Ishbel

“ Her cigarette-box was of elaborately chased silver. Good a sportswoman as she was, she was not in the least “sporty,” being too well balanced and well bred to assume a pose of any sort. She was a woman of the world with many tastes, who was destined to have a good many more.
When Ishbel entered, she was walking up and down, her hands clasped behind her, her heavy black brows drawn above the brooding darkness below. She, too, was in an unenviable frame of mind.
Her brows relaxed as she saw Ishbel. “What on earth is the matter?” ”

“ He asked me, and I said 'No,' but I will go now, and will walk into Portree this very night! Beannachd leibh (good-bye) ."
He had turned away then, furiously. It had all passed as suddenly, swept up as unexpectedly as had the squall outside the Cave of Gold. Ishbel stood as if dazed, staring straight before her. A Highlander's rage is like a Highland storm; one bends before it instinctively. Ishbel did so now.
Rory did not look back. Duncan, in the doorway, saw him stride on to the road, through the little patch of oats before the door. He set his face towards the high road for Portree. ”

“ Don’t you fancy that would be a compensation?”
“You clever! It would be too awful!”
“You talk like Mr. Jones.”
“Hang Mr. Jones. Ishbel was entirely right; and she is one of the few women on this earth that can be clever, as deep as the pit, and never let a man find it out. But you! You are too straightforward and honest. Not that Ishbel isn’t honest; she’s a brick; but she has a special talent—possibly it lies in her coquetry. You have little or no coquetry. You are in a state of flux at present, and if you decide for the second ego, if you become hard and clever, you never could disguise it. ”

“ And if there were ghosts, why not wee folk and kelpies?
"I believe it is Ishbel, herself. Do you not know me, Ishbel?"
He spoke in a new voice. The fluent Gaelic was gone, and the stiff, translated English; he spoke easily, with a strange accent. And yet, ah! she knew him at once! It was Rory! Rory, well-dressed, handsome, upright, with a different and more independent carriage, but Rory all the same!
Ishbel rose and stood quite wordless for a moment. And then—"You are a great stranger," she said. "It is a very long time, I believe, since you hef been in Skye." ”

“ Catriona was growing feeble, and Ishbel did everything; the old woman only spinning a little, and wandering out to gather sticks and twigs for the fire. The girl had been taking up carded wool to the castle, and giving the great London ladies there a spinning lesson.
Before the cottage came in view, with its surrounding field of poor and thinly growing oats and yellow daisies (there being, indeed, a far more plentiful crop of the latter) , she paused to look up the fairy knoll. There, on the top was the fairy ring. Something made Ishbel suddenly turn and mount the little hill. ”

“ If she fled to London and obtained employment of any sort, even in an obscure shop, France would carry out his threat and ruin Ishbel, one way or another. If he dared not employ his original method again—and why not? He was cunning enough to know that one sensational episode might be explained away, but not two of the same kind. There is nothing people weary of so quickly as explanations. ”

“ She knew that other women of humor and intellect, Ishbel, for instance, had ended by accepting the best that life purposed to offer them, and been quite happy, or happy enough. But she dared make no such experiment with herself. Genius of some sort she had, and she guessed that geniuses had best be content with dreams and make no experiments with mere mortal men. ”

“ Ibsen was a symptom, a voice, as all great artists are, but no radical changes spring full fledged from any brain; they are the slow work of the centuries.
“Perhaps I should have put it another way,” said Ishbel. “I fancy the point is, not that the world respects you more for amassing wealth, but that you respect yourself so enormously for having won in the greatest and most difficult game that men have ever played. Diplomacy is nothing to it. That only requires brains and training. ”

“ Perhaps I’ll find that—well, that I love this great cause best, after all.”
“Not a bit of it!” cried Ishbel, in alarm. “Don’t try to persuade yourself of anything so unnatural and foolish. Do you realize how few women have complete happiness offered them? I could shake you.”
Then she reflected that Nevis was a tropical island; and another scheme was forming in her agile brain. “Well, never mind all that. You are worn out now. It is not a matter to discuss, anyhow. Stay out of doors here, and I will prepare your wardrobe. Then you can start as soon as you return to England. ”

