A BOAT IN SIGHT AT SULISCANNA
There was one spot on Suliscanna, the island to which she had been
brought, that Kate especially loved. It was where the great Lianacraig
precipice, a thousand feet of hard rock, curiously streaked with the
green of serpentine and the white of the breeding and roosting ocean
birds, sank sheer into the foam-fringed emerald wash of the sea.
At the eastward end of the vast wall there began a beach of pure white
sand, curving round in a clean sickle-sweep for a mile and a half to
the mural face of the cliffs of Aoinaig, which served for its northern
gateway.
To this wide strand, with its frowning guardian watch-towers of tall
cliff on either side, Kate came every day, week in and week out,
during the first months of her isolation. She took her way thither
from the low, thatched hut of Mistress Alister McAlister, in which she
dwelt in a cleanliness and comfort more reminiscent of Carrick than
characteristic of the neighboring houses of Suliscanna. The cattle did
not occupy the first apartment in the house of Mistress McAlister.
The floor did not, as was commonly the case, rise gradually towards
the roof upon a rich deposit of "peat-coom" and general _débris_,
solidified by the spent water of the household and the trampling of
many feet.
The house in which Kate dwelt on Suliscanna was paved with flags of
slate, which Alister and his wife had put in position, to the great
scandal of the entire island--including the minister of the Small
Isles himself, who preached most powerfully against the practice as
pampering to poor human vanity, and causing foolish people to grasp at
worldly state and pomp, and so neglect the glories of another and a
better world.
But Mistress McAlister had her answer ready to that.
"I am of opinion," she retorted, when the sermon was reported to her,
"that Alister and me will no be left strange and friendless up yonder
on the streets of gold, just because we happen to prefer clean stanes
to dirty peat and fish-banes here below."
And for this pointed rejoinder Mistress McAlister was debarred the
table of communion.
"I'm no carin'," she said. "There's guid and godly ministers in my ain
country that has suffered mickle for godliness. What matters it if I do
suffer a wee here for cleanliness? The one is sib to the other, they
say. And wha kens but after all it may help one's eternal interest to
bide away from sic a kirk as they have here?--no' a wiselike word nor a
solemn reproof from the beginning to the end of the exercises!"
This bright morning Kate stood alone on the white fringe of sand. She
shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked at the far blue hills of
the main-land, and often she sighed heavily.
For weeks she had watched for a boat to come. She had cast every bottle
she could obtain on the island into the race of the tide which passed
Lianacraig, each with a message enclosed telling of her place of
seclusion. Now she could only pace the shore and wait.
"He _will_ come," she said to herself, with a limitless faith. "I am
sure he loves me, and that he will find me. Prison bars could not
contain him, nor dangers daunt him. I know he will follow and find me.
God make it soon--before the other comes."
Her mind went back to the cold, sinister eyes of my Lord of Barra, and
she shuddered even in the hot sunshine.
"Then would the danger begin," she said; "for though all these folks
are kind to me, yet not even the minister nor Betsy Landsborough would
stir a hand to save me from the chief. Such a marriage is customary.
It is the way of the clan. The Lords of Barra have ever chosen their
brides in this fashion, they say. I am here alone on an island without
boats. The chief has ordered it so. None are allowed to approach or
land on Suliscanna till the master comes to claim the captive and the
slave."
The girl's wonderful dark eyes had mysterious depths in them as she
went over in her heart the perils and difficulties of her unknown
future.
"But never, while I live, will I be untrue to him whom I love. If I
cannot be his, at least I shall never be another's. And if they try to
force me to that which I loathe--thank God there is always a way out!
Gladly would I die rather than that any other should take the place
that is his alone--my king, my husband!"
She spoke the last words very softly, but her eyes looked wistfully out
towards the far hills beyond the sea, over which she waited for him to
come. Then she blushed red from neck to brow at the sound of her own
whisper. She even turned her about swiftly to see that none had heard,
and that no bird of the air could carry the matter.
But only the sea-swallows circled widely above, along the black wet
skerries the gulls wailed, and the silly moping guillemots sat in
rows upon the rocks of Lianacraig. All were intent upon their own
concerns that bright morning, and up among the tiny green crofts she
saw Mistress McAlister, a lowland sunbonnet on her head, flashing
in and out of her door in that lively and sprightly fashion which
distinguished her movements from the solid sloth characteristic of even
the busiest moments of the other good-wives of Suliscanna.
Kate paced the shore, and thought within herself the still assured
thoughts of one whose mind is made up about the main issue, and who can
afford quietly to consider concerning matters less important.
The sea was very still this day about Suliscanna. The white surf-rim
round the great cliffs was hardly to be noted. The gap-toothed caves
which pierce them were still. The roaring and hissing of the "bullers"
were not heard. Only in front of the island to landward the tides
swayed and ran like a mill-race, where the ledges rose black and
dripping from the deep, and the currents from the ocean swirled onward,
or sucked back through the narrows in dangerous whirlpools and strange
leaping hillocks of sea-water.
Kate stood wondering at their beauty, without the least idea that these
oily swirls and boiling hummocks of smooth green water were among the
most dangerous sea perils to be met with all the way from Pentland to
Solway.
Suddenly her eyes lit on a dark speck far away out upon the bright
plain. It might have been the head of a swimming seal, or the black
razor-edge of a large skerry showing over the rush of the tide. But,
as she watched, the dot grew blacker and larger. A boat was certainly
approaching the island. Kate stood trembling. For the issue meant life
and death to her. It might be her tyrant come to claim his captive. It
might be her saviour come to save.