CHAPTER XXVI
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.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE TIDE-RACE OF SULISCANNA
Kate McGhie stood looking across the boiling, hillocky water of the Suck of Suliscanna in the direction of the boat, which moment by moment blackened and grew larger, rising steadily towards her out of the east. The day was so still, the tide so smooth as it swept inshore after passing the oily "bullers" of the roost, that she had no idea of the world of danger those in the adventurous bark had to pass before her prow could grate on the white sand of the landing-beach between the opposing headlands of Aionaig and Lianacraig.
Kate's heart beat strangely, almost painfully. It was wonderful, she thought, that men should undergo perils and cross a world's seas for a simple girl's sake. Yet there was pleasure, too, in the thought; for somehow she knew that those who approached loved her and came from far seeking her good.
"It is he – it is surely he!" so her soul chanted its glad triumph within her. "Did I not say that he could break prison-bands and come to find me – that he would overpass unruly seas only to look on my face? Has any maid in the world a lover true like mine? And he will break my prison also and take me away. And with him I am ready to go to the ends of the earth, fearlessly as though he had been my mother."
Poor lassie! Little she knew the long, weary travel she had before her ere it could come to that.
But even as she watched she became conscious of a quick stir and movement among the usually so indolent islanders behind her. Hardly she dared to lift her eyes from the approaching boat, which came on with a little square sail rigged on a temporary mast as long as the wind held, and then with flashing dips of rhythmic oars whenever the breeze dropped away.
The voices of the men of Suliscanna crying harshly to each other among the craig-heads and cliff-edges high above her sounded to Kate's ears like a louder brawling of the sea-fowl. The sound had an edge on it, shrill, keen, and bitter as the east wind in mid-January. Yet there was something in it, too, of new. The girl had heard the like of it before, at the kennels of Cumlodan, when the bloodhounds for the Whig-tracking were waiting to be fed, and springing up with their feet on the bars.
"Eh, sirs me! Guid help the poor souls that are in that boat; they will either gang doon bodily to feed the fish, or else be casten up in gobbets the size o' my neive upon the shore!" cried the voice of Mrs. McAlister at Kate's elbow.
"They can never weather it, and if they do they are naught advantaged, after all. For the men of the isle are that worked upon with the fear of my lord, and his threat to clean them off the isle of Suliscanna, like a count off a bairn's slate, if they let the lass escape, that they declare they will slay the poor lads so soon as ever they set foot on the land, if, indeed, they ever win as far."
In her agitated preoccupation the tall woman from Ayrshire had let her hair fall in a bushy mass over her back, as it was her habit to do in the evenings after supper when preparing for bed. She kept working at it nervously while she watched, twisting up its comely masses in order to fix them in their places with bone pins; and, anon, as the boat tacked shorter and shorter to avoid this hidden peril and that, pulling them out and letting it fall again in wavy coils, so overpowering had become her agitation.
Suddenly startled by a peculiar wavering cry from the hill, she took Kate's hand and ran with her along the path which led to the rocks of Lianacraig.
"Ye will never be for thinking," Bess Landsborough said to the girl as they ran, "that this is him that likes ye – the lad ye left in the Tolbooth irons in Holland, gotten free and come after ye?"
But Kate only clasped her friend's hand tighter and answered nothing.
"Poor lass! poor lass!" she said. "Ye believe that your lad would do as muckle for you after a' that has come and gane between ye. But lads are not what they were in my young days! Pray God that ye may be mistaken, for gin this be your lad come seeking ye, I fear he is as good as dead either from the sharp rocks of Suliscanna or from the sharper knives of the wild McAlisters."
From the southern ridge of the headland of Lianacraig Kate and her companion could look almost directly down upon the gambols of the treacherous Suck of Suliscanna. The boat lay clear to their sight upon the surface of the sea – two men in her, one sitting with the rope of the sheet in his hand, and the other at the stern with an oar to turn her off from the hidden dangers, as the seething run of the tidal currents brought her head on to some sunken reef or dangerous skerry. Sometimes, ere the voyagers could tack or turn in their unsailorlike fashion, a white spurt of foam would suddenly spring up under their very bows as a swell from the Atlantic lumbered lazily in, or again a backdraw of the current would swirl upward from some submarine ledge and raise a great breaking pyramid of salt-water on a spot where a moment before there had been only the smooth hiss of water moving very swiftly.
The islanders, who alone realized the terrible danger of the two in the boat, lay for the most part wholly silent, some on the cliff's immediate edge, and others behind little sodded breastworks which had been erected, partly to keep the wind off, when, as now, they kept watch from their posts of observation, and partly for the drying of their winter's fuel.
