air which stabbed Aline's feelings as with little sharp pins. No, whatever else he might be, he was not bored. "We'll have to do a lot of explaining by and by, indoors."
"Oh, yes," Barrie agreed. And then, plunging into her task, "He found me in the railway station. I've run away from home, and he wouldn't let me go to a hotel. Don't you really mind? Because——"
"Of course I don't mind." Aline rose bravely to the occasion. "It sounds wildly romantic, like most things that contrive to happen to Mr. Somerled, although he says he's ceased to believe in romance. Have you known each other long?"
"Only to-night," replied Barrie. And Somerled began to see that, as he had said, there certainly would have to be a lot of explaining. It almost seemed complicated. Nevertheless, he felt that he had done the only thing possible, and so far from having regrets, he had a curious sense of elation that was boyish. He wanted to see what was going to happen next. He felt as if by some rather nice accident he had been inveigled into playing a new game.
"I've known Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald ever since her first famous tour through America some ten or twelve years ago," he said. "You'll be amused, Mrs. West, to hear in what a queer way I ran across her daughter to-night."
"Yes, indeed, no doubt," answered Aline, as they walked toward the house. She was forcing herself to cheer up a little. His tone in speaking of the actress didn't sound like the tone of a man in love. And men of his type, who had been run after and spoilt, surely didn't fall in love at sight. It was going to prove no more than an annoying incident, this bringing home of a strange girl, who mightn't be so desperately pretty, anyhow, in a bright light. To-morrow the creature would be packed off to her mother or some one; and in a day or two more Somerled and Basil and she—Aline—would start off on their heavenly trip as if nothing had happened.
But Barrie was even prettier in the lamplight of the hall and drawing-room than she had been in the silver vagueness of starlight. Aline tried to think that she was the weirdest frump in the world, and absolutely impossible as a fascinator; but she knew that the weirdness would be superficial to the eye of Man. The thing was to hurry her away in all her frumpiness.
Aline brought them into the low-ceiled drawing-room which, with her own hands, she had made beautiful with many flowers in honour of Somerled's coming. She and Basil had been here for several days, while Somerled attended to business in London, and she had been looking forward to her friend's comments upon this drawing-room. She had imagined his exclaiming: "You've made it look like yourself!" But the girl had spoiled her effects. Somerled merely said, "What a pretty, old-fashioned room! The green wall is a becoming background." And when he uttered this comment it was at his vagabond he looked, not at his hostess.
Barrie was rather remarkable against that green. She glanced around, evidently in rapt admiration of everything she saw. Her eyes were very bright and big, her young, red lips a little apart. "Silly thing, gaping with her mouth open!" Aline relieved her feelings by saying to herself.
"Oh, it's so beautiful here, and Mrs. West's dress is so lovely," the girl said; "it makes me feel I must take off this horrid cloak and tam, not to be a blot. May I take them off?" she asked Aline, turning frank admiration on her, as one turns on a searchlight.
Aline would have liked to think of some reason for saying "no," such as a draught, or an immediate departure for upstairs; but even if the excuse had been valid enough, it would have been of no use, for without awaiting permission, which she took as a matter of course, the weird creature had whipped off her green pancake and was throwing back her cloak. "Not that my dress isn't nearly as bad," she apologized, sighing. "I have never seen such a pretty room as this."
It was really nothing wonderful by way of a room: a little oak panelling; faded green brocade walls; some nice old pastels; furniture of the Stuart period; pretty bright chintz; a few old Chelsea figures on the mantel and in a cabinet; quantities of red and white roses in Chinese bowls. Aline ached to snap, "If you've never seen anything as pretty as this, where have you lived?" But that was not the way of Somerled's ideal woman. It would have been better if the stupid thing had praised Mrs. West's looks, thus riveting Somerled's eyes and appreciation; but all her silly admiration seemed to be for the dress and the room. Little brute! Incapable of calling another female pretty, when a man was present. Just what one would expect of an actress's daughter, especially that actress, if half one heard of "Mrs. Bal" were true.
Aline was inclined to believe that Barrie MacDonald had purposely posed herself under a hanging lamp, so as to show off her hair when suddenly uncovered. The daughter of an actress, with the dramatic instinct in her blood! But the idea did not seem to occur to Somerled, experienced as he was, disillusioned as he thought himself. At least there was nothing cynical in the expression of his face.
"Do let me help you with your cloak," she said to Barrie, dimly hoping that the man would contrast her exquisitely corseted figure in its dress by Lucille with the crude, untrained outlines clothed in blue serge. She was not so tall as Barrie as they stood together, she discovered, and she wanted the girl to sit down. "You must both have something to eat," she went on, pulling the old-fashioned bead embroidered bell rope; and tears were close and hot behind her eyes, remembering how she had planned the little supper for herself and Somerled—and Basil, who hardly counted. "Or would you like to see your rooms first? One shall be made ready directly for Miss MacDonald. I suppose her luggage has come in with yours?"
"I have only a—a parcel," Barrie meekly confessed, feeling three times a worm, even a Laidly Worm. It was odd how this sweet-faced blond woman, with blue eyes and a halo of fair hair and a gentle smile, contrived—of course without meaning it—to make one feel the meanest, shabbiest thing cumbering a beautiful world! "I wonder if I'm going to like men better than women?" she thought.
"Ah, a parcel," repeated Aline daintily, as an incredibly neat maid answered the call of the beaded bell. "Moore," Mrs. West went on, "this young lady, Miss MacDonald, will spend the night. I think she might have the room of the red Chinese chintz at the end of my corridor. Please have it made ready as soon as possible, and——"
"Oh, is your name Muir?" exclaimed Barrie delightedly. "That's the name of our housekeeper at Hillard House. Perhaps you're related, though I never heard of Mrs. Muir having any daughters or nieces."
The maid, deftly taking the cue from her mistress pro tem., put into her impersonal gaze the coldness of a whole glacier as her eyes moved from defect to defect of Barrie's costume. The tone of that "Ah, a parcel," was unmistakable, and she knew exactly what Mrs. West thought of Miss MacDonald. "I am sorry, miss, but I do not think, I am related to your housekeeper," she replied; and Aline determined to give her a blouse or half a dozen handkerchiefs. She really was a most intelligent person. So intelligent was she that she knew by the feeling in her bones exactly how much Mrs. West wanted to get Miss MacDonald out of the drawing-room and into the Chinese room, which would be the most unbecoming in the house to a red-haired person. "I can take the young lady up now, if you wish, madam," she continued, "for the room is in order—only to bring towels and hot water."
