ISHBEL.
One is pretty safe to address a man in Skye as Macdonald! If that fails, then try MacLeod, and if this produces no result, then there is still Nicolson to fall back on. An error in all three is next door to an impossibility! But Ishbel had not any of these three names, though she lived with her maternal grandfather, who was a MacLeod.
Ishbel was a changeling. Anyone would tell you so in Skye—if, perhaps, one or two smiled in the telling. Her grandmother, Catriona MacLeod, said so, and Catriona had the second sight, and saw more than most people. She was held in Skye to see, indeed, beyond that veil which mercifully hides the future. Catriona had early said the girl was a changeling. Her daughter, poor Kirstie, died at the baby's birth, her father Roderick McNeill, was drowned—tragedy and sorrow surrounded the baby, and then the little green folk stole it, and Ishbel was the changeling popularly supposed to be left in its place.
She was always an odd child, Catriona said, with ruddy tawny locks, and sloe-eyes, elfish and silent, doing queer, uncanny, unaccountable things, with moods of sadness and moods of mirth. She grew up in Skye, and would never leave it, though she had her chance to do so.
Ishbel lived with Catriona till she was nineteen, and helped her with her spinning and knitting; she also milked the cows, and worked about the house. The girl's head was full of her grandmother's teaching; she believed in the fairies, though she rarely spoke of them. Her cousin Duncan often found her seated in the fairy-ring on the knowe, above the sheiling, picking the green grass absently, and gazing "frae her."
Some day, she thought, she would hear the tap of fairy feet in their revels, hear a tiny voice which would beckon her to an entrancing world, very different even from lovely Skye. Very often she thought she had been on the brink of meeting the little green folk, and then someone had come and interrupted her. There was that night coming home over the muir from Portree—the stream, richly brown with the peat over which it gurgled, the air heather-scented, the mountains fading into the lovely purple of the night's embrace—everything hushed, save her own footfall. Ishbel had seemed to hear a voice calling her then, and had wandered up amongst the heather, her face eager and expectant. And there above her on the heather knoll, "the wee folks' knowe," seeming to float between the grey lichen-covered boulders—surely these were tiny white figures, beckoning to her?
She almost ran, in her eagerness, but, just as she approached, Duncan's voice hailed her from the high road. What was she doing there? And was that the way home?
Ishbel almost wept as she descended. For she could see nothing near the boulders then but waving cotton-grass amongst the bog and heather. It was lovely September now, and the hill-sides were a glory of tawny colouring, the fading heather and bracken, purple and brown, and orange, and gold, and dusky indescribable grey. Sunset came early, and tinged and stained the loch, the Cuchillans stood out sharply in their lovely serrated outline, against a background of pure gold—they were almost friendly and neighbourly, and approachable; it was in winter that they lowered and sulked in the mist, or frowned blackly from amongst the lashing swirls of rain.
Ishbel had gone to fetch fodder for the cows, and the fodder was a great pile of pale yellow bracken, which she bound together and fastened on her back. Carrying this, she passed up the road, pausing now and then to lean her load on one of the rough dykes which bordered the muir. It was nearing evening, and shadows were creeping over the heather—the burn, amber-coloured under the sun, looked dark and sullen-brown now, and had begun its hoarse night-song, for it only sings in the dark. The deer hear and love this song as they creep down cautiously, light-footedly, turning startled graceful heads from side to side, and they pause a moment, poised with listening ear, before they bury thirsty soft noses into the cool rushing water. The deer did not mind Ishbel! But it was scarcely dark enough for the deer to come yet. There was still a chance of the passing tourist from Sligachan, coming from Coruisk, the far-famed. Ishbel, pausing to rest the high load of bracken on the dyke—the crushed yellow fern making a lovely setting to her tawny locks and black sloe-eyes—suddenly perceived two men approaching, and waited for their coming with something of the deer's startled look. One was Duncan MacLeod, her cousin, short, swarthy, black-browed, with a twinkle of cunning in his grey eyes, and a Highland sing-song voice; and the other? Yes, yes, she had seen the other at the Portree games, and he had tossed the caber further than even Colin MacNeil, and his name was Rory MacPhee! Ishbel remembered him very well, and a little smile melted over her red lips, and lurked in the depths of her lovely eyes as Duncan made him known to her. Rory had rented the small farm next to Catriona's, and he was coming to supper. It was time she, Ishbel, was home.
Duncan did not offer to take the fodder from her, though he thought he was in love with Ishbel, and meant to marry her. Women were used to burdens in Skye. But Rory MacPhee, saying nothing, began to untie the rope at the girl's waist, and he swung the mass lightly over his own shoulders.
"Och! that is not needful," Duncan said. And what he thought was "Amadan!" (stupid!)
"It is too heavy for a lass."
That was all; but Rory and Ishbel did not meet each other's eyes, and they walked home silent through the creeping dusk.
By the red peat-glow in the cottage she looked lovelier than ever; MacPhee ate little, and his mind was in a curious turmoil. Catriona's remarks, and Duncan's slow efforts at conversation—for the Highlander is desperately cautious at making friends, and Rory came from as far away as above Portree, seven miles off—fell on strangely dull ears.
What had come to him?
Rory asked himself the question all next day, for, amidst even the sordid duties of examining the new byres and out-houses, there floated before his mind only one picture—a girl's slim figure in a short faded green skirt, leaning against a dyke, with her small head crushed against a background of faded fern, and the shy lovely eyes looking into his face.
Ishbel! They said she was a changeling.
Well, changeling and all, he loved her!