William Black - A Princess of Thule

Lavender had to confess that this wonderful princess would persist in talking in a very matter-of-fact way. All the afternoon, while he was weaving a luminous web of imagination around her, she was continually cutting it asunder, and stepping forth as an authority on the growing of some wretched plants or the means by which rain was to be excluded from window-sills. And now, in this strange twilight, when she ought to have been singing of the cruelties of the sea or listening to half-forgotten legends of mermaids, she was engaged with the petty fortunes of men and girls who were pleased to find themselves prospering in the Glasgow police force or educating themselves in a milliner’s shop in Edinburgh. She did not appear conscious that she was a princess. Indeed, she seemed to have no consciousness of herself at all, and was altogether occupied in giving him information about practical subjects in which he professed a profound interest he certainly did not feel.

But even Sheila, when they had reached the loftiest part of their route, and could see beneath them the island and the water surrounding it, was struck by the exceeding beauty of the twilight, and as for her companion, he remembered it many a time thereafter as if it were a dream of the sea. Before them lay the Atlantic – a pale line of blue, still, silent and remote. Overhead, the sky was of a clear, pale gold, with heavy masses of violet cloud stretched across from North to South, and thickening as they got near to the horizon. Down at their feet, near the shore, a dusky line of huts and houses was scarcely visible, and over these lay a pale blue film of peat-smoke that did not move in the still air. Then they saw the bay into which the White Water runs, and they could trace the yellow glimmer of the river stretching into the island through a level valley of bog and morass. Far away, toward the East, lay the bulk of the island – dark green undulations of moorland and pasture; and there, in the darkness, the gable of one white house had caught the clear light of the sky, and was gleaming Westward like a star. But all this was as nothing to the glory that began to shine in the Southeast, where the sky was of a pale violet over the peaks of Melasabhal and Suainabhal. There, into the beautiful dome, rose the golden crescent of the moon, warm in color, as though it still retained the last rays of the sunset. A line of quivering gold fell across Loch Roag, and touched the black hull and spars of the boat in which Sheila had been sailing in the morning. That bay down there, with its white sands and massive rocks, its still expanse of water and its background of mountain peaks palely colored by the yellow moonlight, seemed really a home for a magic princess who was shut off from all the world. But here, in front of them, was another sort of sea and another sort of life – a small fishing village, hidden under a cloud of pale peat-smoke, and fronting the great waters of the Atlantic itself, which lay under a gloom of violet clouds.

“Now,” said Sheila, with a smile, “we have not always weather as good as this in the island. Will you not sit on the bench over there with Mr. Ingram, and wait until my papa and I come up from the village again?”

“May not I go down with you?”

“No. The dogs would learn you were a stranger, and there would be a great deal of noise, and there will be many of the poor people asleep.”

So Sheila had her way; and she and her father went down the hillside into the gloom of the village, while Lavender went to join his friend Ingram, who was sitting on the wooden bench silently smoking a clay pipe.

“Well, I have never seen the like of this,” said Lavender, in his impetuous way; “it is worth going a thousand miles to see. Such colors and such clearness! and then the splendid outlines of those mountains, and the grand sweep of this loch! This is the sort of thing that drives me to despair, and might make one vow never to touch a brush again. And Sheila says it will be like this all the night through.”

He was unaware that he had spoken of her in a very familiar way, but Ingram noticed it.

“Ingram,” he said, suddenly, “that is the first girl I have ever seen whom I should like to marry.”

“Stuff!”

“But it is true. I have never seen any one like her – so handsome, so gentle, and yet so very frank in setting you right. And then she is so sensible, you know, and not too proud to have much interest in all sorts of common affairs – ”

There was a smile in Ingram’s face, and his companion stopped in some vexation: “You are not a very sympathetic confidant.”

“Because I know the story of old. You have told it me about twenty women; and it is always the same. I tell you, you don’t know anything at all about Sheila Mackenzie yet; perhaps you never may. I suppose you will make a heroine of her, and will fall in love with her for a fortnight, and then go back to London and get cured by listening to the witticisms of Mrs. Lorraine.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you. Some day, no doubt, you will love a woman for what she is, not for what you fancy her to be; but that is a piece of good fortune that seldom occurs to a youth of your age. To marry in a dream, and wake up six months afterwards – that is the fate of ingenuous twenty-three. But don’t you let Mackenzie hear you talk of marrying Sheila, or he’ll have some of his fishermen throw you into Loch Roag.”

“There, now, that is one point I can’t understand about her,” said Lavender, eagerly. “How can a girl of her shrewdness and good sense have such a belief in that humbugging old idiot of a father of hers, who fancies me a political emissary, and plays small tricks to look like diplomacy? It is always ‘My papa can do this,’ and ‘My papa can do that,’ and ‘There is no one at all like my papa.’ And she is continually fondling him, and giving little demonstrations of affection, of which he takes no more notice than if he were an Arctic bear.”

Ingram looked up with some surprise in his face. “You don’t mean to say, Lavender,” he said, slowly, “that you are already jealous of the girl’s own father?”

He could not answer, for at this moment Sheila, her father and the big greyhound came up the hill. And again it was Lavender’s good fortune to walk with Sheila across the moorland path they had traversed some little time before. And now the moon was still higher in the heavens, and the yellow lane of light that crossed the violet waters of Loch Roag quivered in a deeper gold. The night air was scented with the Dutch clover growing down by the shore. They could hear the curlew whistling and the plover calling amid that monotonous plash of the waves that murmured all around the coast. When they returned to the house the darker waters of the Atlantic and the purple clouds of the West were shut out of sight, and before them there was only the liquid plain of Loch Roag, with its pathway of yellow fire, and far away on the other side the shoulders and peaks of the Southern mountains, that had grown gray and clear and sharp in the beautiful twilight. And this was Sheila’s home.

EARLY morning at Borva, fresh, luminous and rare; the mountains in the South grown pale and cloud-like under a sapphire sky; the sea ruffled into a darker blue by a light breeze from the west; and the sunlight lying hot on the red gravel and white shells around Mackenzie’s house. There is an odor of sweetbrier about, hovering in the warm, still air, except at such times as the breeze freshens a bit, and brings around the shoulder of the hill the cold, strange scent of the rocks and the sea beyond.

And on this fresh and pleasant morning Sheila sat in the big garden-seat in front of the house, talking to the stranger to whom she had been introduced the day before. He was no more a stranger, however, to all appearance, for what could be more frank and friendly than their conversation, or more bright and winning than the smile with which she frequently turned to speak or to listen? Of course, this stranger could not be her friend as Mr. Ingram was – that was impossible. But he talked a great deal more than Mr. Ingram, and was apparently more anxious to please and be pleased; and indeed was altogether very winning and courteous and pleasant in his ways. Beyond this vague impression Sheila ventured upon no further comparison between the two men. If her older friend had been down, she would doubtless have preferred talking to him about all that had happened in the island since his last visit; but here was this newer friend thrown, as it were, upon her hospitality, and eager, with a most respectful and yet simple and friendly interest, to be taught all that Ingram already knew. Was he not, too, in mere appearance like one of the princes she had read of in many an ancient ballad – tall and handsome and yellow-haired, fit to have come sailing over the sea, with a dozen merry comrades, to carry off some sea-king’s daughter to be his bride? Sheila began to regret that the young man knew so little about the sea and the Northern islands and those old-time stories; but then he was very anxious to learn.