Barrie looked pleadingly at Somerled. "I am quite clean," she said. "I washed at home before I started. And I'm so hungry."
Her appeal to him as a tried and trusted friend waked up something in Somerled which he had not known existed. Whatever it was stirred and was soft and warm in the region of his heart.
"I'm sure Mrs. West doesn't want to send you away," he said. And he could have said nothing more tactless. "I, too, am comparatively spotless," he went on, protecting his protégée by putting himself on her level, "and superlatively hungry. We shall both be delighted to accept your invitation to supper." He laughed, and Barrie gave him a grateful, understanding glance. He felt as if she were a wonderfully pretty doll which had somehow come alive after he had bought and rescued it from an upper shelf in an unworthy toy-shop—a dear, delightful, untamed doll which now belonged to him; and he was not sure that he wanted to let anybody else play with it until he had begun to tire a little of its tricks himself. Of course he'd tire in time; but there would not be time for tiring, because the doll must soon be packed off and sent to its mother.
"Tell Mr. Norman that Mr. Somerled has come, and that we're ready for supper," said Aline to Moore. The eyes of mistress and maid met, and for an instant they were social equals.
Basil Norman was a man who had odd thoughts and enjoyed them. For this reason he did not weary of his own society, for he never quite knew what he would think next. When he came to the door and pushed it open, he half believed that he was dreaming the tall, beautiful, badly dressed girl with torrents of red hair. People in real life did not wear their hair in torrents. Perhaps she was a ghost who went with the house, and he had never happened to see her before. He wondered if the others had noticed her yet.
"How are you, Somerled?" he inquired, not taking his eyes off the apparition. It was looking at him, too, almost anxiously, as if it were wondering whether he would be friend or foe; but, of course, it did not speak.
"All right. Very glad to see you both again—and to be here," Somerled answered.
"Miss MacDonald," announced Aline, thin-lipped.
"So you have a name?" said Basil to Barrie. "Was it given to you in dreamland or the spirit-world?" Then she knew at once that he was not a foe, but a friend.
"Fairyland," she replied, beaming on him. "I was in fairyland to-day. If I hadn't been there, I shouldn't be here." She could answer her own late question now, with practical certainty. She was going to like men better than women! Her mother, of course, would be an exception.
VI
It was a delicious little supper that Mrs. West had ordered in Somerled's honour, yet for some mysterious reason, thoroughly understood only by Aline, nobody did justice to it or enjoyed it much. Perhaps there was thunder in the air, which upset the nerves of every one, even the nerves of Moore, who spilt bouillon on Miss MacDonald's sleeve. This was the explanation which occurred to Basil; and certain it was that the sky had suddenly clouded over, hiding all the stars.
"I do hope we're not going to have rain for our trip," he remarked, more for the sake of something to say than because, even if rain came, it were likely to last. "It's just the ticklish time of the month for weather, you know: to-morrow we shall have the new moon."
"The heather moon!" Barrie said softly, looking out of the open window at the purple night, purple as heather.
"What do you mean by a heather moon?" asked Basil, interested. "It sounds sweeter than honeymoon."
"It's the sweetest moon of the year," the girl answered. "The moon when all the most beautiful things ought to happen to the people who are worthy of them—and the honeymoon can't come till afterward. I've always wanted something romantic to happen to me in the heather moon; yet nothing ever has, so far. It couldn't, at Grandma's!"
"But you haven't explained the heather moon," Basil reminded her.
"Don't you really know?" She opened her eyes very wide as she smiled at him in a friendly, childlike way; and Basil and Somerled forgot that there was a Mrs. West in the room. It was a momentary lapse of memory, but Aline felt it electrically. She was enraged at Basil, and disgusted with Barrie, though merely grieved with Somerled.
"There's a minx for you!" thought Moore, who was plain, and had been chosen by Mrs. Keeling because her teeth stuck out more than the lady's own.
"Wait! I believe, as a good Scotsman, I can guess," said Somerled. "The heather moon's the moon of August, the moon when the heather's in its prime of bloom."
"Yes!" cried Barrie, joyous that it should be he, her first friend, the friend of her mother, who had solved the puzzle. "That's it: and it's the moon for falling in love. That's why the honeymoon has to come afterward." Then, seeing that Mrs. West was looking at her with a look that might mean astonishment or disapproval, she blushed. It was queer, but for a minute that pretty, quite young woman—if widows could be called quite young—had an expression almost like Grandma's.
"Oh, I do hope I haven't said anything horrid?" Barrie appealed from one to another. "You see, I never dared say anything at all about love before Grandma or Heppie, but it is talked about so much in books, I thought I might mention it in company. I'm sorry if I've not been maidenly, which Miss Hepburn is always telling me I'm not."
"I suspect most maidens think a good deal about love whether or no they talk of it, don't they, Norman?" said Somerled.
"How should I know?" Basil asked.
Both men were different from their everyday selves to-night. They seemed self-conscious.
"Why, it's your business to know. You write novels. Or do you leave all the love parts to your sister?"
"I suppose widows may talk as much as they like about love," said Barrie reflectively, "having had it and passed it by."
The creature was pretending to take for granted that widows were poor, passée things who had lived their lives and could have no more personal interest in heather moons or honeymoons! Mrs. West grew pale, and was angry with herself for caring. Barrie made her feel faded—a "back number." She told herself that if she could not get rid of this girl the first thing to-morrow, she should be ill.
"You must ask your mother these questions, and she'll answer them better than I can," Aline said in her pretty voice, with her gentle smile.
Already she had heard from Barrie and from Somerled something of the girl's story, and knew that through family misunderstandings mother and daughter had been separated for years. "You must be so impatient to see her!" she went on.
"I am," said Barrie.
"I know Sir George Alexander a little," Aline answered. "He may take a curtain-raiser of ours; and it's occurred to me to telegraph him in the morning, as soon as the post-office opens. He'll be able to let us know where Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald's acting. We won't trust to the stage papers alone. It would be a pity to keep this child in suspense a minute longer than necessary. Don't you think it's a good plan, Mr. Somerled?"
