The Disentanglers Part 53

XII. ADVENTURE OF THE CANADIAN HEIRESS

I. At Castle Skrae

'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 gra.s.s above a sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.e.x 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 s.p.a.ce, 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?'