Mistress McAlister indicated the eager gazers with her elbows.
"See the Heelantmen," she said; "they are a' up there! Lord, what Christians! The verra minister is amang them himsel' – they canna help it. The spirit is on them ever since langsyne the Spaniard's ship drave in, and brocht a' that peltry of mahogany aumries and wrought cupboards, and forbye the queer fashions of knitting that the sailor folk of the crew learned them after they wan ashore. But they learn little from them that's shipwrecked on Suliscanna noo. For them that's no deid corpses before they come to land get a bit clour wi' a stane that soon puts them oot o' conceit wi' a' this world o' sin and suffering."
Kate's face was white and drawn, but she hardly noticed the woman's fell prophecies.
For all the while the two men in the boat were laboring hard, fighting tensely for life, and every eye on the island was upon them. They had reached one of the smoothest and therefore most dangerous places, when suddenly the black back of a skip-jack dolphin curved over like a mill-wheel beside the boat, and a hoarse shout went up from the islanders of Suliscanna, who lay breathlessly waiting the event on the rocks of Lianacraig.
"It's a' by wi' the poor lads noo!" said Bess McAlister, "a' but the warsle in the water and the grip o' the saut in their thrapples! The deil's ain beast is doon there watching for them."
"God help my Wat!" sobbed Kate, half to herself and half to the Divinity – who, as the Good Book says, can do wonders in the great waters.
"Aye, 'deed, lass, as ye say, God help him! He never had mair need. The dead-fish are louping for him and the other with him."
Just at this moment Kate uttered a cry and clasped her hands, for the boat was heaved up from the side nearest the cliffs on the summit of a toppling pyramid of water. The mast fell over, and the whole breadth of the sail hugged the surface of the sea. Then the swirling tide-race took hold of her and sucked her under. In a smooth sea, without a particle of wind, the two men went down within cry of the rocks of Suliscanna, and not a hand could be stretched out to save them. Only now and then something black, a wet, air-filled blob of the sail, the surge-tossed back of a man, or the angle of the boat, showed dark for a moment upon the surface of the pale water, and then was carried under, all racing northward in the grip of the angry tide current.
Kate McGhie had fallen on her knees.
"God forgive his sins and take me soon to him!" she said.
"Wheest, lass! Nae Papist prayers in my hearin'," said Mrs. McAlister in her ear. "Gin that be your lad, he's dead and gane. And that's a hantle better than dying on the gully-knives of the McAlisters."
At the sight of the disaster beneath them on the wrinkled face of the water, all the islanders had leaped suddenly erect behind their shelters and craggy hiding-places. Each man stood with his head thrown forward in an attitude of the most intent watchfulness. And once when the stern of the boat cocked up, and a man's arm rose like the fin of a fish beside it for a moment, every son of Alister expelled the long-withholden air from his lungs in a sonorous "Hough!" which indicated that in his opinion all was over. Instantly the islanders of Suliscanna collected here and there, at likely places along the shore, into quick-gathering knots and clusters which dissolved as quickly. They discussed the disaster from every point of view. The minister was specially active, going about from group to group.
"We must e'en submit," he was saying; "it is the will of God. And, after all, though both men and boat had been cast ashore, it is little likely that they would have had anything worth lifting on them. They were just poor bodies that by misadventure have been cast away in a fog, and would have no other gear about them save the clothes on their backs."
But Alister McAlister was of another mind.
"Work like this is enough to make an unbeliever out of a God-fearing man," he affirmed to his intimates, "to see what Providence will permit – a good fishing-boat with a mast and sail in the charge of two landward men that did not even know where to let her go to pieces, so that Christians and men of sense might get some good of her. For the fools let her sink plumb down in the Suck of Suliscanna, instead of driving her straight inshore against the hill of Aoinaig, whence she would have come safe as weed-drift to our very feet."
And there were more of Alister's opinion than of the minister's, whose spiritual consolation was discounted, at any rate, by the fact that he was officially compelled to speak well of Providence.
But before long there was another sound on the Isle of Suliscanna. Away on the edge of the bay, under the cliffs, a group of men was to be seen grappling some object which repeatedly slipped from their poles between two long shore-skirting reefs. It lay black and limp in the water, and again and again, breaking from their hands, it returned to the push of the tide in the narrow gut with a splash of flaccid weight.
