It is days later, it seems a long time ago that I wrote of our plan to spend the first night in Scotland at Sweetheart Abbey--a long time since the night itself; for I have lived more in these few days than in all my life before.
Soon we are to reach Edinburgh. Monday is the day when my mother will begin acting there in her new play. I shall see her. It is to be the Great Day of all, the day to which all the others have been leading up, and I ought to be perfectly happy. So I am! Still, there's one little heavy spot in my heart. All the yeast of happiness won't make it light. The beginning of the new means the end of the old. The trip will be over--for me; though the Knight and the Gray Dragon will go on and have hundreds of adventures without me. They will be my knight and my dragon no longer. Perhaps I shall never see them again.
Before our days together slip away into the background of my mind (it seems as if they never could!) I want to write down things about them to keep and read when I am old.
First of all, there was Ruthwell Cross.
We went there from Annan; and as we flew along in the car over a good white road, we could see across widening waters the mountains of the English Lake country floating like a mirage along the southern sky, Skiddaw with its twin peaks higher and bluer than the rest. How I love the names of the Cumberland places and mountains! I made Sir S. say Helvellyn and Blencathra and Glaramara over very slowly, just for the music in my ears. And when his voice says a thing it sounds particularly well. I like to hear it roll out such a word as Northumberland, for instance. The way he says it makes you think of thunder on great moorlands, or a rush of wild Scotsmen over the border. But the Celtic names he speaks most lovingly, most softly, so that they ring on your ear for a long time after they are spoken, like an echo of fairy bells.
I did not mean to write all this about him and his voice when I began. There is so much else to say. Yet, somehow, I keep running back to him in my thoughts, especially now the trip is nearly over. And while I still cling to the subject, I have found out that he can sing as well as paint. But the singing belongs to Sweetheart Abbey; and Ruthwell Cross came before.
Mrs. James and Sir S. excited my interest in Galloway by telling me bits from the "Raiders," then stopping in exciting places to talk of something else. And somehow Galloway does seem a country where almost anything might happen--big, sensational, historic things. There was nothing gray to see except glimpses of the Solway, where the sea poured in its resistless tide; and that was the gray of polished silver. I had an impression of high hills, blunt in shape yet strangely dignified, and wide-spreading moors which sent out exquisite smells like lovely unseen messengers to meet us, as the car seemed to break through crystal walls of wind. Here and there were piles of pansy-brown peat, ready for burning. Children with heads wrapped in scarlet flame ran out of cottages to stare at us. Sir S. actually admired their red hair. He exclaimed suddenly, "By Jove, it's worth crossing the ocean to see that glorious stuff again! It's the hair of Circe." I don't know when anything has made me feel so much like a kitten that purrs over a dish of cream. For you know the hair he loved was just my colour, not a bit less scarlet. What would Grandma say?
It rained once--sharp rain like thin daggers of glass stabbing our faces as the car dashed through--and the wet road looked like a shining silver ribbon flung down anyhow on purple velvet. The purple velvet was heather, and I never saw any before we started on our trip, except a little sad, tame heather in the garden of Hillard House--heather moulting like a bird in a cage, with all the spirit of the moors gone out of it. But this Galloway heather was real heather, the heather of poetry; and I knew that by and by I was going to see the heather moon rise over it. The very thought brought a thrill--and I was glad, as I had it, that Mrs. West was somewhere else in her own car. She does so damp you, somehow, in your high moments, and make you feel too young for anybody to care for your crude little thrills or take them seriously.
When the rain stopped, it left a thin white mist floating over the heather, until the sun broke out and the deep purple was lit to crimson, like a running fire.
I'm not quite sure if all this happened before Ruthwell Church (called Rivvel by the people near), but in my memory it is part of the same picture, of that first day in Galloway.
I know we skimmed through a little place called Cummer-trees, and then Sir S. slowed down to show us, he said, one of the "sights of the world." He had never seen it himself, but he knew all about it, and even Mrs. James knew a little. It is a great advantage to a simple woman to have had a clever husband, and feel obliged, to live up to him.
