Almond, Wild Almond. D. K. Broster

the great question still undecided, Ranald left Girolac in February, transacted Mr. Fraser’s business at Lille, and came to Dunkirk to find—this.

      And now, after all, when the weather permitted, he would carry out his original intention, find a passage to Leith or Dundee and, on his way to the West and the shores of Isle Askay, deliver the letter with which his uncle had charged him to that old comrade in arms of his, twice exiled, but now suffered in his declining years to reside on his Perthshire estate, the old poet chief Alexander Robertson of Struan. After that, and as soon as possible, Fasnapoll, the house on the bay, the gulls crying and dipping, and mist over Askival. There was no mist at Girolac.

      CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      (1)

      Much whiter than the wool she was spinning, the snow-flakes floated past the window, but Bride did not see them, for she was too intent upon her task. And as the wheel went round she crooned to herself a song in a sweet little voice which matched her stature, her almost childish air of innocence and her hair of pure, pale gold, itself spun upon some faery loom and for ever slipping out of place beneath her snood, so soft were the loose silken waves.

      In the bedchamber where she sat spinning this afternoon—bedchambers being put to so many uses in Scotland—the firelight seemed to please itself by drawing a sudden gleam from those bright locks of hers, and the dull green hangings of the bed, inwoven with a faded scroll pattern of mulberry, by making a not ineffective background for them. There were those in Bunrannoch who called Miss Bride Stewart, of Inchrannoch House, Bride an Oir, “Bride of the Gold.”

      Had the whirr of the treadle ceased you might have heard the river hurrying past at the back of the house, strong and wide, though shallow, with the late March fullness drawn from Loch Rannoch but a quarter of a mile away; and might have looked out upon it, too, from the little window rather oddly squeezed in near the fireplace. The room, the whole house might well be damp in winter from this close proximity to the Tummel, but such a thought had never troubled Bride’s uncle or aunt, nor would indeed be likely to occur to anyone living in the Perthshire Highlands in the middle of the eighteenth century. Inchrannoch House being conveniently near the ferry, its situation was most proper.

      And Bride had a very different view from her main window on the other side of the room, and one, too, which she loved better, for thence every morning and evening she could greet Sidh Chailleann—Schiehallion, the beautiful and shapely mountain dominating all Strath Tummel. From Kinloch Rannoch village, from all along the loch, from the distant Moor of Rannoch itself Schiehallion showed a perfect cone—the ideal peak; but dwellers along the Tummel further east saw it otherwise, for the long ridge behind came into view. Bride esteemed them much less fortunate.

      There was a knock at the door, and the head of an elderly woman was thrust in. “Mr. Malcolm Robertson’s below,” it announced.

      Bride continued to spin.

      “Do ye no’ hear me?” enquired the head.

      Bride nodded. “But I’m busy.”

      The tall angular body which was topped by this head now came in entirely. “Are ye no’ gangin’ doun, then? There’s a strange gentleman wi’ Mr. Robertson.”

      The wheel stopped. “O Phemie, why do you come fashing me?” exclaimed the spinner. “Now I have broken the thread!”

      “Then gang ye doun!” counselled Phemie starkly. “There’s Mistress Stewart in her bed, and the laird no’ hame yet. Ye canna leave puir Mr. Robertson by his lane.”

      Bride made a tiny gesture, perhaps called forth by the mention of that name, perhaps not. “But you say that he is not alone! However, if Uncle Walter is out. . . .” She rose resignedly. “Why, I declare ’tis snowing!”

      “Aye, and as I gaed across the ha’ I heard the gentleman that’s come wi’ Mr. Robertson say he hadna aft seen snow upon the ground.”

      “Then where can he be from—the tropics belike! I think,” said Bride, “that I will go down.—The gentleman’s not black, I suppose?”

      “Now would young Mr. Robertson bring a black man to wait upon your uncle and auntie, Miss Bride! Sometimes I declare ye have not the sense of a whaup!”

      “Sometimes,” retorted Bride, with an elfin smile, “you have not the sense of a joke, Phemie! But I will go down. We see enough snow and to spare in Rannoch. Ah, never mind the wool; I’ll soon be back.”

      Standing before the dim, discoloured little mirror on her modest toilet table, which gave back her dazzling fairness transfigured to a singularly unflattering, greenish tint—but Bride looked little at her reflection in any glass—she hastily tucked a rebel lock or two more firmly into place under her snood and left the room.

      Downstairs by the generous fire, in the room dark with panelling, old furniture and old portraits, under the great stag’s head, noble and threatening, with crossed claymores resting on its tines, two gentlemen, both young, were waiting. That Mrs. Stewart was abed indisposed had just been conveyed to them, rather in the way of an after-thought, by the middle-aged manservant, bearded and lame, who had ushered them in.

      “Is Miss Stewart at least at home?”

      “Ay, Mr. Robertson, Miss Bride’s to whoam. Phemie will tell her yo’re here, sir. But t’laird hissel’ ’ll soon be back, by what he said.”

      “That man is surely English!” exclaimed Mr. Robertson’s companion as the door closed.

      “Yes, he is English, a Lancashire man. He was a sailor once, Jonas Worrall; he has been at Inchrannoch, however, these seventeen or eighteen years.”

      “Is there but the one daughter, Mr. Robertson?”

      “Miss Bride Stewart,” answered Malcolm Robertson, turning away as he spoke, “is not a daughter; she is a niece—and ward. The laird’s own children are scattered or dead. Bride”—he so palpably lingered over the brief name, as though he wished it not so soon gone from his lips, that the other man glanced at him—“Bride—she’s a sort of cousin of mine—is an orphan with a tragic history. Her parents——” He stopped short. “Here she is!”

      The visitor whom he had brought with him turned and saw that there had come into the sombre, firelit room a golden-haired little figure with no faintest hint of tragedy about it, as one usually reads that word. This girl belonged surely to the race which lives feasting for ever in the fairy duns, where the only tragedy is not mortality but the lack of a soul. The young man was quite startled; the colour deepened in his lean cheek. A curtsey in response to their bows, and she who was “Bride” to his companion came forward, and he heard himself being formally presented: Mr. Ranald Maclean of Fasnapoll in Isle Askay.

      (2)

      The snow had ceased when the two visitors left Inchrannoch House; it had indeed little more than laid a fine carpet upon the ground. But against a livid sky rose up the white cone of Schiehallion, so near, though in appearance so inaccessible, a shape of ethereal purity. The short winter’s daylight was almost spent, yet away in the south-west lingered a fading wound of rose-colour. Ranald Maclean was curiously silent as he and Malcolm Robertson were ferried over the Tummel. He would carry away with him from Perthshire a companion picture to hang beside those canvases of storm and disappointment painted at Dunkirk. Out of them also stood a vivid young figure, a young, never-to-be-forgotten face—but it was a man’s.

      It was nearly a week since he had presented himself at Mount Alexander, the seat of Robertson of Struan, with that letter from his uncle which was the cause of his being in Perthshire. He was royally welcomed at the romantically situated house by the old poet-chief of Clan Donnachaidh, who had fought as a youth at Killicrankie