The Cruise of the Snowbird: A Story of Arctic Adventure. Stables Gordon

was a light weight. So with Donald in front, and the dogs capering and barking all around them, the party commenced the ascent, and half-an-hour afterwards they were safe at the shepherd’s hut. And none too soon, for night was now over all the land, and the snow fell thick and fast.

      Rory was laid upon the shepherd’s dais, and Allan and Donald proposed moving it close to the fire. But McBain knew better.

      “No, no, no!” he cried, “leave him where he is. Never take a frozen man near the fire. I learned that at Spitzbergen. He has young blood in his veins, and will soon come round.”

      But Rory, for a time, lay quiet enough. He was very white too, and but for his regular and uninterrupted breathing, and the tinge of red in his lips, one might have thought him dead.

      “Poor little Rory!” said Allan, smoothing his dark hair from off his brow. “How cold his forehead is!”

      Very simple words these were, yet there was something in the very tone in which they were uttered that would have convinced even a stranger, that Allan McGregor bore for the youth before him quite a brother’s love.

      And who was Rory, and who was Ralph? These questions are very soon answered. Roderick Elphinston and Ralph Leigh were, or had been, students at the University of Cambridge. They had been “inseparables” all through the curriculum, and firm friends from the very first day they had met together. And yet in appearance, and indeed in character, they were entirely different. Ralph was a great broad-shouldered, pleasant-faced young Saxon Rory was small as to stature, but lithe and wiry in the extreme; his face was always somewhat pale, but his eyes had all the glitter and fire of a wild cat in them. Well, then, if you do not like the “wild cat,” I shall say “poet” – the glitter and fire of a poet. And a poet he was, though he seldom wrote verses. Oh! it is not always the verses one writes that prove him to be a poet. Very often it is just the reverse. I know a young man who has written more verses than would stretch from Reading to Hyde Park, and there is just as much poetry in that young man’s soul as there is in the flagstaff on my lawn yonder. But Rory’s soul was filled with life and imagination, a gladsome glowing life that could not be restrained, but that burst upwards like a fountain in the sunlight, giving joy to all around. Everything in nature was understood and loved by Rory, and everything in nature seemed to love him in return; the birds and beasts made a confidant of him, and the very trees and the tenderest flowerets in garden or field seemed to whisper to him and tell him all their secrets. And just because he was so full of life he was also full of fun.

      When silent and thinking, this young Irishman’s face was placid, and even somewhat melancholy in expression, but it lighted up when he spoke, and it was wonderfully quick in its changes from grave to gay, or gay to grave. It was like a rippling summer sea with cloud-shadows chasing each other all over it. Like most of his countrymen, Rory was brave even to a fault. Well, then, there you have his description in a few words, and if you will not let me call him poet, I really do not know what else to call him.

      Ralph Leigh I must dismiss with a word. But, in a word, he was in my opinion everything that a young English gentleman should be; he was straightforward, bold and manly, and though very far from being as clever as Rory, he loved Rory for possessing the qualities he himself was deficient in. Thoroughly guileless was honest Ralph, and indeed, if the truth must be told, he was not a little proud of his companion, and he was never better pleased than when, along with Rory in the company of others, the Irishman was what Ralph called “in fine form.”

      At such times Ralph would not have interrupted the flow of Rory’s wit for the world, but the quiet and happy glance he would give round the room occasionally, to see if other people were listening to and fully appreciating his adopted brother, spoke volumes.

      McBain was right. The young blood in Rory’s veins soon reasserted itself, and after half-an-hour’s rest he seemed as well as ever. His first action on awaking was to put his hand to his brow, and his first words were, —

      “What is it at all, and where am I? Have I been in any trouble?”

      “Trouble, Rory?” said Allan, pressing his hand. “Well, you and Ralph went tumbling over a cliff.”

      “Only fifty feet of a fall, Rory,” said Ralph.

      Rory sat bolt upright now, and opened his eyes in astonishment.

      “Och! now I remember,” he said, “that we had a bit of a fall – But fifty feet! do you tell me so? Indeed then it’s a wonder there is one single whole bone between the two of us. But where is my sketch-book?”

      “Here you are,” said Allan.

      “Oh!” said Rory, opening the book, “this is worse than all; the prettiest sketch ever I made in my life all spoiled with the snow.”

      “Now, boys,” continued Rory, after a pause, “I grant you this is a very romantic situation – everything is romantic bar the smoke; but what are we waiting for? and is this your Castle of Arrandoon, my friend?”

      “Not quite,” replied Allan, laughing. “We are waiting for you to recover, and – ”

      “Well, sure enough,” cried Rory, “I have recovered.”

      He jumped up as he spoke, kicked out his legs, and stretched out his arms.

      “No; never a broken bone,” he said.

      Now it had been arranged between Allan and McBain that Rory should ride in the cart, while they and Ralph should walk.

      But Rory was aghast at such a proposal.

      “What,” he cried; “is it a procession you’d make of me? Would you put me on straw in the bottom of a cart, like an old wife coming from a fair?”

      “But,” persisted Allan, “you must be weak from the loss of blood.”

      “Loss of blood,” laughed Rory, “don’t be chaffing a poor boy. If you’d seen the blood I lost at the last election, and all in the cause of peace and honour, too! No, indeed; I’ll walk.”

      The storm was at its very worst when they once more emerged from the pine-wood, but every now and then they could see the light glimmering from one of the castle turrets, to guide them through the darkness. They sent the dogs on before to give notice of their approach; then Peter tuned up, and high above the roaring of the snow rose the scream of the great Highland bagpipe.

      A few hours afterwards, the three friends had all but forgotten their perilous adventure among the snow, or remembered it only to make merry over it. It is needless to say that Allan’s mother and sister welcomed his friends, or that Ralph and Rory were charmed with the reception they received.

      “Well,” said Rory, after the ladies had retired for the night, “I fully understand now what your poet Burns meant when he said —

      “‘In heaven itself I’ll ask nae mair Than just a Highland welcome.’”

      And now they gathered round the cosy hearth, on which great logs were blazing. McBain was relegated to an armchair in a corner, being the oldest Rory, who still felt the effects of his fall, reclined on a couch in front, with Ralph seated on one side and Allan on the other. Bran, the deer-hound, thought this too good a chance to be thrown away, so he got upon the sofa and lay with his great, honest head on Rory’s knees, while Kooran curled himself up on the hearthrug, and Oscar watched the door.

      “Well,” said Ralph, “I call this delightful; and the idea of doing the Highlands in mid-winter is decidedly a new one, and that is saying a great deal.”

      “Yes,” said Rory, laughing; “and a beautiful taste we’ve had of it to begin with. I fall over a cliff in the snow and Ralph comes tumbling after, just like Jack and Jill, and then we go to sleep like lambs, and waken with a taste of spirits in our mouths. Indeed yes, boys, it is romantic entirely.”

      “Everything now-a-days,” said Ralph, with half a yawn, “is so hackneyed, as it were. You go up the Rhine – that is hackneyed. You go down the Mediterranean – that is hackneyed. You go here, there, and everywhere, and you find here, there, and everywhere hackneyed. And if you go into a drawing-room and begin to speak of where you’ve been and what you’ve done,