The Cruise of the Snowbird: A Story of Arctic Adventure

Very simple words these were, yet there was something in the very tone in which they were uttered that would have convinced even a stranger, that Allan McGregor bore for the youth before him quite a brother’s love.

And who was Rory, and who was Ralph? These questions are very soon answered. Roderick Elphinston and Ralph Leigh were, or had been, students at the University of Cambridge. They had been “inseparables” all through the curriculum, and firm friends from the very first day they had met together. And yet in appearance, and indeed in character, they were entirely different. Ralph was a great broad-shouldered, pleasant-faced young Saxon Rory was small as to stature, but lithe and wiry in the extreme; his face was always somewhat pale, but his eyes had all the glitter and fire of a wild cat in them. Well, then, if you do not like the “wild cat,” I shall say “poet” – the glitter and fire of a poet. And a poet he was, though he seldom wrote verses. Oh! it is not always the verses one writes that prove him to be a poet. Very often it is just the reverse. I know a young man who has written more verses than would stretch from Reading to Hyde Park, and there is just as much poetry in that young man’s soul as there is in the flagstaff on my lawn yonder. But Rory’s soul was filled with life and imagination, a gladsome glowing life that could not be restrained, but that burst upwards like a fountain in the sunlight, giving joy to all around. Everything in nature was understood and loved by Rory, and everything in nature seemed to love him in return; the birds and beasts made a confidant of him, and the very trees and the tenderest flowerets in garden or field seemed to whisper to him and tell him all their secrets. And just because he was so full of life he was also full of fun.

When silent and thinking, this young Irishman’s face was placid, and even somewhat melancholy in expression, but it lighted up when he spoke, and it was wonderfully quick in its changes from grave to gay, or gay to grave. It was like a rippling summer sea with cloud-shadows chasing each other all over it. Like most of his countrymen, Rory was brave even to a fault. Well, then, there you have his description in a few words, and if you will not let me call him poet, I really do not know what else to call him.

Ralph Leigh I must dismiss with a word. But, in a word, he was in my opinion everything that a young English gentleman should be; he was straightforward, bold and manly, and though very far from being as clever as Rory, he loved Rory for possessing the qualities he himself was deficient in. Thoroughly guileless was honest Ralph, and indeed, if the truth must be told, he was not a little proud of his companion, and he was never better pleased than when, along with Rory in the company of others, the Irishman was what Ralph called “in fine form.”

At such times Ralph would not have interrupted the flow of Rory’s wit for the world, but the quiet and happy glance he would give round the room occasionally, to see if other people were listening to and fully appreciating his adopted brother, spoke volumes.

McBain was right. The young blood in Rory’s veins soon reasserted itself, and after half-an-hour’s rest he seemed as well as ever. His first action on awaking was to put his hand to his brow, and his first words were, —

“What is it at all, and where am I? Have I been in any trouble?”

“Trouble, Rory?” said Allan, pressing his hand. “Well, you and Ralph went tumbling over a cliff.”

“Only fifty feet of a fall, Rory,” said Ralph.

Rory sat bolt upright now, and opened his eyes in astonishment.

“Och! now I remember,” he said, “that we had a bit of a fall – But fifty feet! do you tell me so? Indeed then it’s a wonder there is one single whole bone between the two of us. But where is my sketch-book?”

“Here you are,” said Allan.

“Oh!” said Rory, opening the book, “this is worse than all; the prettiest sketch ever I made in my life all spoiled with the snow.”

“Now, boys,” continued Rory, after a pause, “I grant you this is a very romantic situation – everything is romantic bar the smoke; but what are we waiting for? and is this your Castle of Arrandoon, my friend?”

“Not quite,” replied Allan, laughing. “We are waiting for you to recover, and – ”

“Well, sure enough,” cried Rory, “I have recovered.”

He jumped up as he spoke, kicked out his legs, and stretched out his arms.

“No; never a broken bone,” he said.

Now it had been arranged between Allan and McBain that Rory should ride in the cart, while they and Ralph should walk.

But Rory was aghast at such a proposal.

“What,” he cried; “is it a procession you’d make of me? Would you put me on straw in the bottom of a cart, like an old wife coming from a fair?”

“But,” persisted Allan, “you must be weak from the loss of blood.”

“Loss of blood,” laughed Rory, “don’t be chaffing a poor boy. If you’d seen the blood I lost at the last election, and all in the cause of peace and honour, too! No, indeed; I’ll walk.”

The storm was at its very worst when they once more emerged from the pine-wood, but every now and then they could see the light glimmering from one of the castle turrets, to guide them through the darkness. They sent the dogs on before to give notice of their approach; then Peter tuned up, and high above the roaring of the snow rose the scream of the great Highland bagpipe.

A few hours afterwards, the three friends had all but forgotten their perilous adventure among the snow, or remembered it only to make merry over it. It is needless to say that Allan’s mother and sister welcomed his friends, or that Ralph and Rory were charmed with the reception they received.

“Well,” said Rory, after the ladies had retired for the night, “I fully understand now what your poet Burns meant when he said —

“‘In heaven itself I’ll ask nae mair Than just a Highland welcome.’”

