Sitting where Queen Mary sat on her velvet cushions, and looking through her peephole in the thick stone wall, I was almost irresistibly tempted to make love to Barrie. My heart so went out to her that it seemed she must respond: and the Vannecks had wandered to another part of the battlements; but she kept me to my task of cicerone. I had to answer a dozen questions. I had to tell her about Agricola forging his chain of forts across the narrow land between the Clyde, and the Forth "that bridles the wild Highlander." She would be satisfied with nothing less than the unabridged stories of Edward I's siege of this "gray bulwark of the North," the murder of the powerful Douglas by his treacherous host King James II; the building of and the mysterious curse upon Mar's Work, and twenty other human documents not half so moving, had she but known it, as the story of Basil Norman's first and only love. Once or twice I thought she guessed that I wished to speak of myself and her, and that she deliberately held me at arm's length, like a young person of the world dealing with an ineligible at the end of her second season. I almost hated King Edward, and more especially Agricola!
Then, worst of all, before we had half finished our tour of the Castle and its wonders, rain began to fall out of one cloud stationed directly over our heads in the midst of a sun-bright sky. I could almost have believed that Somerled in spite had sent it after us, like a wet blood-hound to track us down. We took shelter in the room where the Douglas was murdered; and who could make love against such a background? Not I: though perhaps gay King James V might have been equal to it. One does not hear that any ghost dogged his footsteps as he crept joyously in disguise out from that dark little chamber into the subterranean passage, which led the "Guid man of Ballangeich" to his Haroun Al-raschid adventures in the night.
The next few days live in my memory as dreams live. They were beautiful. They would have been more beautiful if I could have flattered myself that Barrie was learning to care for me in the way she might have cared for Somerled, if we had left them in peace. But she was always the same—except that, as the world grew more enchanting in beauty and poetic associations, she blossomed into a sweet expansiveness, losing the reserve in which she had been veiled when first we started.
It ought to have been ideal, this moving from scene to scene with the one girl I ever wanted for my own, since I was thirteen and worshipped a tank mermaid in green spangles. That was the hard part! It ought to have been ideal and—it wasn't. I should think a rather well meaning Saracen chieftain who had captured a Christian maiden might have felt somewhat as I felt from day to day. He had got her. She couldn't escape from him and his fortress; but, even with her hand in his, she contrived to elude him.
So it was with me. Old Blunderbore went well on the whole, not counting a few minor ailments of second childhood which attacked him occasionally when he saw a stiff hill ahead, or when he had heard me say I was in a hurry. The Vannecks were perfection as chaperons, not through supernatural tact and unselfishness, but because Maud feared the effect upon Fred of too much Barrie. She laid herself out to charm her husband. Never an "I told you so!" Never a nagging word or look. She chatted to Fred in the car, and saw sights with him out of the car. This, she said, was almost like a second honeymoon. But of the heather moon she had never heard. It was ours—Barrie's and mine: yet I could not induce the girl to speak of it. For all she would say, she might have forgotten its existence. Always, especially when the heather moon tried to give us its golden blessing, an invisible presence seemed to stand between us, as if Somerled had sent his astral body to keep us apart.
As to Somerled in the flesh, there was a mystery at this time. To me at Perth came a telegram from Aline saying:
"S. has left his car and chauffeur here and gone away without a word to any one. Has he come after you? Wire immediately."
I obeyed, replying:
"Seen and heard nothing of S. Will let you have all news. Hope you will do the same by me. Am sending you our route, but suppose you will arrive in few days."