A. M. Williamson

“ I had prophesied to the girl that she would see reflected the face of the man she was destined to love and marry. An instant later she had seen two faces, Somerled's and mine. Would she love one man, and marry the other? Or would only one of these two men count in her life?
Perhaps Queen Mary's mirror knew. It looked capable of knowing—and keeping—any secret of the human heart.
That night—oh, my prophetic soul!—Morgan Bennett saw Barrie at the theatre, and looked at her through his opera-glasses almost as often as he looked at Mrs. Bal in her gay, exciting comedy-drama, "The Nelly Affair." ”

“ Nothing moved but the rushing brown water, and there was no sound, when we stopped to listen, but its joyous song and the humming of bees in bracken and heather.
Basil can "make believe" more easily and less stiffly than Sir S., because he is an author, and used to stringing whimsies together. He and I "pretended" that the bees were a fairy band, playing to a hidden audience in a theatre roofed with the silver sheen of arching ferns. Wafts of perfume came to us, cooled in woodsy dells, or warmed on sunshiny banks of flowers; but not a soul could be seen anywhere, nor a house. ”

“ I might have jumped out of the car and found the rainbow key, but nobody wanted it now!
"Just as that young, young moon has power to shine through the strong afternoon sunlight, so a girl may all in a moment throw her influence over a group of people older and more experienced than herself," said Basil, smiling at me, and then at Mrs. James, as if he didn't mind her hearing the flowery compliment. ”

“ Aline agreed. "But now you do know. Oh, the only way, if Ian is to be made happy again in spite of himself, is for you to marry Basil. Think how happy you will make him too! And Barbara. Every one will be happy, and all through you."
"I'll see Basil and talk to him," said Barrie.
"You will? You little angel! But I must see him first and prepare him. Are you going to do what we all want? Even Ian wants it at heart, though he doesn't know it yet, for it would be such a relief for him to feel you were all right, and he—could go back to—old times." ”

“ Before our eyes rose majestically the colossal shell of a palace, with carved golden walls, a vast courtyard, cyclopean round towers, and wonderful windows full of sky and dreams. Close by was the noble church where James IV had his vision warning him not to go to war with England.
Somerled had talked to Barrie about Linlithgow, doubtless in the hope of making her think of him when there. He had called it the "finest domestic architectural ruin in all Scotland," and told her of Lord Rosebery's suggestion to restore and make of it a great national museum. ”

“ 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 Ballachulish, it is one of the most charming little places I've seen yet in Scotland, although coming here as we did from Loch Maree it would need to be beautiful indeed, not to be what you call in the theatre an 'anticlimax.' Loch Maree lies all secret and hidden among deer forests. Along the narrow, twisting road as you go, you hear the rushing sound of many rivers. Nobody had ever even dreamed of motor-cars when that road was made, so you have to travel slowly and manoeuvre whenever you meet anything if you don't want to be killed. ”

“ Aline wandered nervously about the house and garden, unable to settle anywhere, and it was an added vexation to her disturbed spirit that Basil should be giving himself heart and soul to the entertainment of that dreadful girl in the summer-house. It was well enough that he should entertain her, and keep her passive, but Aline would have liked him to be a martyr, sacrificing his own inclination for his sister's good. She did not wish to think that there was something about this young, crude creature which attracted men to her, and caused them to find pleasure in her society. ”

“ But when all had disappeared into the church, Somerled and Barrie looked at each other. His eyes praised her for a braw and bonnie lassie who had responded in fine style to her first-heard pipes, her first-seen kilt; yet his lips had nothing to say but, "Well, what do you think of them?"
"Think?" echoed Barrie. "I think it's perfectly unbelievable how any girl can ever marry a man who isn't a Highlander and has no right to the kilt!"
There was one for Somerled and one against me; but it only got my blood up. Many a girl says a certain thing, and does another when her time comes. ”

“ What shall we do?" the old eyes said to the young and the young eyes said to the old. Mrs. Muir had forgotten her burning wish and intention to scold Miss Barribel; nevertheless, the housekeeper was not to be trusted as an ally. Under the lash of Mrs. MacDonald's tongue she would defend herself, and Barrie would go to the wall. But the spirit of the martyr was in the girl, and when the first dread thrill of the tap, tap on the garret stairs had subsided in her nerves, she remembered her wrongs and her mother's wrongs, and was not afraid of Grandma. She girded herself for war. ”

“ We had a bridal sort of luncheon in the car, which was shunted off the highway into a green shadowed road abandoned to summer dreams. Mrs. James and I were like the flowers of the field, and had given no thought to food, or where or how we were to get it. We supposed vaguely that when we grew hungry we should stop at some inn and eat; but Sir Somerled had a surprise in the shape of an American invention called a refrigerator basket, nickel-lined, with an ice compartment walled in with asbestos or something scientific. ”

