Letter From Barrie Macdonald To Ian Somerled Macdonald
DEAR SIR KNIGHT: I was glad the morning we saw Mrs. James off that you said you'd like to hear from me, and if I needed help or comfort in any trouble I must let you know. I haven't such an excuse for writing to you now, but you did say that you wanted to hear anyway, and that you'd find out where we were going, so you could wire me your plans. Now I've had two telegrams from you, and a letter; and if they hadn't come I should have been disappointed. I thought we might have seen you and the Gray Dragon before this, but the telegrams have made me understand. That is, I don't understand, because what you tell me sounds very mysterious. Still, as you went back to Carlisle and are now in London, it is no use hoping to see the Gray Dragon's bonnet flash into sight round some complicated Highland corner.
What could have taken you to call on Grandma again? I am almost dying of curiosity. You say 'perhaps you may be able to explain when we meet': but everybody is saying that to me, just now—at least, Barbara is, about not letting me go back to Glasgow till the end of her week there—so it is rather aggravating. Still, it is good to know that we may meet. I wonder when? You don't give me a hint, and it stirs up my curiosity from deeper depths to be told, as if you half expected me to guess what you mean, that 'you're in London for reinforcements.' Shall I ever know? It seems a long time since I said good-bye to you in front of the Caledonian Hotel. Not that I'm having a dull trip. I should be very dull myself if that were true, for everything is beautiful, and every one kind. It is the most wonderful luck for a girl like me, who had never seen anything in her life, suddenly to be seeing all Scotland. But I had grown rather used to seeing things with you and Mrs. James, after I escaped from the 'glass retort,' and I can't accustom myself yet to being with others, and you far away—Mrs. James too, of course. I try to console myself if I feel a tiny bit homesick, thinking how happy she is, and how wonderful everything is going to be for her and her strange, unpractical doctor. It was splendid of you to give him all that money. But wouldn't it have been fun if he could have come over, instead of her going to him? Maybe, if it had turned out so, you would be in the Highlands now.
Do you remember how I used to say that my tour under the heather moon would soon be over, but you would be going on just as if we had never met? Well, it has turned out quite differently, hasn't it, for both of us? Only the heather moon is the same. But I never talk of her now that you are gone.
I don't want you to think I am ungrateful to any one, if I sign myself, Your rather homesick little 'princess,'
Barrie.
P.S.—It does not seem right to have crossed over the borderline into our Highlands without you!
LETTER FROM BARRIE TO HER MOTHER
Dearest, darling Barbara: Can it really be that it won't bother you to have me write to you often and tell you everything interesting that happens? You see, I might think it interesting, and you might think it a bore. I know you are easily bored, dear, so I am not quite sure what I ought to write. I can only tell you about seeing places, because that is all we do. But they are so beautiful, perhaps you may like to hear. If I write about the wrong things, do promise that you'll speak out and tell me to stop. I won't let my feelings be hurt.
Basil is trying to show me as much of Scotland as he possibly can, he says, before I 'get tired of him and Blunderbore.' That is a bad way to put it, and so I have told him, because I should be horribly ungrateful to tire of him. But he says he dislikes gratitude and thinks it an overestimated virtue.