"It is no good thing," said Sheila, "to see the Sutherland hills often, for when you see them it means to rain."
But Lavender had not been taught to fear the rain of the Western Isles. The very weather seemed to have conspired with Mackenzie to charm the young man with the island. At this moment, for example, they were driving away from Stornoway along the side of the great bay that stretches northward until it finds its furthest promontory in Tiumpan Head. What magnificence of color shone all around them in the hot sunlight! Where the ruffled blue sea came near the long sweep of yellow sand it grew to be a bright, transparent green. The splendid curve of the bay showed a gleaming line of white where the waves broke in masses of hissing foam; and beyond that curve again long promontories of dark red conglomerate ran out into the darker waters of the sea, with their summits shining with the bright sea-grass. Here, close at hand, were warm meadows, with calves and lambs cropping the sweet-scented Dutch clover. A few huts, shaped like beehives, stood by the roadside, close by some deep peat cuttings. There was a cutting in the yellow sand of the bay for the pulling up of captured whales. Now and again you could see a solan dart down from the blue heavens into the blue of the sea, sending up a spurt of water twenty feet high as he disappeared; and far out there, between the red precipices and the ruffled waters beneath, white sea-fowl flew from crag to crag or dropped down upon the sea to rise and fall with the waves.
At the small hamlet of Gress they got a large rowing-boat manned by sturdy fishermen, and set out to explore the great caves formed in the mighty wall of conglomerate that here fronts the sea. The wild-fowl flew about them, screaming and yelling at being disturbed. The long swell of the sea lifted the boat, passed from under it, and went on with majestic force to crash on the glowing red crags and send jets of foam flying up the face of them. They captured one of the sea-birds—a young thing about as big as a hen, with staring eyes, scant feathers, and a long beak with which it instinctively tried to bite its enemies—and the parents of it kept swooping down over the boat, uttering shrill cries, until their offspring was restored to the surface of the water. They went into the great loud-sounding caverns, getting a new impression of the extraordinary clearness of the sea-water by the depth at which the bottom was visible; and here their shouts occasionally called up from some dim twilight recess, far in among the perilous rocks, the head of a young seal, which would instantly dive again and be seen no more. They watched the salmon splash in the shallower creeks where the sea had scooped out a tiny bay of ruddy sand, and then a slowly rolling porpoise would show his black back above the water and silently disappear again. All this was pleasant enough on a pleasant morning, in fresh sea-air and sunlight, in holiday-time; and was there any reason, Mackenzie may fairly have thought, why this young man, if he did marry Sheila, should not come and live in a place where so much healthy amusement was to be found?
And in the evening, too, when they had climbed to the top of the hills on the south of Stornoway harbor, did not the little town look sufficiently picturesque, with its white houses, its shipping, its great castle and plantations lying in shadow under the green of the eastern sky? Then away to the west what a strange picture presented itself! Thick bands of gray cloud lay across the sky, and the sunlight from behind them sent down great rays of misty yellow on the endless miles of moor. But how was it that, as these shafts of sunlight struck on the far and successive ridges of the moorland, each long undulation seemed to become transparent, and all the island appeared to consist of great golden-brown shells heaped up behind each other, with the sunlight shining through?
"I have tried a good many new effects since coming up here," said Lavender, "but I shall not try that."
"Oh, it iss nothing—it is nothing at all," said Mackenzie with a studied air of unconcern. "There iss much more beautiful things than that in the island, but you will hef need of a ferry long time before you will find it all out. That—that iss nothing at all."
"You will perhaps make a picture of it some other time," said Sheila with her eyes cast down, and as he was standing by her at the time, he took her hand and pressed it, and said, "I hope so."
Then, that night! Did not every hour produce some new and wonderful scene, or was it only that each minute grew to be so precious, and that the enchantment of Sheila's presence filled the air around him? There was no moon, but the stars shone over the bay and the harbor and the dusky hills beyond the castle. Every few seconds the lighthouse at Arnish Point sent out its wild glare of orange fire into the heart, of the clear darkness, and then as suddenly faded out and left the eyes too bewildered to make out the configuration of the rocks. All over the north-west there still remained the pale glow of the twilight, and somehow Lavender seemed to think that that strange glow belonged to Sheila's home in the west, and that the people in Stornoway knew nothing of the wonders of Loch Roag and of the strange nights there. Was he likely ever to forget?
"Good-bye, Sheila," he said next morning, when the last signal had been given and the Clansman was about to move from her moorings.
She had bidden good-bye to Ingram already, but somehow she could not speak to his companion just at this last moment. She pressed his hand and turned away, and went ashore with her father. Then the big steamer throbbed its way out of the harbor, and by and by the island of Lewis lay but as a thin blue cloud along the horizon; and who could tell that human beings, with strange hopes and fancies and griefs, were hidden away in that pale line of vapor?