The Heather-Moon
was far more fascinating than I! And you knew and liked her first, and
had asked her to take a long motor trip with you: and it _was_ true that
you quarrelled about me. Looking back it all seemed so natural,
especially remembering how you kept away from me and schemed--actually
_schemed_--to have me go about with other men, why shouldn't I believe a
woman _much_ older than I, when she _cried_ as she told me the story?
Why, at this very place, after you'd been so heavenly to me in the
Abbey, you were horrid next day, almost cross: and so you were often.
You hurt my feelings a dozen times a day, and every other man I saw was
kinder."
"Because they weren't fighting a great fight with themselves, as I was,"
he said, holding me a little more closely, if possible. "They, the
selfish chaps, were letting themselves go. I was saying to myself,
'Perhaps I'm too old and hard for her. I'm the first man she's ever
known. I must give her a chance to see and talk with others. For her own
sake, I mustn't yield to temptation and try to snatch her away from the
rest. Norman must have his chance. Douglas must have his chance. The
American boys must have theirs----' and by Jove, you seemed to like
giving it to them! You nearly drove me out of my mind."
"I thought you were being bored with me."
"You darling, adorable little idiot, as if a man could be bored with
you!"
"I didn't know."
"Well, you know now. I was nearly mad in Edinburgh, but I stuck to my
principles. I wanted to be sure one way or the other. But Norman had no
gratitude. He used your mother to help him against me----"
"That was Mrs. West, I think, who used her."
"Don't defend the fellow. It was both of them. They--and James sending
for his wife--drove me into a corner. But I wasn't going to be swept off
the board without a struggle. I meant from the beginning to fight for
you, if I saw a gleam of interest in your eyes for me, and sometimes I
thought I did see it. But thanks to Mrs. Bal MacDonald, they'd got you
in their clutches, those two. It suddenly occurred to me when I lost
Mrs. James, to go and get your grandmother--bring her by force if she
wouldn't come. I knew she had a sneaking kindness for me, as a MacDonald
man. There was a queer bond of sympathy between us, which we'd both felt
when we met. All our worst faults are alike. I dashed off to
Carlisle--quickest way, by train, and threw myself on the old lady's
mercy--told her everything. She was a trump, though perhaps her desire
to help was as much a wish to thwart her daughter-in-law as anything
else. She was too rheumatic to come with me in the car. I suppose it was
a wild scheme! But she herself suggested my going to London to invite
the MacDonalds. She thought, if I offered inducements--and she was
right. It was an inspiration on her part."
"But," I broke in, "isn't it glorious not to have chaperons at all?"
He didn't answer in words. Yet he made me understand in a far more
emphatic and satisfactory way, that he agreed.
"You can imagine what I felt when you coolly went off from Ballachulish
with Norman and his sister," Ian went on. "Then I _did_ think it was all
up--that I had been a fool for my hopes and my pains, till dear old
Vedder hummed and hawed and apologized for taking a liberty, and
mentioned that Salomon had boasted he was going to get his 'party' to
Gretna Green in the shortest time on record. 'It's a plot!' I said to
myself, as Mrs. James had warned me. And five minutes later Vedder and I
and the Gray Dragon were off at a pace--well, I'm afraid we exceeded the
legal limit most of the way; but the gods looked after us."
"And so did the heather moon!" I added.
* * * * *
Now we are at Dhrum, our own dear purple island set in a sea of gold;
but first we went back to Carlisle and visited Grandma; and to please
her and Ian, I consented to be married all over again, in church, with a
special license and everything such as the conventional bride does,
though it seemed treacherous to that happy moment at Gretna Green, which
was like heaven after the valley of death. Grandma was wonderful to Ian,
and very nearly nice to me. Not an unkind word did she say of Barbara,
and she didn't even refer to my running away.
"You have had the sense to choose a real man, and the good fortune to
win him. I'd hardly have thought it of you. A MacDonald too!" she
remarked. And I almost loved her. Mrs. Muir made us a wedding cake,
which she insisted on our taking away, in a large tin box: and when we
left Hillard House, Heppie's nose was pinker than I ever saw it, which
is saying a good deal.
Aline West was married to Mr. George Vanneck the very day we started
from Carlisle for Dhrum. We saw an account of the wedding in the paper.
It was at Glasgow; and she was going to a lovely place called St.
Fillans for her honeymoon. Basil gave her away, and was to return
immediately after to Canada, "on business."