"Lord, what's yon they hae gotten?" cried Mistress McAlister, as soon as she had seen the figures of the men collecting about the thing, like carrion-crows gathering about a dead sheep on the hill. "Thank God, my Alister loon is away south'ard on the heuchs of Lianacraig!"
She stood on tiptoe and looked for the flash of the killing knife or the dull crash of the stone with which commonly the wreckers insured silence and safety when any came alive ashore along with wreckage of price from the great waters.
The heads of the men were all bent inward, but Bess Landsborough saw no threatening movement of their arms nor yet any signs of a struggle.
She would have drawn Kate away from the scene, but the girl by her side suddenly wrenched herself free, and, plucking up her skirts in her hands, ran hot-foot for the northern shore.
CHAPTER XXVIII
JOHN SCARLETT COMES ASHORE
Kate's sojourn on the island had given her back all her girlish spring of carriage and swift grace of movement. Fleet and light as a goat she sped over the short turf and threaded the sharp shark's fins of the black basaltic ridges, her eyes fixed upon the shifting groups on the shore.
Was her love lying there dead before her, or at least in utmost danger of his life? The men stood so close together, all looking inward and downward, that Kate was among them before any one saw her come. She cleft a way through the shouldering press, and there on the wet pebbles of the beach, dragged just a few yards from the shore on which a back-draught from the smooth glides and rattling currents of the tide-race of Suliscanna had cast him, lay the body of John Scarlett.
Kate gave a sharp cry, half of disappointment and half of relief. Her love it was not; but his friend it was. And if this were John Scarlett, where would Wat Gordon be by this time – of a surety lying deep in the green heave of some far-reaching "gloop," or battered against the cruel cliffs of the "goës," into which the surges swelled and thundered, throwing themselves in bootless assault upon the perpendicular cliffs, and fretting their pure green arches into delicatest gray lace of foam and little white cataracts which came pouring back into the gloomy depths along every crevice and over every ledge.
John Scarlett lay with his broad chest naked and uncovered, for his coat and waistcoat had already become centres of two separate quarrels, shrill and contentious as the bickerings of sparrows over the worm which they hold by either end and threaten to rend in pieces.
Patterns of muskets and sword-blades were wrought upon the veteran's breast in a fashion which was then common to all men of adventuring – land travellers and seafarers alike. The old soldier's arms and breast were a mass of scars and cicatrices, both from his many public campaigns and from his innumerable excursions upon the field of private honor.
"This has been a man indeed," said one of the men that stood by; "many a knife has been tried on that skin, and many, I warrant, gat deeper holes and deadlier cuts than these in the making of this pretty patchwork."
"He is an enemy of the chief, that is beyond a doubt," said another; "for he is not a man of the isles, and our Lord Murdo forbade the coming of any else. It will be safer to stick him with a gully-knife before he comes to, lest a worst thing happen us."
And it is likely that this amiable intention might have become the finding and conclusion of the meeting, but that at that moment Kate pierced the throng and threw herself down on the salt, clammy pebbles at John Scarlett's head. She put her hand upon his heart, but could not feel it beat. Before long she was reinforced by Mrs. McAlister, who arrived panting. She swept the men unceremoniously aside with her arm, and addressed them in their own tongue, in words which carried insult and railing in the very sound of them.
The two women had not worked long at the chill, sea-tossed body of the master-at-arms before John Scarlett opened his eyes and looked about him.
"Bess Landsborough!" he said, without manifesting the least surprise, "what for did ye no' meet me at the kirk stile of Colmonel, where I trysted wi' ye?"
"John Scarlett!" cried Mrs. McAlister, "I declare in the name o' a' that's holy, Jack Scarlett, the King's Dragoon – what in the world has brocht ye here, lying bare and broadcast on the cauld stanes of Suliscanna?"
"I cam' seekin' you, Bess," said John Scarlett, easing himself up on his elbow with a grimace of pain. "I heard in Colmonel that ye had kilted your coats o' green satin and awa' wi' John Hielandman. So I e'en cam' round this gate to see if ye had tired o' him."
"And I see that, dead or alive, ye can lie as gleg as ever – certes, there never was a dragoon that was single-tongued, since Satan made the first o' that evil clan oot o' the red cinders of hell!" answered Mistress McAlister, vigorously.
"Weel, Bess, it skills little," replied Scarlett, rising slowly to a sitting posture. "But if ye would prevail on these honest men to withdraw a little and not glower at my nakedness, as if they had never in their lives before cast eyes on a man that has had a wash, it is greatly grateful I will be, and forgive you that little mislippen about the tryst."