We had come not so much for the church as for a wonderful stone cross which it contains, as a jewel-box contains treasure of pearls and diamonds. This cross is worth countless numbers of both; and it has a history as intricate as its own strange carvings.
In the manse they gave Sir S. the key of the small old church behind a high wall with steps up and down: and once inside he led us straight to the north end, where, in a side aisle, we saw a great shape rise. We must have known it to be a marvel, even if we had heard nothing beforehand.
The cross used to stand, not in the church, but out in the open long before the church was built, and it towered eighteen feet tall against the sky. There it lived year after year, generation after generation, and nobody knew what its carved birds and beasts and hieroglyphic inscriptions meant. Nobody cared much, until a gloomy set of men in a General Assembly, when Charles I was King of England, threw it down and broke it up, because it was an idolatrous emblem. Luckily, some wise person hid all the pieces in the church; but after a while another person not so wise threw them out into the backyard. There they stayed until a Doctor Duncan thought he would have the cross put up in his manse garden: and some great Norwegian scholars, to whom he sent copies of the writings, grew very excited, and contradicted each other about them in 1802. But no one knew what the letters really meant till the eldest son of the famous actor John Kemble came to the neighbourhood for a holiday. He was a learned authority on Anglo-Saxon times, and he discovered that the writing was really Early English, the very earliest of all, the rudiments of the language which--as Sir S. expressed it--"Chaucer helped to form and Shakespeare perfected"; because they had to make their words, as well as group them together--which is all that lazy authors have to do nowadays. The quaint carvings relate to the life of Christ and saints, and they are described in Latin from the Vulgate; but it was the runic inscriptions which John Mitchell Kemble puzzled out--a kind of rhymed soliloquy the cross itself was supposed to speak; and afterward he found the whole thing in an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the seventh or eighth century, far away from Scotland, in a library at Vercelli, near Milan. But it was written by the Northumbrian bard Caedmon, in a poem called "The Dream of the Holy Rood."
No wonder Sir S. wished to see Ruthwell Cross. There's nothing else of the kind, he thinks, so splendid anywhere.
Even then my first wonderful day in Scotland wasn't over, for we had time to see Caerlaverock Castle, which, according to Sir S., is another of the best things on earth. I suppose, in old days, when the world was small because it was difficult to travel great distances, it didn't seem odd to find magnificent runic crosses, and castles, and historic blacksmiths' shops, and houses of geniuses all standing cheek by jowl within a step of each other. They had to be like that, or nobody from the next county would ever have seen them: but now, especially to a person who has seen nothing except in dreams, it is startling, almost incredible.
Caerlaverock, Mrs. James said, was probably Scott's Ellangowan in "Guy Mannering"; so I shall read "Guy Mannering" as soon as I settle down to live with my mother. We couldn't help getting a little mixed up with Scott even here, at the gate of the Crockett country; and there were traces of Burns too, because of our being near already to Dumfries, where he lived for years and finally died. But the idea Sir S. had set his heart upon was for us to come back to Dumfries after we had seen Galloway and had run up to Burns's birthplace at Ayr. It would make each part of the trip more "concrete," he said.
Whether or no the stronghold of the Maxwells was Ellangowan, it was in any case the key to southwest Scotland, and in looking at the place it is easy to understand why. A great red-gold Key it was when we saw it, red-gold in the western sunlight in a hollow near the river; such red and gold colour as the old sandstone had, in contrast with the green of lichen and green of waving grass, I wouldn't have believed in, if I'd seen it in a picture. I should have said, "The artist who painted that ruined castle put on the colours he would like to see, not those he did see." But I should have misjudged him, because the colours were real.
Once there was a double moat all round the vast, triangular castle, and still there's water in one of them. You would have thought the Maxwell ladies had thrown their rubies and diamonds into it one wild day when they were escaping from enemies, and that the jewels had lain ever since at the bottom of the moat unnoticed, though the sunlight found out and treacherously tried to tell the secret. Think of Ptolemy writing about Caerlaverock, and calling it Carbantorigun! I'm glad we haven't to call it that now, or I should always have to say it--as one goes on saying "you" to a person whose name one hasn't caught.
