Drifting

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

 

Drifting.

By C. L. Pirkis, Author of “Lady Lovelace,” &c &c

“LET US AT LEAST BE HONEST WITH EACH OTHER,” HE SAID.

HE had drawn up his boat high on the beach, and now lay at the girl's feet, as she sat, out of reach of the tide, on a big boulder stone.

There had fallen a long silence between them—a silence in which, to his fancy, her heart had cried aloud to his, as, in the stillness, the sea-pyot had cried aloud to the sea.

He was the first to break that silence.

“Let us at least be honest with each other,” he said in a constrained, bitter tone. “Let us look the whole miserable facts in the face, and not cheat ourselves into believing that things are better than they are. Supposing that you were to break faith with Euan Mackreth, that would not give me the right to ask you to be my wife, with a millstone of debts—twenty thousand pounds if it's a penny—hanging about my neck. No. Nor would it help you and your mother out of your financial difficulties. I suppose you two are in pretty nearly as evil a case as I am?”

“In a worse, if anything,” answered the girl under her breath.

“And even supposing—not that such a thing is likely, no, nor even possible—that some kind fairy, in the shape of a rich relative, were to come forward and clear off the whole of my liabilities. What then! What am I fit for in life? How should I set about earning my own living? What could I do that would give me the hope of being able, even in twenty years' time, to ask a girl to be my wife to whom luxury and refinement are the very breath of life. Ma mignonne—ma mignonne, things look very black for us! Turn which way I will, I see no rift in the clouds.”

A fit trysting-place for a pair of lovers, this lonely corner of Glen Orloch Isle! Not a human soul save themselves did this scene of sea and sky and cliff enclose. At their feet lay the blue waters of Loch Rhuy; behind them the gaunt mountains, patched with olive-green and golden-brown mosses, seemed to tower upwards to the heavens themselves. Not a sound broke the evening stillness save the lazy lapping and curling of the summer sea, the whirr of a pyot overhead, or the hoarse croak of a distant heron; and over all hung the haze and glamour of a twilight so golden that it seemed as if it were being rained upon them from the after-glow that stretched, in the likeness of gigantic fiery wings, from the western horizon halfway across the sky.

The girl whom he had addressed as “ma mignonne” was emphatically of the “mignonne” type. She had pushed back the hood of her cloak from her golden-brown hair, and the outline of her small head showed like a chiselled cameo against the dark background of rock. Seen in profile, her face recalled the picture of one of Sir Joshua Reynolds's child-angels. It was delicate in colouring, with large, wondering dark eyes and a cupid's bow mouth that seemed expressly called into being to wear the smiles and languors of a spoilt society beauty. It was a face, too, that paired well with the one at this moment upturned to meet her down-cast gaze. There were people who were wont to call Val Thorndyke an Apollo Belvedere and who compared his features to those of a Greek marble; and there were others who vowed that they could see no beauty in beetle-brows and a low forehead, and who hinted at a disagreeable resemblance to a certain well-known picture of Mephistopheles. Possibly the truth lay somewhere between the two verdicts. The beetle-brows were there, and the Greek outline was there, and the combination made a face, dark, clean-cut, impassive—the face that knows how to wear the society mask with so much ease, and that, as a rule, has, as a fit corollary, an unvibrating, passionless voice that would drawl out hottest love or deadliest hate in much the same tone as it would pronounce an opinion on a brand of chablis or fix the stakes of a game at baccarat.

“OH, VAL, IT IS HOPELESS.”

While he had been speaking the girl's eyes had wandered away to the distant horizon. To his fancy a sudden mist seemed to veil them, and there was a sound as of tears in her voice as she clasped her hands together and cried impetuously:

“Oh, Val! Val! it is hopeless! We must give it up! I must marry the castle and the diamonds and the settlements and old Euan, and you must lay yourself out to catch some heiress and get your debts paid, and——”

“Hush!” interrupted Val sternly. “There shall be no talk of heiresses for me! The day that makes you that old idiot's wife will see me take my fate into my own hands, and——”

“Oh, Val, it is wicked, horribly wicked, to talk like that!”

