Cæsar could not have revelled in crossing the Rubicon as I revelled in crossing the border. The very word rings out like the sudden sound of bells, or the mysterious music that thrills one's blood in dreams.
Poor Cæsar was obliged to burn his nice boats, and think disagreeable thoughts about the great responsibility he had taken, whereas we made our crossing in a beautiful motor-car, and I had no responsibility whatever. As for disagreeable thoughts, I had a few in England, but the air of Scotland has chased them away. I see that they were silly as well as selfish thoughts. I was so wicked that I hoped Mr. Somerled would not make up his quarrel with Mrs. West. I was afraid that if he did the poor princess he had rescued would be in his way, and that he would wish her safely back in her glass retort. Now they have made up, yet somehow I don't feel in the way. He is so kind, and--yes, I must admit it--Mrs. West is so tactful.
It seems that while Mr. Douglas and I were walking and talking together in Carlisle Castle she apologized to Mr. Somerled. And outside the entrance gates, when Mr. Douglas had shaken hands, hoping to "run across us" when he gets leave for Edinburgh, Mrs. West walked up to me. "I've begged Mr. Somerled's pardon," she said, with her pretty smile which never changes, "and he has forgiven me, so you mustn't go on thinking me an ill-natured, bad-tempered person, please; I'm not really. Only we writing people have 'temperaments,' just as artists have--Mr. Somerled himself, for instance. My brother scolded me, and I deserved it. He is so interested in you and your talent for writing, and wants to be your friend. You won't blame him for my fault, will you?"
Of course I said no, and she held out her hand. When I'd put mine into it, she pressed it gently, and before letting it go asked in a lower voice if Mr. Somerled had told me why they quarrelled.
I shook my head emphatically as I answered that he hadn't said a word, and she looked suddenly much happier. "That is like him!" she exclaimed--if one can exclaim in a whisper. "Well, we must forget what's passed, and think of the future. Basil and I have hired a car now, and will travel in it; but that will be all the better for our novel, as I've just been telling Mr. Somerled, for we shan't have anything to distract our minds from the scenery and our notebooks. I've begged him to feel no regrets: for now we're friends again, and we shall meet constantly, no doubt, without any embarrassment, but a great deal of pleasure. As for you, dear little girl, you mustn't feel that the cloud we've passed through need shadow you. It had to do only with us grown-ups. You have but to 'play dolls' and be happy, until you're safely tied up in your mother's apron-strings. Not that she's likely to have any!" And Mrs. West laughed, showing her white teeth that are almost like a child's.
"Thank you," I said. "I mean to be happy--very happy!"
She looked over her shoulder at Mr. Norman, as if giving him a signal, and he came and talked to me. He said that he had hardly slept all night, because he was so miserable over what had happened, for every one's sake, but especially for his own, as he felt that a beautiful hope had been snatched away from him. "It was the hope of a friendship with you," he added. "But now we'll take it up just where it fell down, won't we, finding that it isn't broken after all?"
While we were shaking hands I heard Mrs. West tell Mr. Douglas that I was the daughter of Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald, and he seemed immensely astonished, just as Mr. Somerled had, and Mrs. West and Mr. Norman.
I wonder why every one is so surprised? Can it be that actresses do not often have children?
We bade each other good-bye, all of us, for Mrs. West and Mr. Norman are going to see some places that apparently Mr. Somerled doesn't care about; and it isn't quite certain when we shall meet again. "We shall be like bad pennies, always turning up," Mr. Norman said; and Mrs. West added quickly to Mr. Somerled, "But if we do, you mustn't feel that we're tracking you down. The exigencies of authorship force us to be conscientious sight-seers."
As she spoke, she gave her brother a look. I don't know what it meant, but his face had a sad, tired expression, as if there had been some dispute or argument between him and his sister, and he was sick of it. I don't feel, somehow, that he's in a good mood for their story-writing together just now, and I'm sorry for him. I believe he would rather be motoring with us than with her. Perhaps they have had a difference of opinion about the plot of their book, for he told me in the summer-house that he'd suddenly got a new idea for a motor romance, and had lost interest in the old one.
