'How vain a thing is wealth,' said Merton. 'How little it can give of
what we really desire, while of all that is lost and longed for it can
restore nothing--except churches--and to do _that_ ought to be made a
capital offence.'
'Why do you contemplate life as a whole, Mr. Merton? Why are you so
moral? If you think it is amusing you are very much mistaken! Isn't the
scenery, isn't the weather, beautiful enough for you? _I_ could gaze for
ever at the "unquiet bright Atlantic plain," the rocky isles, those
cliffs of basalt on either hand, while I listened to the crystal stream
that slips into the sea, and waves the yellow fringes of the seaweed.
Don't be melancholy, or I go back to the castle. Try another line!'
'Ah, I doubt that I shall never wet one here,' said Merton.
'As to the crystal stream, what business has it to be crystal? That is
just what I complain of. Salmon and sea-trout are waiting out there in
the bay and they can't come up! Not a drop of rain to call rain for the
last three weeks. That is what I meant by moralising about wealth. You
can buy half a county, if you have the money; you can take half a dozen
rivers, but all the millions of our host cannot purchase us a spate, and
without a spate you might as well break the law by fishing in the Round
Pond as in the river.'
'Luckily for me Alured does not much care for fishing,' said Lady Bude,
who was Merton's companion. The Countess had abandoned, much to her
lord's regret, the coloured and figurative language of her maiden days,
the American slang. Now (as may have been observed) her style was of
that polished character which can only be heard to perfection in circles
socially elevated and intellectually cultured--'in that Garden of the
Souls'--to quote Tennyson.
The spot where Merton and Lady Bude were seated was beautiful indeed.
They reclined on the short sea grass above a shore where long tresses of
saffron-hued seaweed clothed the boulders, and the bright sea pinks
blossomed. On their right the Skrae, now clearer than amber, mingled its
waters with the sea loch. On their left was a steep bank clad with
bracken, climbing up to perpendicular cliffs of basalt. These ended
abruptly above the valley and the cove, and permitted a view of the
Atlantic, in which, far away, the isle of the Lewis lay like a golden
shield in the faint haze of the early sunset. On the other side of the
sea loch, whose restless waters ever rushed in or out like a rapid river,
with the change of tides, was a small village of white thatched cottages,
the homes of fishermen and crofters. The neat crofts lay behind, in
oblong strips, on the side of the hill. Such was the scene of a
character common on the remote west coast of Sutherland.
'Alured is no maniac for fishing, luckily,' Lady Bude was saying. 'To-day
he is cat-hunting.'
'I regret it,' said Merton; 'I profess myself the friend of cats.'
'He is only trying to photograph a wild cat at home in the hills; they
are very scarce.'
'In fact he is Jones Harvey, the naturalist again, for the nonce, not the
sportsman,' said Merton.
'It was as Jones Harvey that he--' said Lady Bude, and, blushing,
stopped.
'That he grasped the skirts of happy chance,' said Merton.
'Why don't _you_ grasp the skirts, Mr. Merton?' asked Lady Bude. 'Chance,
or rather Lady Fortune, who wears the skirts, would, I think, be happy to
have them grasped.'
'Whose skirts do you allude to?'
'The skirts, short enough in the Highlands, of Miss Macrae,' said Lady
Bude; 'she is a nice girl, and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, and,
after all, there are worse things than millions.'
Miss Emmeline Macrae was the daughter of the host with whom the Budes and
Merton were staying at Skrae Castle, on Loch Skrae, only an easy mile and
a half from the sea and the cove beside which Merton and Lady Bude were
sitting.
'There is a seal crawling out on to the shore of the little island!' said
Merton. 'What a brute a man must be who shoots a seal! I could watch
them all day--on a day like this.'
'That is not answering my question,' said Lady Bude. 'What do you think
of Miss Macrae? I _know_ what you think!'
'Can a humble person like myself aspire to the daughter of the greatest
living millionaire? Our host can do almost anything but bring a spate,
and even _that_ he could do by putting a dam with a sluice at the foot of
Loch Skrae: a matter of a few thousands only. As for the lady, her heart
it is another's, it never can be mine.'
'Whose it is?' asked Lady Bude.
'Is it not, or do my trained instincts deceive me, that of young Blake,
the new poet? Is she not "the girl who gives to song what gold could
never buy"? He is as handsome as a man has no business to be.'
'He uses belladonna for his eyes,' said Lady Bude. 'I am sure of it.'
'Well, she does not know, or does not mind, and they are pretty
inseparable the last day or two.'
'That is your own fault,' said Lady Bude; 'you banter the poet so
cruelly. She pities him.'
'I wonder that our host lets the fellow keep staying here,' said Merton.
'If Mr. Macrae has a foible, except that of the pedigree of the Macraes
(who were here before the Macdonalds or Mackenzies, and have come back in
his person), it is scientific inventions, electric lighting, and his new
toy, the wireless telegraph box in the observatory. You can see the
tower from here, and the pole with box on top. I don't care for that
kind of thing myself, but Macrae thinks it Paradise to get messages from
the Central News and the Stock Exchange up here, fifty miles from a
telegraph post. Well, yesterday Blake was sneering at the whole affair.'
'What is this wireless machine? Explain it to me,' said Lady Bude.
'How can you be so cruel?' asked Merton.
'Why cruel?'
'Oh, you know very well how your sex receives explanations. You have
three ways of doing it.'
'Explain _them_!'
'Well, the first way is, if a man tries to explain what "per cent" means,
or the difference of "odds on," or "odds against," that is, if they don't
gamble, they cast their hands desperately abroad, and cry, "Oh, don't, I
never _can_ understand!" The second way is to sit and smile, and look
intelligent, and think of their dressmaker, or their children, or their
young man, and then to say, "Thank you, you have made it all so clear!"'