“Wicked!” echoed Val. “Oh, my love, my love!” and for a moment there came a vibrating note in his voice. “Who thinks of what is wicked or what is good in your presence! You, and such as you, are the law of right and wrong to us men. We keep or we break it according as we love you little or much.”

The girl's face flushed, her head bent lower; for a few moments she did not speak.

“Sometimes I feel I am dreadfully, dreadfully wicked,” she presently said, in a low, uncertain tone. “Sometimes I feel I am webbed in—caught in a sort of network of untruth—and do what I will, I can't get out of it. Lady Clancy, Euan's sister, you know, has been whispering little stories about you and me, and yesterday Euan came to me and asked me if there were any truth in them. He asked me first if I could tell him why your friend's Archie, Milner's, yacht had been so long lying off Mull, looking very hard at me all the time. Then he took my hands in his and said, 'Don't be afraid, child; look up in my face and tell me the whole truth, whatever it is.' And, of course, I looked up in his face—so—and said I knew nothing about your yacht, and that you and I never met except in his presence, and——”

“Fay,” interrupted the young man, in a slow, soft drawl, “are you trying to make me add murder to my other sins? Do you want to send me forcing my way into that den of a place over there to put a bullet through the thick skull of that old idiot?”

As he said the words “den of a place over there,” his eyes wandered to where at his right hand, the gaunt cliffs sloped gradually into a succession of green plateaux jutting out to sea. Above the woods of fir and beech that crowned one of these plateaux, a turreted castle, the ancestral home of the laird of Glen Orchol, towered grim and dark against the translucent sky, so grim and dark, indeed, that it seemed as if it were cut out im black bas-relief, upon a plane of agate.

Fay's eyes instinctively followed the direction of Val's.

“It does look like a great, dark, frowning Bastille, doesn't it?” she said, with a little childish pout on her pretty lips. “I never look at it but what it sets me shuddering. Can't we go and sit somewhere else, where the cliffs will shut it out from our sight?”

“Come and sit in the boat,” said Val. “You'll find it pleasanter than this wet boulder. Ah, how the tide has ebbed. Not that way; you'll get your feet wet. Stay, let me carry you?”

But Fay managed to clear the pools, jumping lightly from one slippery rock to another, and seated herself in the boat with scarcely a touch to his hand.

“Oh, kind rocks!” she murmured, glancing upwards, with a sigh of relief, to where the big, over-hanging crags effectually shut out Glen Orchol Castle from view.

Val seated himself, facing her in the boat, and, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, let his eyes feast themselves on the daintily beautiful face before him.

Fay seemed all unconscious of his gaze. Her eyes, with a far-away look in them, were once more fixed on the distant horizon, and for the moment she had fallen into a reverie.

“DO YOU EXPECT ME TO ECHO THAT WISH?”

The shadows of evening grew deeper; the fire of the after-glow began to pale, the gold of the twilight to give place to grey.

“Ma mignonne,” whispered Val, “where are your thoughts—tell me!”

She started and turned her eyes full on him. Was it his fancy once more, or were they again glistening as with unshed tears?

“Oh, Val,” she answered in a low tone that had something of a wail in it, “when I think of—of everything—the hopelessness of it all, and the good-bye we must, sooner or later, say to each other, I sometimes wish I had lain down in my grave before I had seen your face.”

A sudden fire leapt into his eye.

“Do you expect me to echo that wish?” he asked, “and say 'I would that I had lain down in my grave before I met that girl?' If I did, it would be a lie. Supposing Fate had come to me and said 'Here, in this hand, are six months of your usual listless, vacuous existence coupled with your usual listless, vacuous feelings; and here, in the other, are six months of wild, maddening passion, together with wild, maddening pain.' I should have said, 'Give me that—the passion and the pain together! Yes, the passion, a thousand times more delirious—more enthralling than my heart has power to conceive, and let me buy it with torture now, with torture hereafter; so that I have it for one mad, delirious six months of my life, I care not!'”

It was all said in his usual level and slightly cynical tone. Only a very old, or very intimate friend of Val Thorndyke's, listening to him and catching a glimpse of that fire in his eye, would have ventured to say: “That man is in deadly earnest at last!”