When we were ready to start away from Carlisle Castle, Mr. Somerled condemned Vedder to sit at his feet; but the man seemed to take this quite for granted, and not to mind in the least. "Would one of you care to sit beside me?" he asked with so wooden an expression that it was impossible to guess whether he would prefer Mrs. James or me to say yes. Selfishly, I wanted him to prefer me, and because he didn't seem to mind, I pretended not to hear, but went on talking to Mr. Douglas as if he were the most important person in the world. Suddenly I felt a kind of power over him, as if I were a grown-up woman in a book, and could make men take an interest in me. Still, I could quite well hear Mrs. James answer that she was too great a coward for the front seat, but she was sure I would love it. Mr. Somerled turned to me then, without speaking, as if to wait for me to answer, and I couldn't help thinking, by the look in his eyes, that he had wanted me, in spite of the wooden expression. So I stopped in the midst of a word to Mr. Douglas, and said, as meekly as a trained dove, that I should like to sit in front.
"What a pity you haven't got a congenial, romantic companion in the car, like that lad," said the Knight, rather sharply, "instead of a war-worn veteran of over thirty."
"Oh, I'd rather have you, because I feel already as if I'd known you always," I explained. "And do you know, it didn't seem to me there was anything romantic about Mr. Douglas, except his name."
"In that case, you are a little flirt," said he, driving fast. But when I looked at him in the greatest surprise, he seemed sorry. "I take that back," he said. "I really don't believe you know yet what the word means, or what you've done to earn it. Are you contented with me as a companion, or would you rather have Douglas, or Norman? I should really like to know, out of sheer curiosity, so you needn't mind telling the truth, for in any case you won't hurt my feelings."
"Why, but you are my Knight!" I said. And he asked no more questions then about personal matters. We talked of the scenery, or he let me talk, and said that it didn't disturb him in driving. He seemed quite to take an interest in what I had to say, as if I had been an intelligent person like Mrs. West. He didn't laugh at the high-flown ideas I've collected about history, and frontiers between countries, but said that my enthusiasms were contagious.
"I'd given up all hope of a thrill at crossing the border," he said. "I thought it was too late. 'What's long sought often comes when unsought,' you know--or rather, you don't know yet, and I hope you never will. You are making me wonder if, after all, instead of putting off my homecoming too long, I haven't chosen just the right moment."
I was glad to hear this, though I don't know even now how I managed to give him that idea, unless by boiling with inward joy, and always insisting that the world's not old, but young--a wonderful place, where every flower and bird and every ray of sunlight is worth being born to see.
I asked him not to tell me when we came to the border, because I hoped to know it by instinct; and, as it turned out, I did know. But I think any one with eyes must have known.
Out from old Caer Luel, our road had crossed the Eden where Willie Armstrong escaped, and ran on white and smooth toward the Solway, whose sands glistened golden in the sun. The tide, which I'd read of as racing like a horse at gallop, was busy somewhere else, and the river lay untroubled, a broad, blue ribbon in the sandy plain where Prince Charlie's men and horses once struggled and drowned.
Now I knew we must be in the Debatable Lands, the hunting-ground of the border raiders, beautiful wild land, full of the sound of rivers, voices of the Teviot and the Eden, the Ettrick and the Yarrow, singing together and mingling with the voices of poets who loved them. Through the country of dead Knights of the Road my live Knight of To-day drove slowly, thinking maybe of dim centuries before history began, when the Picts and Gaels I have read of fought together among the billowy mountains; or of the Romans building Hadrian's wall against the "little dark men"; or of the many heroes, Scottish and English, who had drenched the heather with their blood since then; or perhaps of himself, and the days of his boyhood when he said good-bye to bonny Scotland and went to try his fortune in the New World. Whatever his thoughts may have been, they made his face at first sad, then hard; I fancied that it was of himself as a boy he thought, and of his father and mother, whom he will not see when he goes home; so to bring him out of his brown study I began to tell him a story Mrs. Muir had told me about the border. It was the tale of the last Picts, and the secret of the heather ale. All, all the mysterious little dark people had been swept away in a great massacre by the Scots after centuries of fighting with the Romans; and only a father and son were left alive. "Give me thy Pictish secret of brewing heather ale," said the King of the Scots, when the pair were brought before him, "and I may perhaps spare thee and thy son."
