Part 38 (1/2)
Afterward, he was afraid that he had offended me; but I hadn't cared at all. However, he has been kinder than ever since, as if to make up. Walking about in the Cathedral next day, we met a delightful man, actually the _Head of a Clan_, who had been in Canada and had known Basil there. He invited us to visit at his place near Aboyne, on Deeside--just think, not far from where Macbeth was killed!--and of course that enchanted Mrs. Vanneck, who has an insatiable yearning to see the inside of Scottish houses.
His is a beautiful house. I must tell you about it. Maybe you remember the road from Aberdeen to Aboyne, through lovely forests and mountains, and how by and by you come to Deeside, and the Grampians. The Chieftain we went to visit owns a whole mountain, and many miles of land besides; and when you arrive at his estate there are no gates to drive into. You wind on and on, along an exquisite avenue through the woods, and you would not know you were on any one's property if you hadn't been told beforehand, though it is all beautifully kept--not too smart and trim, but just right to be picturesque and romantic. There's no impression of 'This is mine, not yours. _You_ are here only on sufferance!' Instead, the trees and hills and heather seem to say gently, 'This is a part of the world where our master lives, because it is lovely and he loves it. He makes you welcome to come and go as you will, whoever you are, as if it were your own.' Don't you think that is a charming impression? And afterward we found out that the doors of this Chieftain's house are never locked. Mostly in the summer they stand wide open all night, although he has beautiful old silver, and quant.i.ties of valuable pictures and things which have been in his family more or less ever since there was a Scotland. It is a dear old sixteenth-century house, with networks of black oak beams, and lots of quaint bow-windows that look out on lovely lawns and flower-gardens, and box or holly hedges, and yew trees cut in fantastic shapes.
We stayed one whole day and two nights. Wasn't it good of him to have us? In all the corridors there are carpets and curtains of the Chieftain's hunting tartan. I loved it. I do hope you have dogs'
heads and antlers, and tartan curtains and carpets and things at your castle at Dhrum? It is yours, you know! I wonder if I shall ever see it?
I can't tell you how excited I was when the Chieftain and several other Highland men he had staying in his house-party wore the kilt to dinner. All their knees were baked to exactly the right brown; but he was the smartest of the men (though some were very young and handsome), because he, being the head of the Clan, had a green velvet coat. Poor Basil and Mr. Vanneck in their ordinary evening things looked like _nothing at all_. I was quite sorry for them, but so glad I hadn't to sit by one at the table, as I wanted only to talk to the kilted men. I wore that white frock you chose for me--do you remember?--and a sash of the MacDonald of Dhrum dress tartan, which I found in Aberdeen. All during dinner the pipers piped, and I was so thrilled I could scarcely eat. Afterward there was an impromptu dance in a bare, tartan-draped room, where it seemed that Macbeth could quite well have been entertained. I thought I should have to look on, of course, as I've never learned to dance; but that dear Chieftain taught me the 'Petronella,' which is very pretty and easy to pick up. It seems as if one could not help dancing to the music of the pipes; don't you find it so? Queen Mary is supposed to have introduced the Petronella to Scotland, the tallest man with the brownest knees told me; and Francis I brought it from Spain to France. It is quite a Spanish sort of dance, though Scotland has adopted it. I learned a lovely Highland schottische, too; and after I had seen others dancing the reels (ought I to say foursomes or eightsomes?) I tried those too, and got on well, everybody said. But the reel is a dance you can dance _only_ with your own hair. Mine, which I had pinned up very neatly, came down. And one of the girls had a curl come _off_. Luckily she didn't seem to care. She said that accidents would happen on the best regulated heads.
I do so wonder, by the way, what a Highlander would do if he happened to be born with legs so crooked that he couldn't wear the kilt? I suppose he would have to emigrate when very young, or else stop in bed all his life.
In the morning a dignified piper named Donal played us awake, walking round and round the house. It delayed my dressing dreadfully, pausing to gaze him out of sight every time he pa.s.sed under my window. I could have cried when he stopped; but he played more while we had breakfast. I sat next to an Englishman, and would you believe it, the loveliest lament got on his horrid nerves, and he said in a low voice, 'Shall I be able to _live_ through it?' If I had been engaged to him I should have broken it off at once.
