The Romances of Sandy McGrab/The Romances of Sandy McGrab
The Romances of Sandy McGrab
CHAPTER I.
THE SIREN AND THE SCOT.
IN the Highland town of Kirk Humphries, there is a high street, and at the end of the high street a clothier where the simple Londoner buys Scotch tweeds in the hopes of currying favor with the native. There were three clothiers in Kirk Humphries, but the firm of McGrab & Son had done more in the line of gulling the credulous upstart English than the other two put together, and consequently was the most noted for its strict integrity. Not that the McGrabs were dishonest. Far from it. But they were Scotch, and their customers were English—and further explanation is superfluous.
Sandy McGrab was selling a warranted heather mixture to Sir John Hodge. Sir John Hodge—of Hodge's Patent Baby Food fame—had bought Glen Every, the McPhersons' estate on the other side of the loch, and wore kilts. During the grouse season, he cultivated a Scotch accent, and had patiently endeavored to warm his business relationship with the McPhersons to a glowing friendship—which endeavor had more than failed. The McPhersons still occupied a fragment of their ancestral dominions, lived on bread and cheese and a majestic sense of superiority, and hated the interloper with an amazing, entirely racial pertinacity. The fact that it was Hodge's English money that provided the bread and cheese and gave sustenance to the superiority, softened them not at all. Sandy McGrab, who with the rest of Kirk Humphries took cautious sides with the ousted clan, was explaining the exact merits of the unshrinkable tweeds to Sir John's patronizing innocence.
“Ah, weel, ye can make me a shooting coat out of that,” said Sir John breezily, “and damn the expense!”
Sandy bowed his customer out of the shop and watched him stride down the high street, the kilts swinging uncomfortably round his stout Saxon legs, the ribbons in his cap floating out wildly behind him. At intervals, he raised a saluting forefinger to some unresponsive vassal on his newly acquired property, and presently, laying hold of Kirk Humphries' “guardian of souls”—a meek, shabby-coated gentleman, who accepted the English invasion as a chastisement from Heaven, mercifully tempered with bawbees—carried him off in triumph.
Sandy McGrab did not smile, but he happened to catch the eye of Saunders, the rival clothier on the other side of the road, and they looked at each other long and intently. Saunders sauntered across and propped a broad shoulder against the doorway.
“There's another week to September,” he said thoughtfully. “Na doot they'll be going along home soon.”
“Aye,” said Sandy, as one accepting consolation.
“There be twenty of them up there,” Saunders went on, indicating the direction taken by the English baronet with a jerk of the head. “Me son James gang oot with them a week since, and twa grand royals walked away under their big noses with a wisk of the tail and a rare wink of the eye at Jamie. Jamie was no interested at the moment, for he had his knee full of London lead, but he heard the beasties whispering and laughing all down the glen. He'll no have the face to be after them again this year!”
The two men shook silently. In Sandy McGrab's eye there was an unmistakable twinkle.
“But Sir John's got the last bit of me last year's homespun,” he said, as if thereby getting the laugh back on the Scotch side. “I'm to make him a shooting coat out of it, he said.”
“And he canna shoot a haystack!” said Saunders, still convulsed with solemn and noiseless mirth.
“Ah, weel, he can pay for the coat,” Sandy commended placidly.
The statement appeared to have a sobering influence on the elder man. He stared thoughtfully up at his own chimney pot, as if the smoke curling up into the evening sky were giving him the cue for his next remark, and his grizzled eyebrows were contracted
“Ve be doing vurry weel for yerself, laddie,” he observed, after a moment.
“It'll do,” said Sandy noncommittally
“Since the bailie, your father, deed, ye maun ha'e turned many a gold bit,” Saunders persisted
“They come and they go,” said Sandy, with profound philosophy.
Saunders shook his head.
“Yet you're a young man, laddie. You'll no be wanting to sit in Kirk Humphries all the days of your life.”
“There's the shop.” said Sandy.
He had colored up, however, and his expression was less determinedly expressionless. Saunders followed the smoke till it lost itself in the sapphire blue.