"Very," he agreed. It was a good plan. And it would be a pity to keep the child in suspense. The pretty doll must be packed up and sent away where it belonged, whereupon everything would go on as before. And the heather moon would begin to shine gold on purple, for the trip through bonny Scotland, which he had planned. He had been looking forward to the tour, not with keen enthusiasm indeed, but with interest. He had been satisfied with the companions he had chosen, and the fact that they wanted to see Scotland had given him an incentive for taking the rest cure he had been imperatively ordered, in his native land rather than elsewhere. Once, long ago, self-exiled at the age of Barrie MacDonald, he had passionately yearned for his "ain countree," and often regretted the boyish vow he was too proud and obstinate to break. But years had passed now since Duncan MacDonald and his daughter Margaret visited America to find themselves worth knowing only as kinsfolk of the despised peasant. Accepting the situation because of its advantages and his necessities, the old man had ignored the past and "made up" to the young millionaire artist. Ian's sense of humour had been so tickled that, to his own surprise, he had laughed and forgotten his youthful rancour. It struck him as distinctly funny that he had ever taken old Duncan's waspishness seriously enough to make vows of any sort because of it. And he saw that indirectly he owed fortune to the haughty lord of Dhrum. It had amused Somerled a good deal and pleased him a little that "his highness" (as he called the great one) should implore the "peasant brat" to become tenant of Dunelin Castle for an unlimited term of years; that Duncan should chat to newspaper men of his "distinguished relative Ian MacDonald, who had won fame under the very suitable nom de guerre of Somerled"; and that "Cousin Ian" should be pressed to meet "Cousin Margaret." It was a queer world, and nobody in it was queerer than one's self. So Somerled had felt when, just because the miracle had happened to free him of his vow, he no longer pined to gaze upon his native Highlands. He felt at home and happy enough in America; and if being "happy enough" wasn't quite the beautiful state he had pictured as a boy, it was full of interest. He had taken Dunelin Castle off its owner's hands at a high yearly rent, in order that no rich and vulgar Cockney should become the tenant, but he had never stayed there, though once, even to have the right of entrance would have seemed a fairy dream. There were no such things as fairy dreams for him since he had thoroughly grown up, because in the process of becoming a millionaire he had ceased to believe in any kind of dreams. Friendships and sympathies he had vainly longed for in his poverty could be his for the asking or even without the asking now; and that was the reason he did not feel they were worth having. He had no use in his heart for little brothers and sisters of the rich, and in his experienced hardness he was sometimes unjust to kindly people. But he had liked the novels of Aline West and Basil Norman before he met the two popular Canadian authors on shipboard; and learning that they planned to write a "Scotch book," it had occurred to him that they might all three go about sight-seeing together. His rest cure had ceased to bore him in prospect; he had thought with some pleasure of showing Aline Dunelin Castle and the island of Dhrum. Suddenly, however, Aline's own words damped the prospect as with a douche of cold water.
She was perfectly right, too. It would be a very good plan to place the waif he had picked up as soon as possible in the care of a mother, even such an extraordinary, incredible mother as Mrs. "Bal" MacDonald: a good plan for the girl's sake, and for everybody's sake, because it was arranged to start for Scotland the day after to-morrow. Still, Barrie's impromptu ode to the heather moon had for a moment irradiated his mind with a light such as had not shone for Somerled on land or sea since he had become rich enough to afford the most expensive lighting. Then as quickly it had died down. He saw himself spinning agreeably through Scottish scenes with Mrs. West and her brother, and suddenly, treacherously, he felt that to spin agreeably was not enough to satisfy him, that it was unworthy of wondrous golden light on purple hills of high romance. He wanted something more, something altogether different, and the plans which had contented him looked dull as ditchwater in the fading glamour. He himself looked dull. Aline looked dull, and for a moment he almost disliked her sweet blue eyes, her pretty, ever gentle smile, behind which must lurk some true feeling, or she could not write those delicately charming books.
"And don't you think, too," Aline urged kindly, "that we ought to put Miss MacDonald's poor grandmother out of her misery? I might write a note to—Hillard House, I think she said?—explaining—er—what has happened, as well—as well as I could? Let me see, what would be best? Oh, I could say that by accident her granddaughter had met a guest of mine, a friend of Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald's; that she wasn't to worry, because, though her granddaughter refused to return, we would see that the child reached her mother safely, by to-morrow night if possible. I can mention Basil, and say we are the writers. If she has heard of us, that may relieve the poor lady's mind."
"Grandma hasn't heard of you, I'm sure," said Barrie, "unless you write religious books; but she won't need her mind relieved. While I was with her, I think she considered it her duty to take strict care of me; but now I've gone my own way, she'll see it was predestined. It was just the same with a Dresden china teapot she inherited. She didn't approve of it because it was too gay, but she always washed it herself because it was her father's. When it broke in spite of her, she wouldn't have it mended, and told Heppie to throw the pieces away."
"Nevertheless, I must write, and send the letter to Hillard House by hand," Aline insisted. "If I didn't do that I should not be able to sleep." She spoke with fervour, for she felt that she must have two strings to her bow. If "Mother" failed, she must be able to fall back on "Grandma."
VII
Barrie meant to be up and dressed before any one else in the house, but she lay awake until long after midnight, an unprecedented thing for her, and in consequence slept late, making up her accustomed nine hours.
Usually she fell asleep at ten or soon after, and jumped briskly out of bed at seven, waked only by her eager desire for renewed life, in a perfectly new day which no one else had ever seen yet. This morning it was a repeated knocking at the door which mingled with her dreams and shook her out of them. What door could it be? Where was she? the girl wondered for a dazed instant. Then Moore appeared with a breakfast-tray.
"Mrs. West said not to wake you for early tea," she explained with a glacial coldness worthy of Hillard House. "Madam and the two gentlemen are having breakfast out of doors in the summer-house; and when you get up, miss, I advise you to draw your curtains well across the windows or you may be seen."
Barrie wished that she too were having breakfast in the summer-house, and thought it mistaken kindness on the part of Mrs. West not to have her called. But, from Aline's point of view, there was no mistake. "I have let the child sleep," she explained to Somerled and Basil. "It is such a child, isn't it? And when she wakes up there may be a wire in answer to mine, which went before eight."
When ten o'clock struck and still the telegram had not arrived, Aline asked herself if she oughtn't to go and call on old Mrs. MacDonald, who had deigned to take no notice of her tactfully expressed letter. Just then, however, Somerled's chauffeur was seen hovering in the flowery distance. He had brought two stage papers which his master had sent him out to buy. Aline was not pleased that Somerled had thought it necessary to get information on his own account. She would have preferred that he should trust to her; but she tried to think that perhaps he too was secretly tired of the girl and wanted to be rid of her. While he was glancing through the first paper, Moore glided into the summer-house with a brick-coloured envelope on a silver tray. It was addressed to Aline, and she opened it quickly, glad to be ahead of Ian with news. Then she found herself confronting an unexpected difficulty. "Mrs. B. M. trying new play small towns; will open Edinburgh in five or six days." With something like a gasp, Aline stopped on the brink of reading the telegram aloud. Who would have thought of this?