As John Scarlett turned himself about, he pressed Kate's hand sharply to intimate that he desired her to pretend complete ignorance of his person and purpose. But the fear which now had become almost a certainty, that she had seen her lover go down in the tide-race of Suliscanna, dominated her heart. She was scarce conscious of the meeting of John Scarlett and his ancient sweetheart, but continued to gaze steadily and with straining eyes out upon the smooth and treacherous swirls of the Suck.
"Have ye a cloak or a plaid, Bess, that I may gird myself with it, and go decently to my quarters – unless these gentlemen still desire to finish me here?" asked Scarlett, calmly.
Whereat the wife of Alister drew a plaid of rough brown wool from the shoulders of the man nearest to her and cast it about him. By this time Scarlett had managed to stand upon his feet, and even to walk a few steps along the pebbles of the shore. All Suliscanna was now gathered about the new-comer, and on the skirts of the crowd the minister and Alister stood apart with bent brows in anxious consultation.
"It is the chief's order!" said the minister. "We will have to answer for it with our lives if we do not ward him safely."
"In the vaults of the tower will be the best and securest place," answered Alister.
Then, with no more words spoken, Alister McAlister stepped up to his wife, and, seizing her by the arm, said, "This is chief's business – do as I bid you, now!"
And Mrs. McAlister knew that the time had come for her to obey. For well as she could make the burly dhuine wassail do her bidding when the business was his own or hers, Bess never put her general supremacy to the test by offering resistance to her husband's will when the clan or the chief were in question.
"Tell the Lowland man," said Alister, looking his wife straight in the eyes, "that it is the order of the chief that he be warded till we hear what is to be done with him. We did not ask him to come to Suliscanna, and we must see that he does not invite himself quietly away again now that he is here. He is to bide in the tower at our house-end, and ye can boil him Lowland brose as muckle as ever he can sup, since ye seem to be so well acquainted with his kind of folk."
When Mistress McAlister had interpreted this to John Scarlett, the old campaigner gave the brown plaid a twirl about his shoulders, and crying, "Content – lead on!" accepted the situation with a soldier's philosophy.
The ancient tower of Suliscanna, in which Scarlett presently found himself, was no extensive castle, but simply a half-ruinous block-house constructed for defence by some former lords of the isle. The upper part was a mere shell in which Alister's wild goats were sometimes penned, when for some herdsman's purpose they had been collected in the vicinity of the huts by the expectation of the spare crystals of salt when the pans were drawn. But underneath there was a vaulted dungeon still strong and intact. This subterranean "strength" possessed a door of solid wood – a rare thing in Suliscanna – brought at some remote period from the main-land; for, save drif-twood, there is no plant thicker-stemmed than the blackberry to be found on all these outermost islands of the sea. This door was secured by a ponderous lock, the bolt of which ran into the stone for nearly two feet, while the wood of which it was composed was studded with great iron nails and covered with hide like a targe. It was the sole article of value which had been left in the ancient tower when my lord's new house was built farther up the hill.
The tower stood at the summit of the first ascent of the island, close beside the cottage of Alister McAlister – of which, indeed, very characteristically and economically, it formed the gable-end. Heather bloomed close up to the door of it, and looked into the dungeon at every narrow peep-hole, so that when Scarlett set his head to one of these he found himself staring into a fairy forest of rose and green, in which the muir-fowl crouched and the grasshoppers chirred.
John Scarlett found that during the time he had been conferring with the representative of the Lord of the Small Isles and his wife Bess upon the pebbles of the beach, a bed of fragrant heather tops had been made for him by the clansmen in this arched and airy sleeping-place. Alister went in with him, glanced comprehensively around, and nodded.
"Now you will be comfortable and make yourself at home," the action said. And John Scarlett smiled back at his taciturn jailer. For indeed, except the stone seat which ran round the vault, and the new-laid bed of heather tops in the corner, the available accommodations of the Tower of Suliscanna consisted exclusively of an uneven area of hard-beaten earthen floor made visible by the light of half a dozen narrow port-holes, which looked in different directions out upon the moor and through the gable against the dark wall of Bess Landsborough's house.
Alister locked the dungeon door by turning the huge key with a spar of driftwood thrust through the head of it like the bar of a capstan. Then he called to him a shaggy gillie and bade him watch the door on the peril of his head. Whereupon the red-headed Gael grinned obediently, pulled himself an armful of heather, and effectually double-locked the door by stretching himself across the entrance with his hand on his dirk and his sword naked by his side.