The Chieftain has a friend who is a Princess--not a little 'pretend' princess like me, but a real one with a capital 'P'--and he introduced us to her at a big garden party he was having at his place on our day there. 'They are going on to Braemar to-morrow,'
he said; and she being as kind and hospitable as he, promptly invited us to lunch with her at Braemar Castle. Mrs. Vanneck was pale with joy!
We left from the Chieftain's early in the morning, and Donal played us away, on the best run Blunderbore has given us yet, through what I am sure is true Highland scenery. There are castles dotted about everywhere; and I saw my first Highland cattle--adorable little s.h.a.ggy beasts with forelocks like sporans, and innocent short faces. Their eyes were so wide apart it seemed that they might be able to see round all the corners. A cherubic bull tried to charge Blunderbore, but changed his mind at the last moment owing to the persuasions of his female friends. The rough, dark brown forms somehow emphasized the beauty of the wild background, the hills painted golden and purple with bracken and heather, the mountains (for there seem always to be mountains in the distance in Scotland) looking exactly the colour of violets against the hyacinth blue of the sky. All sorts of Highland things got in our way, counting deer; and I made up rules for creatures which it would be very useful if they could be taught to obey.
'Bulls kindly requested not to charge motor-cars. No sitting down or cud-chewing allowed in the middle of roads. Deer will please, when darting across, start at least six yards ahead of motors.
Chickens will keep to their own side of the road when they have chosen it three times. Rabbits not to run directly ahead of the car for more than three miles at a stretch.'
As we lumbered along with Blunderbore, each heather-dyed hill that rolled out of our way disclosed a new, or rather a very old, castle. I should think there must be as many castles in this part of the world as there are cottages. I know we saw more! except perhaps those sweet little dwellings grouped together in the charming villages of Ballater and Braemar. No wonder the King and Queen love this part of the world. Basil thought everything here quite foreign-looking: but there's always that French spirit in Scotland, isn't there? I'm sure the coffee is so good just because of that.
It was fun having luncheon at Braemar Castle, which has more turrets than you can count without knowing it well. Each room nearly has a turret, and some have two: and on the thick wooden shutters names of soldiers quartered in the Castle after Prince Charlie days are roughly carved. Of _course_ there's a dungeon, and a secret way to the far-off village and river: and when you enter you have to wind up and up a tower stairway with here and there a little deep-set iron-barred window to give you light. I wish you could see the Princess's Persian dog, Mirzan, of the oldest race of dogs in the world: yellow-white as old ivory, tall and thin and graceful as a blowing plume. He takes strange att.i.tudes like dogs in pictures by old masters; and you feel he can't be real. He must have stepped stealthily out from a dim tapestry hanging on one of the thick stone walls, and he will have to go back to his place beside the sleeping tapestry knight, as soon as he has finished running after the doves, who have left their dovecote and are balancing with their coral feet on the battlements, or walking in the courtyard. Seeing this castle of the Princess's makes me quite envy you having Dunelin. I should like to live in a castle. _Do_ buy Dunelin, as you said you sometimes thought of doing, and invite me to be a humble little member of one of your big house-parties.
Your deserted princess, BARRIE.
LETTER FROM BARRIE TO HER MOTHER
DEAREST BARBARA: Every prospect pleases and only man is vile. At least, I don't mean vile, but upsetting. It is too bad about Basil. I don't know what to do. I hope _you_ aren't hoping that I may fall in love with him? Something he said makes me think _he_ believes you want it. But why should you? You don't know him and his sister so very well. They aren't old friends. Darling, if I am a bother to you--and I know I am--I'll go far away and change my name and do anything you like, except marry Basil. It isn't that I'm too young. It seems to me if I loved a man desperately I should like to marry him while I was young, so as to give him all my years, and because I should grudge the days and weeks and months lived away from him. But Basil is just like a brother. He might hold my hand all day, and I shouldn't have a single thrill, which he says is the way for a girl to find out whether she's really in love.
Everything might be so pleasant, if it weren't for this silliness.