“The shop's no difficulty, laddie. I'm a puir mon, but I'd give ye fifty pounds for the place as it stands. It's a bargain.”
“It would be,” said Sandy, without emotion.
“I'd make it sixty for the old bailie's sake.”
“I'll not be ruining you,” said Sandy generously,
Saunders heaved a sigh.
“Ye be the true son of your father,” he said. There was a moment's contemplative silence, then he sighed again as one arousing himself reluctantly from a pleasant reverie. “Ah, weel, maybe you're right to stick to the old place, laddie. You'll settle down and take a bra' lassie to look after ye. There's Jeannie waving me to come into supper. You'll no drop in for a bit?”
The young man shook his head.
“There's a nine-pointer somewhere in the glen. I've promised the laird to stalk for him to-morrow, and I'll be having a look round before I turn”
He was interrupted by a sudden crash of music from the far end of the street—the rattle of drums and a discordant blare of trumpets; and half a dozen of Kirk Humphries' rising generation took to their heels with warlike shrieks of delight that their forefathers would have envied. Saunders drew himself up.
“It's the play actors,” he said, hoarse with indignation. “They've set their tent right in the market place, and it's there the devil'll sit and spin round the souls of our puir foolish laddies. I tell ye, Sandy, play actors are the children of the evil one. I ha'e seen them in London—brazen-faced hussies, with blue eyes and golden hair, and no more on than a pair of pink stockings”
“I canna believe it,” interrupted Sandy, crimson to the ears.
“You may weel say so—but it's the truth. I took no count of London, to which Sodom be white as snow, but I'll no stand by and see Kirk Humphries go to perdition. I and the meenister will have a word with the laird, and if we canna sweep the place free” He snorted unutterable threats. “It's the English ha'e brought Satan amongst us,” he went on, with redoubled fierceness, as a scurrying urchin in bedraggled kilt stumbled over his feet. “Me son Jamie heard tell that Sir John has ordered a foreign play actress—Donna Eleonora Dolamora, she's called—up to Glen Every, and that she's to play act to them”
“In pink stockings?” queried Sandy, deeply distressed.
“Maybe. But she gets a hundred pounds a night, says Jamie.”
It impressed them both, in spite of themselves. Sandy McGrab glanced cautiously down the street in the direction of the hubbub.
“I'm thinking she'll not be like that,” he said.
“She'll be worse!” was the retort. “It's for the wickedness that they're paid. You'll no be yielding to temptation, laddie?”
McGrab shook his head.
“It's awful that such things be,” he said very solemnly, and turned his eyes resolutely to the house opposite. “I'll be getting along. Good night.”
“Good night. And if you care to change your mind some time, Sandy McGrab, I'd make it sixty-five for auld lang syne”
But Sandy was already out of hearing at the back of the shop. There it was now quite dusk. Very cautiously, as if afraid of being caught red-handed in some felonious enterprise, he waited until Saunders' broad-shouldered figure had vanished from the square patch of daylight. Then he slipped his hand behind a bale of homespun and, drawing out a tattered-looking volume that lay hidden there, he thrust it into an inner pocket of his coat. Thereafter, with an air of grave detachment, he proceeded to shut up the shop for the night.
A quarter of an hour later, Jeannie Saunders, who had kept anxious watch at the window opposite, saw him stride up the street and around by the bridge that leads over the river to Glen Every. Jeannie Saunders drew a little sigh of relief. She had never been outside Kirk Humphries, but her woman's instinct mistrusted brazen hussies who danced in pink stockings, and still more the strong-mindedness of the mankind that condemned them. And Sandy McGrab had not so much as glanced at the white tent pitched in the market place. That much she was sure of.
But the din with which the traveling show announced its advent into Kirk Humphries pursued Sandy McGrab far into the mountains. He climbed rapidly, leaving the beaten track and following the lengthening shadows toward the heights outlined against the pale emerald sky. Whether or not he was stalking was hard to say, but it seemed unlikely, for he looked neither to the right nor to the left until he had reached his destination.