Even if Caerlaverock were in hideous surroundings, it would be magnificent: but the river Solway is its silver foreground, and Lochar Moss is its mysterious background; so it is perfect in beauty as in strength, and if only no such hateful things as cannons had been invented, it would not now be a ruin. Although it lies so low, it was built to resist everything but gunpowder: for how could the Maxwells dream that all their beautiful arrangements for pouring down molten lead and boiling oil would be useless against a new foe?
Edward I took the castle in 1300, but Bruce got it back thirteen years later; and there was much fighting and tossing back of the Key from one hand to the other even before the great siege when the Earl of Essex punished Lord Herries for defending Queen Mary. Still, the walls stood bravely, and after the Essex affair they were made stronger than ever--so strong and so splendid it must have seemed as if Caerlaverock need never capitulate again to any enemy. But no sooner had the Maxwells finished a lovely new façade, the best they'd ever had, with carved window and door caps of the latest fashion, than Colonel Home came along with his grim Covenanters and blew up everything with his horrid cannons. I can't help disliking him, for the Maxwells seem to have been the most fascinating people. One Lord Maxwell of the seventeenth century, who was Roman Catholic when it wasn't safe to be Roman Catholic, used to disguise himself as a beggar, and play the fiddle in the market-place of Dumfries as a signal to tell the faithful of his own religion where and when they might come to Mass. They understood according to certain tunes agreed upon, which was easy, as they had only three meeting-places. A nice old man in the castle told us these stories and showed us the exquisite courtyard where Burns came one day when he was seventeen and cut on a stone in the wall the initials R. B. in a triangle, like a masonic sign, which suggests the wedge shape of the castle.
Sir S. knew all about this carving, and said that Americans had offered two thousand pounds for the stone. But the Duchess of Norfolk, who is mistress of Caerlaverock in her own right, turned up her nose, metaphorically speaking, at the offer. "I bid ye fair:" is the motto that goes with the crest over the huge gateway between two towers, and the rumour is that the Americans, in bidding for the stone of the initials, quoted this motto; but their aptness did them no good. In one of those towers Murdoch, the blind Duke of Albany, was imprisoned for seven years by James I before he was executed at Stirling; and they say that in the green hollow where the great red ruin glows he can be seen walking in the moonlight on the anniversary of his beheading.
One of my favourite stories in history is about Lord Nithsdale and his brave, clever wife who saved him on the eve of his execution by dressing him in her clothes and letting him walk calmly out of the Tower of London in her place. Think of being able to do such a thing for a man you loved! He was one of the Lords Nithsdale who came from Caerlaverock; and not far away, at Terregles House, is a portrait of that Countess of Nithsdale, with the cloak which her husband wore when he escaped. They have a Prayer Book, too, of Queen Mary's in that house, for she gave it to Lord Herries, who sheltered her in her flight after the battle at Langside, eighty miles away. But we didn't see these things. It was the old man at the castle who told us of them, because they are still in the keeping of the Maxwell family, of which he is very proud.
We hurried quickly through Dumfries, not to see or think of the Burns associations there until we should come back; but at Lincluden Abbey, close by, we were forced to think of him--although, as far as our trip was concerned, he wasn't born. At Lincluden, where he loved to come, walking out from Dumfries (as he must have walked to Caerlaverock to cut his initials) he saw the Vision. And Lincluden is so sweet a place that my thoughts of it, mingling very humbly with the great poet's thoughts, will lie together in my memory as pressed flowers lie between the pages of a book.
