Lochinvar: A Novel

At this time Fiara was wholly without inhabitant, and remained as it had come from the shaping hand of the tides and waves. And so mainly it abides to this day. The islanders of Suliscanna had indeed a few sheep and goats upon it, the increase of which they used to harvest when my Lord of Barra's factor came once a year in his boat to take his tithes of the scanty produce of their barren fortress isle.

It was, then, upon the northern shore of this islet of Fiara that Wat, exhausted with the stress and the rough, deadly horseplay of the waves, was cast ashore still grasping his oar. He landed upon a long spit of sand which stretched out at an obtuse angle into the scour of the race, forming a bar which was perpetually being added to by the tide and swept away again when the winds and the waters fought over it their duels to the death in the time of storm.

Thus Wat Gordon found himself destitute and without helper upon this barren isle of Fiara. His companion he had seen sink beneath the waves, and he well knew that it was far out of the power of the soldier Scarlett to reach the shore by swimming. Also he had seen him entangled in the cordage of the sail. So Wat heaved a sigh for the good comrade whom he had brought away from the solvent paymasters and the excellently complaisant landladies of Amersfort, to lay his bones for his sake upon the inhospitable shores of Suliscanna – and, what was worse, without advantage to the quest upon which they had ventured forth with so much recklessness.

Wat knew certainly that his love was upon that island of Suliscanna. For months he had carefully traced her northward. With the aid of Madcap Mehitabel he had been able to identify the spot at which the chief's boat had taken off Captain Smith's passenger, and a long series of trials and failures had at last designated Suliscanna as the only possible prison of his love.

So soon as he was certain of this he had come straight to the spot with the reckless confidence of youth, only to see his hopes shattered upon the natural defences of the isle, before ever he had a chance to encounter the other enemies whom, he doubted not, Barra had set to guard the prison of Kate of the Dark Lashes.

But even in his sad and apparently hopeless plight the knowledge that his love was near by stimulated Wat's desire to make the best of his circumstances.

First of all he set himself the task of exploring the islet, and of discovering if there was any way by which he could reach that other island, past which he had been carried by the current of the race, and on which he hoped to find his love.

From the summit of the south-looking crags of Fiara which he ascended, he could look up at a perpendicular face of vast and gloomy cliffs. Lianacraig fronted him, solid and unbroken on either side as far as he could see. That lower part of it on which the surf fretted and the swell thundered was broken by caves and openings – none of them, save one, of any great size.

But that one made a somewhat notable exception. It was a gateway, wide and high, squarely cut in the black front of the precipice, into which one might have driven two carriages, with all their horses and attendants, abreast, and yet have left room to spare on either side. The swell which pulsed along the narrow strait between Fiara and Suliscanna, regular as the beating of a strong man's heart, was lost within its wide maw, and did not as elsewhere come pouring back again in tessellated foam, white as milk curdled in a churn. The square tunnel to which this was the imposing entrance evidently penetrated far into the rock, and communicated with some larger cavity deep within.

The rest of the isle, which had so unexpectedly become Wat's prison-house, was cut on its northerly aspect into green flats of sparse grass, terminating in sweet sickle-sweeps of yellow sand, over which the cool, green luxury of the sea lapped with a gliding motion. And as Wat looked down upon them from above he saw lights wavering and swaying over the clean-rippled floor, and could fancy that he discerned the fishes wheeling and steering among the bent rays and wandering shadows that flickered and danced like sunshine through thick leaves.

So Wat stood a long time still upon the topmost crest of Fiara, printing its possibilities upon his heart.

Two hundred yards across the smooth, unvexed strait, which slept between its two mighty walls of rock, rose the giant cliffs of Lianacraig, with the ocean-swell passing evenly along their base from end to end – smooth, green steeps of water, dimpled everywhere into knolls and valleys. Seabirds nested up there by thousands. Gillemots sat solemnly in rows like piebald bottles of black and white. Cormorants stood on the lower skerries, shaking their wings for hours together as if they had been performing a religious rite. And here with his gorgeous beak, like a mummer's mask drawn over his ears for sport, waddled the puffin – the bird whose sad fate it is, according to the rhyme, to be forever incapable of amorous dalliance. For have not half a dozen generations been told in rhyme how

"Tammy Norrie o' the BassCanna kiss a bonny lass?"

