Red Rowans Part 7

"I'm afraid it is no use," he said despondently. "Too fine; besides, I haven't had my breakfast, and it is growing late. I'll get Cameron to come down afterwards and show me the casts. A river changes in ten years."

"You can't possibly judge from here; and I can show you the cast perfectly," she retorted. It had come to a stand-up fight with the gloves on between his will and hers, and accustomed as she was to instant submission from everybody of the opposite s.e.x, she would not confess her own defeat by getting rid of him with a crude dismissal.

To begin with he scarcely merited the insult, and, in addition, it might be awkward afterwards. So she pointed out the probable lie of the fish, and, her sporting instincts overcoming her contempt, exclaimed against the gaudy cast he selected--a cast no decent fish would have looked at except in flood time.

"No! no!" she cried, in real eagerness. "Something less like a firework, if you have one--a brown body and turkey wing. Ah! here's the very thing. I don't believe in the steel loops, though, do you--?

Will doesn't. And you have bridge rings I see; I never saw them before. They look good. Now then! Just below the break, down the slidy bit, and across to the ripple--Oh-h!"

The exclamation was caused by a fall as of a coiled hawser on the water, and a separate "blob" of each fly on the surface.

"You had better try again," she said gravely, "and don't thrash so; use your wrist."

"If there was more wind," he suggested.

"Nonsense! you ought to be able to throw that distance anyhow. It's all knack; it will come back after a cast or two. I'm sure it will."

Apparently she was wrong. The line ceased, it is true, to fall in a heap like an umbrella, yet failed by many feet to reach the break above the slidy bit.

"Give me the rod a moment," she cried, "and I'll show you the turn of the wrist. You'll recognise it then."

There was an instant's pause as she stood, one foot planted against a stone, her lithe figure thrown backwards, her chin following the little toss of her head, tilted sideways; so that her eager young face was in full view of her companion; and then the long line flew out in the spey cast and seemed to nestle down just where the water broke.

"Bravo!" cried Captain Macleod, as much to the picture as to the skill. And then before he could say another word came an eddy, a noise like the cloop of a cork, a glint of a silvery side, and the whirr of the reel. Things to drive all else from a fisherman's brain.

"In to him!" shouted the Captain, excitedly; "and a beauty, too. No!

no; keep it. I'd rather you kept it! I'd like to see you land him--if you can."

The implied doubt, joined to the vicious shooting of something like a huge silver whiting with its tail in its mouth into the air, warning the girl of the danger of a slack line, had the desired effect. She set her teeth and gave herself up to repairing the error of indecision. The fish, having got his head, was now further down the pool than he should have been, and close to an ugly snag, towards which he bored with the strange cunning which seems born in fish.

Marjory gave him the b.u.t.t bravely, but he fought like a demon, and for one instant the reel gave out an ominous clicking.

"Perhaps I had better," came an eager voice beside her. "It is heavier than I thought."

"Please not! Please let me keep it now! I'd rather lose him--there!" A rapid wind-up emphasised her excitement. "I can manage him, you see--if you will go down--there by the white stones--I'll get him into the shallow--the tackle is so light I can scarcely bring him up--and--and--don't be in a hurry--I'll bring him in right over the click."

The old imperiousness was back in full swing, and once again she had a willing slave, eager as she was for the sight of something long and brown curving, snakelike, into the shallow as if of its own free will, or coming in despairingly "this side up." It was a sharp, swift struggle, all the sharper and swifter because of that ominous snag over the way; and then an eight-pound grilse with the sea-lice still on him lay on the bank.

"Oh! What a beautiful creature! One of the prettiest I have ever seen," cried Marjory, ecstatically, on her knees beside the prize.

"Very much so, indeed." Captain Macleod's voice was absent, and his eyes were not on the fish. "You killed him splendidly."

The light went out of the girl's face; she rose to her feet slowly.

"I wish I had given you the rod," she said, still looking down on the palpitating, quivering bar of silver.

"That is most forgiving of you!"

She turned upon him almost indignantly. "Oh! I wasn't thinking of all that--that stuff! I was thinking--it seems so cruel."