The road which leads from Dumfries to Lincluden seems like a quiet prelude to a lovely burst of music, so gentle and pretty it is. Then suddenly you come to the promontory stitched on to the mainland with great silver stitches of rivers, the Cluden and the Nith; and there are old earthworks, fallen into ruin, which guard the Abbey as the skeletons of watch-dogs might lie guarding a dead master. There's a mound, too, by the side of the ruined church, and it is called a Mote, which means something desperately interesting and historic, and there's a Peel-tower in ruin. Indeed, all is in ruin at Lincluden Abbey; but that makes it the sweeter and sadder. And as we came, the red of the crumbling sandstone burned in the fire of sunset like a funeral pyre heaped with roses. The melancholy, crowding trees and the delicate groups of little bushes were like mourners coming with their children to look on at the great burning.
We went into the church to see the tomb of Margaret Countess of Douglas, who was a daughter of King Robert the Third; and somehow the mutilations of the effigy made it more beautiful, causing you to see as in a blurred picture the thousand events of troublous times which had passed over the figure, leaving it through all peacefully asleep. A daughter of a king, with the Douglas Heart to guard her, she would be too noble in her stony slumber to show that she minded losing her features and a few other trifling accessories which might spoil the looks of less important women.
When we came out, high in the sunset glory gleamed a silver sickle, reaping roses. It was the heather moon, and I cried out to Sir S. as I saw it, "Wish--wish! Your first sight of the heather moon, and over our right shoulders for luck! Whatever we wish must come true!"
I was so excited that I seized his hand; and he was too polite to give it back to me like a thing he didn't want. So he held it firmly in his while we both looked up to the sky, silently making our wishes. My wish was to be that my mother might love me; but I stopped and thought, "What is the good of making such a wish, when I've only one, and I'm sure to get that one without the heather moon, as mothers all love their children." This caution was very "canny" and proved my Scottish blood, I couldn't help thinking, as I paused in order to select the most appropriate wish for the heather moon to grant.
Several ideas presented themselves with a bow: a wish to be happy: but that wasn't "concrete" enough, as Sir S. would say. A wish to be very rich and able to do anything in the world I might like to do; but being rich sounds so fat and uninteresting--or else bald-headed; for nearly all the photographs in picture papers of desperately rich people are one or the other, or both. At last I began to be nervous, for if Sir S. or Mrs. James (who was close by) should speak before I'd given my wish to the new moon, she'd be unable to grant it, even with the best intentions. That is a well-known fact in connection with wishing by the moon. I have it on the authority of both Mrs. Muir and Heppie. Being in a hurry, I grew confused, and so could think of nothing more important than to wish for my knight never to forget me in future, wherever he may be. And just as I'd finished, he said, "Well? What did you wish?"
Of course I couldn't tell him such a wish as that; but, luckily, you must never let anybody know what you've wished by a moon or a star, if you want the wish to come true.
I explained this to Sir S., and he said, as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter, for he hadn't wished after all. "Oh, what a waste of the heather moon!" I cried, for it really seemed too bad. But he answered that the only thing he particularly wished for just then was a thing which wasn't fair to wish, on account of the 'other party concerned.' I laughed, and said if he had wished to wish, he had wished, in spite of himself, and the heather moon had heard; because that's the business of any well-trained new moon, and the heather moon is the best-trained of the year. "'The other party concerned' must just take the risk," I said. "And very likely 'twill be the best thing for him, her, or it in the end."
"I daren't hope that," said he, looking up at the silver sickle as earnestly as if we weren't talking nonsense.
"Don't you think the heather moon knows best?" I reproached him. But he did not answer, and only hummed under his breath, as we walked to the waiting car:
"How far, how far to Gretna?
It's years and years away--
And coach-and-four shall nevermore
Fling dust across the day."
All the way along the shadowy, switchback road from Dumfries going to Sweetheart Abbey (I like to write the name, it is so pretty and old-fashioned) we had glimpses of the moon scattering silver through the tree branches as she fell down the west. I thought the soft white curve like a baby's arm, rounded at the elbow; and it waved us good-night over the heather-clad mound of Criffel, as a baby might wave over the fat shoulder of a big nurse dressed in purple. It is cheek of Criffel to call itself a mountain, and of course it wouldn't dare to if there were other real mountains within twenty-five miles.
