Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 31, October, 1873

"Oh, Mr. Ingram, won't you go and see my papa?"

The cry that suddenly reached him was like the cry of a broken heart. He started as from a trance, and found Sheila regarding him with a piteous appeal in her face: she had been listening intently to all he had said.

"Oh yes, Sheila," he said kindly, and quite forgetting that he was speaking to her before strangers: "of course I must go and see your papa if we are any way near the Lewis. Perhaps you may be there then?"

"No," said Sheila, looking down.

"Won't you go to the Highlands this autumn?" Mrs. Lorraine asked in a friendly way.

"No," said Sheila in a measured voice as she looked her enemy fair in the face: "I think we are going to the Tyrol."

If the child had only known what occurred to Mrs. Lorraine's mind at this moment! Not a triumphant sense of Lavender's infatuation, as Sheila probably fancied, but a very definite resolution that if Frank Lavender went to the Tyrol, it was not with either her or her mother he should go.

"Mrs. Lavender's father is an old friend of mine," said Ingram, loud enough for all to hear; "and, hospitable as all Highlanders are, I have never met his equal in that way, and I have tried his patience a good many times. What do you think, Mrs. Lorraine, of a man who would give up his best gun to you, even though you couldn't shoot a bit, and he particularly proud of his shooting? And so if you lived with him for a month or six months—each day the best of everything for you, the second best for your friend, the worst for himself. Wasn't it so, Lavender?"

It was a direct challenge sent across the table, and Sheila's heart beat quick lest her husband should say something ungracious.

"Yes, certainly," said Lavender with a readiness that pleased Sheila. "I, at least, have no right to complain of his hospitality."

"Your papa is a very handsome man," said Mrs. Lorraine to Sheila, bringing the conversation back to their own end of the table. "I have seen few finer heads than that drawing you have. Mr. Lavender did that, did he not? Why has he never done one of you?"

"He is too busy, I think, just now," Sheila said, perhaps not knowing that from Mrs. Lorraine's waist-belt at that moment depended a fan which might have given evidence as to the extreme scarcity of time under which Lavender was supposed to labor.

"He has a splendid head," said Ingram. "Did you know that he is called the King of Borva up there?"

"I have heard of him being called the King of Thule," said Mrs. Lorraine, turning with a smile to Sheila, "and of his daughter being styled a princess. Do you know the ballad of the King of Thule in Faust, Mrs. Lavender?'"

"In the opera?—yes," said Sheila.

"Will you sing it for us after dinner?"

"If you like."

The promise was fulfilled, in a fashion. The notion that Mr. Ingram was about to go away up to Lewis, to the people who knew her and to her father's house, with no possible answer to the questions which would certainly be showered upon him as to why she had not come also, troubled Sheila deeply. The ladies went into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Lorraine got out the song. Sheila sat down to the piano, thinking far more of that small stone house at Borva than of the King of Thule's castle overlooking the sea; and yet somehow the first lines of the song, though she knew them well enough, sent a pang to her heart as she glanced at them. She touched the first notes of the accompaniment, and she looked at the words again:

Over the sea, in Thule of old,
Reigned a king who was true-hearted,
Who, in remembrance of one departed—

A mist came over her eyes. Was she the one who had departed, leaving the old king in his desolate house by the sea, where he could only think of her as he sat in his solitary chamber, with the night-winds howling round the shore outside? When her birthday had come round she knew that he must have silently drank to her, though not out of a beaker of gold. And now, when mere friends and acquaintances were free to speed away to the North, and get a welcome from the folks in Borva, and listen to the Atlantic waves dashing lightly in among the rocks, her hope of getting thither had almost died out. Among such people as landed on Stornoway quay from the big Clansman her father would seek one face, and seek it in vain. And Duncan and Scarlett, and even John the Piper—all the well-remembered folks who lived far away across the Minch—they would ask why Miss Sheila was never coming back.

Mrs. Lorraine had been standing aside from the piano. Noticing that Sheila had played the introduction to the song twice over in an undetermined manner, she came forward a step or two and pretended to be looking at the music. Tears were running down Sheila's face. Mrs. Lorraine put her hand on the girl's shoulder, and sheltered her from observation, and said aloud, "You have it in a different key, have you not? Pray don't sing it. Sing something else. Do you know any of Gounod's sacred songs? Let me see if we can find anything for you in this volume."