It is like a dream to be living in the vast, turreted gray castle of our
ancestors, looking out over an endless sea, and to be the mistress of
such a house--I, little Barrie MacDonald, the princess rescued from a
glass retort. But it is a true dream. Ian says that he won me by a kind
of fraud, as the first Somerled won his Pictish princess; because we
weren't really married by that game we played with the photograph people
at Gretna Green. Only, he made up his mind even then, that if the wrong
man ever got a hold upon me, he would use the episode to frighten him
away. How thankful I am that it happened! If it hadn't, perhaps I should
have missed my happiness: but Ian says no, he would have snatched me
from Basil somehow, if not in one way, then in another. Poor Basil, I
can afford to remember him with forgiveness, and even a kind of
tenderness now! I think he always hated himself in his heart for doing
what he did. But tragedy came so near for a few hours that sometimes, if
Ian is separated from me for a moment, we have to rush to find each
other, and say "It's true--after all!"
At Dunelin Castle there are all the things I used to wish for: MacDonald
tartan on the walls and floors of many rooms; and torn, faded MacDonald
banners hanging in the dimness high up on the stone walls of the great
dining-hall--where we never dine. Pipers pipe us away in the morning,
and the skirl of the pipes mingles with the crying of gulls and the boom
of the sea in a thrilling way. The old servants look as if they had
never been born and could never die. They are delightfully superstitious
and quaint, and not one of them would kill a spider. Neither would I,
for the matter of that! I suppose it's my MacDonald blood and my love of
Bruce. You ought to see the elaborate precautions that are taken to get
rid of a spider in Dunelin Castle without insulting or hurting its
feelings!
Ian always wears the kilt; and if I hadn't loved him as much as I
possibly could before, I should have fallen in love with him all over
again the day I saw him in it first. He is painting my portrait in the
Gretna Green costume; and when we are tired, we take long walks
together, I in a short tweed, with my hair down my back, Ian in the
kilt. Our favourite tramp is to a mysterious, hidden lake, surrounded
with rugged black mountains like petrified guardian-dragons watching a
treasure. This wild, mountain walled lake is called the "Heart of
Dhrum," and Ian says it is no more wild or savage or dark with clouds
than _his_ heart used to be every day when he was giving other men their
chance with me. He says, too, that if the lady who used to be imprisoned
in a fearful dungeon under the dining-hall at Dunelin, and fed only with
salt beef, had been Aline West it would have served her right. He would
have given her no sympathy, but a great deal of salt and very little
beef. But of course he does not mean that. His heart overflows with
kindness for all humanity nowadays, and it never was hard really. He
finds the world a glorious place with very few faults; but he says it is
I who have taught him this lesson, and that I should be able to make a
skeleton-ghost, condemned to clank chains in an underground prison
through eternity, see his fate in a rose-coloured light. I love him to
say foolish things. And I love him when he says nothing at all, but only
looks at me.
He has taught me to dance the Highland fling. I do it with my hair down,
while the pipers pipe; and Ian cries Hoo! and Ha! and claps his hands,
as we dance, like the true Highlander he is. He was splendid in the
Games Week; for he could do the great jumps and "put" the stones as well
as the best of the Skye men who came over to compete with the men of
Dhrum. And here at Dunelin, where we danced reels till morning, on the
night of the ball we gave, he danced everybody else down--except me.
* * * * *
This castle, which my fierce ancestors built nearly a thousand years
ago, is a fairy castle for me and for Ian. It is all our own now, to
have and to hold, because he has bought it, so it will belong to a
MacDonald while it and the world lasts--I pray. We shall go to live in
America, where I hope Barbara may let me see her sometimes; but we shall
have this fairy island of purple and gold to come back to always, the
hidden home of our hearts.
I used to ask myself, when the heather moon vanished behind a mountain
or into the sea, in what secret place she lurked while she hid from the
world? Now I know that the purple island of Dhrum is her fastness, and
that because she loved us she brought us safely here, together.
I wonder sometimes if Basil will ever write his romance of our
journeyings and adventures under the heather moon--months or years from
now, when he has forgotten to be sad, and is only pleasantly romantic,
as when I knew him first? Ian says he will never write it, because if he
did, he would have to be the villain; and no man ever yet made himself
the villain of his own book. Perhaps that is true. But I do not think
there ought to be a real villain in a story about a rainbow key and a
heather moon.
THE END