When I made this remark Mrs. James asked me where, in my sequestered life, I had got hold of such an unladylike word as "cheek," but I told her I must have been born knowing it, as there was never a time in my memory when I didn't. Also Mr. Douglas had used it several times in Carlisle Castle.
"Haven't you forgotten him yet?" asked Sir S.
"It would be silly to forget, and have to make his acquaintance over again at Edinburgh," I said. "He asked me particularly to think of him during our trip whenever I should see the Douglas Heart. Now I have just seen it at Lincluden."
"Douglas Heart indeed! Douglas cheek!" I heard Sir S. mutter.
There is one part of that road between Dumfries and Sweetheart Abbey I shall never forget: the view from Whinny Hill--a sudden view springing from behind trees, as if a green curtain had been pulled back from a picture. In this picture there were the silver Nith, and purple Criffel of course (which always tries to get itself noticed wherever you turn), a great forty-foot monument put up to commemorate Waterloo; and again the red triangle of Caerlaverock glowing on the green shore of the Solway Firth.
I suppose the people who were shy of seeming sentimental insisted on calling Sweetheart Abbey New Abbey. I can imagine Sir S. voting for the change, because I fancy that he would endure torture rather than be thought sentimental. He describes a place or a thing or a person glowingly, then hurries to cap his description with a few joking or even ironical words, lest he should be suspected of romance or enthusiasm.
The village is called New Abbey too, so it is safe to mention that to the driest person. It was just beginning to be evening, an evening softly gray as doves' wings folding down, when our Dragon sidled toward an inn it saw, quite a nice little inn, where Sir S. announced that we would stop the night. Before going in, however, he took us to look at a queer bas-relief built into the wall of a whitewashed cottage on the left side of the road. It showed three ladies industriously rowing a boat across the ferry--pious dames who brought all the stones from Caerlaverock, on the other side of the Solway, to build the Abbey.
"Rock of the Lark" is a delightful name, but Sweetheart Abbey is prettier, and the reason of the name is the prettiest part. Only I wish that the devoted Devorgilla who built the Abbey of Dolce Cor to be a big sacred box for the heart of her husband had had a worthier object of worship than the king, John Balliol. All the history I have ever read makes him out to be a weak and cowardly and rather treacherous person; but, as Sir S. said, "Mirabeau judged by the people and Mirabeau judged by his friends were two men"; and I suppose John must have put himself out to be charming to Devorgilla, or she wouldn't have wandered about with his heart in an ebony box inlaid with silver, and insisted on having it on the table in front of her when she ate her dinner. That was one way of keeping her husband's heart during her whole lifetime--and even after death, for of course she had it buried with her. It must have been glad of a little rest by that time, the poor heart, for it had so much travelling to do. I suppose it even went as far as Oxford when Devorgilla founded Balliol College.
The last shaft of the sun was turned off the rose-coloured ruin and the secluded valley where the cross-shaped Abbey hides from the world; and the moon was gone, too, swept away like a tiny boat on a wave of sunset. Still, it was full daylight, and Sir S. announced that he had a plan. This plan was for us to go (as soon as we'd seen our rooms, which he had engaged by telegram) and get permission to enter the Abbey by twilight, when no one else was there.
The little gray inn of the town looked no bigger than a good-sized private house, but it was the very first hotel of my life, and I regarded it as an Epoch, with a capital E. That point of view was upheld later by the heavenly scones and honey they gave us--heather honey, gold as the heather moon. And we had cool, clean rooms, suitable for the dreaming of sweet dreams. My dreams there seemed very important.
The great Somerled can of course get anything he wants to ask for if he chooses to reveal himself--anyhow, in Scotland; because already I am beginning to learn that even the smallest or humblest Scottish peasant knows all that's worth knowing, not only of the past but of the present, and has heard of all the celebrities. Maybe there might be miniature places in England, America, Germany, or France where the poor and uneducated would know nothing of Somerled the painter and millionaire. But in Scotland, apparently, though there are many poor, there are no uneducated persons. Those to whom his being a painter would mean nothing would be interested in his money. Those who didn't care for his millions of dollars would have read about his painting: and all would value him because he belongs to Scotland.