“ We don’t change much under the armor Life forces us into. Dismiss Ishbel from your mind. Take care of yourself. What is Ishbel’s business when weighed against a lifetime of horror and demoralization? Nobody knows this better than Ishbel. I fancy if you don’t go, she’ll chuck the business. It’s a deuced unpleasant position for her. And she has made enough to live on comfortably until she can marry Dark —”
“I don’t believe it. It might be years —”
The butler entered and announced luncheon. Julia smoothed her hair, feeling much herself again. ”

“ That women who married men for jewels and not for love were no better than the women of the street? Most women would have stopped there. It is a sentimental form of reasoning, eminently satisfactory to many women, and to some male novelists. But Ishbel had been born with a clear logical brain in which the fatal gift of humor was seldom dormant, and of late this brain had shown symptoms of impatience at neglect, muttered vague demands for recognition. ”

“ For Duncan kept her very close now. Rory laid a packet smilingly in her lap, and said he thought he had money enough.
Next forenoon Catriona saw him coming up the road; Ishbel ran to meet him, and together they wandered off to the burn-side. They came back by-and-by, and Ishbel stood smiling in the cottage door, her arms full of rowan branches; Rory had a spray in his coat, and the red berries nestled under her chin.
"I have brought you back luck," the girl cried happily. "We found the rowans down by the pool. And Rory says that there are maybe good folk in the world, after all! ”

“ He also amused himself with politics and society. Devoted to Ishbel for years before he could marry her, he was now as completely happy as a man may be whose wife is giving a large part of her energies to a cause of which he fastidiously disapproves. Broadminded, he was quite willing that all women outside of his particular circle should vote, but wished that his ancestors had settled the question and spared his generation. ”

“ Rory asked himself the question all next day, for, amidst even the sordid duties of examining the new byres and out-houses, there floated before his mind only one picture—a girl's slim figure in a short faded green skirt, leaning against a dyke, with her small head crushed against a background of faded fern, and the shy lovely eyes looking into his face.
Ishbel! They said she was a changeling. ”

“ CHAPTER II. ISHBEL'S PROMISE.
"It is no use at all to go against the lass. I hef said so before now. And there are many lasses in Skye, as good as she, and with, maybe, a cow or two, or a few pounds to bring with her. There is Sheila Macdonald—Sheila will hef as much as three hundred pounds!"
"As if I would look at a squinting woman"—and Duncan threw down the fishing-rod he held, furiously—"I will hef none but Ishbel, and if she will not hef me, I will do someone an injury!"
His mother went on peeling potatoes, deliberately.
"Rory MacPhee is stronger and bigger than you," she remarked. ”

“ You’ve a duty to yourself, to say nothing of Mr. Tay; and you’re not going to a frivolous useless life—not with him! No one is indispensable to any real cause, and in ours there are too many to carry on the work without the supreme sacrifice on your part. Promise me, at least, that you will go at once to Nevis. It would be the beginning of the solution.”
“I’d like to go.”
“You really must want to see your mother, and your old home,” continued Ishbel, insinuatingly. “One’s mother and one’s birthplace are the great refuges in time of trouble. ”

“ The best thing would be that they would quarrel. And I will tell you a way. He does not like to hear that they are all saying she is a changeling; and he does not like her to talk of the good folk. When she told him the story of the kelpie that followed Ross MacRae over the muir, and [428] drowned him at last in the Rowan Pool, he was angry, and called it all nonsense, and said that she should not repeat such folly. And Ishbel did not like that. She was asking me about the Cave of Gold only yesterday, and when it was that anyone might see the fairies dancing, and if the tide would suit to go. ”

“ In the afternoon an experiment was made with the apparatus known as a Ouija board, and this, as is very often the case, resolved itself, after a time, into automatic writing. There is in the library a portrait of a very handsome woman, to which no name is attached, but which shows the costume of the last century. Her name was asked, and the word Ishbel was given several times. It is not certain whether this word was meant as an answer to the question, or whether, as often happens in such cases, it was intended merely as an announcement of the name of the informant supposed to communicate. ”

