“Yes,” said Lavender to the captain, “it will be a cold drive across to Loch Roag. I shall give Mackenzie’s man a good dram before we start.”
But it was not Mackenzie’s notion of hospitality to send Duncan to meet an honored guest, and ere the vessel was fast moored Lavender had caught sight of the well-known pair of horses and the brown wagonette, and Mackenzie stamping up and down in the trampled snow. And this figure close down to the edge of the quay? Surely, there was something about the thick gray shawl, the white feather, the set of the head, that he knew!
“Why, Sheila!” he cried, jumping ashore before the gangway was shoved across, “whatever made you come to Stornoway on such a day?
“And it is not much my coming to Stornoway, if you will come all the way from England to the Lewis,” said Sheila, looking up with her bright and glad eyes.
For six months he had been trying to recall the tones of her voice in looking at her picture, and had failed; now he fancied that she spoke more sweetly and musically than ever.
“Ay, ay,” said Mackenzie, when he had shaken hands with the young man, “it wass a piece of foolishness, her coming over to meet you in Styornoway; but the girl will be neither to hold nor to bind when she teks a foolishness into her head.”
“Is this the character I hear of you, Sheila?” he said; and Mackenzie laughed at his daughter’s embarrassment, and said she was a good lass for all that, and bundled both the young folks into the inn, where luncheon had been provided, with a blazing fire in the room, and a kettle of hot water steaming beside it.
When they got to Borva, Lavender began to see that Mackenzie had laid the most subtle plans for reconciling him to the hard weather of these Northern Winters; and the young man, nothing loth, fell into his ways, and was astonished at the amusement and interest that could be got out of a residence in this bleak island at such a season. Mackenzie discarded at once the feeble protection against cold and wet which his guest had brought with him. He gave him a pair of his own knickerbockers and enormous boots; he made him wear a frieze coat borrowed from Duncan; he insisted on his turning down the flap of a sealskin cap and tying the ends under his chin; and thus equipped they started on many a rare expedition around the coast. But on their first going out, Mackenzie, looking at him, said with some chagrin, “Will they wear gloves when they go shooting in your country?”
“Oh,” said Lavender, “these are only a pair of old dogskins I use chiefly to keep my hands clean. You see I have cut out the trigger finger. And they keep your hands from being numbed, you know, with the cold or the rain.”
“There will be not much need of that after a little while,” said Mackenzie; and indeed, after half an hour’s tramping over snow and climbing over rocks, Lavender was well inclined to please the old man by tossing the gloves into the sea, for his hands were burning with heat.