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."