A Princess of Thule. Black William

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СКАЧАТЬ and Ingram met them. There was the usual “Well, Sheila?” followed by a thousand questions about the very things she had been inquiring into. That was one of the odd points about Ingram that puzzled and sometimes vexed Lavender; for if you are walking home at night it is inconvenient to be accompanied by a friend who would stop to ask about the circumstances of some old crone hobbling along the pavement, or who could, on his own door-step, stop to have a chat with a garrulous policeman. Ingram was about as odd as Sheila herself in the attention he paid to those wretched cotters and their doings. He could not advise on the important subject of broth, but he would have tasted it by way of discovery, even if it had been presented to him in a tea-cup. He had already been prowling around the place with Mackenzie. He had inspected the apparatus in the creek for hauling up the boats. He had visited the curing houses. He had examined the heaps of fish drying on the beach. He had drunk whisky with John the Piper and shaken hands with Alister-nan-Each. And now he had come to tell Sheila that the piper was bringing down luncheon from Mackenzie’s house, and that after they had eaten and drunk on the white beach they would put out the Maighdean-mhara once more to sea, and sail over to Mevaig, that the stranger might see the wondrous sands of the Bay of Uig.

      But it was not in consonance with the dignity of a king that his guests should eat from off the pebbles, like so many fishermen, and when Mairi and another girl brought down the baskets, luncheon was placed in the stern of the small vessel, while Duncan got up the sails and put out from the stone quay. As for John the Piper, was he insulted for having been sent on a menial errand? They had scarcely got away from the shore when the sounds of the pipes were wafted to them from the hillside above, and it was the “Lament of Mackrimmon” that followed them out to sea:

      Mackrimmon shall no more return,

      Oh never, never more return!

      That was the wild and ominous air that was skirling up on the hillside; and Mackenzie’s face, as he heard it, grew wroth. “That teffle of a piper, John!” he said, “will be playing Cha till mi tuiligh?”

      “It is out of mischief, papa,” said Sheila – “that is all.”

      “It will be more than mischief if I burn his pipes and drive him out of Borva. Then there will be no more of mischief.”

      “It is very bad of John to do that,” said Sheila to Lavender, apparently in explanation of her father’s anger, “for we have given him shelter here when there will be no more pipes in all the Lewis. It was the Free Church ministers, they put down the pipes, for there was too much wildness at the marriages when the pipes would play.”

      “And what do the people dance to now?” asked the young gentleman, who seemed to resent this paternal government.

      Sheila laughed in an embarrassed way.

      “Miss Mackenzie would rather not tell you,” said Ingram. “The fact is, the noble mountaineers of these districts have had to fall back on the Jew’s harp. The ministers allow the instrument to be used – I suppose because there is a look of piety in the name. But the dancing doesn’t get very mad when you have two or three young fellows playing a strathspey on a bit of a trembling wire.”

      “That teffle of a piper John!” growled Mackenzie, under his breath; and so the Maighdean-mhara lightly sped on her way, opening out the various headlands of the islands, until at last she got into the narrows by Eilean-Aird-Meinish, and ran up the long arm of the sea to Mevaig.

      They landed and went up the rocks. They passed two or three small white houses overlooking the still, green waters of the sea, and then, following the line of a river, plunged into the heart of a strange and lonely district, in which there appeared to be no life. The river track took them up a green glen, the sides of which were about as sheer as a railway cutting. There were no trees or bushes about, but the green pasture along the bed of the valley wore its brightest colors in the warm sunlight, and far up on the hillsides the browns and crimsons of the heather and the silver gray of the rocks trembled in the white haze of the heat. Over that again the blue sky, as still and silent as the world below.

      They wandered on, content with idleness and a fine day. Mr. Mackenzie was talking with some little loudness, so that Lavender might hear, of Mr. John Stuart Mill, and was anxious to convey to Ted Ingram that a wise man, who is responsible for the well-being of his fellow creatures, will study all sides of all questions, however dangerous. Sheila was doing her best to entertain the stranger, and he, in a dream of his own, was listening to the information she gave him. How much of it did he carry away? He was told that the gray goose built its nest in the rushes at the edge of lakes; Sheila knew several nests in Borva. Sheila also caught the young of the wild duck when the mother was guiding them down the hill-rivulets to the sea. She had tamed many of them, catching them thus before they could fly. The names of most of the mountains about here ended in bhal, which was a Gaelic corruption of the Norse fiall, a mountain. There were many Norse names all through the Lewis, but more particularly towards the Butt. The termination bost, for example, at the end of many words, meant an inhabited place, but she fancied bost was Danish. And did Mr. Lavender know of the legend connected with the air of Cha till, cha till mi tuille?

      Lavender started as from a trance, with an impression that he had been desperately rude. He was about to say that the gray gosling in the legend could not speak Scandinavian, when he was interrupted by Mr. Mackenzie turning and asking him if he knew from what ports the English smacks hailed that came up hither to the cod and the ling fishing for a couple of months in the autumn. The young man said he did not know. There were many fishermen at Brighton. And when the King of Borva turned to Ingram, to see why he was shouting with laughter, Sheila suddenly announced to the party that before them lay the great Bay of Uig.

      It was certainly a strange and impressive scene. They stood on the top of a lofty range of hills, and underneath them lay a vast semicircle, miles in extent, of gleaming white sand, that had in by-gone ages been washed in by the Atlantic. Into this vast plain of silver whiteness the sea, entering by a somewhat narrow portal, stretched in long arms of a pale blue. Elsewhere the great crescent of sand was surrounded by a low line of rocky hill, showing a thousand tints of olive-green and gray and heather purple; and beyond that again rose the giant bulk of Mealasabhal, grown pale in the heat, into the Southern sky. There was not a ship visible along the blue plain of the Atlantic. The only human habitation to be seen in the strange world beneath them was a solitary manse. But away toward the summit of Mealasabhal two specks slowly circled in the air, which Sheila thought were eagles; and far out on the Western sea, lying like dusky whales in the vague blue, were the Plada Islands – the remote and unvisited Seven Hunters – whose only inhabitants are certain flocks of sheep belonging to dwellers on the main land of Lewis.

      The travelers sat down on a low rock of gneiss to rest themselves, and then and there did the King of Borva recite his grievances and rage against the English smacks. Was it not enough that they should in passing steal the sheep, but that they should also, in mere wantonness, stalk them as deer, wounding them with rifle bullets, and leaving them to die among the rocks. Sheila said bravely that no one could tell that it was the English fishermen who did that. Why not the crews of merchant vessels, who might be of any nation? It was unfair to charge upon any body of men such a despicable act, when there was no proof of it whatever.

      “Why, Sheila,” said Ingram, with some surprise, “you never doubted before that it was the English smacks that killed the sheep.”

      Sheila cast down her eyes and said nothing.

      Was the sinister prophecy of John the Piper to be fulfilled? Mackenzie was so much engaged in expounding politics to Ingram, and Sheila was so proud to show her companion all the wonders of Uig, that when they returned to Mevaig in the evening the wind had altogether gone down and the sea was as a sea of glass. But if John the Piper had been ready to foretell for Mackenzie the fate of Mackrimmon, he had taken means to defeat destiny by bringing over from Borvapost a large and heavy СКАЧАТЬ