Her brain worked quickly. She didn't want Somerled to know that "Mrs. Bal" was so near. He might—make some ridiculous proposal about the girl—Heaven alone knew what! Men were capable of anything. The troublesome creature must really go back to her grandmother at once. Mrs. Bal could easily come to Carlisle and collect her—like lost luggage—if she cared to be burdened with such luggage. If only Aline could find some excuse to make Somerled put down that paper and forthwith go into the house!
"Is your telegram from Sir George?" he inquired calmly, looking up from the paper which she longed to snatch.
For half a second she hesitated, and then said, "No. It's not what I expected." This was almost true.
Basil was gazing at her with solicitude. He thought that she had turned pale. "No bad news from any one, I hope, dear?" he asked.
"It is annoying," she replied with reserve, and crumpled up the telegram. "I was stupid to let Moore go—I must send an answer. Mr. Somerled, it would be too good of you to look for a form on the desk in the drawing-room."
"Shan't I——" began Basil.
"I must ask your advice, meanwhile, about what I'm to say," she cut him short. Somerled put down the paper on the rustic seat, got up with alacrity, and started for the house. He would be back in three or four minutes, and not one of those minutes ought to be wasted. "Don't bother with questions," she said to Basil, "but if you love me, make those theatrical papers disappear before Mr. Somerled can read them. I'm going to change my mind and follow him into the house to write my telegram. I'll keep him a while talking. If he comes looking for his papers, I want them to be gone. I depend on you!"
Without waiting for Basil's promise, she darted away in order to intercept Somerled before he could finish his errand in the drawing-room. Of course, it would be easy for him to buy more papers, but before he could get them, Aline was hoping to have maneuvered the embarrassing Miss MacDonald out of the house. She counted that Ian would be long in finding the forms, because men never could find the simplest things when told to look for them; but Somerled was an exception, and she only just caught him on the threshold. "After all, I want your advice instead of Basil's," she said. "Do sit here where we shall be quiet, and let me consult you." She patted the arm of a big chintz-covered sofa invitingly, and as she sat down Ian followed suit. Still she did not know what on earth to say to him. She hoped for an inspiration at the last instant, as Basil had taught her to do in arranging a difficult situation between hero and heroine. She wanted to play heroine now with Somerled as hero. Oh, how much she wanted it!
She took a long breath which must bring that inspiration at the end of it, if inspiration were to be of use. And it came at command, as things good or bad do come if intensely desired. But it was such a thoroughly objectionable inspiration that she hardly dared snap at it as she wished, for Aline was not malicious, and disliked malice and all uncharitableness as she disliked smearing her pink and white fingers with ink. Still, no alternative idea occurred to her, and Somerled was waiting. In desperation she had to take what offered, excusing herself to herself with every word she spoke. Yet through all she could not help thinking that she was clever, that she had marvellous presence of mind, and that she was displaying an inventive faculty which would have surprised Basil, though, of course, he must never know, because men were often as idiotically conscientious about little things as they were unscrupulous about big ones.
"The telegram that came was from Mrs. MacDonald, the child's grandmother," she heard herself explaining, not forgetting, in her mental confusion, to rub in the impression of Barrie's unfledged youth. "I was surprised at not hearing, but this wire is an answer to my letter. The old lady goes into no particulars, but she says: 'Gravest reasons why my granddaughter should not join her mother. Hope you in person will bring her back to me.' Now, dear Mr. Somerled, the little girl is your protégée. It's for you to say what's to be done with her."
Somerled did not reply at once. He sat thinking, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, making a jingling noise with keys or silver, which in her present mood got upon Aline's nerves extraordinarily. She felt that if he did not stop jingling and begin to speak she should scream. If he asked to see the telegram, she was prepared to say that she had torn it up, as an excuse not to show it to Basil, on second thoughts the affair appearing to be Somerled's business. Somerled did not, however, make the request, and Aline was spared an extra fib, at which she was unreasonably pleased.
"Well?" she controlled herself to murmur, instead of screaming.
"I should feel a traitor to give the girl up," he said. "In fact, I can't do it unless she agrees. I promised not even to advise her that she ought to go back. She trusted me when I brought her here."
"Shall I have a little talk with her?" Aline suggested, and never had her voice been so kind and sweet. Indeed, in her trembling hope, she was willing to be sweet and kind—with limitations.
Somerled thought again for a minute, jingling more horribly than ever. Then, just at screaming-point once more for Aline, he said decidedly, "No, thank you. From what Miss MacDonald's told us, it's natural her grandmother should think there are grave objections to Mrs. Bal as a guardian; but the old lady's two generations at least behind the age. Youth's at the prow nowadays, and—a mother's a mother, anyhow. We'll have to give Mrs. Bal a chance to do the maternal act——"
"She may be far, far away, even in America—or Australia," Aline objected. "And even if——"
"Oh, Mr. Somerled, mother's coming to Edinburgh!" cried a voice at the long window, and Barrie appeared, waving a newspaper.
The one unforeseen thing had happened. The vagabond had strayed into the summer-house and beguiled Basil. Aline knew too well what excuse he would make if accused: "Why, you didn't tell me she wasn't to look at the papers!"
"I've seen the name, 'Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald,'" the detestable girl went on, pushing into the room without asking permission. "She's going to 'open,' as the paper expresses it, in a new play called 'The Nelly Affair,' on Monday night at the Lyceum Theatre. Next Monday! Nearly a week from now! How can I wait—what shall I do till then?"
It was to Somerled that she appealed. She made him feel that the responsibility was his. And it was a bad moment to feel this, because of Mrs. West's telegram from Grandma. He got up from the sofa, still jingling the money in his pockets. Looking down at Aline he saw only her profile and an ear as deeply pink as coral under a loop of blond hair. Evidently she too was feeling the situation. Good of her to take an interest! She really was good. She had asked his advice. Now he would ask hers.
"Mrs. West and I will talk over a plan I have for you," he said to the girl.
"Is it your plan—or hers?" asked Barrie anxiously.
"It will be both by the time you hear it," he answered, with a reassuring smile.
Aline humoured him. "Run away and play, little girl, till the plan is cooked," she gayly cried. "Play with my brother."
Barrie backed out, feeling as if she had been half smothered with a perfumed pillow.
"Do you guess my plan?" asked Ian.