But as Wat looked for a moment away from the white-spotted, lime-washed ledges of Suliscanna to the green-fringed, sandy shores of his own island, he saw that in the water to the north which sent him off at a run. Long ere he reached the beach he had recognized the boat from which John Scarlett and he had been capsized, bobbing quietly up and down at the entrance of the bay.

The rebound or "back-spang" of the current from some hidden reef to the northward had turned the boat aside, even as it had done Wat himself with his oar, and there the treasure was almost within his reach. Wat's clothing was still damp from his previous immersion, so that it was no sacrifice to slip it off him and swim out to the boat. Then, laying his hand on the inverted stern, he managed easily enough to push her before him to a shelving beach of sand, where presently, by the aid of a spar of driftwood, he turned her over. To his great joy he found that the little vessel was still fairly water-tight and apparently uninjured, in spite of her rough-and-tumble steeple-chase with the white horses of the Suck of Suliscanna. Wat opened the lockers and saw, as he had expected, that the pistols and powder were useless. But he found, too, Scarlett's sword and his own trusty blade, together with a dagger, all of which he had the satisfaction of polishing there and then with fine sand held in the palm of his hand.

Then he swung his sword naked to his belt, and felt himself another man in an instant.

The lockers also contained a pair of hams of smoked bacon, which had suffered no damage from the water, and which, so far as sustenance went, would at least serve to tide him over a week or two should he be compelled to remain so long upon the isle.

Nevertheless, when Wat sat down to consider his position and plans, he felt that difficulties had indeed closed impenetrably upon him.

Yet he wasted no time in idle despondency. Lochinvar was of other mettle. He believed his love to be on the island close to him – it might be in the power of his enemy himself, certainly in the hands of his emissaries. John Scarlett, his trusty comrade, was equally surely lost to him. Nevertheless, while his own life lasted, he could not cease from seeking his love, nor yet abandon the quest on which he had come.

So, using the dagger for both knife and cooking apparatus, he cut and ate a slice of the smoked bacon. Then he quenched his thirst with a long drink out of a delicious spring which sent a tiny thread of crystal trickling down the rocks towards the northern strand of Fiara.

CHAPTER XXX

WAT SWIMS THE WATER CAVERN

Whereupon, refreshed and invigorated, Wat proceeded to reconnoitre. He set about his inquiries with the utmost circumspection and caution, for it occurred to him that if Barra's first line of defence – that of the whirls and glides of the Suck of Suliscanna – had proved itself so effective, it was likely that he had made other dispositions equally dangerous in the event of that line being forced. Wat Gordon pushed his boat into the water and clambered on board. But he soon found that, damaged and water-logged as she was, she would move but sluggishly through the water, and must prove but little under command in any seaway. It was manifestly impossible therefore for Wat, with his single sculling oar, to venture out again into the tide-race which threshed and tore its way past the eastern side of the island.

Wat's harbor of refuge was on the northern shore, in the safest nook of the little sandy haven in which he had first brought his boat ashore. He was resolved, so soon as it should grow a little dusk, that he would endeavor to turn the angle of his small isle, and see if by any means he could find a landing-place along the western side of Suliscanna. When, therefore, the sun had dipped beneath the sea-line, and the striped rose and crimson of the higher clouds faded to gray, Wat slipped into his boat and pushed off. He guided her slowly, sculling along the inner side of the sandy reef which protected the northern bay of Fiara.

As Wat sailed farther to the west he could hear the surf hammering in the caves which look towards the Atlantic – a low, continuous growl of sound, mostly reverberating like the distant roaring of many wild beasts, but occasionally exploding with a louder boom as a full-bodied green roller from mid-ocean fairly caught the mouth of a cave, for a moment gagged and compressed the imprisoned air within it, and then sent it shooting upward through some creux or gigantic blow-hole in a burst of foam and white water which rose high into the air. The wonder and solemnity of this ceaseless artillery at the hour of evening, and with the Atlantic itself lying like a sea of glass outside, impressed the landwardborn Wat greatly. For he had never before dwelt in the midst of such sea-marvels, nor yet upon the shores of such a rock-bound, wave-warded prison as this inhospitable isle of Suliscanna.

