The Heather-Moon
nevermore see his island home nor the love of his youth. It was a
heart-breaking song; and though his voice was pitched so low it was
almost like singing in a whisper, there was a strange, vibrating power
in it, as there is in the strings of a violin touched but lightly by the
bow. Sir S. transferred his attention from the wall to me as he sang
this sad old ballad, and I could not look away, because there was the
same compelling power in his eyes as in his voice. No doubt it was only
of the song he thought, not of me at all, really; yet I could not shake
off the haunting impression of the look, and it made me dream of him all
night. I saw him standing beside me in the strange, pale twilight of
Sweetheart Abbey. And in his hand was a box of ebony, inlaid with
silver, which he held out. But when I took the box it was locked, and he
had no key. "Only the key of the rainbow will open this box," he said.
And then I woke up, feeling somehow as if the dream were of importance,
and I must try to find out why.
VII
Next morning when I saw Sir S. I felt confused and vaguely ashamed, as
if something had happened. But, of course, nothing had happened, nothing
at all. I kept on reminding myself of that until I was at ease again.
And his manner helped me to realize how silly I was, for almost he
seemed to go out of his way to put on the commonplace air I had
disliked. It was as if he wrapped himself up in a big, rough coat,
smelling of tobacco smoke, and rather old and shabby, with the collar
well turned up.
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 hardships 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 class
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 competition."
"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 glass. 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 noble mountains of Cumberland 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 fashionable 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 Gods": 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 cushion 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 "tassel"
dangling from the knoblike "hanging stone" over the great gate.
"Workers of high-handed outrage!
Making King and people grieve,
O the lawless Lords of Galloway!
O the bloody 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 horsemen."
"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-glass 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.
While the chauffeur made the dragon's toilet, patching up a fat white
foot as he might have doctored the pad of an elephant, we wandered
about, and finally decided to lunch in a secluded corner of the
twelfth-century ruins.
Mrs. James and I set out our picnic-table, a folding thing that Sir S.
carries in the car, and we counted on having the place to ourselves.
Tourists though we are, we scorn other tourists. But it seems incredible
that such as they can scorn us. We talked about Queen Mary and of her
last meal within those walls, and it felt sacrilegious to laugh and joke
where she had been so sad. We pictured her, young and beautiful, taking
leave of the loyal men who had begged her in vain not to trust
Elizabeth; and we could fancy the town turning out to see her vessel set
sail--a very different town it would have been then from the charming
little place it is to-day, with its low white cottages half covered with
flowers, the spotless walls as clean as damask tablecloths, and all so
gay and bright to the eye that grim Dundrennan Abbey in its midst is
like a skull fallen in a rose-garden.
"Ah," sighed Mrs. James, shaking her head, with a jam puff in her hand,