'And the third way?'
'The third way is for you to make it plain to the explainer that he does
not understand what he is explaining.'
'Well, try me; how does the wireless machine work?'
'Then, to begin with a simple example in ordinary life, you know what
telepathy is?'
'Of course, but tell me.'
'Suppose Jones is thinking of Smith, or rather of Smith's sister. Jones
is dying, or in a row, in India. Miss Smith is in Bayswater. She sees
Jones in her drawing-room. The thought of Jones has struck a receiver of
some sort in the brain, say, of Miss Smith. _But_ Miss Smith may not see
him, somebody else may, say her aunt, or the footman. That is because
the aunt or the footman has the properly tuned receiver in her or his
brain, and Miss Smith has not.'
'I see, so far--but the machine?'
'That is an electric apparatus charged with a message. The message is
not conducted by wires, but is merely carried along on a new sort of
waves, "Hertz waves," I think, but that does not matter. They roam
through space, these waves, and wherever they meet another machine of the
same kind, a receiver, they communicate it.'
'Then everybody who has such a machine as Mr. Macrae's gets all Mr.
Macrae's messages for nothing?' asked Lady Bude.
'They would get them,' said Merton. 'But that is where the artfulness
comes in. Two Italian magicians, or electricians, Messrs. Gianesi and
Giambresi, have invented an improvement suggested by a dodge of the
Indians on the Amazon River. They make machines which are only in tune
with each other. Their machine fires off a message which no other
machine can receive or tap except that of their customer, say Mr. Macrae.
The other receivers all over the world don't get it, they are not in
tune. It is as if Jones could only appear as a wraith to Miss Smith, and
_vice versa_.'
'How is it done?'
'Oh, don't ask me! Besides, I fancy it is a trade secret, the tuning.
There's one good thing about it, you know how Highland landscape is
spoiled by telegraph posts?'
'Yes, everywhere there is always a telegraph post in the foreground.'
'Well, Mr. Macrae had them when he was here first, but he has had them
all cut down, bless him, since he got the new dodge. He was explaining
it all to Blake and me, and Blake only scoffed, would not understand,
showed he was bored.'
'I think it delightful! What did Mr. Blake say?'
'Oh, his usual stuff. Science is an expensive and inadequate substitute
for poetry and the poetic gifts of the natural man, who is still extant
in Ireland. _He_ can flash his thoughts, and any trifles of news he may
pick up, across oceans and continents, with no machinery at all. What is
done in Khartoum is known the same day in Cairo.'
'What did Mr. Macrae say?'
'He asked why the Cairo people did not make fortunes on the Stock
Exchange.'
'And Mr. Blake?'
'He looked a great deal, but he said nothing. Then, as I said, he showed
that he was bored when Macrae exhibited to us the machine and tried to
teach us how it worked, and the philosophy of it. Blake did not
understand it, nor do I, really, but of course I displayed an intelligent
interest. He didn't display any. He said that the telegraph thing only
brought us nearer to all that a child of nature--'
'_He_ a child of nature, with his belladonna!'
'To all that a child of nature wanted to forget. The machine emitted a
serpent of tape, news of Surrey _v_. Yorkshire, and something about
Kaffirs, and Macrae was enormously pleased, for such are the simple joys
of the millionaire, really a child of nature. Some of them keep
automatic hydraulic organs and beastly machines that sing. Now Macrae is
not a man of that sort, and he has only one motor up here, and only uses
_that_ for practical purposes to bring luggage and supplies, but the
wireless thing is the apple of his eye. And Blake sneered.'
'He is usually very civil indeed, almost grovelling, to the father,' said
Lady Bude. 'But I tell you for your benefit, Mr. Merton, that he has no
chance with the daughter. I know it for certain. He only amuses her.
Now here, you are clever.'
Merton bowed.
'Clever, or you would not have diverted me from my question with all that
science. You are not ill looking.'
'Spare my blushes,' said Merton; adding, 'Lady Bude, if you must be
answered, _you_ are clever enough to have found me out.'
'That needed less acuteness than you suppose,' said the lady.
'I am very sorry to hear it,' said Merton. 'You know how utterly
hopeless it is.'
'There I don't agree with you,' said Lady Bude.
Merton blushed. 'If you are right,' he said, 'then I have no business to
be here. What am I in the eyes of a man like Mr. Macrae? An adventurer,
that is what he would think me. I did think that I had done nothing,
said nothing, looked nothing, but having the chance--well, I could not
keep away from her. It is not honourable. I must go. . . . I love
her.'
Merton turned away and gazed at the sunset without seeing it.
Lady Bude put forth her hand and laid it on his. 'Has this gone on
long?' she asked.
'Rather an old story,' said Merton. 'I am a fool. That is the chief
reason why I was praying for rain. She fishes, very keen on it. I would
have been on the loch or the river with her. Blake does not fish, and
hates getting wet.'
'You might have more of her company, if you would not torment the poet
so. The green-eyed monster, jealousy, is on your back.'
Merton groaned. 'I bar the fellow, anyhow,' he said. 'But, in any case,
now that I know _you_ have found me out, I must be going. If only she
were as poor as I am!'
'You can't go to-morrow, to-morrow is Sunday,' said Lady Bude. 'Oh, I am
sorry for you. Can't we think of something? Cannot you find an opening?
Do something great! Get her upset on the loch, and save her from
drowning! Mr. Macrae dotes on her; he would be grateful.'
'Yes, I might take the pin out of the bottom of the boat,' said Merton.
'It is an idea! But she swims at least as well as I do. Besides--hardly
sportsmanlike.'
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 500,000_l_. 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 AEginetan
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 the _Poetry 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?'