While he had been speaking all sorts of expressions, like so many summer clouds, had gone sweeping over Fay's more easily read features.

Was she afraid of what they might speak to him that she suddenly bowed her head, covering her face with both hands?

He was kneeling at her feet in a moment, trying to withdraw those hands. Then his arm encircled her; he drew her head upon his shoulder, and still kneeling beside her, covered her brow, her hair with impassioned kisses.

She made no effort to free herself. Ah! if she could but have held up her finger to old Time and bade him stand still!

“O sun dare not to rise!” she would have cried, like one in by-gone days; “dare not to bring in another dawn of bondage and misery! Let this glamour of twilight know no ending, this rest, this love be my eternity!”

But even as the thought filled her mind the glamour of twilight had gone. It was the shades of night that were gathering about them now.

With the shadows of the night came its stillness also. No wing of sea-fowl nor distant cry of heron broke the silence now. The tide was ebbing fast, and even the wash of the waves sounded muffled and far away.

Val, with his lips close to her ear, whispered a few words. They were:

“Let us summon our courage, my darling, break our bonds, shake off our chains and claim our lives for our own.

Softly as the words were spoken, they seemed to sound like a fanfaronade of trumpets in the stillness of the air. Fay could fancy that the very rocks beneath whose shadow their boat lay had caught the echo of them and were flinging them back at her.

She gave a great start, but for a moment did not speak.

Val went on lingeringly, persuasively: “It is only half-an-hour's row out to Archie's yacht. There is no one but Archie and the four sailors on board—he is true as steel, you know. Only whisper 'Yes,' ma mignonne, and the thing is done. We will sail the yacht just whereever you will like best to go—Italy, Corsica, Algiers?”

Fay was trembling from head to foot now, but still she did not open her lips.

“Think,” he went on, his voice rising louder and more distinct, “what you will escape from—what you will escape to! Your life your own to do what you will with! The glorious freedom! You and I alone on the wide ocean, no one to come between us, no good-byes to be said! No more of the dismal old Bastille—one delicious round of enjoyment from year's end to year's end!”

But Fay's lips were still dumb.

“People are doing it every day in the week,” he went on, his voice once more sinking to a low, persuasive tone. “A marriage such as you would make is no true marriage; the true marriage bond is between heart and heart, soul and soul.”

“Oh, stop, stop!” said Fay, with a sudden, sharp, piteous cry, as she lifted her white face with its aureola of ruffled hair from his shoulder, “what are you saying? I did not come Gut to-night to hear such words as these! It would break my mother's heart!”

“Your mother's heart?” repeated Val, with a slow, scornful emphasis. “Will you tell me that a woman who will sell her daughter to the highest bidder has such a foolish thing as a heart in her organism? Did she think of your heart, I wonder, when she hunted you into saying 'Yes' to a man old enough to be your father? Has not she brought you here to Orchol Castle for the whole and sole purpose of clenching your bonds still more tightly, and——”

“Oh, stop, stop!” again cried Fay in sharp, piteous tones. “Let me think—for pity's sake, let me think!”

Her words came in short gasps. She released herself from his encircling arm, sinking back in the boat, with her trembling hands tightly clasped together and her eyes downcast and half-veiled by their long lashes.

Val still kneeled beside her, with his strong gaze fixed upon those downcast eyes.

Once more the silence of the night seemed to make itself felt; the shadows around them, one after another, were fading into the deepening gloom. In that gloom Fay seemed to see, dimly outlined as in a vision, two dark shapes. On one side seemed to stand a form, bright-eyed, smiling, with outstretched, beckoning hand; on the other a dark, shadowy shape, with veiled face, and wings spread as if about to take flight.

“Freedom is a glorious thing!”

Fay started. Was that Val speaking? The voice seemed to come from that bright-eyed, smiling form that stood beside her.

“You forged your own chains.”

Yes yes, that was Val's voice, she was certain.

“And must wear them,” seemed to say a solemn voice that was not Val's.

“And can break them,” finished Val.

“Help me! help me!” moaned Fay, covering her ears with both hands to shut out the bewildering voices.

Val took those hands in his. “Ma mignonne,” he said, “look ahead. Some day, and a day not very far off, all our sweet, stolen intercourse must come to an end. There will have to be said a long last good-bye, our hands will let go, the world will come in between.”

