The Second Victorian Mystery Megapack, page 152
Lady Bude tried to comfort him; it is the mission of young matrons. He must not be in such a hurry to go away. As to Mr. Blake, she could entirely reassure him. It was a beautiful evening, the lady was fair and friendly; Nature, fragrant of heather and of the sea, was hushed in a golden repose. The two talked long, and the glow of sunset was fading; the eyes of Lady Bude were a little moist, and Merton was feeling rather consoled when they rose and walked back towards Skrae Castle. It had been an ancient seat of the Macraes, a clan in relatively modern times, say 1745, rather wild, impoverished, and dirty; but Mr. Macrae, the great Canadian millionaire, had bought the old place, with many thousands of acres “where victual never grew.”
Though a landlord in the Highlands he was beloved, for he was the friend of crofters, as rent was no object to him, and he did not particularly care for sport. He accepted the argument, dear to the Celt, that salmon are ground game, and free to all, while the natives were allowed to use ancient flint-locked fusils on his black cocks. Mr. Macrae was a thoroughly generous man, and a tall, clean-shaved, graceful personage. His public gifts were large. He had just given 500,000l. to Oxford to endow chairs and students of Psychical Research, while the rest of the million was bestowed on Cambridge, to supply teaching in Elementary Logic. His way of life was comfortable, but simple, except where the comforts of science and modern improvements were concerned. There were lifts, or elevators, now in the castle of Skrae, though Blake always went by the old black corkscrew staircases, holding on by the guiding rope, after the poetical manner of our ancestors.
On a knowe which commanded the castle, in a manner that would have pained Sir Dugald Dalgetty, Mr. Macrae had erected, not a “sconce,” but an observatory, with a telescope that “licked the Lick thing,” as he said. Indeed it was his foible “to see the Americans and go one better,” and he spoke without tolerance of the late boss American millionaire, the celebrated J. P. van Huytens, recently deceased.
Duke Humphrey greater wealth computes,
And sticks, they say, at nothing,
sings the poet. Mr. Macrae computed greater wealth than Mr. van Huytens, though avoiding ostentation; he did not
Wear a pair of golden boots,
And silver underclothing.
The late J. P. van Huytens he regarded with moral scorn. This rival millionaire had made his wealth by the process (apparently peaceful and horticultural) of “watering stocks,” and by the seemingly misplaced generosity of overcapitalising enterprises, and “grabbing side shows.” The nature of these and other financial misdemeanours Merton did not understand. But he learned from Mr. Macrae that thereby J. P. van Huytens had scooped in the widow, the orphan, the clergyman, and the colonel. The two men had met in the most exclusive circles of American society; with the young van Huytenses the daughter of the millionaire had even been on friendly terms, but Mr. Macrae retired to Europe, and put a stop to all that. To do so, indeed, was one of his motives for returning to the home of his ancestors, the remote and inaccessible Castle Skrae. The Sportsman’s Guide to Scotland says, as to Loch Skrae: “Railway to Lairg, then walk or hire forty-five miles.” The young van Huytenses were not invited to walk or hire.
Van Huytens had been ostentatious, Mr. Macrae was the reverse. His costume was of the simplest, his favourite drink (of which he took little) was what humorists call “the light wine of the country,” drowned in Apollinaris water. His establishment was refined, but not gaudy or luxurious, and the chief sign of wealth at Skrae was the great observatory with the laboratory, and the surmounting “pole with box on top,” as Merton described the apparatus for the new kind of telegraphy. In the basement of the observatory was lodged the hugest balloon known to history, and a skilled expert was busied with novel experiments in aerial navigation. Happily he could swim, and his repeated descents into Loch Skrae did not daunt his soaring genius.