They were a long time finding anything in that volume. When they did find it, behold! it was one of Mrs. Lorraine's songs, and that young lady said if Mrs. Lavender would only allow herself to be superseded for a few minutes—And so Sheila walked, with her head down, to the conservatory, which was at the other end of the piano; and Mrs. Lorraine not only sung this French song, but sang every one of the verses; and at the end of it she had quite forgotten that Sheila had promised to sing.

"You are very sensitive," she said to Sheila, coming into the conservatory.

"I am very stupid," Sheila said with her face burning. "But it is a long time since I will see the Highlands—and Mr. Ingram was talking of the places I know—and—and so—"

"I understand well enough," said Mrs. Lorraine tenderly, as if Sheila were a mere child in her hands. "But you must not get your eyes red. You have to sing some of those Highland songs for us yet, when the gentlemen come in. Come up to my room and I will make your eyes all right. Oh, do not be afraid! I shall not bring you down like Lady Leveret. Did you ever see anything like that woman's face to-night? It reminds me of the window of an oil-and-color shop. I wonder she does not catch flies with her cheeks."

So all the people, Sheila learned that night, were going away from London, and soon she and her husband would join in the general stampede of the very last dwellers in town. But Mairi? What was to become of her after that little plot had been played out? Sheila could not leave Mairi to see London by herself: she had been enjoying beforehand the delight of taking the young girl about and watching the wonder of her eyes. Nor could she fairly postpone Mairi's visit, and Mairi was coming up in another couple of days.

On the morning on which the visitor from the far Hebrides was to make her appearance in London, Sheila felt conscious of a great hypocrisy in bidding good-bye to her husband. On some excuse or other she had had breakfast ordered early, and he found himself ready at half-past nine to go out for the day.

"Frank," she said, "will you come in to lunch at two?"

"Why?" he asked: he did not often have luncheon at home.

"I will go into the Park with you in the afternoon if you like," she said: all the scene had been diligently rehearsed on one side, before.

Lavender was a little surprised, but he was in an amiable mood.

"All right!" he said. "Have something with olives in it. Two, sharp."

With that he went out, and Sheila, with a wild commotion at her heart, saw him walk away through the square. She was afraid Mairi might have arrived before he left. And, indeed, he had not gone above a few minutes when a four-wheeler drove up, and an elderly man got out and waited for the timid-faced girl inside to alight. With a rush like that of a startled deer, Sheila was down the stairs, along the hall and on the pavement; and it was, "Oh, Mairi! and have you come at last? And are you very well? And how are all the people in Borva? And Mr. M'Alpine, how are you? and will you come into the house?"

Certainly, that was a strange sight for a decorous London square—the mistress of a house, a young girl with bare head, coming out on the pavement to shake hands in a frantic fashion with a young maid-servant and an elderly man whose clothes had been pretty well tanned by sunlight and sea-water! And Sheila would herself help to carry Mairi's luggage in. And she would take no denial from Mr. M'Alpine, whose luggage was also carried in. And she would herself pay the cabman, as strangers did not know about these things, Sheila's knowledge being exhibited by her hastily giving the man five shillings for driving from Euston Station. And there was breakfast waiting for them both as soon as Mairi could get her face washed; and would Mr. M'Alpine have a glass of whisky after the night's traveling?—and it was very good whisky whatever, as it had come all the way from Stornoway. Mr. M'Alpine was nothing loath.

"And wass you pretty well, Miss Sheila?" said Mairi, looking timidly and hastily up, and forgetting altogether that Sheila had another name now. "It will be a great thing for me to go back to sa Lewis, and tell them I wass seeing you, and you wass looking so well. And I will be thinking I wass neffer coming to any one I knew any more; and it is a great fright I hef had since we came away from sa Lewis; and I wass thinking we would neffer find you among all sa people and so far away across sa sea and sa land. Eh—!" The girl stopped in astonishment. Her eyes had wandered up to a portrait on the walls; and here, in this very room, after she had traveled over all this great distance, apparently leaving behind her everything but the memory of her home, was Mr. Mackenzie himself, looking at her from under his shaggy eyebrows.