As soon as our luggage was in our rooms and dinner ordered, Sir Somerled inquired if we were ready for the Abbey; but Mrs. James mildly asked if we would mind going without her. She had begun to realize that she was tired, and would like to rest. She could go by herself to the Abbey early in the morning before starting time. I felt that I ought to mind more than I did, but I couldn't help liking to be with Sir S. alone. It seemed like the night of our first meeting; for some one had always been with us, more or less, ever since. It was only a short stroll through the village, not enough to call a walk. A dear little lady who lives in a nice cottage close to the ruin opened the iron gate, but she did not go in with us, because it was time for her supper. She had a photograph done from one of the great Somerled's most famous pictures, and if he had been a long she could not have been more polite.
At first, the inside of the shell-like Abbey with the beautiful name was a disappointment. The green grass was encumbered with tasteless graves and flat modern stones which looked as if they had lain down there without permission.
We wandered about rather forlornly for a while, until we found Devorgilla's thirteenth-century tomb. Sir S. told me her history, and waked the sad old place to living interest. I seemed to see the ever-loving lady, followed by her chosen maidens carrying the heart in its ebony and silver box. And together we made up a theory, that of every event something reminiscent lingers on the spot where it happened. If only our eyes were different, we should be able, wherever we went, to see filmy, mysterious pictures painted on air--fadeless, moving photographs of all the people and all the deeds which have made up the world's history.
This set us talking of our own pictures, which we are leaving behind us as we go through life; and I couldn't help thinking how he and I, in accordance with this idea, will for ever and ever go on being "married" at Gretna Green. I laughed at the thought, and he asked me why, so I told him.
"When you're marrying your real wife, years from now maybe, and have forgotten my existence, that scene will still be enacting itself," I said, "not only on the films the photograph men took, but on air films. Doesn't it frighten you?" I asked.
"Doesn't it frighten you?" he echoed. "Because you will marry. I never shall."
"How do you know?" I catechized him.
"If I can't have the wife I want, I'll have none."
"Perhaps you can have the one you want if you ask her nicely."
"I don't intend to ask. I'm not the right one for her."
"You might let her decide that!" I nobly said, for Mrs. West may be the woman. "I do hope, if men ever love me, they'll tell me so."
"No fear! They will." He laughed more loudly than I have heard him laugh.
"But the right one mayn't, if he thinks as you do."
"He won't. He'll be thinking only of himself. But look here, my girl, be sure you do take the right one when you marry; for if in my opinion you're likely to make a big mistake when the time comes, I may be tempted to put a spoke in the fellow's wheel."
"Please do!" I laughed.
"You think I'm joking," he said, watching me in a way he has, between narrowed lids, his eyes almost black in the twilight. "And so I am to a certain extent. Yet I might forbid the banns, perhaps--if I chose."
"But how?"
"Haven't you any idea?"
"Not half a one."
"Then I won't tell. It would only worry you--for nothing. Marry in peace, when your Prince comes, and I'll send you my blessing--from far away."
"I don't like to think of your being far away," I said. "Let's not talk of it. For you are my only friend--except Mrs. James. And you're so different."
"I thank Heaven!" he said. "And I thank her for wanting a rest. Good as she is, three would be a crowd in Sweetheart Abbey."
Speaking of her made me think of the time. We had promised Mrs. James to go back in half an hour for dinner! Already more than half an hour had slipped away as we made our air-film photographs to haunt Sweetheart Abbey with all its other ghosts.
The twilight was changing to a light more mysterious, and as we looked at each other through the opal haze I felt strangely that we were changing too. It was as if our realities were less real than the shadow pictures which were to live on here together forever--as if our bodies, which would go away and separate, to live different lives far away from one another, would not be us any more.