There, underneath the great bowlder that frowned over the glen, he came to a halt, and surveyed the prospect with anxious intentness. Nothing moved save the sunlight, flying like a beaten army to a last fastness on the distant hilltops. Not a stag—not so much as a rabbit—showed itself. Sandy McGrab sniffed the air luxuriously. There was a keenness in it that told of long, hard nights to come and the scent of the moldering leaves that shone red gold against the somber background of faded gorse and heather. A long way off something dead white glittered amidst the crimson clouds—the first finger streak of winter. A mighty sigh of relief heaved up Sandy McGrab's big shoulders. Then, very solemnly, he took out the shabby little volume.
“In such a night
Did Jessica”
he began.
He went right through with it, at first reading with his back against the bowlder, his feet crossed, his tam-o'-shanter rakishly planted over one ear: but finally the volume dropped from his hands, the tam-o-shanter went after it to keep it company, and Sandy McGrab and Will Shakespeare made love to the sunset with a mingled passion and delicacy, flavored with the faintest Scotch accent. that would have moved a harder heart than that of sweet Jessica.
But by the time the shadows had deepened from amethyst to purple, poor Jessica had been faithlessly deserted. To an attentive white-tailed rabbit, which squatted on its haunches at a safe distance, Sandy McGrab poured out his glowing narrative of Cleopatra's passage down the Nile, her meeting with great Antony, the detailed picture of her glories, and of the winds that sighed about her in amorous attendance. What the rabbit thought of it could not be said, but there was that in Sandy McGrab's rich-toned voice that assuredly must have compelled the late Andrew McGrab, minister at Kirk Humphries, to turn, not once, but many times, in his grave.
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety,”
declared Sandy McGrab finally and triumphantly. And at that moment some one applauded.
Sandy McGrab started as if he had been shot. No conscience-stricken murderer could have gazed more guiltily about him. Whence had come the burst of approval? Certainly not from the rabbit, which had taken to instant and precipitous flight. Sandy gazed up. On the top of the bowlder, half sitting, half kneeling, her face full of the golden sunlight, was his audience.
“Oh!” he said, with a deep breath.
She nodded at him.
“I've been listening,” she said. “I couldn't help it. I've heard those lines from a good many people—some of the very greatest—but I've never heard them like that. It was wonderful! Who are you?”
He made no answer, still petrified with the awfulness of his discovery and the loveliness of his discoverer.
“You must be a 'pro,'” she asserted gravely.
Sandy McGrab pulled himself together.
“I'm not,” he said. “I'm a Highlander.”
She laughed.
“A Highland actor!” she said gayly. “Isn't that a possible combination?”
“Play actors are the children of the devil,” he declared, and the spirit of the late McGrab shone in his scornful eyes.
“All of them?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said truculently.
“Thanks! I'm one. You're another.”
“Oh!”
“Are you a child of the devil?”
“No!” very decidedly.
“Am I?”
He took courage to look up at her again. Verily, her hair glistened like gold, her eyes were blue, and her lips crimson. It was even as Saunders had said, and yet
“I canna think it!” he broke out, deeply moved, and with a sudden lapse into his own tongue. “I canna think it. You are not as they be.”
“Thank you again. I'm not like what?”
He pointed down to Kirk Humphries.
“Not like those,” he said.
“Ah!” She was silent a moment. “You mean—the traveling players,” she went on slowly. “You've seen them, I suppose?”
“No.”
“That means you wouldn't go to see them—for fear of your immortal soul? Why not? What's the matter with them?”
Sandy McGrab crimsoned.
“I canna tell you,” he said coldly. “It's not for the ears of a woman.”
He was thinking of the pink stockings dancing their way to perdition, and his brow darkened with defiance. The lady perched above him laughed to herself.
“I see. Too bad for words. And who, then, do you think I am?”
He looked up at her again—more boldly.
“The great play actress from abroad,” he said. “The one that is to stay with Sir John Hodge over there, and play to his guests for a hundred pounds a night. I ken her name. Donna Eleonora Dolamora, she's called.”
“And because I am great and get a hundred pounds a night, my relationship with the devil is to be passed over, while those poor beings down there are to be cast into utter darkness?”
