The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster. D. K. Broster

arrived, in order to be able to make an early start with his sister next morning. He had come to the house to pay his respects, finding no one, not even the laird himself, at home, and had, the domestic understood, taken up his quarters at the tiny inn down by the loch.

      “But Mr. Campbell must not remain there!” exclaimed Grizel on hearing this news. “Ian shall go and bid him come up to the house for the night—will you not, Ian?”

      Without waiting to find his father Ian went off. He had no desire at all for the company of a male Campbell, and his father, he was sure, would have still less; yet he knew that Invernacree would not be satisfied to leave the traveller to the mercies of the inn, more especially when his sister was already staying beneath his roof. And after all, thought the young man, nothing mattered very much to-night. His outburst had by now numbed him; he felt nothing. To-morrow the world would come to an end for him . . . if it had not already done so over there on Eilean Soa among the daisies.

      He found at the inn Mr. Colin Campbell, a tall, fair young man of about his own age, who at first refused to put the laird of Invernacree to the trouble of receiving him for one night, and was stiff even when, unable to do anything else, he finally yielded. The two of them walked together up to the house, neither finding much to say to the other.

      And through the evening, while Ian watched Olivia in a kind of dream, still numbed, but every now and again waking to a stab of pain, as though the blood was beginning to run once more in a frozen limb, it seemed to him not unfortunate, perhaps, that Colin Campbell was here, for the atmosphere was changed by it. The presence of that typical son of Clan Diarmaid seemed to draw Olivia so much further away from them, back into the circle to which she belonged; it showed things as they really were. It was better so.

      She left early next morning with her brother in their father’s coach, which by now had been repaired. Ian had no word alone with her. But as old Invernacree was about to hand her in she said, “I shall never ride in this carriage again, sir, without the most grateful thoughts of what I owe to you and . . . your family.”

      For a moment her gaze went past him to that member of it for whom no doubt her thanks were specially intended, where he stood by Jacqueline’s side, saying nothing and not, apparently, looking at any one.

      “My dear young lady,” replied the old man, with an air at once courteous and paternal, “anything which my family has been able to do for you is their good fortune. God bless you, and may you have a better journey than the last!”

      Their good fortune! Ian could have laughed out loud. If his father only knew!

      Mr. Colin Campbell, a little less stiff than last night, but still not at ease, got into the coach and slammed the door, the postillion chirruped to the horses, and that fatal vehicle drew away from the old white house among the oak trees. Grizel and Jacqueline stood on the steps for some time, Jacqueline waving a handkerchief, to which, as the coach turned just outside the gate, there was an answering flicker of white. But Ian had not stayed to see that.

      So she was gone, the enchanted, the enchanting. Up in his own room he had only to shut his eyes, and he was back in the flowery meadow where he had kissed her hand. His heart still lay there among the daisy stems, in the place where the King of Lochlann’s daughter had stood. But now that she was gone from Appin he had a half hope that it might creep back to his breast, even if it should never be the same heart again, but remain what it seemed now, as much ashes as any in the ancient tomb on Eilean Soa.

      CHAPTER VII

       AN EXPLANATION AT THE GOATS’ WHEY

       Table of Contents

      § 1

      Aug. 11th—13th.

      In his house in the Trongate, in the pleasant and prosperous little city of Glasgow, Mr. John Buchanan, Invernacree’s “doer” for nearly forty years, sat, a little more than six weeks later, on one side of a table and looked at Invernacree’s son, on the other, with a smile compounded of shrewdness and benevolence, as befitted a family lawyer of long standing. He had the round legal face, not the long; it was smooth and fresh, with no trace of eyebrows remaining, and he did not wear spectacles.

      “You’ll find those all in order, Mr. Ian,” he said, indicating the packet of documents which he had just handed over. “Or rather the laird will. He still keeps the reins pretty closely in his own hands, I see.”

      “There is, thank God, no reason why he should not,” observed Ian.

      “Quite so, quite so,” agreed Mr. Buchanan. “And indeed it seems but a few years ago that you were a wee bit wean in petticoats. Yet you are twenty-five years of age now, I’m thinking.”

      “Twenty-six,” said his visitor.

      “D’ye hear that now, Gib?” remarked the lawyer to the large sphinx of a tabby which sat like an immense paperweight upon his table. “Twenty-six! To think of it! And when shall I have the pleasure of drawing up your marriage contract, young man?”

      “Oh, before very long, I expect,” responded Ian in as colourless a voice as he could muster. “Then I am to tell my father that he will hear from you later on the subject of that wadset?”

      “If you please. But, speaking of your prospective marriage, my dear young gentleman, who is the fortunate lady to be?”

      Ian ran his hand down Gib’s massive back, feeling the muscles under the fur ripple in the opposite direction at his touch. “I have to ask her, sir, before I can tell you that . . . It seems to me that I remember this cat of yours as long as I remember you.”

      “I wonder does he remember you—eh, Gib, ye rascal, do ye? And to think you are twenty-six! Aye, ’tis time that ye thought of matrimony now that ye have taken poor Alan’s place.”

      Ian made no comment. “I see you have a map upon the wall there,” he said. “I shall make bold to study it for a moment, if I may.”

      “Ye surely know your way home, Mr. Ian?”

      “Yes, I know my way home,” said the young man, getting up and going over to the map. Nevertheless he looked minutely at it, and there was something in his face as he did so which suggested that he was making calculations. “Thank you, sir; ’twas only curiosity. Maps have ever interested me.”

      He came back to the table. The cat Gib stood up, arched his back, stretched himself prodigiously, uttered a small sound and sat down again, fixing upon Ian a gaze of such apparent omniscience as almost to be perturbing. Then the topaz orbs blinked; with a twitch of the end of his tail the sage appeared to dismiss the matter from his mind, and lay solidly down again, folding his paws inward. But Ian had a momentary conviction, quite difficult to shake off, that Gib knew, if his owner did not, why he had just been studying the map.

      As he walked away from Mr. Buchanan’s house, past the colonnades of the Trongate, with their cave-like little shops beneath, the papers entrusted to him safely inside his coat, his thoughts were busy with another paper—and that, not to mince matters, a stolen one—which lay nearer to his heart than they did, and was the sole cause of his consulting the lawyer’s map just now.

      About a week after Miss Olivia Campbell’s departure from Invernacree, at the end of June, had come a letter from her to Grizel, which, among expressions of undying gratitude to the writer’s dear Miss Stewart for her kindness and her skill, had contained the information that when the summer was a little more advanced she herself was, in deference to her father’s wishes, going up into the hills of Central Perthshire to take that sovereign specific, goats’ milk. “Papa is of opinion that my health—which is in truth perfectly sound, and never was better—would be re-established by a course of the whey. At any rate he so urges it, in order to counteract the possible effects of the coach accident, that I have not the heart to stand out against him; and so, my dear Miss Grizel, you