And now they gathered round the cosy hearth, on which great logs were blazing. McBain was relegated to an armchair in a corner, being the oldest Rory, who still felt the effects of his fall, reclined on a couch in front, with Ralph seated on one side and Allan on the other. Bran, the deer-hound, thought this too good a chance to be thrown away, so he got upon the sofa and lay with his great, honest head on Rory’s knees, while Kooran curled himself up on the hearthrug, and Oscar watched the door.

“Well,” said Ralph, “I call this delightful; and the idea of doing the Highlands in mid-winter is decidedly a new one, and that is saying a great deal.”

“Yes,” said Rory, laughing; “and a beautiful taste we’ve had of it to begin with. I fall over a cliff in the snow and Ralph comes tumbling after, just like Jack and Jill, and then we go to sleep like lambs, and waken with a taste of spirits in our mouths. Indeed yes, boys, it is romantic entirely.”

“Everything now-a-days,” said Ralph, with half a yawn, “is so hackneyed, as it were. You go up the Rhine – that is hackneyed. You go down the Mediterranean – that is hackneyed. You go here, there, and everywhere, and you find here, there, and everywhere hackneyed. And if you go into a drawing-room and begin to speak of where you’ve been and what you’ve done, you soon find that every other fellow has been to the same places, and done precisely the same things.”

“Sure, you’re right, Ralph,” said Rory; “and I do believe if you were to go to the moon and come back, some fellow would meet you on your return and lisp out, ‘Oh, been to the moon, have you! awfly funny old place the moon. Did you call on the Looneys when you were there? Jolly family the Looneys.’”

“There is a kind of metaphorical truth in what you say, Rory,” Ralph replied; “but I say, Allan, wouldn’t it be nice to go somewhere where no one – no white man – had ever been before, or do something never before accomplished?”

“It would indeed,” said Allan; “and I for one always looked upon Livingstone, and Stanley, and Gordon Cumming, and Cameron, and men like them, as the luckiest fellows in the world.”

“Now,” said Ralph, “I’m just nineteen. I’ve only two years more of what I call roving life, and if I don’t ride across some continent before I’m twenty-one, or embark at one end of some unknown river and come out into the sea at the other, I’ll never have a chance again.”

“Why, how is that?” said McBain.

“Well,” replied Ralph, “Sir Walter Leigh, my father, told me straight that we were as poor as Church mice, and that in order to retrieve our fortunes, as soon as I came of age I must marry my grandmother.”

“Marry your grandmother!” exclaimed McBain, half rising in his chair.

“Well, my cousin, then,” said Ralph, smiling; “she is five-and-forty, so it is all the same. But she has oceans of money, and my old father, bless him! is very, very good and kind. He doesn’t limit me in money now; though, of course, I don’t take advantage of all his generosity. ‘Go and travel, my boy,’ he said, ‘and enjoy yourself till you come of age. Just see all you can and thus have your fling. I know I can trust you.’”

“Have your fling?” cried Rory; “troth now that is exactly what my Irish tenants told me to do. ‘The sorra a morsel av rint have we got to give you,’ says they, ‘so go and have your fling, but ’deed and indeed, if we see you here again until times are mended, we’ll shoot ye as dead as a Ballyshannon rabbit.’”

“Well, young gentlemen,” said McBain, after a pause in the conversation, during which nothing was heard except the crackling of the blazing logs and the mournful moaning of the wind without, “you want to do something quite new. Well, I’ve got an idea.”

“Oh, do tell us what it is?” cried Ralph and Rory, both in one breath.

“No, no; not to-night,” said McBain, laughing; “besides, it wants working out a bit, so I’m off to bed to dream about it. Good night.”

“Depend upon it,” said Allan McGregor, as he parted with his friends at their chamber door, “that whatever it is, McBain’s idea is a good one, and he’ll tell us all about it to-morrow. You’ll see.”

Chapter Three

Life at the Old Castle – McBain Explains his “Idea” – Allan’s Dream

To say that our heroes, Ralph and Rory, were not a little impatient to know something about the scheme McBain was to propose for the purpose of giving them pleasure, would be equivalent to saying that they were not boys, or that they had men’s heads upon boys’ shoulders. So I willingly confess that it was the very first thing they thought about next morning, immediately after they had drawn up the blinds, to peep out and see what kind of a day it was going to be.

But this peeping out to ascertain the state of the weather was not so easily accomplished, as it would have been in the south of England. For fairy fingers seemed to have been at work during the night, and the panes were covered with a frost-work of ferns and leaves, more beautifully traced, more artistically finished, than the work of any human designer that ever lived. The whole seemed floured over with powdered snow. It was a pity, so thought Rory, to spoil the pattern on even one of the panes, but it had to be done, so by breathing on it for quite half a minute, a round, clear space was obtained; and gazing through this he could see that it was a glorious morning, that the clouds had all fled, that the sky was bluer than ever he had seen a sky before, that the wind was hushed, and the sun shining brightly over hills of dazzling white. The stems of the leafless trees looked like pillars of frosted silver, while their branches were more lovely by far than the coral that lies beneath the blue waves of the Indian Ocean.

“How different this is,” said Rory, “from anything we ever see in England! Ah! sure, it was a good idea our coming here in winter.”

“I wonder where McBain is this morning?” said Ralph.