"I wonder?" Aline murmured. She could not have spoken aloud just then.
"It's this. Why shouldn't we take her with us in the car to Edinburgh? We've lots of room."
She had known that this would come. All she had done had only hastened the catastrophe. "That poor old lady," she stammered. "I can't help sympathizing—being a little sorry for her. Isn't she, then, to be considered—after bringing up the girl?"
"You think," he said reflectively, "that she ought to be consulted?"
"Oh, I do!"
"Very well. Then I'll go and have it out with her myself."
"The telegram!" thought Mrs. West, her ears more coraline than ever. "After all," she faltered, "perhaps it would bring about complications. She might resort to—to something legal. Fancy if she sent the police to get back her granddaughter."
Somerled laughed and said nothing. He was not in a mood for argument.
"He won't go," Aline thought. "Thank Heaven, he hates bother."
This was true of Somerled as a rule; but his rules had exceptions.
VIII
So this was the garden where that strange flower of girlhood had budded and blossomed. All at once Barrie, in her quaintness, became a readable riddle to Somerled.
The two gates in the high wall were kept bolted, but there was a jangling bell for each, the gate for visitors (it was almost supererogatory), and the gate for tradesmen and servants. An elderly and sullenly astonished woman opened the visitors' gate for Somerled, and made of her lean form a barrier lest he should try to pass. But she being narrowly built, on somewhat Gothic lines, and the gateway being broad, Somerled saw past the flying buttresses of her skirts into the background. And it was this background that explained in a flash why the girl knew less of life than a bird which has learned to use its wings; also the reason why she could never return to waste her young years behind the garden wall of Hillard House. The thought came into Somerled's mind that it would be interesting to show her the world she had never seen, not only between Carlisle and Edinburgh, but over the hills and far away, as far as the purple island of Dhrum, set in its sunset frame of ocean gold—or even farther. That could not be, of course, but the picture was pleasant.
He had prepared himself to be ingratiating; but he realized that ingratiation was not a successful line to pursue with dragons. Instead of inquiring politely if Mrs. MacDonald were at home, he said bluntly, "I wish to see Mrs. MacDonald; I have business with her—not my business, but hers. And you may tell her I am not The MacDonald of Dhrum, but a MacDonald from Dhrum, a very different thing."
He knew well that the name of Somerled would be no "Open Sesame" to this door, and he rather enjoyed the knowledge. It was clear at once that he had used the right key. Perhaps no other would have served a stranger. Anna Case was not a Scotswoman, but the name of MacDonald was respected within these gates, no matter who bore it, and this dark man, with the blue eyes that went through you like bright steel blades, didn't look like one who would claim what he had no right to claim. She bade him follow her into the house, which he did; into the hall; and so to a drearier drawing-room than he had ever entered. There had perhaps been some as gray and grim on his island of Dhrum; but in those days he had known nothing of drawing-rooms.
This was not even early Victorian. It was mid-Victorian, and rubbing and brushing had given the ugly furniture no time to mellow. He sat down on a horsehair-covered sofa which had two worked worsted cushions, each stiffly upright in its corner. One represented a dog's head, the other a bunch of white and yellow flowers with a cold background of steel beads. On the walls hung a few steel engravings; a meeting of Covenanters; portraits of unco' guid worthies with sidewhiskers or beards; and some tortured stags pursued or caught by hounds.
"Terrible!" he groaned in spirit. "Who'd suppose that such things existed nowadays?"
He might appropriately have made much the same criticism of the old woman who at that instant opened the door and came in, sturdily, in spite of her limp and the stout stick grasped in a knuckly hand. But as their eyes met—hers like thick glass panes behind which a burning fire could be dimly seen—something in her grim spirit spoke to something as grim and uncompromising far down his nature. To his own surprise he felt awaking in himself a queer impulse of sympathy for the redoubtable Grandma. Perhaps, reluctantly, she felt the same for him. But she looked him in the face, keenly and unblinkingly. "Well, sir," she said, in a deep voice almost like a man's, and amazingly young and vital, "well, sir, I do not recognize you, though you have gained entrance to my house by claiming the name of MacDonald."
"That is true," replied Ian, who had risen at her coming. "It's the first time I've claimed the name for many years, though it is mine and was my father's before me."
"Who was your father?" the old woman catechized him. "What kin to Duncan, my dead husband's half-brother?"
"No kin except by clan ties. You wouldn't have heard of us. My father was a crofter. His name was David."
"I well remember that man," said Mrs. MacDonald, "and his wife too when I lived with my husband on the island in my youth. Let me see—Mary her name was. They were God-fearing folk, and didn't wear any such grand clothes as you do, not even for their Sunday best."
"I paint people's portraits, you see, and have to live in cities," explained Ian calmly, though he had grown lazy as he grew rich and had not painted. "My clothes suit my trade and way of life better than my father's would, I think; though, as for my brains, my father's hat would have been too big for them."
"I dare say you are right about the brains. You are that youth who went off to America under the name of Somerled," Mrs. MacDonald severely remarked. "I have read of you in the newspapers; but I never approved of you, sir. It's not man's work, to my mind, smearing canvas with paint, and encouraging silly women to be vain of their faces."
"My portraits aren't considered to have that effect," returned Somerled; "rather the contrary, in some cases. And I'm sorry you don't approve of me, because that makes a bad opening for what I've come to say. However, it can't be helped. I know Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald slightly; met her in America——"
"If you think an acquaintance with that woman will recommend you to me, sir, you are mightily mistaken," was the answer he got.
"I mention it to make you understand why, when I met her daughter last night, I felt it my duty to do what I could, being of the same name and not quite a stranger to the family."
"Oh, you felt it your duty! Then you're the person mentioned in a letter I received from a certain Mrs. West, according to herself a writer of books. I do not read her sort of books, and never heard of her. 'Motor novels' indeed! What worse than nonsense! Little enough sense fools must have to buy them! If you have come from this Mrs. West, you can tell her from me, as she has made her bed she may lie in it. She has not taken under her roof my granddaughter, but the daughter of Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald, the play actress. I did my best for the girl, striving to bring her up to be a good and modest woman, despite the bad blood of the mother who broke my son's heart and killed him, who did what she could, and has been doing what she could in the years since, to disgrace our house. I might have known I should strive in vain, and I did know at heart. Vanity and extravagance and fondness of pleasure were Barbara Ballantree's undoing. I preserved her daughter from those dangers, and gave her a religious education. Levity was sternly rebuked in her. She had no young acquaintances to teach her foolishness, or tell her of her mother's sin. She was allowed no money to fritter away on vanities, no silly novels to read, such as those your friends write, no frivolous pursuits which could distract her mind from duty—yet she is her mother over again, and, like her mother, runs away from my house by stealth, in the dead of night."