The heavy boat slowly gathered way under the pressure of the broad oar-blade wielded by Wat's very vigorous young arms. And all went well while he kept the inner and protected side of the reef, but so soon as he had begun to clear the lofty cliffs of Suliscanna, and to bethink himself of attempting to cross the belt of turbid and angry waters interposed between the quiet inner haven and the cool, green lift of the ocean waves without, the boat stuck in the sand and heeled over, first with an oozy glide, and then with a sharper "rasp," as though the knife-edge of a basalt reef were masked beneath. Her head fell sharply away, and the waves coming over the bar in brown-churned foam threatened every moment to swamp her.

Wat felt the depth of the water with his oar, and promptly leaped overboard. His feet sank dangerously into the slushy ooze of the bank, but the boat, relieved of his weight, rose buoyantly on the swell, and Wat, clasping his hands about her prow, was dragged clear, and presently, drenched and dripping for the third time that day, he found himself aboard again.

Clearly there was nothing further to be obtained by persevering in that direction, at least with a boat so unwieldy as that in which Scarlett and he had come over from the main-land. So Wat resolved to try if he could not find a smooth and safe passage by hugging the shore of Fiara, thus avoiding the sweep of the tide-race, and in the end reaching the still, deep strait lying between the rocks of his isle and the huge, lowering cliffs of Lianacraig, which so tantalizingly shut out from his view all that he wished to see of the spot on which, as he believed, his love waited for him.

Full of this thought, Wat turned the prow of the boat and struck confidently along the shore, past the bay where he had first brought the derelict ashore, and on towards the projecting eastern ness of Suliscanna. But here there was no projecting bar, and Wat promptly found himself in the same uneasy, boiling swirl which had so disastrously ended his former voyage. Nevertheless, he persevered for some distance, for indeed he saw no other way of reaching the southern isle. But suddenly, not ten yards in front of his boat, appeared the turbulent, arched back of a yet more furious tide-race. The prow of the boat was snatched around in an instant; two or three staggering blows were dealt her on the quarter as she turned tail. The oar was almost dragged from his hand, and in another moment Wat found himself floating in the smooth water at the tail of the reef, not far from where he had started. He almost laughed, so suddenly and completely had the proof been afforded him that there was no outgate east or west for a heavy craft so undermanned as his was.

It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that Wat had perforce to give up the boat as a means of reaching the southern island. After his defeat he went ashore and sat gloomily watching the pale lilac light of the evening fade from the rocks above the narrow strait. Beneath him the waters of the deep sound were still, and only beat with a pleasant, clappering sound on the rocks. A quick and desperate resolve stirred in Wat's heart.

He stripped himself of his upper clothes, and, leaving all but his shirt and his knee-breeches among the rocks, he bound these upon his head, fastening them with his soldier's belt under his chin.

Then, without pausing a moment to give his resolution time to cool, he dropped into the water and swam straight across the narrow, rock-walled strait towards the black rampart line of the cliffs of Lianacraig.

He was well aware that he had taken his life in his hand, for from the side of the sea these grim crags had apparently never been scaled by human foot. But Wat had another idea than climbing in his mind. As he had watched the waves glide without sound or rebound into the great square arch which yawned in the midst of the rocky face, a belief had grown into certainty within him that the passage must be connected with another arm of the sea at the farther side of the cliffs. With quick, characteristic resolve he determined to discover if this supposition were correct. He found no difficulty in swimming across the narrow strait of Fiara, in spite of a curious dancing undertow which now threw him almost out of the water, and anon mischievously plucked him by the feet as if to drag him bodily down to the bottom. Presently, however, he found himself close underneath the loom of the cliffs, and the great black archway, driven squarely into their centre, yawned above him.

By this time Wat's eyes had become somewhat accustomed to the darkness, and he could make out that the line where the sea met the rocks was brilliantly phosphorescent, and that this pale green glimmer penetrated for some distance into the dark of the rock-cut passage.