“ONCE I HEARD OF A MAN AND WOMAN,” FAY WENT ON.

“Oh, Val, death were better than that!” she said brokenly. “If there must come an end to all that makes our lives worth having, let us end our lives also and agree to die together!”

“Why not?” answered Val promptly. “To live together would be better, but if that cannot be, why then I agree and say let us die together.”

“Once,” Fay went on, a little unsteadily, as if uncertain whither her words were leading her, “I heard of a man and a woman who loved each other just as you and I do, and who agreed that chance, not will, should decide their future for them.”

“By the 'hazard of the die?'” said Val, catching at her meaning; “I have no dice-box here, ma mignonne.”

“No! in this way,” said Fay, still in a low, unsteady tone. “The girl, like me, wavered, she did not dare say 'Yes,' she could not—no, could not say 'No.' They were riding along a country road in France and it was getting night. They threw the reins on their horses' necks, and swore an oath to each other that they would go wherever their horses took them and accept just whatever fate this should bring them to.”

“No doubt the man thought his horse would lead, and take them straight home to his stables.”

“Perhaps. But it did not. The horses, instead, rambled on through fields and dark lanes, and at last led them into a part of the country that was flooded—into a swollen stream—and both man and woman were drowned.”

“LISTEN, IT IS THE CURLEW,” SHE SAID.

“Possibly that was the best thing that could happen to them both. When Fate is iron and your life is hopelessly ruined, it is better by far to end it or to have it ended for you,” he answered recklessly.

“Val,” the name was whispered very softly, very sweetly; “what would most likely happen if you were to push this boat away from the shore and let it drift?”'

“Let it drift! Well, it would go out of the loch with the tide, of course; but what would happen afterwards would depend on so many things—on the currents, for instance. You know outside the loch there is a perfect network of 'shallows and narrows' among the islands. If a gale sprang up, it might be a case of a boat floating bottom upwards before day dawned”

Fay looked at him wistfully.

“Val,” she said softly and sweetly still, “would you be willing to put our fate to such a test as that? And would you swear to me that you would accept, without resistance, just whatever the dawn might bring. If it brought us death, even, would you accept it without a word of reproach——”

“My darling!” interrupted Val, springing to his feet. “I'll swear it a thousand times over, if you, on your part, will do the same, and swear to accept whatever the dawn may bring, even supposing it finds us in sight of Mull and Archie's yacht!”

And this, as he said the words, seemed to him a not unlikely contingency.

Fay, perhaps, read his thoughts.

“I ought to tell you,” she said, the wistful look lingering still in her eyes, “that old Angus—Euan's steward—who is noted all over the island for his weather-wisdom, told me last night that this hot weather was bound to end in a storm before another forty-eight hours had passed; the moon, he said, had gone down with a double halo round it, and that was a certain sign of wind and foul weather.”

“Let it come! What does it matter, so long as you and I can face it together? Now, Fay, put your hand in mine, and let us swear to abide by whatever decision the dawn may bring—life together if it bring us life, death together if it bring us death.”

So these two, hand in hand, looking up to the dark heavens, swore their strange oath.

Val tossed one oar out on to the beach, the other he kept to push the boat off shore with. Then, refusing to allow Fay to get out of the boat, he dragged it down to the receding tide, averring that her light weight could make no possible difference to a man's arm.

And just as he had sprung into the boat and was pushing off, a strange thing happened—a long, mournful cry, a sort of eked-out whistle in a minor key, sounded twice across the silent loch.

Fay started, holding up a warning finger.

“Listen, it is a curlew,” she said. “The people here look upon its cry as a death warning if it comes after sunset. They have a rhyme:—

'If the whaup whistles thrice after set of sun,
A life will be ended ere day has begun.'

Oh! pray listen—don't let the keel grate again.”

Val paused, oar in hand. Fay's face seemed to grow rigid with the strain upon her listening powers.

“Well,” he said at length, breaking the silence, “so far, so good; two whistles evidently stand for nothing, even to the Celtic mind” His words were cut short by a third sharp, resonant cry, that seemed to sound in the darkness immediately over their heads.