“ As we lumbered along with Blunderbore, each heather-dyed hill that rolled out of our way disclosed a new, or rather a very old, castle. I should think there must be as many castles in this part of the world as there are cottages. I know we saw more! except perhaps those sweet little dwellings grouped together in the charming villages of Ballater and Braemar. No wonder the King and Queen love this part of the world. Basil thought everything here quite foreign-looking: but there's always that French spirit in Scotland, isn't there? ”

“ Sir S. talks of—those ghost pictures—as far as the eye could reach we should see men marching, splendid men and women, too, who have made the world shine with their deeds, processions coming from every direction, out of the dim beginning of things up to the present day.
After the wildness of Loch Trool we had a country of plenteousness and peace. Basil said it was like a Surrey set down by the sea, so I suppose Surrey has big trees and flowery hedges and rolling downs, purple with heather. But surely no heather can be as purple as Scottish heather? ”

“ James still thought my bride-game had been played too long, and she switched the conversation to the real romances of Gretna Green—so breathlessly thrilling, some of them, that I was ashamed to hark back to the subject of ourselves. Not that Sir S. wouldn't make a hero for my romance. I feel that under his quiet, sometimes tired manner, there's a hidden fire, and I want to find out what he is really like, if I can. The study of such a man will be more interesting and even more mysterious than peeping through the keyhole of the garret door, into what I used to call "fairyland." ”

“ The car is so singularly intelligent that you feel it is a friend, too kind-hearted and chivalrous a creature to let anything bad happen. Of course, about every ten minutes something almost happens, but that is invariably the fault of other people's cars. You dash up to the mouth of a cross-road which you couldn't possibly have seen, because it is subtly disguised as a clump of trees or a flowery knoll; and you discover its true identity only because another motor—a blundering brute of a motor—bursts out at fifty miles an hour in front of your nose. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Your deserted princess, Barrie.
LETTER FROM BARRIE TO HER MOTHER
Dearest Barbara: Every prospect pleases and only man is vile. At least, I don't mean vile, but upsetting. It is too bad about Basil. I don't know what to do. I hope you aren't hoping that I may fall in love with him? Something he said makes me think he believes you want it. But why should you? You don't know him and his sister so very well. They aren't old friends. Darling, if I am a bother to you—and I know I am—I'll go far away and change my name and do anything you like, except marry Basil. It isn't that I'm too young. ”

“ Not that the high road between Kilmarnock and Dumfries wouldn't be worth seeing if Burns had never set foot on it, and if no other great ones had passed that way. It would be worth travelling for itself alone, for every mile has its own special beauty. And the more I think of Scotland the more I tell myself she is like a wise connoisseur (I hope that's the word!) who goes ahead of others to a sale of splendid pictures, and secures the finest for herself at a bargain. Several of the prettiest pictures hang on the blue-and-gold walls of the Burns country. ”

“ He did not say this to himself now, did not realize the truth of it, and did not even believe that he could go on writing stories and succeeding without Aline. Only, he knew that he loved his work for itself, and she did not. That the light of his life would be gone without it, whereas she would be glad to stop working and be idle as the admired wife of a celebrity and a millionaire. In this he felt a vague injustice of fate which depressed him—a rare state of mind for Basil Norman, to whom for four years the world had been a happy and magically beautiful dwelling-place.
"I hear a car now!" ”

“ Could you ever mistake a Scot for an un-Scot? No! Our wide-apart eyes and our dreamy yet practical expression, our high cheekbones, our sensitive, clear-cut nostrils, and the something mysterious in our gaze which no one can explain or understand, not even ourselves, is all our own. I have just found this out since crossing the border. And am I not a MacDonald of Dhrum?
I can't say that the first Scots I met—men, women, or children—looked like descendants of the robber hordes who used to make the Borderland their home ”

“ She laid herself out to charm her husband. Never an "I told you so!" Never a nagging word or look. She chatted to Fred in the car, and saw sights with him out of the car. This, she said, was almost like a second honeymoon. But of the heather moon she had never heard. It was ours—Barrie's and mine: yet I could not induce the girl to speak of it. For all she would say, she might have forgotten its existence. Always, especially when the heather moon tried to give us its golden blessing, an invisible presence seemed to stand between us, as if Somerled had sent his astral body to keep us apart. ”

“ Then, the night Aline and I had our big talk about Somerled, the Girl came. And that was the end of the book for me too.
If some time I grow callous enough to write her into a romance (she'd fit into nothing else) , I doubt if I could make clear the extraordinary and instantaneous effect of her on all those she approaches.
It isn't only her looks, though she's beautiful, as some blithe sprite met by chance in a forest. It isn't only her youth, for she is too absurdly young. A girl, to be taken seriously by a grown man, should be at least one-and-twenty. ”

“ What do you say?"
"Me in a motor-car!" exclaimed Barrie, rapturous. "It can't be true."
"It will be true if you say 'yes.'" Somerled spoke coolly, but it seemed to Aline that his eyes were alight. They were fixed on the girl, noting how she paled and flushed. Her face, seen in the golden lights and green shadows of the summer-house, had the texture of flowers. Aline had not known it was in her to hate any one so bleakly as she hated Barrie MacDonald at this moment; and she hated Somerled too, more than she had hated him last night. She ached to make him suffer as he was making her suffer. ”