Above the basement of the observatory were rooms for bachelors, a smoking-room, a billiard-room, and a scientific library. The wireless telegraphy machine (looking like two boxes, one on the top of the other, to the eye of ignorance) was installed in the smoking-room, and a wire to Mr. Macrae’s own rooms informed him, by ringing a bell (it also rang in the smoking-room), when the machine began to spread itself out in tape conveying the latest news. The machine communicated with another in the establishment of its vendors, Messrs. Gianesi, Giambresi & Co., in Oxford Street. Thus the millionaire, though residing nearly fifty miles from the nearest station at Lairg, was as well and promptly informed as if he dwelt in Fleet Street, and he could issue, without a moment’s procrastination, his commands to sell and buy, and to do such other things as pertain to the nature of millionaires. When we add that a steam yacht of great size and comfort, doing an incredible number of knots an hour on the turbine system, lay at anchor in the sea loch, we have indicated the main peculiarities of Mr. Macrae’s rural establishment. Wealth, though Merton thought so poorly of it, had supplied these potentialities of enjoyment; but, alas! disease had “decimated” the grouse on the moors (of course to decimate now means almost to extirpate), and the crofters had increased the pleasures of stalking by making the stags excessively shy, thus adding to the arduous enjoyment of the true sportsman.
To Castle Skrae, being such as we have described, Lady Bude and Merton returned from their sentimental prowl. They found Miss Macrae, in a very short skirt of the Macrae tartan, trying to teach Mr. Blake to play ping-pong in the great hall.
We must describe the young lady, though her charms outdo the powers of the vehicle of prose. She was tall, slim, and graceful, light of foot as a deer on the corrie. Her hair was black, save when the sun shone on it and revealed strands of golden brown; it was simply arrayed, and knotted on the whitest and shapeliest neck in Christendom. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes large and lucid,
The greyest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey.
Her complexion was of a clear pallor, like the white rose beloved by her ancestors; her features were all but classic, with the charm of romance; but what made her unique was her mouth. It was faintly upturned at the corners, as in archaic Greek art; she had, in the slightest and most gracious degree, what Logan, describing her once, called “the Æginetan grin.” This gave her an air peculiarly gay and winsome, brilliant, joyous, and alert. In brief, to use Chaucer’s phrase,
She was as wincy as a wanton colt,
Sweet as a flower, and upright as a bolt.
She was the girl who was teaching the poet the elements of ping-pong. The poet usually missed the ball, for he was averse to and unapt for anything requiring quickness of eye and dexterity of hand. On a seat lay open a volume of thePoetry of the Celtic Renascence, which Blake had been reading to Miss Macrae till she used the vulgar phrase “footle,” and invited him to be educated in ping-pong. Of these circumstances she cheerfully informed the new-comers, adding that Lord Bude had returned happy, having photographed a wild cat in its lair.
“Did he shoot it?” asked Blake.
“No. He’s a sportsman!” said Miss Macrae.
“That is why I supposed he must have shot the cat,” answered Blake.
“What is Gaelic for a wild cat, Blake?” asked Merton unkindly.
Like other modern Celtic poets Mr. Blake was entirely ignorant of the melodious language of his ancestors, though it had often been stated in the literary papers that he was “going to begin” to take lessons.
“Sans purr,” answered Blake; “the Celtic wild cat has not the servile accomplishment of purring. The words, a little altered, are the motto of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders. This is the country of the wild cat.”
“I thought the ‘wild cat’ was a peculiarly American financial animal,” said Merton.
Miss Macrae laughed, and, the gong sounding (by electricity, the wire being connected with the Greenwich Observatory), she ran lightly up the central staircase. Lady Bude had hurried to rejoin her lord; Merton and Blake sauntered out to their rooms in the observatory, Blake with an air of fatigue and languor.
“Learning ping-pong easily?” asked Merton.
“I have more hopes of teaching Miss Macrae the essential and intimate elements of Celtic poetry,” said Blake. “One box of books I brought with me, another arrived to-day. I am about to begin on my Celtic drama of ‘Con of the Hundred Battles.’”
“Have you the works of the ancient Sennachie, Macfootle?” asked Merton. He was jealous, and his usual urbanity was sorely tried by the Irish bard. In short, he was rude; stupid, too.