Fay grew white to her very lips. “The moon had not gone down overnight with its double halo for nothing,” she said to herself.

“Ma mignonne,” said Val tenderly, “I had no idea you were so superstitious! Have you no faith in me? Death shall not lay its finger——”

“Hush,” interrupted Fay solemnly; “you forget! Our compact is to accept death, not to fight it!”

Val made no reply. He gave a vigorous push to the boat which sent it out with a lurch on to the swaying waves. Mechanically, he drew his oar up into the boat, as he seated himself facing the girl.

She noted the action. “You are breaking faith with me,” she said reproachfully; “if that oar lies near your hand, you would use it in an emergency and dictate a decision to Fate!”

“Well, then, let it go,” he answered, giving the oar a vigorous spin over the side. “You are right, Fay; if I found ourselves in sight of Mull and the yacht, and that oar lay handy, I should certainly make good use of it.”

They watched the oar rise and fall with the waves, and then disappear into the blackness that was slowly circumscribing the waters of the loch on three of its sides.

“Now we are nothing more than whirling leaves upon the tide; Fate has us in her grip right enough,” said Val.

Fay made no reply. She had sunk back in her seat once more, and with a look in her eyes that puzzled Val, was peering curiously into the darkness, now on this side, now on that.

What had become of those dimly outlined shapes that had before seemed so real to her? Had the one spread its wings and taken flight and the other melted into the shadows out of which it was born?

The veil of darkness through which those shapes had seemed to smile and frown at her was consolidating into a wall now, that, little by little, was shutting out the shores of the loch on either side of the placid waters over which they drifted so easily and pleasantly, shutting her in, in fact, alone with Val in that cockle-shell of a boat and cutting them both off, at least so it seemed, from the whole of the rest of creation.

Val's thoughts were busy also. It was all very well for him to declare that they were simply whirling leaves upon the waters, and that they had now nothing to do but bow to Fate's decree. In his heart of hearts it seemed to him that Fate was dealing very well with him. Was not the yacht within a few miles of them? and what more likely than that they should drift within sight of it—at least he might venture to say there were no odds against the likelihood of such a thing. And then, why a signal from him, a shrill note on the gold whistle that hung upon his chain would set Archie steaming up towards them in a trice.

Or, supposing that instead of towards Mull, they were to drift north-west towards Skye, what more probable than that they would be sighted by one cf the steamers that ply between the coast and the Hebrides, and that, seeing their helpless condition, it would at once put to and take them on board. But, whichever of these contingencies, or any other equally felicitous, came about, one thing was certain—the woman whom he idolized and worshipped, and from whom he had been kept apart by an evil conjunction of circumstances, was his own now, his own special possession, and would so remain to the last hour of her life.

This was a thought to grow jubilant over surely Could it be that Fay as yet did not realise the glorious freedom that was dawning for her, that she sat so still and silent? Or was her heart quaking lest she might lose that freedom before it was well begun—lest at that very moment old Euan Mackreth might be calling together his men, and organising a pursuit and re-capture.

A question that Fay asked sharply—suddenly—at that moment seemed to give colour to the latter surmise. It was:

“Shall we ever—ever get out of this loch?”

“We are getting out of it as fast as we can,” he answered. “But don't be frightened, my darling; they can't possibly have discovered your absence yet awhile. it was such a clever idea of yours to plead headache and lock your door——”

“I was not thinking of anything of that sort,” interrupted Fay, “but I feel as if I were shut up in prison in this loch—being stifled by inches—with the darkness.”

“With the darkness? Don't you think it's with this hot haze that hangs about the shore? But when we round that point we shall get a glimpse of the moon, and see a little which way we are going, There'll be a moon for about a couple of hours to-night.”

The point was rounded and the moon came in sight, hanging low over the green plateau crowned by the beech woods and the castle. The stretch of translucent sky that before had shown like a plane of agate, was now flooded with white light, and the castle appeared as if carved in black bas-relief upon a silver plane.

Fay turned her head sharply away from it.

“I shall never get the sight of that place from off my eye-balls!” she exclaimed. “When I lie dying I believe it will dance before my eyes!”