Then the dark Pict shut his eyes for a moment, and thought what to do. He thought that the King would kill him and his son when he had their secret; and he thought of the mead which had the power of wafting the Picts to the Land of Pleasant Dreams.
From the bonny bells of heather,
They brewed a drink langsyne,
Was sweeter far than honey,
Was stronger far than wine.
They brewed it and they drank it,
And lay in blessed swound
For days and days together,
In their dwellings underground.
When he had thought with his eyes shut, the Pict said that he could not tell the secret while his son lived, because of the shame he would feel that his own flesh and blood should know him a traitor. He said this because he believed they would kill the boy quickly without torture; and the old man was right, for they bound his son hand and foot, and flung him out to sea. "Now tell us the secret," they said. But the Pict only laughed and answered, "Now I will not tell, because there is nothing more you can do to hurt me." So they killed him quickly too, in their rage, and the secret of the heather ale died with him.
Though he liked the story, the obstinate man argued that the last of the Picts were not really killed in this or any other way; that they had slowly died out as a race, and had married with the Scots, leaving a strain of their blood in the land to this day. "You know," he said, "that Somerled of the Isles married a Pictish princess, and so there's Pictish blood in the veins of the MacDonalds, in your veins and in mine, though I'm of cottage birth, and you are of the castle."
"I know that story of Somerled," I answered, "and how, hero though he was, he got his princess by a fraud. It makes Kim seem more human."
"I wonder if his princess thought so?" said Somerled the Second.
"Why, of course she did," I answered him as if I were in her confidence.
When I was in Carlisle, and proud of my English birth, I used to like reading about the great battle of the Solway Moss, where two hundred English horsemen killed or took prisoners more than a thousand Scots they'd chased into the bog; but now I've forgotten everything except that I'm a Scottish lass; and though I'm of the Highlands, and these were Lowland men, I don't, as I did, love to dwell upon the raid of the Solway Moss. Still, I could not get it out of my head, and while I pictured it, as I have to do most things, whether I wish or no, I saw a bridge--a fine stone bridge, flung like the span of a petrified rainbow across a small stream.
"That must be the Sark!" I gasped. "And we've come--we've come to the border!"
"Good lass, to divine it!" said he. And how I liked his calling me a good lass--it was better than princess!
We crossed the bridge slowly, lingering with half the car in England, half in Scotland; then suddenly we sprang on gayly, with a rush ahead, past the famous toll-house, which looked exactly like all its pictures.
"Ho for Scotland--our ain countree!" I cried; and though he did not turn to me, I saw his profile looking flushed and glad.
"Now you should take back your own name of MacDonald again, from this very minute of crossing the border," I said, when I had drawn in my first long breath of Scotland. "Somerled's a grand name, yet it was only the foundation of MacDonald. But I forgot! You've made your fame and money as Somerled. Which do you love more--your Scottish blood or your American fame and fortune?"
"Blood is stronger than water, and fame is running water," he said. "As for the money, I've cared too much for it--at least for the power it gave me. I didn't make the most of it with my pictures, and greed led me to love it better than my true work. That's why I lost the way to fairyland, little Princess. I buried myself under the 'shields and bracelets,' and I buried my talents, such as they were. For a while Somerled tried to deserve the great name he had chosen--but only for a little while. When by accident he grew rich, he began to wallow. Not a picture worthy of his boyish ambition has he painted for five years. What he has done have been 'potboilers.' He forgot that he was an artist, and wanted only to be a millionaire. Disgusting! Now that I've told you this, do you--a MacDonald--bid me to take the name again at the border, where, as a boy, I laid it down--long ago, with high hopes and vows romantic enough to please even you?"
"Yes," I said, "I, a MacDonald, bid you to take up the name, and with it all the old hopes and the old ambitions, as you come back into your own land. Forget your silly money, and remember only that you're an artist in a lovely motor-car. Won't that make you happy--and a boy again?"
"Something is making me happy--and a boy again," he echoed.
