“Iss he going to put any people in the pictures?” said Mackenzie in a confidential whisper to Ingram.
Ingram got up from the grass, and said with a yawn, “I don’t know. If he does, it will be afterward. Suppose we go along to the wagonette and see if Duncan has brought everything up from the boat?”
The old man seemed rather unwilling to be cut out of this particular sketch, but he went, nevertheless; and Sheila, seeing the young man left alone, and thinking that not quite fair, went over to him and asked if she might be permitted to see as much as he had done.
Lavender shut up the book.
“No,” he said with a laugh, “you shall see it to-night. I have sufficient memoranda to work something out of by and by. Shall we have another look at the circle up there?”
He folded up and shouldered his camp-stool, and they walked up to the point at which the lines of the “mourners” converged. Perhaps he was moved by a great antiquarian curiosity; at all events, he showed a singular interest in the monuments, and talked to his companion about all the possible theories connected with such stones in a fashion that charmed her greatly. She was easily persuaded that the Callernish “Fir-Bhreige” were the most interesting relics in the world. He had seen Stonehenge, but Stonehenge was too scattered to be impressive. There was more mystery about the means by which the inhabitants of a small island could have hewn and carved and erected these blocks; there was, moreover, the mystery about the vanished population itself. Yes, he had been to Carnac also. He had driven down from Auray in a lumbering old trap, his coachman being unable to talk French. He had seen the half-cultivated plain on which there were rows and rows of small stones, scarcely to be distinguished from the stone walls of the adjoining farms. What was there impressive about such a sight when you went into a house and paid a franc to be shown the gold ornaments picked up about the place? Here, however, was a perfect series of those strange memorials, with the long lanes leading up to a circle, and the tallest of all the stones placed on the Western side of the circle, perhaps as the headstone of the buried chief. Look at the position, too—the silent hill, the waters of the sea-loch around it, and beyond that the desolation of miles of untenanted moorland. Sheila looked pleased that her companion, after coming so far, should have found something worth looking at in the Lewis.
“Does it not seem strange,” he said suddenly, “to think of young folks of the present day picking up wild flowers from among these old stones?” He was looking at a tiny bouquet which she had gathered.
“Will you take them?” she said, quite simply and naturally, offering him the flowers. “They may remind you some time of Callernish.”
He took the flowers and regarded them for a moment in silence, and then he said gently, “I do not think I shall want these to remind me of Callernish. I shall never forget our being here.”
At this moment, perhaps fortunately, Duncan appeared, and came along toward the young people with a basket in his hand.