“When I lie dying!” Why here was the croak of a raven indeed! What had come over Fay to-night? Thoughts such as these were intolerable at such a time.

Perhaps Fay thought so too. For suddenly, without a word of prelude, she broke into a gay, coquettish song.

“WE ARE GETTING OUT AS FAST AS WE CAN.”

Her voice was a high, light mezzo, and the songs that suited her best were of the sort that make life appear to be one vast fairy-garden in which pretty, spoilt maidens of eighteen lead about the little god of love in chains of flowers.

Such a song she carolled forth now, high and right merrily, till the old mountains, whose massive sides seemed better suited to resound the roil of artillery, threw it back at her in a hundred echoes.

And as she sang Val, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed full on her sweet, child-like face upturned in the moonlight, said to himself over and over again: “Did God ever mould a more dainty, exquisitely lovely child-angel? And she is mine—mine only! Mine for ever!”

Drifting, drifting, drifting, easily, lightly, pleasantly over the swaying waves, they went. Now into the pathway of silver light that the moon threw athwart the waters, anon into the black shadows of the gaunt mountains, which here and there kissed the opposite shore. Out of Loch Rhuy at last they went, and for a moment the waves seemed to lose a little of their laziness, and a light breeze ruffled Val's dark hair. Almost, however, before he had time to say in his heart, “Thank heaven, we are drifting towards Mull!” a current, setting in from an opposite quarter, had taken charge of their little boat, and they were hurried past some jutting point and swept into a loch once more. Here the hot, hazy darkness seemed to press down upon them again. Fay's voice began to lose a little of its light, joyous ring, and, as if unconsciously, she drifted into a low, crooning lullaby sort of song that kept time with the lazy, swaying motion of the boat.

“I WISH I HAD NOT TOLD HIM THAT LIE.”

It was difficult for them to make out their exact whereabouts, or to give a name to the loch in which they found themselves now. The shores of these lochs have many natural features in common.

On either side of them black mountains seemed to stretch right up into the darkness of the skies; on either side the shore, at the base of those mountains, lay hidden with the drowsy haze of heat.

Fay's voice, little by little, was losing its lullaby croon for a note that had something of a wail in it.

Once, quite suddenly, she broke off to make, what seemed to Val, an utterly irrelevant remark. It was:

“I think if my mother had been a different woman I should have grown up into something better than I am!”

And again, a little later on, she suddenly said: “I wish I had not looked up into Euan's face yesterday and told him that lie.”

To which Val replied promptly and without that touch of bitterness which he generally showed when Euan's name was mentioned: “Why let that man's name pass your lips, darling? he has utterly gone out of your life now.”

Presently the moon went down behind the mountains, and then thicker, hotter, blacker than ever, the darkness seemed to press down upon them once more.

Fay ceased singing. “I am so sleepy, she said, speaking like a tired child; “I know there is a storm coming; I can feel it in the air.”

Val said nothing. He, too, knew that a storm was coming. He had scouted alike the curlew's warning cry and old Angus's prophecy, but there was no mistaking what the black, lowering sky, the lot mist, the heavy air meant.

He knew what a storm in these mountain districts was, and how little mercy it would show to their cockle-shell of a boat. One by one his hopes of sighting his yacht or a passing ocean steamer were vanishing; their only chance he felt now lay in the possibility of day-dawn outstripping the thunder:storm so rapidly travelling towards them, and of its revealing to them some shallow coast or sheltering hollow where he could land and, dragging the boat into safety, there await the passing of the storm.

Yet, with all sorts of tragic possibilities looming now into view, not for one instant did he regret the wild promptness with which he had acceded to Fay's suggestion to leave their lives to the decision of chance.

“Better death a thousand times over,” he said to himself, “than the life of protracted torture, that otherwise must have been his in the future with Fay—like the princess of fairy legend enclosed in her crystal mountain—so near and yet so far.”

Every moment the darkness seemed to grow denser and deeper. Not alone was the sky blotted out, the sullen, lazy, lapping waves had also disappeared. Even Fay's form, her face, her white hand seemed gradually being enshrouded in a hazy veil.

SHE WAS BANDAGING HER EYES.