“No,” he faltered, and then went on firmly: “I'm thinking—if you're great, you'll love great things—as I do.”
“Modest man! Because I appreciate the things you appreciate!”
“You're laughing!” he said sullenly.
“No, I'm not. It's very serious—a little tragic. You've not thought that greatness is often only success, and that failure can sometimes love great things.”
He was silent, frowning over her words, and she rested her chin in the palm of her hand, and looked down at him meditatively.
“I wonder who you are,” she said again.
It was scarcely a question, and somehow he did not accept the opportunity to tell her of the long-established firm of McGrab & Son. Her eyes were very blue, and might become a little mocking.
“I think I can guess,” she went on. “Before you began making love to Jessica, I had been dreaming, picturing to myself the kind of man to whom all this wild, ragged land must belong. I saw his ancestors—strong, brave men, defending inch for inch their beloved glens and hills from the treacherous English horde. I heard the wail of the bagpipes, and the clash of the swords, and the din of battle. And then I saw you, and I knew you must be the son of those brave days and those brave men. I felt as if I were an alien—a trespasser—and that this land was yours.”
He did not speak for an instant. He had taken a step forward, so that he stood, one foot advanced, on the very edge of the crag, his handsome, stubborn head thrown back, his shoulders squared, his hands clenched at his sides. A gust of wind caught his tartan shawl, and blew it back in a hold sweep against the rocks.
“My clan fought here” he said jerkily,
“I felt sure. And now you are still defending the land from the invader—from me?”
“You are—welcome.”
“Am I? I'm glad—if it's true. I do not wish to flatter you. I have always loved everything that belongs to the Highlands. I've wanted to know and see and understand.”
“You'll not see much up there,” he said, with a sudden scorn. “You'll not learn much from him.”
“From whom? Oh, from Sir John! I had forgotten. No. He's English He can't hear the bagpipes or see the queer little fairy folk in the glens, can he?”
“Can you?” he asked quickly, a little breathlessly.
“I've been watching them all this evening,” she said.
“You!” His eyes shone, his straight mouth relaxed. “I could show you” he began impulsively, and faltered again.
“What?” She bent down to him. “Won't you show me things, lord of the glen; I've a few days of freedom before go—up to Sir John. Won't you show me your castle up there on the crags—where you live, where your wild ancestors fought and died—won't you?”
She was pointing up to the McPhersons' last stand against their oncoming host of creditors—a low-built hunting box, rising up from the crest of a distant precipice—and he followed the indication of her finger with a suppressed gasp.
“I” he began. Then he looked up at her. Her eyes were extraordinarily, wonderfully blue, and she was smiling. He squared himself defiantly. “I'll take you—to-morrow,” he said.
“Thank you It will be my great day—when I shall forget how great I am, and just be happy. You won't forget? Oh, no, know a Scotsman keeps his word! And now it is getting late, I must go back.”
She had risen suddenly, as if impelled by a sudden alarm, and he watched her graceful, sure-footed descent of the rocks with an awkward, shamefaced interest. It was a very small foot in a very neat shoe. There seemed nothing satanic about either, and yet Sandy McGrab's soul quivered within him as before the first onslaught of the evil one. She was almost beside him when she turned and glanced down at him over her shoulder.
“Give me your hand to help me!” she said, almost petulantly.
He gave her his hand with an inspired gallantry that all the chieftains of Scotland might have envied. He held it for an unnecessary moment with a reckless disregard for every moral exhortation that had ever been uttered.
“Thank you—Antony,” she said, and smiled.
He accompanied her to the little hotel where, as she informed him, she was resting for a night or two before entering on a strenuous social life up at Glen Every. She grew more voluble as they approached the town, Sandy McGrab more reticent. As they passed the doors of McGrab & Son's, clothiers, the very bales of homespun seemed to shriek at him. A minute later, she was bidding him good night and her hand was in his again.
“Till to-morrow, laird! laird is the right word, isn't it?”
“Yes,” said Sandy, and gulped down something that had once been a conscience.
“And I'm glad you're not going to see the play actors,” she added. “I—I like you not to.”