"Many things seem so afterwards. One might spend a lifetime in regretting, if it was worth it; but it isn't."

"Isn't it? I wish anyhow that I hadn't killed that fish."

"Why not go further back, and wish you hadn't interfered to safe my cast? for, as it happens, the one you chose out was the very one Fate had ordained should remain in an alder bush----"

"Perhaps I do," she replied stiffly, realising how he had played upon her for the first time. The knowledge, rather to her own surprise, brought tears to her eyes.

"I don't wonder that you regret having helped me," he said with a sudden change of manner. "If you will tell me where to leave the fish I will no longer trouble you. I am sorry for having given you so much already."

There was no mistaking the hidden depth of his apology. As he stood there in the sunlight, looking at her gravely, Marjory felt to the full the charm of his gracious presence. Who could really be angry with him for such a trifle? For it was a trifle after all.

"My name is Marjory Carmichael," she said briefly, "and I live at the Lodge with the Camerons. But I don't want the fish. I don't indeed."

"Then you shall not have it. I owe you some obedience, do I not?--and thanks beyond measure."

He stood there with his cap off smiling at her, and she, feeling apologetic in her turn, hesitated. After all, if he was going her way it would be foolishness itself to tramp that mile and a half with an interval of fifty yards or so between them.

"And now I must emulate your skill," he said cheerfully, "though I can't expect your luck." And as she moved away she saw his flies settle softly as thistledown in the right place. Well! that was better than keeping up the pretence.

As for him, though he continued to fish conscientiously, his thoughts were with the figure of the retreating girl. She had amused him and interested him greatly. A relation, he supposed, of Dr. Carmichael's; in fact, he had a dim recollection of a curly-haired child scampering about on a Sheltie ten years before; though he had never known the doctor, who had lived as a recluse. But how came she here still, and with the Camerons? A cut above them surely! By Jove! how she had hung on to that grilse, and how nearly she had cried over it afterwards.

Maudlin sentimentality, of course, and yet he had felt the same a hundred times over a wounded deer. The look in her eyes had been like that, somehow; uncommonly pretty eyes they were, too, into the bargain!

CHAPTER V.

Paul Macleod sate in the business-room, where so many lairds of Gleneira had received rents and signed cheques, playing his part with great propriety, much to Will Cameron's delight and astonishment.

Captain Macleod was, undoubtedly, the laird, and as such bound to a semi-parental interest in every living thing, to say nothing of every stick and stone about the old place. On the other hand, he had been away in a perfectly different environment for nearly ten years, and it seemed nothing short of marvellous to the factor that he should remember every farmer and cottier, nay, more, their wives, and sons, and daughters, by name. And so, perhaps it was; though, to tell truth, the mental qualities it represented were small, being no more nor less than a quick responsiveness to the renewal of past sensation; that very responsiveness which ten years before had made Paul shrink from giving an unpleasant memory a place in his life. Moralists are apt to sneer at the popularity which the possessor of this faculty enjoys; and, of course, it is easy to cheapen the sympathy of the man, who when he sees you, is instantly reminded of all the past connected with you in detail, and proceeds to inquire eagerly about your ox and a.s.s, your manservant and your maidservant, and everything that is within your gate. Yet, when all is said and done, and though he certainly gives the false impression that these things have never been out of his mind, the gift is not only an enviable one, but in itself argues a quicker sensibility than that possessed by his more stolid, if more honest, neighbours.

So there was no effort to Paul Macleod in taking up the thread of his past life at Gleneira; at the same time, he felt no more regret at hearing, as he did through Will's answers to his inquiries, of Jeanie Duncan's death, somewhere in the vague South country, than he did for many another item of news. Partly because that old life had really pa.s.sed out of existence for him altogether, and partly because Will, being a good-natured kindly soul, said nothing about the child which poor old Peggy had brought with her. There are many men of this sort--more men for the matter of that than there are women--who hate to face the sad aspect of life, and slur over a painful story whenever they can.