He took out his watch, but it was too dark to see the hands He tried to feel the time with his fingers and conjectured, for he could not be sure, that there was yet another hour and a half to be lived through before those black mountain tops caught the light of dawn. The tide would turn, he knew, half an hour before that; Heaven help them if it were to carry them out into the broad Atlantic, and the storm in all its fury were to burst upon them there!

Fay had grown very silent. Her thoughts were becoming tumultuous and chaotic. §he felt, rather than thought, “Here are we doing just exactly o what we have been doing all our lives through—drifting on an unseen sea to an unknown goal! Heaven help us! how will it end?” And to her fancy the lazy, lapping, unseen waves seemed to take up her cry and to repeat it in heavy, dull, monotonous fashion as they washed the keel of the boat.

Of necessity the same question was ringing the changes in Val's brain. His nerves were held at tension now; it was with difficulty that he kept himself under control. Moment by moment his excitement seemed to grow more intense, and the horrible suspense to become more insupportable. He began to lose count of time; it seemed as if they had been shut up for an eternity in the hot, hazy darkness of that loch. Would they ever make their escape from it? Would the current that had brought them in turn with the turning tide and bear them out—and, if so, to what? To storm and wind on the open sea, or to daybreak and a chance of escape? Both storm and day-dawn were travelling towards them at a rapid pace now; which would win?

“Val!” came Fay's voice faintly from out the darkness, after a long, a measureless silence, “are we drifting in a circle? Can you see anything anywhere to tell us where we are?”

“It's black as the Styx,” answered Val, trying to pitch his voice to a cheerful note, “and I can't see even your face, dearest. Stretch out your hand;-at least let me feel that in mine!”

Were they drifting in a circle? What in heaven's name were they doing? And hark! What was that booming, hollow sound? Was it the thunder upon them at last, or was it the sea breaking over some subterranean cavern? And what meant this sudden change in the easy swinging motion of the boat? Had another current caught them now, or was this the tide coming in full and fresh from the Atlantic?

Fay's hand, lying cold and tremulous in his own, was suddenly withdrawn. Something white seemed to flutter about her in the darkness, and Val, straining his eyes, made out that she was bandaging her eyes with her handkerchief.

She, too, must have felt that a crisis was at hand.

“Don't be angry, Val,” she said pleadingly, “but I cannot face it.”

Minutes seemed to prolong themselves into hours. Only prisoners standing in the dock, awaiting the sentence of the judge, could understand with what leaden feet time went for them now. Fay, sitting blindfold and mute, could have fancied she had lived through, not half-an-hour, but half a lifetime in the brief space that elapsed between the turn of the tide and the break of day.

“Look up, Fay,” suddenly, sharply said Val, with an odd, jarring, out-of-tune note in his voice.

Fay pulled her handkerchief from her eyes.

Yes, the dawn was upon them at last. All around the darkness was being torn into shreds; the mists were growing silvery, the mountain tops were catching a tender grey, although to their rugged sides the night-blue was clinging still.

But what—what shore was this that the mystic light half-hid and half revealed?

Fay turned her white face towards Val.

“It is Kismet!” she said brokenly; and bowing her head, she once more covered her eyes with her hands.

The sight that she would fain have shut out from them was nothing less than the familiar shores of Glen Orchol, with its ribbed and ridged cliffs and its green plateaux crowned with the beech-woods and turreted castle.

They had drifted in a circle with a vengeance!

Glen Orchol stands in the very centre of Loch Rhuy and the current that had carried them out of the loch on one side of the island had carried them in again on the other, and within these familiar waters, drifting hither and thither they had passed the whole of that dread night.

On the shallow shores of the green plateau, dominated by the castle, the tide was landing them. Val had to jump from the boat and drag it up the shingle, or it would have been dashed against a jutting spur of rock, for the tide was coming in furiously now.

Standing up to his knees in it, he lifted Fay out of the boat and carried her towards the shore.

“It is a fate to which it would be sheer folly to bow,” he said, holding her tightly in his arms; “do you think that Euan Mackreth would——”

His sentence was not to be finished. At that moment a bare-headed, bare-legged fisher-lad came speeding breathlessly over rock and shingle towards them.