"You must have seen that picture in Borva, Mairi," Sheila said. "Now come with me, like a good girl, and get yourself ready for breakfast. Do you know, Mairi, it does my heart good to hear you talk again? I don't think I shall be able to let you go back to the Lewis."

"But you hef changed ferry much in your way of speaking, Miss—Mrs. Lavender," said Mairi with an effort. "You will speak just like sa English now."

"The English don't say so," replied Sheila with a smile, leading the way up stairs.

Mr. M'Alpine had his business to attend to, but, being a sensible man, he took advantage of the profuse breakfast placed before him. Mairi was a little too frightened and nervous and happy to eat much, but Mr. M'Alpine was an old traveler, not to be put out by the mere meeting of two girls. He listened in a grave and complacent manner to the rapid questions and answers of Mairi and her hostess, but he himself was too busy to join in the conversation much. At the end of breakfast he accepted, after a little pressing, half a glass of whisky; and then, much comforted and in a thoroughly good-humor with himself and the world, got his luggage out again and went on his way toward a certain inn in High Holborn.

"Ay, and where does the queen live, Miss Sheila?" said Mairi. She had been looking at the furniture in Sheila's house, and wondering if the queen lived in a place still more beautiful than this.

"A long way from here."

"And it iss no wonder," said Mairi, "she will neffer hef been in sa Lewis. I wass neffer thinking the world wass so big, and it wass many a time since me and Mr. M'Alpine hef come away from Styornoway I wass thinking it wass too far for me effer to get back again. But it is many a one will say to me, before I hef left the Lewis, that I wass not to come home unless you wass coming too, and I wass to bring you back with me, Miss Sheila. And where is Bras, Miss Sheila?"

"You will see him by and by. He is out in the garden now." She said "gyarden" without knowing it.

"And will he understood the Gaelic yet?"

"Oh yes," Sheila said. "And he is sure to remember you."

There was no mistake about that. When Mairi went into the back garden the demonstrations of delight on the part of the great deerhound were as pronounced as his dignity and gravity would allow. And Mairi fairly fell upon his neck and kissed him, and addressed to him a hundred endearing phrases in Gaelic, every word of which it was quite obvious that the dog understood. London was already beginning to be less terrible to her. She had met and talked with Sheila. Here was Bras. A portrait of the King of Borva was hung up inside, and all round the rooms were articles which she had known in the North, before Sheila had married and brought them away into this strange land.

"You have never asked after my husband, Mairi," said Sheila, thinking she would confuse the girl.

But Mairi was not confused. Probably she had been fancying that Mr. Lavender was down at the shore, or had gone out fishing, or something of that sort, and would return soon enough. It was Sheila, not he, whom she was concerned about. Indeed, Mairi had caught up a little of that jealousy of Lavender which was rife among the Borva folks. They would speak no ill of Mr. Lavender. The young gentleman whom Miss Sheila had chosen had by that very fact a claim upon their respect. Mr. Mackenzie's son-in-law was a person of importance. And yet in their secret hearts they bore a grudge against him. What right had he to come away up to the North and carry off the very pride of the island? Were English girls not good enough for him, that he must needs come up and take away Sheila Mackenzie, and keep her there in the South so that her friends and acquaintances saw no more of her? Before the marriage Mairi had a great liking and admiration for Mr. Lavender. She was so pleased to see Miss Sheila pleased that she approved of the young man, and thanked him in her heart for making her cousin and mistress so obviously happy. Perhaps, indeed, Mairi managed to fall in love with him a little bit herself, merely by force of example and through sympathy with Sheila; and she was rapidly forming very good opinions of the English race and their ways and their looks. But when Lavender took away Sheila from Borva a change came over Mairi's sentiments. She gradually fell in with the current opinions of the island—that it was a great pity Sheila had not married young Mr. Maclntyre of Sutherland, or some one who would have allowed her to remain among her own people. Mairi began to think that the English, though they were handsome and good-natured and free with their money, were on the whole a selfish race, inconsiderate and forgetful of promises. She began to dislike the English, and wished they would stay in their own country, and not interfere with other people.

"I hope he is very well," said Mairi dutifully: she could at least say that honestly.