However, Blake had his revenge after dinner, on the roof of the observatory, where the ladies gathered round him in the faint silver light, looking over the sleeping sea. “Far away to the west,” he said, “lies the Celtic paradise, the Isle of Apples!”
“American apples are excellent,” said Merton, but the beauty of the scene and natural courtesy caused Miss Macrae to whisper “Hush!”
The poet went on, “May I speak to you the words of the emissary from the lovely land?”
“The mysterious female?” said Merton brutally. “Dr. Hyde calls her ‘a mysterious female.’ It is in his Literary History of Ireland.”
“Pray let us hear the poem, Mr. Merton,” said Miss Macrae, attuned to the charm of the hour and the scene.
“She came to Bran’s Court,” said Blake, “from the Isle of Apples, and no man knew whence she came, and she chanted to them.”
“Twenty-eight quatrains, no less, a hundred and twelve lines,” said the insufferable Merton. “Could you give us them in Gaelic?”
The bard went on, not noticing the interruption, “I shall translate
“There is a distant isle
Around which sea horses glisten,
A fair course against the white swelling surge,
Four feet uphold it.”
“Feet of white bronze under it.”
“White bronze, what’s that, eh?” asked the practical Mr. Macrae.
“Glittering through beautiful ages!
Lovely land through the world’s age,
On which the white blossoms drop.”
“Beautiful!” said Miss Macrae.
“There are twenty-six more quatrains,” said Merton.
The bard went on,
“A beautiful game, most delightful
They play—”
“Ping-pong?” murmured Merton.
“Hush!” said Lady Bude.
Miss Macrae turned to the poet.
“They play, sitting at the luxurious wine,
Men and gentle women under a bush,
Without sin, without crime.”
“They are playing still,” Blake added. “Unbeheld, undisturbed! I verily believe there is no Gael even now who would not in his heart of hearts let drift by him the Elysiums of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, to grasp at the Moy Mell, the Apple Isle, of the unknown Irish pagan! And then to play sitting at the luxurious wine,
“Men and gentle women under a bush!”
“It really cannot have been ping-pong that they played at, sitting. Bridge, more likely,” said Merton. “And ‘good wine needs no bush!’”
The bard moved away, accompanied by his young hostess, who resented Merton’s cynicism.
“Tell me more of that lovely poem, Mr. Blake,” she said.
“I am jangled and out of tune,” said Blake wildly. “The Sassenach is my torture! Let me take your hand, it is cool as the hands of the foam-footed maidens of—of—what’s the name of the place?”
“Was it Clonmell?” asked Miss Macrae, letting him take her hand.
He pressed it against his burning brow.
“Though you laugh at me,” said Blake, “sometimes you are kind! I am upset—I hardly know myself. What is yonder shape skirting the lawn? Is it the Daoine Sidh?”
“Why do you call her ‘the downy she’? She is no more artful than other people. She is my maid, Elspeth Mackay,” answered Miss Macrae, puzzled. They were alone, separated from the others by the breadth of the roof.
“I said the Daoine Sidh,” replied the poet, spelling the words. “It means the People of Peace.”
“Quakers?”
“No, the fairies,” groaned the misunderstood bard. “Do you know nothing of your ancestral tongue? Do you call yourself a Gael?”
“Of course I call myself a girl,” answered Miss Macrae. “Do you want me to call myself a young lady?”
The poet sighed. “I thought you understood me,” he said. “Ah, how to escape, how to reach the undiscovered West!”
“But Columbus discovered it,” said Miss Macrae.
“The undiscovered West of the Celtic heart’s desire,” explained the bard; “the West below the waters! Thither could we twain sail in the magic boat of Bran! Ah see, the sky opens like a flower!”
Indeed, there was a sudden glow of summer lightning.
“That looks more like rain,” said Merton, who was standing with the Budes at an opposite corner of the roof.
“I say, Merton,” asked Bude, “how can you be so uncivil to that man? He took it very well.”
