A Princess of Thule

“It means – it means,” said Duncan, in still greater perplexity, and getting a little impatient, “it means —stac, tat iss a steep rock; Stac-nan-Balg – it means – well, sir, it is ower deep for ta English.”

The tone of mortification in which Duncan uttered these words warned Lavender that his philological studies might as well cease; and indeed Sheila and Ingram had by this time reached the banks of the White Water, and were waiting Duncan and his majestic rod.

It was much too bright and pleasant a morning for good fishing, but there was a fair ripple on the pools of the stream where ever and anon a salmon fresh run from the sea would leap into the air, showing a gleaming curve of silver to the sunlight. The splash of the big fish seemed an invitation, and Duncan was all anxiety to teach the stranger, who, as he fancied, knew nothing about throwing a fly. Ingram lay down on a rock some little distance back from the banks, and put his hands beneath his head and watched the operations going forward. But was it really Duncan who was to teach the stranger? It was Sheila who picked out flies for him. It was Sheila who held the rod while he put them on the line. It was Sheila who told where the bigger salmon usually lay – under the opposite bank of the broad and almost lake-like pool into which the small but rapid White Water came tumbling and foaming down its narrow channel of rocks and stones.

Then Sheila waited to see her pupil begin. He had evidently a little difficulty about the big double-handed rod, a somewhat more formidable engine of destruction than the supple little thing with which he had whipped the streams of Devonshire and Cornwall.

The first cast sent both flies and a lump of line tumbling on to the pool, and would have driven the boldest of salmon out of its wits. The second pretty nearly took a piece out of Ingram’s ear, and made him shift his quarters with rapidity. Duncan gave him up in despair. The third cast dropped both flies with the lightness of a feather in the running waters of the other side of the pool; and the next second there was a slight wave along the surface, a dexterous jerk with the butt, and presently the line was whirled out into the middle of the pool, running rapidly off the reel from the straining rod.

“Plenty o’ line, sir, plenty o’ line!” shouted Duncan, in a wild fever of anxiety, for the fish had plunged suddenly.

Ingram had come running down to the bank. Sheila was all excitement and interest as she stood and watched every slackening or tightening of the line as the fish went up the pool and down the pool, and crossed the current in his efforts to escape. The only self-possessed person, indeed, was Lavender himself, who presently said, “Miss Mackenzie, won’t you take the rod now and have the honor of landing him? I don’t think he will show much more fight.”

At this moment, however, the line slackened suddenly, and the fish threw himself clean out of the water, turning a complete somersault. It was a dangerous moment, but the captive was well hooked, and in his next plunge Lavender was admonished by Duncan to keep a good strain on him.

“I will take the second one,” Sheila promised, “if you like; but you must surely land your first salmon yourself.”

I suppose nobody but a fisherman can understand the generosity of the offer made by the young man. To have hooked your first salmon – to have its first wild rushes and plunges safely over – and to offer to another the delight of bringing him victoriously to bank! But Sheila knew. And what could have surpassed the cleverness with which he had hooked the fish, and the coolness and courage he showed throughout the playing of him, except this more than royal offer on the part of the young hero?

The fish was losing strength. All the line had been got in, although the forefinger of the fisherman felt the pulse of his captive, as it were, ready for any expiring plunge. They caught occasional glimpses of a large white body gliding through the ruddy-brown water. Duncan was down on his knees more than once, with the landing-net in his hand, but again and again the big fish would sheer off, with just such indications of power as to make his conqueror cautious. At length he was guided slowly in to the bank. Behind him the landing-net was gently let into the water – then a quick forward movement, and a fourteen pounder was scooped up and flung upon the bank, landing-net and all. “Hurrah!” cried Ingram, and Lavender blushed like a school-girl; and Sheila, quite naturally and without thinking, shook hands with him and said, “I congratulate you;” and there was more congratulation in her glad eyes than in that simple little gesture.

It was a good beginning, and of course the young man was very much pleased to show Sheila that he was no mere lily-fingered idler about town. He buckled to his work in earnest. With a few more casts he soon got into the way of managing the big rod; and every time the flies fell lightly on the other side of the pool, to be dragged with gentle jerks across the foaming current of the stream. Ingram went back to his couch on the rock. He lay and watched the monotonous flinging back of the long rod, the light whistle of the line through the air, and the careful manipulation of the flies through the water. Or was it something else that he was watching – something that awakened in his mind a sudden sense of surprise and fear, and a new and strange consciousness that he had been guiltily remiss?

Sheila was wholly pre-occupied with her companion and his efforts. He had had one or two rises, but had struck either too soon or too late, until at last there was a terrific plunge and rush, and again the line was whirled out. But Duncan did not like the look of it somehow. The fish had been sheering off when it was hooked, and the deep plunge at the outset was ugly.

“Now will you take the rod?” said Lavender to Sheila.

But before she could answer the fish had come rushing up to the surface, and had thrown itself out of the water, so that it fell on the opposite bank. It was a splendid animal, and Duncan, despite his doubts, called out to Lavender to slacken his hold. There was another spring into the air, the fish fell with a splash into the water, and the line was flying helplessly into the air with the two flies floating about.

“Ay,” said Duncan, with a sigh, “it wass foul-hooked. It wass no chance of catching him whatever.”

Lavender was most successful next time, however, with a pretty little grilse of about half a dozen pounds, that seemed to have in him the spirit and fight of a dozen salmon. How he rushed and struggled, how he plunged and sulked, how he burrowed along the banks, and then ran out to the middle of the pool, and then threw himself into the air, with the line apparently, but not really, doubling up under him. All these things can only be understood by the fisherman who has played in a Highland stream a wild and powerful little grilse fresh in from the salt water. And it was Sheila who held him captive, who humored him when he sulked, and gently guided him away from dangerous places, and kept him well in hand when he tried to cross the current, until at last, all the fierceness gone out of him, he let himself be tenderly inveigled into the side of the pool, where Duncan, by a dexterous movement, surrounded him with network and placed his shining body among the bright green grass.

But Ingram was not so overjoyed this time. He complimented Sheila in a friendly way, but he was rather grave, and obviously did not care for this business of fishing. And so Sheila, fancying that he was rather dull because he was not joining in the sport, proposed that he should walk back to the house with her, leaving Mr. Lavender with Duncan. And Ingram was quite ready to do so.

But Lavender protested that he cared very little for salmon-fishing. He suggested that they should all go back together. The sun was killing the wind, and soon the pools would be as clear as glass. Had they not better try in the afternoon, when, perhaps, the breeze would freshen? And so they walked back to the house.

On the garden-seat a book lay open. It was Mr. Mill’s “Essay on Liberty,” and it had evidently been left there by Mr. Mackenzie, perhaps – who knows? – to hint to his friends from the South that he was familiar with the problems of the age. Lavender winked to Ingram, but somehow his companion seemed in no humor for a joke.

They had luncheon then, and after luncheon Ingram touched Lavender on the shoulder, and said, “I want to have a word with you privately. Let’s walk down to the shore.”

And so they did; and when they had got some little distance from the house, Ingram said: “Look here, Lavender. I mean to be frank with you. I don’t think it fair that you should try to drag Sheila Mackenzie into a flirtation. I knew you would fall in love with her. For a week or two, that does not matter – it harms no one. But I never thought of the chance of her being led into such a thing, for what is a mere passing amusement to you would be a very serious thing to her.”

“Well?”

“Well? Is not that enough? Do you think it fair to take advantage of this girl’s innocence of the world?”

Lavender stopped in the middle of the path, and said, somewhat stiffly, “This may be as well settled at once. You have talked of flirtation and all that sort of thing. You may regard it as you please, but before I leave this island I mean to ask Sheila Mackenzie to be my wife.”

“Why, you are mad!” cried Ingram, amazed to see that the young man was perfectly serious.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you mean to say,” continued Ingram, “that even supposing Sheila would consent – which is impossible – you would try to take away that girl from her father?”

“Girls must leave their fathers sometime or other,” said Lavender, somewhat sullenly.

“Not unless they are asked.”

“Oh, well, they are sure to be asked, and they are sure to go. If their mothers had not done so before them, where would they be? It’s all very well for you to talk about it, and argue it out as a theory, but I know what the facts of the case are, and what any man in my position would do; and I know that I am careless of any consequences, so long as I can secure her for my wife.”

“Apparently you are – careless of any consequences to herself or those about her.”

“But what is your objection, Ingram?” said the young man, suddenly abandoning his defiant manner; “why should you object? Do you think I would make a bad husband to the woman I married?”

“I believe nothing of the sort. I believe you would make a very good husband, if you were to marry a woman whom you know something about, and whom you had really learned to love and respect through your knowledge of her. I tell you, you know nothing about Sheila Mackenzie as yet. If you were to marry her to-morrow, you would discover in six months she was a woman wholly different from what you had expected.”