"It wasn't ten o'clock when I met her in the railway station," Somerled defended the absent. "She was then not very stealthily seeking a train for London, where she expected to find her mother. Mrs. West has written you, I know, and told you everything that happened. For my part, I've called to speak of a plan I have in mind for your granddaughter. The telegram you sent Mrs. West seemed——"
"The telegram I sent Mrs. West? I've sent no telegram to her nor any one. I don't send telegrams."
"Indeed?" stammered Somerled, taken aback. "I understood—Mrs. West believed the telegram to be from you——"
"Nothing of the kind. She couldn't have believed it," Mrs. MacDonald shut him up mercilessly. "She must have been 'romancing,' as I suppose she would call it. I should call it lying."
Remembering Aline's words, Somerled also was frankly inclined to call it lying—on the part of the young woman or the old. He would gladly have blamed the elder, but reason rebelled. Whatever Mrs. MacDonald's faults might be, she did not seem to be one who would deliberately tell a lie.
"But why should Mrs. West?" Somerled asked himself, calling up the pretty smile, the soft blue eyes of his friend. He had been inclined to believe her true. He had liked her very much, more than he liked most women, and had wondered if he might not learn to like her still better in time. The women he saw oftenest were mostly nervous, exacting, self-centred creatures, craving constant flattery. Aline was none of these things. She had many charms, and he had seen few defects; but a motive for falseness in the matter of the telegram would suggest itself to his intelligence. He tried to shut the door in its insinuating, conceited grin.
"There must be a mistake—somewhere," he mumbled.
"Not here, anyhow," retorted the old lady.
"After all, it's apart from the question in hand. But perhaps my plans for your granddaughter don't interest you?"
"Not particularly. Still, you may as well tell them. I see you want to."
"And I see"—Somerled squandered a smile, but only because it came spontaneously—"I see that you want to hear them, because," he dared to go on with a flash of his keen eyes into hers, "you do care what becomes of Miss MacDonald. If you had not got Mrs. West's letter, you would have had no sleep last night. As it is, knowing your granddaughter has fallen into safe hands, you can comfortably disclaim anxiety."
"You seem to fancy yourself a mind-reader, my good sir," returned Mrs. MacDonald at her haughtiest, or what Barrie would have called her "snortiest." "Think what you like. It is nothing to me, and thinking costs naught. As for the hands she has fallen into, what do I know of them? They may be black with sin for all I can tell. No doubt Barbara Ballantree's daughter would be just as ready to accept help from such hands."
"As a painter, I try to keep mine clean," said Somerled. "I tell you that in earnest, not in joke, because for the present I've constituted myself your granddaughter's guardian. My plan is to take her in my motor-car to Edinburgh, where I shall deliver her safely to Mrs. Bal—Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald. In the car will be Mrs. West and her brother, Basil Norman. Have you anything to say against the plan? If you have, kindly speak now."
"If I did speak, would it prevent your doing what you've made up your mind to do?"
"Perhaps not, unless your reasons appealed to my judgment," Somerled admitted.
"You're no prevaricator, anyhow."
"I don't come of prevaricating stock."
"You don't, if you're David MacDonald's son. He was a humble, God-respecting man. But you have no humble air. You hold your crest high."
Somerled was minded to be impudent and say that in that case he must get his hair cut; but he refrained. "The atmosphere of this house does not conduce to humility, madam," he answered instead—and always as they talked the two looked one another straight and full in the face.
"H'm!" the old woman grunted. Yet there was something vaguely resembling a twinkle in the glass-gray eyes, a gleam which Barrie and few others now living had ever seen; for not more than one or two of her fellow-beings had ever had the slightest idea how to manage Mrs. MacDonald, née Ann (scorning an "e") Hillard.
"Go on your motor trip, then, so far as I care," said she, a permission which from her was well-nigh a blessing. "It will probably end in a smash-up before Edinburgh."
"I think not," said Somerled. "I drive myself, and I know how to drive rather well."
"I was not referring to physical results."
"So I presumed. Nor was I," he retorted.
If she found the reply enigmatical she did not say so.
They had not sat down during the conversation. Now, Somerled took a step toward the door. "I'm obliged to you for receiving me, madam," he said as a prelude to departure.
"I received you on the strength of your name," she reminded him.
"Which I don't intend to disgrace in your eyes."
"Why in my eyes? They will not long be looking your way."
"I think they will, as long as I'm in charge of your granddaughter. That's what I mean."
"I do not thank you for the assurance. Except that when she's twenty-one I shall make over certain money of my son's to her, I have washed my hands of the girl."
"I haven't. That's not the kind of washing to make them clean."
"You reproach me, sir!" She glared at him.
"Not at all, madam. Even if I would venture, there's no need, for I think your bark is worse than your bite."
Again she almost twinkled at the wretch's daring. There was excitement in it, which she had not experienced since early married days. Then she had had to do with another MacDonald, and even a Hillard could without disgrace afford to be mastered by a MacDonald of Dhrum.
"When I've put your granddaughter into more suitable guardianship than mine," Somerled went on quickly, "I'll write and tell you."
"Suitable guardianship! It will be some time before I get that letter."
"I thank you for the compliment."
"It was not one."
"You're not to blame if I choose to take it as such."
"I am not to blame in any way in this matter."
"There I'm no judge. It's my own actions I must look after." And again he smiled.
"I advise you to be careful, sir, between Barbara Ballantree and Barribel MacDonald. I wish you joy of them both."
"And what of Aline West?" The question whispered itself in Somerled's ears.
But Mrs. MacDonald knew nothing of Aline West. And Somerled was beginning to think that, for all the boasted sagacity of experience, he knew not much more.
"Thank you for your kind wishes," he said non-committally. "And now I will wish you a good day."
He put out his hand, and, to her own intense surprise when she thought of it afterward, Mrs. MacDonald gave hers. Over the prominent knuckles the old skin lay soft and loose. The grim woman was vaguely pathetic to Somerled in his youth and strength and full tide of success. The touch of the would-be iron hand in the velvet glove of faded age made him conscious of his vast advantage over her. He went away filled with hope, and a curious new joy of life, which was partly the excitement of battle.
"The heather moon!" he found himself saying, as he passed out of the ill-kept, once lovely garden where Barrie had often dreamed. Perhaps the thought came then because here and there a patch of heather glorified the weeds, or perhaps because Barrie's dreams still empurpled their birthplace.