I could not have imagined so wonderful a light as that which illuminated the great rose-window and filled the vast broken shell of the Abbey. It was as if the day had been poured out of a cup, and night was being slowly poured in--the dove-gray night of dreams. It was pale, yet not bright like the light of dawn. It was more like a light glimmering over a sheet of water, a light made of the water itself. Almost I expected to see the Heart rise up in the ebony and silver box, and the box opening.
"You look like a young seeress," my Knight said. "What is it that you see with your great eyes gazing through the dusk?"
"I see--a heart," I answered. "I think I see a heart."
"That is very intelligent of you," he said, in a changed tone. "Come, child, it's time I took you home."
"Is there the ghost of a heart floating here?" I asked, wishing to linger. But he took my hand and drew me toward the gate.
"To me," he said dryly, "it appears to be a real heart--almost too real for comfort."
We walked back to the inn, and he was uninterestingly commonplace all the way. He talked about dinner, and buying petrol for the car, and told me dull facts about tiresome things called carburettors. It would have been a horrid anticlimax, spoiling all the romance of Sweetheart Abbey, if he had not changed later on. But he did change. There was a little piano in the sitting-room they gave us, and Mrs. James began drumming out a few Scotch airs, warbling the words in a high, thin voice rather like that of an intelligent insect. There was one tune I knew, and I couldn't resist joining in. At the end Sir S. applauded.
"What a pity her grandmamma wouldn't let her take lessons, as I once ventured to suggest!" said Mrs. James. "She has a true ear, and a sweet voice wonderfully like her mother's, which I quite well remember. But Mrs. MacDonald had the idea that music lessons would lead to vanity. Don't you think, sir" (she often slips in a respectful "sir"), "that her voice would repay instruction?"
"I do," pronounced the great Somerled.
"I'm sure you sing," went on Mrs. James. "I flatter myself I can always tell by people's faces."
"Like Barrie, I never had lessons," he said. "But I suppose we Highlanders are born with music in our blood."
"Then you do sing?" she persisted.
"Only to please myself. Not that it does!"
"Will you sing to please us?"
"It wouldn't please you."
"Barrie, you ask."
"The Princess commands!" I said, not expecting him to humour my impudence, but he did, by going at once to the piano. It had lisped and stammered awkwardly for Mrs. James, but it obeyed him as if the keys were mesmerized. He played a prelude, and then sang "Annie Laurie," in a soft, mellow voice, so low that people outside the room could hardly have heard. It seemed as if there must really be an "Annie Laurie" in his life. Surely a man could not sing like that, and look like that in singing, unless he called up the face of some woman he loved. I wondered if he thought of Mrs. West, who is so very pretty, and rather like the description of "Annie Laurie." His eyes looked far away as he sang, through the wall--oh, yes, I'm sure they could see through the wall at that moment--perhaps as far as "Maxwellton Braes"; perhaps still farther, searching for Mrs. West wherever she might be.
I don't know how it would make one feel if such a man with such a voice looked into one's eyes and sang a song of love. I'm afraid it might make one rather foolish. But it was only at the wall that Sir S. stared until he began a very different song--the lament of a Highlander who would nevermore see his island home nor the love of his youth. It was a heart-breaking song; and though his voice was pitched so low it was almost like singing in a whisper, there was a strange, vibrating power in it, as there is in the strings of a violin touched but lightly by the bow. Sir S. transferred his attention from the wall to me as he sang this sad old ballad, and I could not look away, because there was the same compelling power in his eyes as in his voice. No doubt it was only of the song he thought, not of me at all, really; yet I could not shake off the haunting impression of the look, and it made me dream of him all night. I saw him standing beside me in the strange, pale twilight of Sweetheart Abbey. And in his hand was a box of ebony, inlaid with silver, which he held out. But when I took the box it was locked, and he had no key. "Only the key of the rainbow will open this box," he said. And then I woke up, feeling somehow as if the dream were of importance, and I must try to find out why.