Wat did not hesitate a moment, but whispering "For her sake!" he pushed, with a full breast-stroke, straight into the midst of that sullen, brooding blackness and horror of unsteady water. Outside in the sound he had been conscious of the brisk, changeful grip of winds fretting the water, the swift pull of currents fitful as a woman's lighter fancies, the flash of iridescent silver foam defining and yet concealing the grim cliff edges. But inside there was nothing but the blackness of darkness, made only more apparent by a pervading greenish glimmer which, perhaps because it existed more in the eyes of the swimmer than in the actual illumination of the cavern, revealed nothing tangible, but on the contrary seemed only to render the gloom more tense and horrible.

But Wat had made up his mind and was not to be turned aside. He would follow this sea-pass to its end – even if that end should bring death to himself. For at all hazards he was resolved to break a way to his sweetheart, if indeed she yet lived and loved him.

The silence of the cave was remarkable. Wat could feel as he swam the slow, regular pulse-beat of the outer ocean-swell which passed up beneath him, and which at each undulation heaved him some way towards the roof. But he could hear no thundering break as it arched itself on the clattering pebbles or broke on the solid rock bottom as it would have done if the cavern had come soon to an end. He oared his way therefore in silence through the midst of the darkness, keeping his place in the centre of the tunnel by instinct, and perhaps also a little by the faint glimmer of phosphorescence which pursued him through the cave.

The way seemed endless, but after a while, though the wall of rock continued to stand up on either hand, it grew perceptibly lighter overhead. Wat chanced to look downward between his arms as he swam. A disk of light burned in the pure water beneath him. He turned on his back and glanced up, and there, at the top of an immense black cleft with perpendicular walls, lo! the stars were shining. Without knowing it he had come out of the tunnelled cavern into one of the "goës" or narrow fiords which cut into the Lianacraig fortress of basalt to its very foundations.

The passage still kept about the same width, and the water within it heaved and sighed as before, but the rock wall seemed gradually to decrease in height as Wat went on. Also the direction of the "goë" changed every minute, so that Wat had to steer his way carefully in order to avoid striking upon the jutting, half-submerged rocks at the corners.

Presently the passage ended, and Wat came out again on a broader stretch of water, over which the free, light breezes of the night played chilly. He found himself quite close to the beach of Suliscanna. There was a scent of peat-reek and cheerful human dwellings in the air – of cattle also, the acrid tang of goats, and, sweetest of all to a shipwrecked man, the indescribable kindly something by which man advertises his permanent residence to his fellows amid all the world of inhuman things.

After the darkness of the "goë" it seemed almost lucid twilight here, and Wat could see a black tower relieve itself against the sky, darker than the intense indigo padding in which the stars were set that moonless night. He stood on shore and rubbed himself briskly all over with the rough cloth of his knee-breeches before clothing himself in them. Then he donned the shirt and belt which he had brought over with him on his head by way of that perilous passage through the rocky gateway of Suliscanna, whose virgin defences had probably never been violated in such a manner before.

Being now clothed and in the dignity of his right mind, Wat cautiously directed his way upward towards the bulk of a tower which he saw loom dark above him.

CHAPTER XXXI

BESS LANDSBOROUGH'S CATECHISM

As he went his unshod feet sometimes rasped on the sharp edges of slaty rocks, and anon trod with a pleasantly tickling sensation on the shaggy bull's-fell of the inland heather. Wat drew his breath instinctively shorter and more anxiously, not so much from any increased consciousness of danger as because he knew that at last he trod the isle whereon his love lay asleep, all unconscious of his living presence so near her.

Climbing steadily, he surmounted the steep slope, and came to the angle of the castle wall. Here Wat peered stealthily round. A fire of peat, nearly extinct, smoked sulkily in front of an arched doorway which led underneath the masonry, and stretched out with his bare feet towards it, and barring all passage into the vault, lay a gigantic Highlander with a naked claymore by his side. It was Alister McAlister on guard over his prisoner.

Wat drew back. "Surely," he thought, "it cannot be in this morose dungeon that they have shut my love?"

At the thought he grasped the dagger which was his sole weapon, and glanced at the prostrate form of the unconscious sentinel, with the tangled locks thrown back from the broad brow.