“Very well, then,” said Lavender, with an air of triumph; “you can’t deny this; you think so much of her that the real woman I would discover must be better than the one I imagine; and so you don’t expect I shall be disappointed?”

“If you marry Sheila Mackenzie you will be disappointed – not through her fault, but your own. Why, a more preposterous notion never entered a man’s head! She knows nothing of your friends or your ways of life; you know nothing of hers. She would be miserable in London, even if you could persuade her father to go with her, which is the most unlikely thing in the world. Do give up this foolish idea, like a good fellow, and do it before Sheila is dragged into a flirtation that may have the most serious consequences to her.”

Lavender would not promise, but all that afternoon various resolutions and emotions were struggling within him for mastery, insomuch that Duncan could not understand the blundering way in which he whipped the pools. Mackenzie, Sheila and Ingram had gone off to pay a visit to an old crone who lived in a neighboring island, and in whom Ingram had been much interested a few years before; so that Lavender had an opportunity of practicing the art of salmon-fishing without interruptions. But all the skill he had shown in the morning seemed to have deserted him; and at last he gave the rod to Duncan, and sitting down on a top-coat flung on the wet heather, indolently watched the gillie’s operations.

Should he at once fly from temptation and return to London? Would it not be heroic to leave this old man in possession of his only daughter? Sheila would never know of the sacrifice, but what of that? It might be for her happiness that he should go.

But when a young man is in love, or fancies himself in love, with a young girl, it is hard for him to persuade himself that anybody else can make her as happy as he might. Who could be so tender to her, so watchful over her, as himself? He does not reflect that her parents have had the experience of years in taking care of her, while he would be a mere novice at the business. The pleasure with which he regards the prospect of being constantly with her he transfers to her, and she seems to demand it of him as a duty that he should confer upon her this new happiness.

Lavender met Sheila in the evening, and he was yet undecided. Sometimes he fancied, when their eyes met unexpectedly, that there was something wistful as well as friendly in her look; was she, too, dreaming of the vague possibilities of the future? This was strange, too, that after each of these little chance reveries she seemed to be moved by a resolution to be more than usually affectionate toward her father, and would go around the table and place her hand on his shoulder and talk to him. Perhaps these things were but delusions begotten of his own imaginings, but the possibility of their being real agitated him not a little, and he scarcely dared to think what might follow.

That evening Sheila sang, and all his half-formed resolutions vanished into air. He sat in a corner of the curious, dimly-lit and old-fashioned chamber, and, lying back in the chair, abandoned himself to dreams as Sheila sang the mystic songs of the Northern coast. There was something strangely suggestive of the sea in the room itself, and all her songs were of the sea. It was a smaller room than the large apartment in which they had dined, and it was filled with curiosities from distant shores, and with the strange captures made by the Borva fishermen. Everywhere, too, were the trophies of Mackenzie’s skill with rod and rifle. Deer’s horns, seal skins, stuffed birds, salmon in glass cases, masses of coral, enormous shells, and a thousand similar things made the little drawing-room a sort of grotto; but it was a grotto within hearing of the sound of the sea, and there was no musty atmosphere in a room that was open all day to the cold winds of the Atlantic.

With a smoking tumbler of whisky and water before him, the King of Borva sat at the table, poring over a large volume containing plans for bridges. Ingram was seated at the piano in continual consultation with Sheila about her songs. Lavender, in the dusky corner, lay and listened, with all sorts of fancies crowding in upon him as Sheila sang of the sad and wild legends of her home. Was it by chance, then, he asked himself, that these songs seemed so frequently to be the lamentation of a Highland girl for a fair-haired lover beyond the sea? First of all, she sang the “Wail of Dunevegan,” and how strangely her voice thrilled with the sadness of the song! —

Morn, oh mantle thy smiles of gladness!
Night, oh come with thy clouds of sadness!
Earth, thy pleasures to me seem madness!
Macleod, my leal love, since thou art gone.
Dunevegan, oh! Dunevegan, oh!
Dunevegan! Dunevegan!

It was as in a dream that he heard Ingram talking in a matter-of-fact way about the airs, and asking the meaning of certain lines of Gaelic to compare them with the stiff and old-fashioned phrases of the translation. Surely this girl must have sat by the shore and waited for her absent lover, or how could she sing with such feeling? —

Say, my love, why didst thou tarry
Far over the deep sea?
Knew’st thou not my heart was weary,
Heard’st thou not how I sighed for thee?
Did no light wind bear my wild despair
Far over the deep sea?