IX
When luncheon-time drew near and Somerled was absent, Aline's heart misgave her. It was useless to argue that he must have lingered in talk with his chauffeur, with whom he had early gone to confer. Reason offered this explanation, which was plausible, and altogether more likely than any other; but instinct was deaf to it. Aline wandered nervously about the house and garden, unable to settle anywhere, and it was an added vexation to her disturbed spirit that Basil should be giving himself heart and soul to the entertainment of that dreadful girl in the summer-house. It was well enough that he should entertain her, and keep her passive, but Aline would have liked him to be a martyr, sacrificing his own inclination for his sister's good. She did not wish to think that there was something about this young, crude creature which attracted men to her, and caused them to find pleasure in her society. Aline's head ached, and she could not think consecutively. Again and again she asked herself, "What shall I do if he has been to see that old woman and found out about the telegram?" but no clear answer would come. She could only repeat the would-be consoling words, "But he hasn't been there. It's silly to think of such a thing. He's not that sort of man."
She was in the summer-house with her brother and Barrie MacDonald when at last Somerled did come. She called to him gayly as he appeared round the corner of an immense architectural rose-bush, and he answered pleasantly. He even met her smile with a smile as friendly to the eye, and there was no definable change in his look or manner, yet—Aline was filled with a cold fear which chilled the perfumed August noon. Her perception of the invisible was as sensitive as the needle of a compass to the thrill of the magnetic north. Her brain suddenly buzzed as if a hive of bees had been let loose in her head. A voice seemed to be yelling in her ears accusations: "What a fool you have been—what a fool you have been. It's all your fault if he has found out. You needn't have done the thing. It wasn't necessary."
She feared to meet Somerled's eyes and read condemnation, yet her very dread forced her to seek them, and learn at once the best or worst, since suspense was unbearable. It seemed to her that he avoided her look; that he too was nervous and uncomfortable, while trying to appear at ease.
For a moment or two he talked of the car, which he had been to see, and of a sight-seeing expedition round Carlisle which Basil had proposed for the afternoon. Then he turned suddenly to Barrie: "I've been thinking over what we can do for you, Miss MacDonald," he said. "We don't know where your mother is now, but we do know that she'll be in Edinburgh the first of next week. Perhaps we might be able to find out her whereabouts meanwhile, but there'd be delay before we could expect answers to inquiries, if she's playing small towns in order to knock her new play into shape. You don't want to go back to your grandmother's. We're starting off in my car to-morrow. I've undertaken the responsibility of you, so I'm your guardian pro tem. I couldn't allow you to hang about alone anywhere. The alternative is, taking you with us in the car. What do you say?"
"Me in a motor-car!" exclaimed Barrie, rapturous. "It can't be true."
"It will be true if you say 'yes.'" Somerled spoke coolly, but it seemed to Aline that his eyes were alight. They were fixed on the girl, noting how she paled and flushed. Her face, seen in the golden lights and green shadows of the summer-house, had the texture of flowers. Aline had not known it was in her to hate any one so bleakly as she hated Barrie MacDonald at this moment; and she hated Somerled too, more than she had hated him last night. She ached to make him suffer as he was making her suffer. If only she could—if she but had the power!
This was the blow she had known would fall: the invitation to Barrie. Now the worst had happened despite the risk she had run for its prevention. And Somerled would not meet her eyes. Did this mean that he not only made light of her arguments, but had found out the falsehood on which they were based?
"Of course I say 'yes!'" Barrie was gayly answering. "It seems more than ever as if I were in a fairy story. Travelling for five days, in a real, live motor-car, to see my real live mother! Oh, if Grandma knew!"
"She does know," said Somerled. The words spoke themselves. For once unable to decide quickly and definitely, he had come back from Hillard House to Moorhill Farm without making up his mind whether or no to tell how he had spent most of his morning. He had left chance to settle the question; and now it was settled. Still he did not look at Mrs. West. He spoke in a commonplace tone, as if Mrs. MacDonald's knowledge of his plan included no secret knowledge on his part.
"How do you know she knows?" asked Barrie eagerly, leaning toward him with elbows on knees, chin in hand, long red plait failing over shoulder. "You—you haven't seen her?"
"I have."
"You met her looking for me!"
"No, not that."
"Then you must have been to Hillard House."
"Yes. I went there to talk with Mrs. MacDonald about you."
To save her life, Aline could not have kept down her agonizing blush. Tears started to her eyes. Though she had been half prepared for this blow, it fell upon her with an almost mortal shock. Ostentatiously, Somerled was keeping his eyes off her face; and that was worse than if he had stared straight into her eyes. Her terrible blush must have touched the consciousness of a blind man. It called Basil's fascinated attention from the girl; and so stricken did his sister look that he would have cried out to ask what was the matter had she not sealed his lips with a glance of desperate command.
There was no longer a gram of doubt. Somerled knew that Mrs. West had lied about the telegram, and everything was changed between them forever. For a moment Aline told herself that there was no hope, there could not possibly be any; and yet, if he cared for her, would he not forgive? Was there no way of saving the situation, and turning the inevitable change into gain instead of loss? She took a quick and courageous resolution, as a timid woman may when told that her life depends upon a dangerous operation, to be performed instantly or not at all.
"Mr. Somerled," she said, "can I speak to you—just you and me alone for a few minutes?" As she made her plea, she rose from the rustic seat where she had been sitting by her brother's side and opposite Barrie.
"Of course, with pleasure." Somerled rose too, stiff and alert as a soldier on duty. She hated this stiffness, this alertness. It showed her that he was sensitively dreading the scene to come, and hiding reluctance behind a hard, bright shield.
"Mrs. West," Barrie spoke out impulsively, "if you don't want me to go in the car, I won't."
"Of course I want you to go, silly child." Aline tried to withdraw sharpness from her voice, but it was there, like the sting of a wasp in a wound. "Even if I didn't think it wise for some reasons, it isn't my car, you know, but Mr. Somerled's, and he has a perfect right to invite any guests he likes. Don't imagine that I'm going to talk to him about you. It's something quite different I have to say."
Barrie was snubbed into instant silence; but as Aline and Somerled walked away together they heard her appeal confidentially to Basil, in a tone of passionate interest: "What shall I do about clothes? I can't go off in a motor-car with——" The rest was lost in distance.
The two walked without speaking as far as the big, spouting rose-bush and the junction where two paths met. Then, choosing the path which avoided the house, Aline took her life in her hands.