We have seen Elgin, which has the most exquisite ruined Cathedral that ever lived or died; and sweet Pluscarden Abbey not far off; and Forres, full of memories of Macbeth; and a mysterious carved shaft of sandstone called Sweno's Stone; and the hidden, secret glen of the Findhorn River, where we had to get out, and walk for miles through a gorge of the most entrancing beauty. Sometimes it was wild and grand, sometimes peaceful as a dream of fairyland.
Every kind of lovely tree grew there, out of sheer, rocky walls red as coral, or pale and glistening as gray satin; and you looked far down on water brown as the brown of dogs' eyes--deep pools, and a hundred rapids and tiny cataracts filling the glen with their singing. But Mr. and Mrs. Vanneck would walk far ahead of us on the steep narrow paths, which were so slippery I had to let Basil help me, and it was most embarra.s.sing and futile to keep refusing him all the time. He says we were meant for each other, but I know better!
You remember, don't you, dear, I didn't want to take this trip? My feeling must have been a presentiment.
At Culloden Moor I couldn't help crying a little over Prince Charlie and his brave Highlanders, for I think no other battlefield can keep its sadness and romantic pathos, and its effect upon the mind as that does. You know it's almost within sight and sound of the sea; and the voice of the wind among the pines--dark, straight ranks of pines like soldiers in mourning, standing in a bloodstained sea of heather--seemed to me like the wail of ghostly pipes playing a Highland lament. Wandering among the wavy graves and piled cairns of the different clans who gave their lives in vain for Prince Charlie, I was with Basil all alone, for those wretched Vannecks would go off by themselves, as usual, in the most marked way. He made me wipe my eyes with his handkerchief, and then folded it up to 'keep forever.' He does choose the strangest places to make love, and always contrives the minute the others go away, to bring the subject round to that. Luckily we are all four together in the car, as the chauffeur drives, but even there he looks at me, which is quite getting on my nerves. Yesterday I asked to sit in front, saying I wanted more air. It was after leaving Inverness; and I had the best of it, quite by accident. It was a horrid road, almost the only bad one we've had; full of flat holes which the chauffeur called 'pans,' and the others, in the back of the car, nearly had their spines come through the tops of their heads. Strange what a difference there is, sitting in the driver's seat! The b.u.mping lasted all the way to Drumnadrochit, where we turned away from a long, straight loch to mount up into lovely strange country; then plunged down a steep hill to Invercannich--a charming place ringed round with lovely, mysterious-looking mountain-peaks which seem to say 'If we chose, we could tell you the secret of Glen Affric, which we are hiding.'
Isn't that an alluring name--Glen Affric? A little while ago I should have wanted immensely to see it; but now whenever any one proposes walking through a glen I always argue that it would be better not.
Last night we stopped at Strathpeffer, a gay and beautiful little cure-town, which is like a walled flower-garden set down in the midst of wild and stern Caledonia. The mountains are the walls; and heather flows round them and beats against them like a purple ocean. It is so foreign looking that it reminded Basil of Baden Baden. Now we are going on into Ross-s.h.i.+re, which Basil describes as a country of moorlands and great s.p.a.ces where red deer live. But already we have seen deer walking quite calmly out of the forests on to our road, where they stop to gaze quizzically, without the least fear, at the car. It is almost as if they took it for a brother-animal. To-night we shall be at Loch Maree, and of course you won't get this in time to telegraph there. But perhaps you might wire to Ballachulish, where we shall be to-morrow. Do, dearest, and tell me to come back to you. In spite of all the loveliness, I can't stand this much longer, for I cannot make Basil stop without being really _rude_ to him. You needn't keep me more than a day if it's inconvenient. I'll go anywhere afterward--except to Grandma's. Or even there, if she'll have me back!--Your loving and anxious BARRIE.
TELEGRAM TO BARRIE FROM MRS. BALLANTREE MACDONALD
If you want to please me and be very happy yourself say 'Yes' to B. N. Splendid thing for you. Could wish nothing better for your future. Do relieve my mind by writing that you have decided. Yours lovingly and hopefully,
BARBARA.
LETTER FROM BARRIE TO HER MOTHER