Part 53 (1/2)

XII. ADVENTURE OF THE CANADIAN HEIRESS

I. At Castle Skrae

'How vain a thing is wealth,' said Merton. 'How little it can give of what we really desire, while of all that is lost and longed for it can restore nothing--except churches--and to do _that_ ought to be made a capital offence.'

'Why do you contemplate life as a whole, Mr. Merton? Why are you so moral? If you think it is amusing you are very much mistaken! Isn't the scenery, isn't the weather, beautiful enough for you? _I_ could gaze for ever at the ”unquiet bright Atlantic plain,” the rocky isles, those cliffs of basalt on either hand, while I listened to the crystal stream that slips into the sea, and waves the yellow fringes of the seaweed.

Don't be melancholy, or I go back to the castle. Try another line!'

'Ah, I doubt that I shall never wet one here,' said Merton.

'As to the crystal stream, what business has it to be crystal? That is just what I complain of. Salmon and sea-trout are waiting out there in the bay and they can't come up! Not a drop of rain to call rain for the last three weeks. That is what I meant by moralising about wealth. You can buy half a county, if you have the money; you can take half a dozen rivers, but all the millions of our host cannot purchase us a spate, and without a spate you might as well break the law by fis.h.i.+ng in the Round Pond as in the river.'

'Luckily for me Alured does not much care for fis.h.i.+ng,' said Lady Bude, who was Merton's companion. The Countess had abandoned, much to her lord's regret, the coloured and figurative language of her maiden days, the American slang. Now (as may have been observed) her style was of that polished character which can only be heard to perfection in circles socially elevated and intellectually cultured--'in that Garden of the Souls'--to quote Tennyson.

The spot where Merton and Lady Bude were seated was beautiful indeed.

They reclined on the short sea gra.s.s above a sh.o.r.e where long tresses of saffron-hued seaweed clothed the boulders, and the bright sea pinks blossomed. On their right the Skrae, now clearer than amber, mingled its waters with the sea loch. On their left was a steep bank clad with bracken, climbing up to perpendicular cliffs of basalt. These ended abruptly above the valley and the cove, and permitted a view of the Atlantic, in which, far away, the isle of the Lewis lay like a golden s.h.i.+eld in the faint haze of the early sunset. On the other side of the sea loch, whose restless waters ever rushed in or out like a rapid river, with the change of tides, was a small village of white thatched cottages, the homes of fishermen and crofters. The neat crofts lay behind, in oblong strips, on the side of the hill. Such was the scene of a character common on the remote west coast of Sutherland.

'Alured is no maniac for fis.h.i.+ng, luckily,' Lady Bude was saying. 'To-day he is cat-hunting.'

'I regret it,' said Merton; 'I profess myself the friend of cats.'

'He is only trying to photograph a wild cat at home in the hills; they are very scarce.'

'In fact he is Jones Harvey, the naturalist again, for the nonce, not the sportsman,' said Merton.

'It was as Jones Harvey that he--' said Lady Bude, and, blus.h.i.+ng, stopped.

'That he grasped the skirts of happy chance,' said Merton.

'Why don't _you_ grasp the skirts, Mr. Merton?' asked Lady Bude. 'Chance, or rather Lady Fortune, who wears the skirts, would, I think, be happy to have them grasped.'

'Whose skirts do you allude to?'

'The skirts, short enough in the Highlands, of Miss Macrae,' said Lady Bude; 'she is a nice girl, and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, and, after all, there are worse things than millions.'

Miss Emmeline Macrae was the daughter of the host with whom the Budes and Merton were staying at Skrae Castle, on Loch Skrae, only an easy mile and a half from the sea and the cove beside which Merton and Lady Bude were sitting.

'There is a seal crawling out on to the sh.o.r.e of the little island!' said Merton. 'What a brute a man must be who shoots a seal! I could watch them all day--on a day like this.'

'That is not answering my question,' said Lady Bude. 'What do you think of Miss Macrae? I _know_ what you think!'

'Can a humble person like myself aspire to the daughter of the greatest living millionaire? Our host can do almost anything but bring a spate, and even _that_ he could do by putting a dam with a sluice at the foot of Loch Skrae: a matter of a few thousands only. As for the lady, her heart it is another's, it never can be mine.'

'Whose it is?' asked Lady Bude.

'Is it not, or do my trained instincts deceive me, that of young Blake, the new poet? Is she not ”the girl who gives to song what gold could never buy”? He is as handsome as a man has no business to be.'

'He uses belladonna for his eyes,' said Lady Bude. 'I am sure of it.'