I
By the look of her she might have been a queen, or a princess, or at the
very least a duchess. But she was no one of these. She was only a
commoner--a plain miss, though very far from plain. Which is
extraordinary when you consider that the blood of the Bruce flowed with
exceeding liveliness in her veins, together with the blood of many
another valiant Scot--Randolph, Douglas, Campbell--who bled with Bruce
or for him.
With the fact that she was not at the very least a duchess, _most_ of
her temporal troubles came to an abrupt end. When she tired of her
castle at Beem-Tay she could hop into her motor-car and fly down the
Great North Road to her castle at Brig O'Dread. This was a fifty-mile
run, and from any part of the road she could see land that belonged to
her--forest, farm, and moor. If the air at Beem-Tay was too formal, or
the keep at Brig O'Dread too gloomy, she could put up at any of her
half-dozen shooting lodges, built in wild, inaccessible, wild-fowly
places, and shake the dust of the world from her feet, and tread, just
under heaven, upon the heather.
But mixed up with all this fine estate was one other temporal trouble.
For, over and above the expenses of keeping the castles on a good
footing, and the shooting lodges clean and attractive, and the motor-car
full of petrol, and the horses full of oats, and the lawns empty of
weeds, and the glass houses full of fruit, she had no money whatsoever.
She could not sell any of her land because it was entailed--that is, it
really belonged to somebody who didn't exist; she couldn't sell her
diamonds, for the same reason; and she could not rent any of her
shootings, because her ancestors had not done so. I honestly believe
that a sixpence of real money looked big to her.
Her first name was the same as that of the Lady of the Lake--Ellen. Her
last name was McTavish--if she had been a man she would have been The
McTavish (and many people did call her that)--and her middle names were
like the sands of the sea in number, and sounded like bugles blowing a
charge--Campbell and Cameron, Dundee and Douglas. She had a family
tartan--heather brown, with Lincoln green tit-tat-toe crisscrosses--and
she had learned how to walk from a thousand years of strong-walking
ancestors. She had her eyes from the deepest part of a deep moorland
loch, her cheeks from the briar rose, some of the notes of her voice
from the upland plover, and some from the lark. And her laugh was like
an echo of the sounds that the River Tay makes when it goes among
the shallows.
One day she was sitting all by herself in the Seventh Drawing Room
(forty feet by twenty-four) of Brig O'Dread Castle, looking from a
fourteen-foot-deep window embrasure, upon the brig itself, the river
rushing under it, and the clean, flowery town upon both banks. From most
of her houses she could see nothing but her own possessions, but from
Brig O'Dread Castle, standing, as it did, in one corner of her estates,
she could see past her entrance gate, with its flowery, embattled lodge,
a little into the outside world. There were tourists whirling by in
automobiles along the Great North Road, or parties of Scotch gypsies,
with their dark faces and ear-rings, with their wagons and folded tents,
passing from one good poaching neighborhood to the next. Sometimes it
amused her to see tourists turned from her gates by the proud porter who
lived in the lodge; and on the present occasion, when an automobile
stopped in front of the gate and the chauffeur hopped out and rang the
bell, she was prepared to be mildly amused once more in the same way.
The proud porter emerged like a conquering hero from the lodge, the
pleated kilt of the McTavish tartan swinging against his great thighs,
his knees bare and glowing in the sun, and the jaunty Highland bonnet
low upon the side of his head. He approached the gate and began to
parley, but not with the chauffeur; a more important person (if
possible) had descended from the car--a person of unguessable age, owing
to automobile goggles, dressed in a London-made shooting suit of tweed,
and a cap to match. The parley ended, the stranger appeared to place
something in the proud porter's hand; and the latter swung upon his heel
and strode up the driveway to the castle. Meanwhile the stranger
remained without the gate.
Presently word came to The McTavish, in the Seventh Drawing Room, that
an American gentleman named McTavish, who had come all the way from
America for the purpose, desired to read the inscriptions upon the
McTavish tombstones in the chapel of Brig O'Dread Castle. The porter,
who brought this word himself, being a privileged character, looked very
wistful when he had delivered it--as much as to say that the frightful
itching of his palm had not been as yet wholly assuaged. The
McTavish smiled.
"Bring the gentleman to the Great Tower door, McDougall," she said,
"and--I will show him about, myself."
The proud porter's face fell. His snow-white _mustachios_ took on a
fuller droop.
"McDougall," said The McTavish--and this time she laughed aloud--"if
the gentleman from America crosses my hand with silver, it shall
be yours."
"More like"--and McDougall became gloomier still--"more like he will
cross it with gold." (Only he said this in a kind of dialect that was
delightful to hear, difficult to understand, and would be insulting to
the reader to reproduce in print.)
"If it's gold," said The McTavish sharply, "I'll not part wi' it,
McDougall, and you may lay to that."
You might have thought that McDougall had been brought up in the Black
Hole of Calcutta--so sad he looked, and so hurt, so softly he left the
room, so loudly he closed the door.
The McTavish burst into laughter, and promised herself, not without some
compunction, to hand over the gold to McDougall, if any should
materialize. Next she flew to her dressing-room and made herself look as
much like a gentlewoman's housekeeper as she could in the few minutes at
her disposal. Then she danced through a long, dark passageway, and
whisked down a narrow winding stair, and stood at last in the door of
the Great Tower in the sunlight. And when she heard the stranger's feet
upon the gravel she composed her face; and when he appeared round the
corner of a clipped yew she rattled the keys at her belt and bustled on
her feet, as becomes a housekeeper, and bobbed a courtesy.
The stranger McTavish was no more than thirty. He had brown eyes, and
wore upon his face a steady, enigmatic smile.