Helen.
The young man looked down. On most of the toes of those small, fat feet was perched, like a hat, a tiny shell.
“To keep them dry if it should rain,” explained Helen, glowing with pride, and shaking back her loosened hair, she lifted a sunburnt face to him.
Ranald smiled and put a hand on her head. “Vastly ingenious, mo chridhe!” How yellow the child’s hair was, partly bleached by sun and sea. But it was not of that pure, pale gold, silk-fine . . .
It was most foolish of him, he knew, to intend passing through Western Perthshire on his road to the coast, retracing thus the route he had taken on his homeward way in the spring of last year, instead of setting out for France by way of Glasgow, more usual for dwellers in the West. But, devil take it all, though he was poor enough still, he would be tolerably prosperous this autumn, and what were riches meant for but to enable one to indulge one’s whims? Above all, when riches were purchased so dear as his would be.—But he had not so far told Norman of his intention.
Yet Bride Stewart was by now, quite probably, married to Malcolm Robertson. He would no doubt make an excellent husband, though a thought dull for that bright creature. Not that Bride had shown especial wit or sparkle in Ranald’s two encounters with her; but she was like no other girl whom he had ever seen, and that first impression of her in the dark room at Inchrannoch would always live with him, effacing even the second, less conventional meeting. She was of the blood of the sidhe; she had been cradled in a fairy dun, been lulled to sleep by the fairy songs. That was no doubt why he had so vehement a wish to see her once again, married or no—and meant to indulge it.
A step behind him made him look round, and Helen’s welcoming shriek told him whose it was.
“Dinner’s all but ready, Ranald,” announced his brother, “or so I’m told. So get you in, Helen, and put yourself to rights a little—faith, you look like a tinker’s child!”
“No, no,” protested Ranald, “she’s only a stranded mermaid! And some day, Helen, I will send you from Paris a blue silk gown, with a fine snood for Sundays!”
Jumping with joy, Helen ran off towards the house on the verge of the bay behind them. But Norman’s face was dark. “Ranald, as God sees me, I’d liefer she wore a beggar’s clothes all her life than that I should seem to push you out of Fasnapoll! I’d liefer——”
“Stop, or in another moment you’ll be believing that you are pushing me out, and never was a falser notion in the world than that! Am I not the lucky man to be coming into so fine an inheritance, and ought not I to be counting the hours until I set eyes on it? . . . If I do not, ’tis mere foolishness.”
Norman’s hand was on his shoulder, gripping it hard. After a moment he said, rather huskily: “I were as foolish in your place, I know well,” and the two of them looked in silence at the bright, plunging water.
The call of a woman’s voice came to them, and turning, they could see the mistress of Fasnapoll standing in the doorway of the low weatherbeaten house, the year-old heir in her arms.
“That will be dinner,” said her husband. “Ranald”—he paused a second, glancing at his brother’s face as if to see how he would take it—“Ranald, I hope . . . that is, of course you will follow your own bidding in the matter . . . but ’twould like us better, you’ll well understand, if you did not wed with a French lass.”
Ranald’s expression was inscrutable. He stopped and picked up one of the child Helen’s discarded shells. “Then it would seem that I am not like to wed at all! Would you have me force a Highland girl into exile too?”
“You’d not be saying that if you had set your heart on one—nor would she!”
“Then, by all the rules of logic,” riposted his brother, “’tis clear that I have not so set my heart! I doubt I’ll die unwed, like my uncle.”
“Unwed he was not, but childless.”
“Ay, I had forgot. But he made a French marriage—’twas that which brought him Girolac . . . Well, find me a wife then, Norman, a wife as good as your own, if such an one is to be found, and I’ll make shift to come home and marry her.”
(2)
It was but natural that this scrap of conversation should ring again in Ranald Maclean’s head when some days later he rode along Loch Rannoch side. As he had foreseen, his brother had been surprised at his electing to take ship for Bordeaux from the east coast, which involved so much longer a sea voyage; but Ranald said that having come from France last year by that route he would return the same way; moreover he had a fancy to see Struan again and to tell him that he himself was now the possessor of his old friend’s inheritance. And since he had never mentioned Bride Stewart’s name at Fasnapoll, and had just thrown cold water on the idea of marrying a Scottish girl, Norman could have no suspicion of the real motive underlying, not only his preference for Leith over Glasgow, but his preference for the roundabout approach to Leith by Perth, instead of by Stirling.
Ranald Maclean was always inclined to reserve over his own affairs—some might have called him secretive—and those few who knew him well were quite aware of this as of the proud and passionate temper which lay, usually unstirring, beneath his self-contained demeanour; a temper which (like a wise young man) he had struggled, and with fair success, to bit and bridle. But one is not always wise at nine-and-twenty, nor, at any age, is one always consistent. For in conjunction with what in a Lowlander would be termed dourness, Ranald possessed a strong vein of the startling impetuosity of the Celt.
And he was, he knew it himself, giving rein to something a little unbridled and impulsive now, coming this long way to indulge a whim. He had journeyed very slowly, giving himself as long as possible to feed his eyes on the last glimpses of his native Highlands, on the sweeps of heather or scree, the flash of the narrow mountain torrent or the mist stealing from the mountain crag. And even as he crossed the upper end of Rannoch Moor, that great tract of mortal desolation, all quagmire and stones, he had said to himself, “What will the vineyards of the Gironde have to show as dear . . . to me?”
And what like this, he thought now? He had already seen, before ever he got to Loch Rannoch, the pointed peak of Schiehallion lifting itself in perfect symmetry twenty miles away. Now, much nearer, and more lovely still, it welcomed him across the lazy sunlit water, between the birch trees—her mountain.
This fine afternoon the old Chief of Clan Donnachaidh was in his garden, sitting near the beloved spring which he had enshrined in his verse under the name of Fons Argentinus. Among the flowers hummed the bees, three pints of whose honey was the rent he paid every Martinmas to the Duke of Atholl for the right of fishing in Loch Rannoch. He welcomed the traveller warmly and gave orders for a bedchamber to be prepared for him.
“Exile!” he exclaimed that evening over the wine. “Faith, I have known enough of that to have no wish to see France again! Too many years have I spent there! But your absence will not be exile, for there’s no Government ban on you, Mr. Maclean. You’ll soon be coming back to the Highlands with your pockets full of louis d’ors to pick yourself a châtelaine for Girolac.”
Why would everybody harp upon this question of marriage? Ranald turned the conversation; yet it was not long before he asked after his late hosts at Auchendrie—as a preliminary to another enquiry—saying in a sufficiently unconcerned tone that he supposed Mr. Malcolm Robertson was a married man now.
There was a twinkle
