“Oh, no, not this evening, anyway,” said her father; “for I know she will expect you all to be up at the house this evening; and what would be the use of tumbling about in the bay when you can be in a house? But it is very kind of you. Oh, yes, to-morrow night, then, we will go down to the boat, but this night I know Sheila will be ferry sorry if you do not come to the house.”
“Well, let’s go back now,” Johnny said, “and if we’ve time we might go down for our guns and have a try along the shore for an hour or so before the daylight goes. Fancy that chance at those wild duck!”
“Oh, but that is nothing,” Mackenzie said. “To-morrow you will come with me up to the loch, and there you will hef some shooting; and in many other places I will show you you will hef plenty of shooting.”
They had just got back to the house when they found Sheila coming out. She had, as her father supposed, been detained by her preparations for entertaining their guests; but now she was free until dinner-time, and so the whole party went down to the shore to pay a visit to the Phœbe and let Mackenzie have a look at the guns on board. Then they went up to the house, and found the tall and grim keeper with the baby in his arms, while Scarlett and Mairi were putting the finishing touches on the gleaming white table and its show of steel and crystal.
How strange it was to Sheila to sit at dinner there, and listen to her husband talking of boating and fishing and what not as he used to sit and talk in the olden time to her father, on the Summer evenings, on the high rocks over Borvapost! The interval between that time and this seemed to go clean out of her mind. And yet there must have been some interval, for he was looking older and sterner and much rougher about the face now, after being buffeted about by wind and rain and sun during that long and solitary stay in Jura. But it was very like the old times when they went into the little drawing-room, and when Mairi brought in the hot water and the whisky, the tobacco and the long pipes, when the old King of Borva sat himself down in his great chair by the table, and when Lavender came to Sheila and asked her if he should get out her music and open the piano for her.
“Madam,” young Mosenberg said to her, “it is a long time since I heard one of your strange Gaelic songs.”
“Perhaps you never heard this one,” Sheila said, and she began to sing the plaintive “Farewell to Glenshalloch.” Many a time, indeed, of late had she sung its simple and pathetic air as a sort of lullaby, perhaps because it was gentle, monotonous and melancholy, perhaps because there were lines here and there that she liked. Many a time had she sung—
Sleep sound, my sweet babe, there is naught to alarm thee,
The sons of the valley no power have to harm thee,
I’ll sing thee to rest in the balloch untrodden,
With a coronach sad for the slain of Culloden.
But long before she had reached the end of it her father’s patience gave way, and he said, “Sheila, we will hef no more of those teffles of songs! We will hef a good song; and there is more than one of the gentlemen can sing a good song, and we do not wish to be always crying over the sorrows of other people. Now be a good lass, Sheila, and sing us a good cheerful song.”
And Sheila, with great good nature, suddenly struck a different key, and sang with a spirit that delighted the old man.