In the Tideway

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

So Rick kept the ring, with its legend "Beautiful, constant, chaste," as his birthday present. He did not even give it to his wife. It belonged, he said, to the most perfect woman he had ever seen, and when people suggested the propriety of this being a euphonism for the one he had chosen as his life-companion, he shook his head with a smile.

Nevertheless, Miss Willina was not silent of blame. She poured vials of it on her own head for having neglected a clear duty. If she had only insisted on the other devil being burnt as well, this terrible thing might not have come to pass. Anyhow, she would go over to the deserted Lodge without delay, and destroy the wicked idol, lest it should do more harm.

"Let me come too," said Rick in a low voice.

This time Miss Willina did not meet his request with the query, "Was she so pretty as all that, dear?" Indeed, the memory of those words choked her.

So Rick went for the first time into the little sanctum where Lady Maud had stood adrift at the window. The image was still on the mantelpiece, and he started at the sight of it. "Aunt Will!" he cried in quick, half-alarmed tones, "I never made that--it is not my work."

It was not. The professor had been right for once, when he called it a genuine savage conception of fate, brought thither by the Gulf Stream.

Rick took it up in his hands and looked at it curiously. "I wonder," he said, half to himself, "if things would have been different." Then, with a sort of appeal, he turned to Miss Willina. "Aunt Will--you don't really believe--all that rubbish--do you?"

Her answer was decisive. She took the image from him, and marched off with it to Kirsty's peat fire.

So that was an end of the tragic comedy of Roederay. When Rick set off to sail the seas, all the actors in it had disappeared, save Miss Willina in the windblown Noah's Ark at Eval.

Will Lockhart came back the next summer, and painted a picture of Eilean-a-fa-ash, with a golden sea-haugh hanging over drifted sand, and the skeleton of a hand showing from a stone coffin. It was gruesome and morbid; so it was much admired by the Gulf Stream of society in the Royal Academy. Miss Willina, however, still refused to find entertainment in a magic lantern. The past was sacred, she said, and no good ever came in disbelieving in it. Besides, what would become of her animals?