He had a strange story to tell when his breath came back to him. At first he could only point a little further along the shore to a break in the rocks, to the self-same spot, in fact, that had been Val's and Fay's trysting-place overnight.

Fay, following the direction of the lad's hand, saw a group of shadowy figures gathered around what appeared to be a prostrate form.

More than this she could not clearly make out. For although the threatening storm had evidently swept over their heads and the clouds were being broken into fragments to let out the glories of the dawn, the spray rose high with the incoming tide, and the night shadows lingered in the hollows still.

Yet her heart seemed to tell her the meaning of that group as, with swift steps, she made her way along the shore, Val following, and the fisher-lad by her side telling his Strange tale in an odd mixture of Gaelic and English.

WITH FOLDED ARMS AND BENT BROWS, VAL STOOD.

It was to the effect that the “laird” (as he styled Euan Mackreth), after a long consultation with old Angus overnight about some projected improvements on his estate, had gone out in company with him to survey a site that he deemed suitable for a pavilion that he was desirous of building for his future wife, who loved the magnificent seascapes to be seen from those rocks. The site was surveyed and approved; the night was hot, the moon bright and, tempted by the low tide, the laird and old Angus decided to descend the mountain path and return to the Castle along the shore. Halfway down that path—the very one that Fay had descended to meet her lover—Euan's foot had slipped, and he had fallen heavily, some fifteen or twenty feet, on to a projecting ledge of rock, losing consciousness and sustaining serious and, it was feared, fatal internal injuries. Angus had contrived to swing himself down to this ledge of rock, and there had supported the laird in his arms until help had arrived. That, however, had not been until close upon daybreak. Fay's absence from her room had been discovered by her mother almost at the moment that information was brought to Lady Clancy of her brother's non-return from his after-dinner walk with his land-steward. In a state of great alarm, the two ladies had organised a search party, and men with lanterns and ropes had been set to scour every corner of the island. Eventually they were guided to the spot where Euan lay by old Angus's shouts for help, and almost simultaneously tidings had been brought to the search party that Fay had been seen nearing shore in a boat with Val Thorndyke.

With ropes and a roughly-improvised ambulance they had contrived to lower the laird from the ledge of rock to the beach.

There he lay now, a gaunt, stalwart figure, with old Angus kneeling on one knee still supporting his head and shoulders. His face was ashen grey, his eyes were closed, his white hair, swept back from a massive brow, fluttered in the fresh breeze that the incoming tide brought with it. A silent group of gillies and fishermen stood under the shadow of the rocks in the background. Lady Clancy, rigid-featured, stony-eyed, with a plaid thrown over the evening-dress she had worn all night through, stood beside him, shading her eyes with her hand and peering through the haze of the dawn into the far distance.

As Fay drew near, she advanced to meet her. “Stand back!” she said, drawing herself to her full height, and speaking in a voice that had a ring as of iron in it; “stand back, I say, you who would have been wife and no wife to Euan.”

But Euan's eyes had suddenly opened, and Fay had seen a look in them—dumb, pleading, pathetic—that made her dare Lady Clancy's wrath.

“Come near, child,” those eyes had seemed to say, “and bend your ears to my lips,” and she did so.

Life was ebbing fast now, his breath was coming and going in gasps, and when he spoke, his voice sounded weak and faraway.

“Child! child!” he said faintly, between catches of his breath, “if you had but waited—it would not have been for long.”

And then his eyelids drooped never again to be lifted.

So, then, someone had tortured Euan's dying ears with the story of her untruth!

With folded arms and bent brows, Val stood watching her as she knelt beside the dead man.

Love made him bold, and sent him to her side.

“Come away, Fay,” he whispered; “this is no place for you now; see, Fate reverses her decree.”

Fay, kneeling still, upturned her white, tearless face to his.

“Not so—she confirms it,” she answered brokenly. She pointed to the dead laird's face. “This would for ever lie between us. Whenever I looked in your-face, I should see not your eyes but his, with their last heart-broken look in them. Whenever I touched your hand, I should feel not your warm touch, but his death cold one.”

Here she took the dead man's hand reverently in her own. And Val, having no words wherewith to answer, turned and left her.