Thus Captain Macleod was able to quit the past and plunge into the future without even the slight regret which the news must have brought him; for in his way he had really loved Jeanie, and the thought that his admirable self-sacrifice had not availed to keep her memory pleasant, would have been a distinct annoyance. As it was, he began at once on plans and arrangements, which convinced Will Cameron that the laird must be going, unconsciously, to follow his advice, and marry a rich wife. Nothing else could explain the fact that Gleneira House had to be generally smartened up for the present, pending more solid repairs during winter, that carriages and horses had to be bought at once, and preparations of all sorts made for the houseful of guests which would come with the shooting season. In the matter of slates, gla.s.s, stables, and garden, Will Cameron felt himself equal to the occasion, but when chintzes and furniture came under discussion he meekly suggested a reference to Maples', or Morris, or his mother.

"I should prefer Mrs. Cameron," replied the laird, with a laugh. "If I wanted the other sort of thing my sister Blanche would do it for me fast enough. Take a brougham by the day--to save her own horse, you know--and re-create poor old Gleneira. First day, paper, painting, draping; second day, furnishing; third day, creeping things innumerable--you know them. Chenille things climbing up the lamp, a j.a.panese toad on the writing-table, and a spider on the edge of a teacup." He rose and went to the window. "But that sort of thing is desecration of this," he went on, looking out on the opalescent shimmer of sea and sky and hills; "though it does well enough in South Kensington. I never could fit myself out, even in clothes, with a view to both hemispheres, and though some folk profess to prepare for heaven and enjoy earth at the same time, I'm not made that way."

He pulled himself up with an airy smile, and turned round again.

"So let us be off to Mrs. Cameron, and perhaps that young lady who is staying with you--I met her by the river this morning----"

"Marjory," put in Will, eagerly; "why, yes, of course, she is the very person we want--has awfully good taste."

"Indeed," said the other, smiling again. He was thinking that in that case he could not claim distinction since she had not favoured him with much of her approval. Not that it mattered, since he had quite made up his mind that during the next few weeks, before his married sister came to do hostess, Marjory would be a decided acquisition to the limited society at his command; for Paul was distinctly gregarious in his tastes. It did not take much to amuse him; but he needed some gentle interest to start the wheels of his pleasure, and that interest was, preferably, a woman. So, being able thus to combine duty and amus.e.m.e.nt by a visit to the Lodge, he calmly suggested an adjournment on the spot, to which Will agreed, blissfully oblivious of the fact that not half-an-hour before he had left his mother in the agonies of redding up the best parlour, with a view to the laird's expected visit in the afternoon.

No doubt when the women of the future have won large interests for themselves, such a spectacle as Mrs. Cameron presented when she saw two tweed-clad figures lounging up the path together will be impossible. Even nowadays the attempt to describe her feelings must fall far short of the reality, since few of this generation can grasp the mental position of the last, and Mrs. Cameron belonged to the generation before that. Of far better birth than many a farmer's wife who would be ashamed at being discovered engaged in household work, Mrs. Cameron would as a rule have gloried in what was to her the sole aim and object of woman's creation; but this was no ordinary occasion; how could that be one which necessitated clean muslin curtains at a time when clean muslin curtains should not be, a cake made after her mother's original recipe baking in the oven, and a bottle of her dead husband's very best Madeira waiting to be decanted on the sideboard?

She stood transfixed on the steps, in the very act of running a tape through the stiffened hem of the curtain, an operation which in itself had reduced her patience to the lowest ebb; and then, after an instant's pause, her resentment found an outlet in one expressive epithet.

"The Gowk!" For it was Will's fault, of course; had not the lad been a perfect dispensation ever since he was born? (this being her favourite word for describing all the inevitable trials of her life). Besides, after the manner of most housewifely women, she always visited any failure in domestic arrangements on the head of the nearest male belonging to the family. No one but a man, no one but a man, sent to make _her_ life a burden, could have been guilty of such a disgraceful blunder, when a word, a hint, could have kept the laird from coming until the afternoon. The conviction brought a sort of martyred resignation with it, as she continued in a lower key, "and the parlour as bare as the loof o' my hand, save for the tea leaves on the drugget."