"Never yet did Wat Gordon slay a sleeping man," he muttered, somewhat irresolutely, and took a backward step to consider the matter. But at that instant a thick plaid was thrown over his head and he was pulled violently to the ground. Limber Wat twisted like an eel and struck at his assailant with his dagger. But a hand clasped his arm and a voice whispered in his ear, "Down with your blade, man. I am a friend. If ye love Kate McGhie, you endanger both her life and yours by the least noise."

The plaid was unwound from about his head, and in the dim light Wat could see that he stood beside the door of a cabin, so low as hardly to be distinguishable from the bowlders upon the moor, being as shapelessly primitive and turf-overgrown as they. Beside him crouched a woman of middle age, apparently tall and well-featured.

"Wheest, laddie," she whispered, "hae ye the heart o' gowd that the lassie left for ye wi' that daft hempie, Mehitabel Smith?"

Wat slipped the love-token from under his shirt and let the woman touch it. It was chill and damp with the crossing of the salt strait.

"Aye, lad, surely ye are the true lover, and Bess Landsborough is no' the woman to wrang ye," said the wife of Alister. "But mind ye, there are mony dangers yet to encounter. Your friend that was casten oot o' your bit boatie among the Bores o' the Suck is safe-warded yonder in the tower, and that is my man Alister that ye swithered whether to put your gully-knife intil or no."

Wat hastened to disclaim any such fell intent.

"Wi' laddie, was I no watchin' ye?" said the woman, "and did I no see the thocht in the verra crook o' your elbow? Bess Landsborough has companied ower lang wi' men o' war no' to ken when they are playin' themselves, and when the death o' the heart rins like wildfire alang the shoother blade, doon the strong airm, and oot at the place where the fingers fasten themselves round the blue steel. Sma' blame till ye! But lest ye should be ower greatly tempted, I e'en threw the plaidie ower ye to gie ye time to consider better. For, after a', Alister's my ain man, and a kind man to me. And forbye, stickin' a knife atween puir Alister's ribs wad no hae advantaged you a hair, nor yet helped ye to your bit lass – no, nor even assisted that ill-set skelum Jock Scarlett to win clear oot o' his prison hole."

The woman took Wat by the hand.

"Come this side the hoose," she said; "I want a word wi' you. Bess Landsborough is takin' some risks the nicht, and she maun ken what mainner o' lad she is pittin' her windpipe in danger for."

She drew him round the low, turf-roofed house to the end farthest from the castle. Here stood a peat stack, or rather a mound of the large surface "turves" of the country, for there are no true peat-mosses upon Suliscanna.

Alister's wife crouched upon her heels in the black shelter of the stack, and drew Wat down beside her.

"Now," she said, "what brocht ye here this night, and where did ye come frae?"

"I came seeking Kate McGhie, the lass that I have followed over a thousand miles of land and sea," answered Wat, promptly, "and also to discover what had become of my friend whose name you have mentioned, John Scarlett, he who was with me when our boat overset near the island."

"To seek your lass and your friend, says you," answered the woman, "a good answer and a fair; but whilk o' them the maist? Ye are cauld and wat. Ye will hae soomed frae some hidie-hole in the muckle cliffs they name Lianacraig, I doot na. Was it your lass or your friend that ye thocht on when ye took life in hand and cam' paddling like a pellock through the mirk? Was it for the sake o' your love or your comrade that ye were gangin' to slit the hass of Alister McAlister, decent red-headed son o' a cattle-thief that he is?"

"For both of them," said Wat, stoutly; "I am much beholden to John Scarlett. He set out on this most perilous adventure over seas at a word from me, and without the smallest prospect of advantage to himself."

"I doubt it not," said Bess Landsborough; "it was the little sense o' the cuif all the days of him, that he would ever do more for his comrade than for his lass. And that is maybe the reason annexed to Bess Landsborough's being here this day, a Heelantman's wife on the cauld, plashy isle o' Suliscanna. But, laddie, listen to me. I am no gaun to let the bonny bit young thing that I hae cherished like my ain dochter mak' the same mistake as I made langsyne. Tell me, laddie, as God sees ye, what yin ye wad leave ahint ye, gin ye could tak' but yin o' them and ye kenned that death wad befall the ither?"

"I would take Kate McGhie, though ye hanged old Jack Scarlett as high as Haman," quoth Wat, instantly.