"You mentioned that telegram to Mrs. MacDonald?"
"Yes," confessed Somerled. "The subject came up—accidentally."
"What did she say? I want you to tell me. Afterward I'll explain—why."
"She said that she hadn't sent any telegram; and I saw at once that you must have made a mistake."
"You needn't put it that way to save my feelings!" Aline caught him up, panting a little, not trying to calm herself. "You knew that I had—told you a fib. Be honest with me. You must. And I'll be honest with you."
"I'm glad you're talking to me like this," said Somerled simply, "because I was puzzled, I admit. I couldn't bear to think——"
"I know exactly what you couldn't bear to think," she cut in, letting herself break into a sob. "You thought: 'Mrs. West has told me a deliberate lie because she's jealous of that child, and doesn't want me to take her in the car.' Oh, don't deny it. I know. And it's true. I was jealous, I don't dislike the poor little thing. Why should I? She's too insignificant, too much a child in intellect as well as years. But—I wanted you to ourselves. It was horrid of me. Only you can't imagine how I've looked forward to this trip, ever since the day you asked us to take it with you. Before that I was bored with the idea of writing the book we've promised our publishers. Our going with you made all the difference to me. You see, we got to be such friends on shipboard—that last night. I am a jealous friend. I admit it. And it was such a blow to have a stranger thrust upon us—to have you thrust her upon us—when you might have guessed how I felt, if we're friends. The telegram this morning was from Sir George. It told me that Mrs. Bal was coming to Edinburgh. Instantly I knew you'd ask that girl to go with us there in the car—oh, simply in your kindness of heart to a waif. But I couldn't bear it. I saw everything spoiled—for us all, even you. I was like a disappointed child. I had to do something—and on the impulse I made up that fib. I'm not sorry even now—I think. Yet I did mean to tell you, sooner or later, the truth. Honestly, I shouldn't have kept silence long if you hadn't found out. I'm not a coward when it's necessary to be brave."
"I see you're not," said Ian. "You—have paid me a great compliment, and I thank you."
"You thank me for what—precisely? For telling a fib because I wanted to keep my friend to myself—if I could?"
"For liking me well to enough tell it."
"For liking you well enough! Yet now I've shown my liking—and my courage, you like me less."
"No."
"You do!"
"No."
"Prove that."
"How do you want me to prove it?"
Aline's voice was thick. She felt broken, but not beaten yet. "Prove it," she almost whispered, "by sacrificing that girl to—our friendship. When we go back to the summer-house, tell her you've changed your mind; that you'll find out at what place her mother is playing now; and that after all you think it best to send her there at once. You could find out easily, you know! And I'd take the child myself if you liked. I'd do that for you, if you'd do what I ask for me."
"You're only trying me, Mrs. West," said Somerled. "You don't really wish me to fail the girl."
"Fail her! What an exaggeration. She wants to go to her mother."
"At present she wants to go to her mother by motor-car."
Anger at his obstinacy and her own failure lost Aline her self-control. "You mean you want the girl in your motor-car!" Her manner made the words an accusation. But he took the challenge in silence, walking at her side, his head slightly bent, his hands in his pockets. Aline darted a glance at his profile. His jaw looked set, and he had the expression of a man who would give anything to be smoking a cigarette.
It was too late to grope her way back to the path of tactfulness, and the hot blood in her temples made her indifferent to his opinion, to the future, to everything except her own anger and the need to vent it.
"Silence gives consent," she said bitterly, seeing her hopes lie broken at her feet, but not caring much yet. Only, she knew dully that she would care by and by, care to the sharpest point of agony. "Well, so much for our friendship! I'm sorry. I would have done a good deal for my part of it, but there's a limit, isn't there? And friendship can't be all on one side. I'm afraid, if you want Miss MacDonald in your car, you'll have to get her another chaperon. I don't engage in that capacity."
Now there was just one last loophole open for Somerled. He could protest that Aline had misunderstood him; that he cared not a hang or anything of that kind whether Miss Barrie MacDonald went to Edinburgh or Jericho; that the only thing which mattered was Mrs. West's friendship. If he said this quickly, she would hold out both hands to him and cry a little, and beg his pardon for being cross. Then they would forgive each other and everything would be as before, or better. But Aline waited breathlessly for an instant, and several more instants: and Somerled said nothing at all. He would have continued to walk slowly on if she had not stopped suddenly in the middle of the path, and brought him up short. Already she was beginning to feel the pain of loss and the weighty irrevocability of everything. "What are we going to do?" she panted, her breast rising and falling alluringly. Her cheeks were bright pink, and her eyes brilliant. Never had she been so near to beauty; but Somerled faced her with a calm very like sullenness.
"What are you going to do?" he answered her with a question.
"What do you want me to do?"
"I want you and Norman to go motoring with me through Scotland, of course."
"Thank you. But I've made my point, and I must stick to it. Basil and I won't go with you if this girl goes."
"We've quarrelled, then, have we?" he asked. His eyes were blue as the ice of glaciers in his brown face. His mouth and chin looked hard as iron; and never had Aline liked him half as well.
"Yes, we've quarrelled—if you insist," she said.
"Then I must no longer intrude on you as your guest."
"You'll go——"
"Naturally I'll go. I can't stay in your house—it's the same as your house—when you think I no longer deserve your friendship. On my side, I think you're unreasonable; but I may be wrong. Perhaps it's I who am unreasonable, and can't see it. Anyhow, I shall have to go."
"I won't have Miss MacDonald in the house a minute after you leave," Aline said, almost threateningly.
"Why should you? Her packing won't take long, poor child."
"You'll have to send her back to her grandmother now," Aline warned him, in a brief flame of defiance.
"That's impossible. I wouldn't break my promise, even if Mrs. MacDonald didn't forbid her the house."
"She can't very well go alone with you to Edinburgh in your car, I suppose?"
"She is going to Edinburgh in my car, but not alone with me. Won't you go too, Mrs. West, and let us forget all this nonsense?"
"You call it nonsense? That shows how little you understand me, how willing you are to spoil everything for the sake of this wretched girl! Basil and I will simply go back to our original plan, and travel through Scotland together in a hired car."
"Luncheon is served, madam," Moore announced, at the turn of the path.
Luncheon—and the world in ruin!
"Mr. Somerled and Miss MacDonald will not be lunching," said Aline icily.
Moore hid surprise by retiring in decorous haste.
"Good-bye, Mrs. West," said Somerled.
He held out his hand, looking at her steadily, but she turned and rushed away from him, crying.