“ Then, changing her tone, Catriona told of the only woman who had ever caught sight of the wee green folk, and how, ever after, riches and wealth were hers, and she had never a wish unsatisfied! It was the going on into the inner caves that had undone the piper! The lass who had seen the fairies was a certain Eilidh Macdonald, and she married a chief, and went to live far away in Oban, and all her days she was clad in green silk. Yes, all her days!
"How did she go?" Ishbel cried.
"In a boat, with a man. It is easy, if the man is strong, and you hef the rowan with you. ”

“ The fact of the name Ishbel being transferred to the inquirers assembled at Ballechin, may indicate whose was the spirit that should profess to preach to victims. Women are often said to be worse, if evil, than men, and they play this ugly role better.
That rain interrupted the phenomena is another point against the partisans of the supernatural. When after rain the nun was surprised and chased by Miss Freer, it would seem that she intended mischief to some other member of the garrison at B——, or she would have been en rapport with Miss Freer, and aware that she was nearing her. ”

“ This may perhaps be taken as throwing light upon the intended personality of Ishbel, and supplying a possible clue to the identity of the mind of which she seems to be an imaginary creation.
Fifty-nine was the age of the late Rev. Mother Frances Helen in the year 1873, when Sarah N—— died. They are not people who are at all likely to have met each other upon "the other side" any more than upon this. ”

“ Alas! it was no penitent face which met his, and jealousy and wrath broke forth fiercely, sweeping love aside.
"Are you asking what I am thinking, Ishbel?" he cried, "of the lass who promised me, and who broke her word, and went out with Duncan MacLeod? Well, I am thinking chust nothing at all of her! I hef warned her that the boat was not safe, and of the squalls, and that it was not the thing for a lass like her to go so late; and she had promised, and yet she went! And this was the claymore brooch made of Iona pebbles I hef bought for you; and it can go there!" ”

“ Many a maiden would have been angry had she heard her lover speak these words; but Burd Isbel loved him too much to be offended at anything which he said, so she crept away to her chamber with a determined look on her girlish face.
"'Tis not for thy lands or thy Castle," she whispered, "but for pure love of thee. Love hath made maidens brave ere now, and it will make them brave again."
That night, when all the palace was quiet, Burd Isbel wrapped herself in a long gray cloak, and crept noiselessly from her room. ”

“ The heritage of blood his father had bequeathed him, the unshakable love for a worthless girl who had so dwarfed and obstructed his will and so bitterly defeated and reviled his poor, romantic, boyish faith, the killing of hostile men, so strange in its after effects, the pursuits and fights, and loss of one by one of his confederates—these had finally engendered in Jean Isbel a wild, unslakable thirst, these had been the cause of his retrogression, these had unalterably and ruthlessly fixed in his darkened mind one fierce passion—to live and die the last man of that Jorth-Isbel feud. ”

“ Isbel's vernacular was significant. Speaking of one of our horses he said: "Like a mule he'll be your friend for twenty years to git a chance to kick you." Speaking of another that had to be shod he said: "Shore, he'll step high to-morrow." Isbel appeared to be remarkably efficient as camp-rustler and cook, but he did not inspire me with confidence. In speaking of this to the Doyles I found them non-committal on the subject. Westerners have sensitive feelings. I could not tell whether they were offended or not, and I half regretted mentioning my lack of confidence in Isbel. ”

“ Shore they've shot their bolt," declared Gaston Isbel.
"Wal, I doon't know aboot that," returned Blaisdell, "but they've shot a hell of a lot of shells."
"Listen," suddenly called Jean. "Somebody's yellin'."
"Hey, Isbel!" came in loud, hoarse voice. "Let your women fight for you."
Gaston Isbel sat up with a start and his face turned livid. Jean needed no more to prove that the derisive voice from outside had belonged to Jorth. The old rancher lunged up to his full height and with reckless disregard of life he rushed to the window. "Jorth," he roared, "I dare you to meet me—man to man!" ”