“Is it all true?” he asked himself. “Is it all true?” And then drearily he kept on muttering, “I can’t stay here now—I can’t stay here now.”
He had walked on for about a mile, when he turned to look back for a farewell glance at the castle, when he found Scoodrach close at his heels, glaring at him in a peculiar way, which slightly startled Max, but he returned the gaze boldly, and then, with a confused idea of walking on till he could reach some inn, when there was nothing of the kind for forty or fifty miles, he asked the young gillie if that was the way for Glasgow.
Scoodrach’s face lit up with satisfaction as he said it was; and, when Max went right on, the Highland lad stopped back watching him for a time, and then, laughing silently to himself, returned to stand in the shadow and glare at the bailiff and his men; while Max trudged on, with the sense of being mentally stunned increasing, but not so rapidly as the growing feeling of misery and shame within his breast.
Rocky path, moist sheep-track, steep climb, sharp descent into boggy hollow; then up over a hill, with a glance at the sunny sea; and then on and on, in and out among the everlasting hills, which lapped fold upon fold, all grey crag and heather, and one valley so like another, and the ins and outs and turns so many, that, but for the light in the west, it would have been hard to tell the direction in which he tramped on and on, as near as he could divine straight away for Glasgow and the south.
“I must get home,” he muttered dreamily, as he tramped on. “Oh, the shame of it!” he burst out. “Father! father! how could you do such a thing as this?”
There was a wild cry close at hand, and a curlew rose, and then a flock of lapwings, to flit round and round, uttering their peevish calls; but Max saw nothing but the scene at the castle, heard nothing but The Mackhai’s bitter words, and he tramped onward and onward into the wilderness of mountain and moss, onward into the night.
There are people who would laugh at the idea of an active lad being lost in the mountains. To them it seems, as they travel comfortably along by rail or coach, impossible that any one could go perilously astray among “those little hills.”
Let them try it, and discover their ignorance, as they learn the immensity of the wild spaces in Scotland and Wales, and how valley succeeds valley, hill comes down to hill, with so great a resemblance one to the other, that in a short time the brain is overwhelmed by a mist of confusion, and that greatest of horrors,—one not known, fortunately, to many,—the horror of feeling lost, robs the sufferer of power to act calmly and consistently, and he goes farther and farther astray, and often into perils which may end in death.
Max Blande wandered on, looking inward nearly all the time, and backward at the scenes of the past day, so that it was not long before he had diverged from the beaten track and was trudging on over the short grass and among the heather. Then great corners of crags and loose stones rose in his way, forcing him to turn to right or left to get by. Then he would come close up to some precipitous, unclimbable face of the hill, and strike away again, to find his course perhaps stopped by a patch of pale green moss dotted with cotton rushes, among which his feet sank, and the water splashed with suggestions of his sinking completely in if he persevered.
But he kept on, now in one direction, now in another, striving to keep straight, with the one idea in his mind to get right away from Dunroe, and certainly increasing the distance, but in a weary, devious way, till he seemed to wake up all at once to the fact that it was growing dark, and that a thick mist was gradually creeping round him, and he was growing wet, as well as so faint and weary that he could hardly plod along.