“ He didn't realize then that he was founding a great school of romance and that all the world would be his family in mind and heart.
A book Basil had, said that the house was "ill-placed," but to me that seemed a dull and unimaginative criticism. Nowadays people may think a great deal about wide views from their windows; and if I ever build a house with a fairy wand, that's what I shall choose to have myself. But perhaps in Sir Walter's day the thing most sought for was a peaceful, sheltered outlook all to yourself and your family, like a secret garden of which only you had the key. ”

“ The mountains are the walls; and heather flows round them and beats against them like a purple ocean. It is so foreign looking that it reminded Basil of Baden Baden. Now we are going on into Ross-shire, which Basil describes as a country of moorlands and great spaces where red deer live. But already we have seen deer walking quite calmly out of the forests on to our road, where they stop to gaze quizzically, without the least fear, at the car. It is almost as if they took it for a brother-animal. To-night we shall be at Loch Maree, and of course you won't get this in time to telegraph there. ”

“ When Aline arrived at Ballachulish, Barrie and Somerled and Margaret MacDonald were walking together by the side of fair Loch Leven. Barrie wore a white dress and no hat. The late afternoon sun was dazzling on her hair, and as Somerled looked at her, across Miss MacDonald (it was like Margaret to walk between them) , there was an expression on his face which made Aline feel capable of desperate things. A child like Barrie to win him away from her so easily! There was something wrong about the world. Aline yearned to right it, and live happily ever after. ”

“ That might have offended admirers and kept money out of the theatre. It was the radiant unawareness of a passing sunbeam.
A few more seconds and this charming figure, framed in floating clouds of chiffon, would have reached the door of the lift, to be wafted out of sight like a pantomime fairy. But Barrie could no longer be held within bounds, for the great moment of her life had come. She darted away from us, her figure as tall, more youthful, more willowy, and more charming than the other, though singularly like in movement and in outline. ”

“ There was a pale dusk mingling with the moonshine, and I couldn't help remembering the mysterious light in Sweetheart Abbey, on my first night of Scotland and the heather moon. I remembered my dream, too, the dream of the locked ebony and silver box, which could be opened only by the key of the rainbow. It nearly broke my heart to think of these things, and I wished it would break, so that I might die instead of marrying Basil: for if I were dead I should be safely out of everybody's way, just the same as being married. ”

“ Chestnut-tressed Mary herself could not have been lovelier than the red-haired girl who walked beside me, and when the royal beauty came on a day of chill, northern haar, to her Scottish realm, she was only a year older than this child we all love but think too young for love. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It makes us feel we haven't got beyond things. Still, she needn't grudge you those lads. She's got the great Somerled."
"Yes, I suppose she has," I admitted grudgingly.
I went to bed feeling as if elephants had walked over me for years.
Next morning Sir S. seemed to take it for granted that Basil would look after Mrs. James and me. He certainly put on rather a "kind uncle" air with me, but the more he did so, the less and less I felt as if he were my uncle, and the more and more I wanted to have him for my knight—mine all alone, without so much as a link of his chain armour for any one else. ”

“ Barrie said softly, looking out of the open window at the purple night, purple as heather.
"What do you mean by a heather moon?" asked Basil, interested. "It sounds sweeter than honeymoon."
"It's the sweetest moon of the year," the girl answered. "The moon when all the most beautiful things ought to happen to the people who are worthy of them—and the honeymoon can't come till afterward. I've always wanted something romantic to happen to me in the heather moon; yet nothing ever has, so far. It couldn't, at Grandma's!" ”

“ The hour after a wedding at Gretna Green is no tune for talk of any woman-thing except the bride; and as I may perhaps never be anybody's real bride, I insisted on my rights. This carrying on of the Gretna Green game rather scandalized good Mrs. James, but when she scolded me gently for my "childishness," Sir S. said, "Do let her be a child as long as she can. It would be well for every one of us if we kept something of our childhood all our lives. Just now I'm finding childhood gloriously contagious. ”

“ I'm sorry if I've not been maidenly, which Miss Hepburn is always telling me I'm not."
"I suspect most maidens think a good deal about love whether or no they talk of it, don't they, Norman?" said Somerled.
"How should I know?" Basil asked.
Both men were different from their everyday selves to-night. They seemed self-conscious.
"Why, it's your business to know. You write novels. Or do you leave all the love parts to your sister?"
"I suppose widows may talk as much as they like about love," said Barrie reflectively, "having had it and passed it by." ”

“ They hovered over rivulets, dancing in the sunlight; or stained with colour the rocks thickly silvered with a brocade of lichen, or else hid suddenly in the heather which, mingling with pale green bracken, made a straggling pattern of amethyst and jade for miles along the way. Oh, it was all lovely; and we stayed a night there, at an ideal inn where fishermen engage their rooms years beforehand. A dear old waiter in the Loch Maree hotel advised me in the kindest way never, never to speak of fresh herring as fish, in Scotland. I wonder why? ”