“Well!” she said, trying to cheer up the mournful company, “misfortunes can’t be helped sometimes. It is sad. Twenty-five pounds of fish; boiled, fried into steaks, kippered. Oh, dear! what a help in the feeding of the household!”
“Yes,” said the patient gentleman, who, being unable to walk, could only sit and fish, and, having come all the way from London to catch a salmon, had never yet had a bite except this one. “Yes, twenty-five pounds at two shillings the pound,—Billingsgate price now. That makes two-pound-ten of good English money gone to the bottom of the loch!”
Everybody laughed at this practical way of putting the matter, and the laugh a little raised the spirits of the gentlemen. Though still they mourned, and mourned, looking as wretched as if they had lost their whole families in the loch, instead of that unfortunate—or fortunate—salmon.
“It isn’t myself I care for,” lamented Maurice’s papa. “It’s you others. For I know you will have no other chance. The rain will clear off—it’s clearing off now, into a beautiful starlight night. To-morrow will be another of those dreadfully sunshiny days. Not a fish will bite, and you will have to go home at the week’s end,—and there’s that salmon lying snugly in his hole, with my hook in his mouth!”
“Never mind,” said the patient gentleman, who, though really the most to be pitied, bore his disappointment better than anybody. “There’s plenty of fish in the loch, for I’ve seen them every day jumping up; and somebody will catch them, if I don’t. After all, we had an hour’s good sport with that fellow to-day,—and it was all the better for him that he got away.”
With which noble sentiment the good man took one of the boys on his knee,—his godson, for whom he was planning an alliance with his daughter, a young lady of four and a half,—and began discussing the settlements he expected; namely, a large cake on her side, and on the young gentleman’s, at least ten salmon out of the loch, to be sent in a basket to London. With this he entertained both children and parents, so that everybody grew merry as usual, and the lost salmon fell into the category of misfortunes over which the best dirge is the shrewd Scotch proverb, “It’s nae use greeting ower spilt milk.”
CHAPTER IX.
The forebodings of the disappointed salmon-fishers turned out true. That wet Monday was the first and last day of rain, for weeks. Scarcely ever had such a dry season been known in the glen. Morning after morning the gentlemen rowed out in a hopeless manner, taking their rods with them, under a sky cloudless and hot as June; evening after evening, if the slightest ripple arose, they went out again, and floated about lazily in the gorgeous sunset, but not a salmon would bite. Fish after fish, each apparently bigger than the other, kept jumping up, sometimes quite close to the boat. Some must have swum under the line and looked at it, made an examination of the fly and laughed at it, but as for swallowing it, oh, dear, no! Not upon any account.
What was most tantalising, the gardener, going out one day, without orders, and with one of his master’s best lines, declared he had hooked a splendid salmon! As it got away, and also carried off the fly, a valuable one, perhaps it was advisable to call it a salmon, but nobody quite believed this. It might have been only a large trout.
By degrees, as salmon-fishing, never plentiful, became hopeless, and game scarcer than ever, the gentlemen waxed dull, and began to catch at the smallest amusements. They grew as excited as the little boys over nutting-parties, going in whole boat-loads to the other side of the loch, and promising to bring home large bags of nuts for winter consumption, but somehow the nuts all got eaten before the boats reached land.