“A rotter,” said Merton. “He has just got that stuff by heart, the verse and a lot of the prose, out of a book that I brought down myself, and left in the smoking-room. I can show you the place if you like.”
“Do, Mr. Merton. But how foolish you are! do be civil to the man,” whispered Lady Bude, who shared his disbelief in Blake; and at that moment the tinkle of an electric bell in the smoking-room below reached the expectant ears of Mr. Macrae.
“Come down, all of you,” he said. “The wireless telegraphy is at work.”
He waited till they were all in the smoking-room, and feverishly examined the tape.
“Escape of De Wet,” he read. “Disasters to the Imperial Yeomanry. Strike of Cigarette Makers. Great Fire at Hackney.”
“There!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “We might have gone to bed in London, and not known all that till we got the morning papers to-morrow. And here we are fifty miles from a railway station or a telegraph office—no, we’re nearer Inchnadampf.”
“Would that I were in the Isle of Apples, Mell Moy, far, far from civilisation!” said Blake.
‘There shall be no grief there or sorrow,’ so sings the minstrel of The Wooing of Etain.
‘Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of new milk and ale shalt thou have with me then, fair lady,’ Merton read out from the book he had been speaking of to the Budes.
“Jolly place, the Celtic Paradise! Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of ale and new milk. Quel luxe!”
“Is that the kind of entertainment you were offering me, Mr. Blake?” asked Miss Macrae gaily. “Mr. Blake,” she went on, “has been inviting me to fly to the undiscovered West beneath the waters, in the magic boat of Bran.”
“Did Bran invent the submarine?” asked Mr. Macrae, and then the company saw what they had never seen before, the bard blushing. He seemed so discomposed that Miss Macrae took compassion on him.
“Never mind my father, Mr. Blake,” she said, “he is a very good Highlander, and believes in Eachain of the Hairy Arm as much as the crofters do. Have you heard of Eachain, Mr. Blake? He is a spectre in full Highland costume, attached to our clan. When we came here first, to look round, we had only horses hired from Edinburgh, and a Lowlander—mark you, a Lowlander—to drive. He was in the stable one afternoon—the old stable, we have pulled it down—when suddenly the horses began to kick and rear. He looked round to the open door, and there stood a huge Highlander in our tartans, with musket, pistols, claymore, dirk, skian, and all, and soft brogues of untanned leather on his feet. The coachman, in a panic, made a blind rush at the figure, but behold, there was nobody, and a boy outside had seen no man. The horses were trembling and foaming. Now it was a Lowlander from Teviotdale that saw the man, and the crofters were delighted. They said the figure was the chief that fell at Culloden, come to welcome us back. So you must not despair of us, Mr. Blake, and you, that have ‘the sight,’ may see Eachain yourself, who knows?”
This happy turn of the conversation exactly suited Blake. He began to be very amusing about magic, and brownies, and “the downy she,” as Miss Macrae called the People of Peace. The ladies presently declared that they were afraid to go to bed; so they went, Miss Macrae indicating her displeasure to Merton by the coldness of her demeanour.
The men, who were rather dashed by the pleasant intelligence which the telegraph had communicated, sat up smoking for a while, and then retired in a subdued state of mind.
Next morning, which was Sunday, Merton appeared rather late at breakfast, late and pallid. After a snatch of disturbed slumber, he had wakened, or seemed to waken, fretting a good deal over the rusticity of his bearing towards Blake, and over his hopeless affair of the heart. He had vexed his lady. “If he is good enough for his hosts, he ought to be good enough for their guests,” thought Merton. “What a brute, what a fool I am; I ought to go. I will go! I ought not to take coffee after dinner, I know I ought not, and I smoke too much,” he added, and finally he went to breathe the air on the roof.
The night was deadly soft and still, a slight mist hid the furthest verges of the sea’s horizon. Behind it, the summer lightning seemed like portals that opened and shut in the heavens, revealing a glory without form, and closing again.
“I don’t wonder that these Irish poets dreamed of Isles of Paradise out there:
“Lands undiscoverable in the unheard-of West,
Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea
