Part 22 (1/2)
We started early, long before eight, and Mrs. James remarked, while we were dressing--calling out from her room to mine through the open door--that there was more credit for Sir S. than for us in liking an early start. Many men as successful and flattered and rich as he, she said, would have grown luxurious in their tastes, and lazy. They would loathe getting up at six, and staying in tiny hotels, and fussing about to help their chauffeurs when anything went wrong with their cars. They would hate so much having to pack bags and look after themselves that they would find it impossible to enjoy travelling without a valet; but here was this man, used to every luxury, and able to command it, putting himself to trouble of all sorts and even enduring hards.h.i.+ps as cheerfully as a ”little bank clerk out for a holiday with his sister and aunt.”
I agreed with her, and I suppose bank clerks are as interesting a cla.s.s as any; but I'm glad Sir S. is not one. And it is more fun being his princess than his sister. Mrs. James may be his aunt if she likes. I wouldn't be it for all his millions.
He asked her again if she would like to try the front seat, but she politely refused, and then, with his rough-coat, turned-up-collar-air, he invited me to take it. Something deep down in me, like a little live creature whispering, told me to make him turn down that collar and throw off that rough coat. It did seem such a _waste_, to have him wearing his commonplace airs while we travelled through the most adorable country we had seen yet. I wanted him and me and the scenery all to be romantic together, and so I told him at last. ”But if I'm determined to keep on the safe side of romance?” he said.
”If you've decided to be dull and disagreeable,” I threatened, ”I shan't give you the 'rainbow key' when I find it. I'll hand it over to somebody else.”
”Will you?” he said. ”Be sure the somebody else deserves it, then.”
This annoyed me. Because I'm looking for the rainbow key for _him_, not somebody else. ”At present I don't happen to know anybody else I'd care to give it to,” I remarked.
”Ay,” said he, ”there's the rub. You know so few. But it will be different when the princess has a dozen knights all in the compet.i.tion.”
”Perhaps other knights won't notice that I'm a princess.”
”Judging from what I've observed, I think they'll be quick to notice that.”
”Well, it remains to be seen.”
”Just so. It remains to be seen.” His voice sounded sad or bored, so I tried to be tactful for once, like Mrs. West, and changed the subject.
This was the road which Carlyle thought the most beautiful in the kingdom. Going to Mainsriddle and Dalbeattie we skimmed through dark, haunted-looking woods, to sudden glimpses of far-down yellow sands and floating forms of mountains. The tide was running out or running in, veining the floor of gold with misty blue traceries, and making bright pools like bits of broken gla.s.s. The trees along our way were a procession of benevolent giants holding green umbrellas over our heads, because they mistook us for expected royalties; and on the smooth white surface of the road they had scattered shadows like torn black Spanish lace. Criffel followed us everywhere, trying jealously to keep us from noticing that the n.o.ble mountains of c.u.mberland were still watching us out of sight, across the Solway Firth. And indeed, Criffel, with some small brother hills he had to-day collected, like the hasty gathering of a clan, did manage to destroy the effect of distance so far as he and his brethren were concerned. He and all the rest, no matter how far off, pushed themselves into the foreground by means of their colour, so violent a purple that it struck at the eyes, and vibrated in the ears like rich wild notes of an organ rolling over the uplands of Scotland.
Only the sands and the sea looked distant, though really they were near; and I worried about the groups of cattle gossiping so pleasantly together about their cuds and calves. They had a placid air of ignoring such large facts of life as incoming tides, and could never have read what happened to Mary and her cows on the sands of Dee, a resort only less fas.h.i.+onable in the cattle world than their own.
Lights on sky and sands, seen through the netting of tree branches, were like sweet bursts of laughter in the forests; and the glory of the heather was a wordless song in praise of Scotland. Yet in these flying Galloway landscapes there was an impression of the mystic and melancholy, which reminded Sir S. of ”The Twilight of the G.o.ds”: strange purple rocks jutting out into water coldly bright as a sheet of mercury, and desolate islands remote and haunted as the place where Gunter and his sister lived in the opera. We seemed to be travelling through vast, lonely places, though it was but a part of Galloway, and all Scotland is but small--just large enough to give an eyeful of beauty always.
When we came to the sparkling granite town of Dalbeattie (a miniature Aberdeen, Sir S. called it) instead of going straight on toward Kirkcudbright we turned westward to see the great stronghold of the Black Douglases. It was no more than seven easy miles to Castle Douglas, a little modern town all laid out in rectangles. Sailing straight through, we came out on the edge of Carlingwark Loch, which rings a few green islets with silver; and taking a side road we were close to the river Dee. There, on a cus.h.i.+on of an island, only big enough to hold it, rose the great ruin of Thrieve Castle, the home of the proud and magnificent Douglases. Once boats must have carried the knights and ladies back and forth between the mainland and the fourteenth-century fastness of old Archibald the Grim. But now I saw a line of half-submerged stepping-stones, the only way of crossing in these days when there is no fighting or feasting at Thrieve, and no ”ta.s.sel”
dangling from the k.n.o.blike ”hanging stone” over the great gate.
”Workers of high-handed outrage!
Making King and people grieve, O the lawless Lords of Galloway!
O the b.l.o.o.d.y towers of Thrieve!”
Sir S. quoted as we stared up at the giant keep, seventy feet high, with its tremendous walls. ”They were a terrible power in the land, that family, at their greatest, when they lorded it over Galloway and Annandale, and owned Touraine and Longueville in France, and used to ride out with a retinue of a thousand picked hors.e.m.e.n.”
”That nice soldier yesterday--Mr. Douglas at Carlisle--thinks they were a _charming_ family,” said I. ”He has an old proverb something like this:
”So many, so good as of Douglases have been Of one surname in Scotland never yet was seen.”
and he told me a great deal about the Douglas Heart.”
”He would!” mumbled Sir S. ”There were good hearts and bad hearts among them, but all were great hearts in the old days; anyhow, I'm not surprised that Crockett got inspiration from this place when he used to play here, coming over from Castle Douglas, where he was at school. He must have had his head buzzing with story plots when he'd climbed up inside the walls and crawled out to sit astride of the hanging stone.
I'll warrant he saw Maclellan beheaded in the courtyard while Sir Patrick Gray, the King's messenger, supped with Douglas; and heard Mons Meg fire off the first granite cannon-ball, that shot away the hand of the Countess as she held a wine-gla.s.s up, drinking confusion to her enemies. No wonder little boy Crockett got absent-minded one day, when he dropped his watch instead of a pebble in wanting to test the time the stone would take to fall.”
The next bit of Crockett-lore I heard was at Auchencairn in the deep, indented bay we'd reached by turning south for the coast again. There, it seemed, we were in the heart of Crockettland, for Hestan Island is the Rathan Island of the ”Raiders.” All round was sweet, welcoming country, low mountains and rippling meadows, where it seemed that the Douglas soldiers had laid their glittering helmets down in long straight ranks on a carpet of cloth o' gold. Over these fields of garnered wheat came a breeze from the sea, with a tang of salt like a tonic mixture, and there was a murmurous sound on the air, a message from the tide.
There were hundreds of historic things to see, in every direction, if we had had time for all: traces of the Attecott Picts; Pict forts and tombs, castles of the Middle Ages; robber caves; Convenanters'
monuments; and at Balcarry, near Auchencairn, the landing-place of the smuggler Yawkins, who was Scott's ”Dirk Hatteraick.” But we had only five days for everything before the Great Day--which will be coming so soon now. From Auchencairn we turned inland to a rolling country where the Gray Dragon would be down one hill and halfway up another before he knew what had happened. At Dundrennan--”Hill of the Thorn Bushes”--he had his first mishap; but after the surprise of thinking a bomb had exploded, I was glad he'd seized just that opportunity of bursting a tire, because it gave us more time for the Abbey than we should have given ourselves.