“I shan't,” he affirmed bluntly, and added hypocritically: “Not now.”
“Good night, then, laird.”
“Good night.”
Saunders was standing on his door-step as Sandy McGrab returned. He was smoking thoughtfully, and staring at the shop opposite with an air of dispassionate criticism.
“Sandy McGrab!” he called across. “I've been thinking it over, mon. I'll make it seventy”
Sandy McGrab went into his ancestral dwelling and slammed the door.
II.
THE LAIRD ENTERTAINS.
“Well, I shall make one more attempt at a reconciliation,” said Sir John pompously and stretched out an unbooted foot in the direction of his valet. “The man's a fool, of course, going about with his nose in the air because his grandfather was a smarter sheep stealer than the others; but it's my duty as landowner to do the neighborly, and I shall ask him up to meet Donna Eleonora next week. The car at ten-thirty sharp, James.”
“Yes, Sir John.”
On the other side of the glen, the last of the McPhersons was rallying his retainers round him preparatory to the day's sport. The retainers consisted of two ancient gillies, a daw-faced housekeeper, and a blind pony, and all four had belonged to the McPhersons from the day of their birth, a date too remote even for historical research.
“And if that red-faced, turned-milk son of an Englishman puts his nose in here, ye can shoot him!” said the laird, shouldering his gun. “Where the devil is that man, Sandy?”
Old Janie, the housekeeper, looked blanker than usual and, no one seeming to know the renegade Sandy's whereabouts, the laird went off, cursing gloomily. The news that a foreign actress was to be entertained by the turned-milk son of an Englishman at Glen Every, which the laird persistently regarded as usurped property, added to Sandy's desertion, had heated his irascible temper to boiling point.
Fortunately, he had passed over the brow of the hill long before Sandy McGrab made his belated appearance. There was nothing about the latter to suggest deerstalking. Never, save for the gathering of the clans, had Sandy McGrab adorned himself so bravely. The kilt was brand-new, likewise the plaid, and the buckles on his shoes sparkled true silver in the sunlight. And beside him walked a lady. At the narrow stone bridge that crossed the ravine, they came to a halt.
“And so this is where you made your last great stand?” she asked gently, and looked up at him, standing broad and erect beside her.
He nodded.
“They came up here—along the track,” he said, “hundreds of them. Donald McPherson knew the secret path, and reached the bridge with a minute to spare. There were forty of his clan left, and they held the bridge for a day and a night. As each man fell, another took his place—then it was all over. But Donald McPherson was over the mountains and with the Stuarts. It was a grand fight.”
“And the forty?”
“They died,” he said.
Again she glanced at him wonderingly.
“You'd do that?” she asked.
“Die? Oh, yes!”
“Only—it would be the others that would die for you,” she corrected quickly, “You are the chieftain.”
There was a note of pride in her soft voice. He stemmed his fist against his thigh, and frowned proudly over the glen. Had one Douglas McGrab not held his post loyally at the bridge, perchance there would have been no more McPhersons to lead to glory; and if not a McPherson, why not a McGrab? It was a matter of the purest chance.
“Of course,” said Sandy.
The narrative of the fight had brought the hot blood to his cheeks, and his heart was thumping against his ribs. At that moment, he could have held the bridge against a thousand for so long as she looked at him with that wondering admiration. Never, surely, had a woman such blue, sweet eyes!
“There is the house,” he said, almost gruffly.
It was old Janie who opened the iron-studded door to them. Old Janie stared mightily as the unknown lady swept past her, and as her eyes met those of Sandy McGrab, her jaw dropped. He put his finger to his lips.
“Whist, Janie! Ye ken if the laird's awa'?”
“Aye, but”
“The lady's fra Glen Every,” he whispered back. “I'm the laird. Ye'll no tell on me, Janie?”
She looked at him. The old, dull eyes became exceedingly shrewd. One might almost have said that they laughed in whimsical self-mockery
“You're a bra' laddie, and I'm a puir, foolish old woman,” she said. “I'll no tell on ye till ye be found oot, Sandy.”
He went past her. In the great dining hall his lady was waiting for him, standing like some lovely spirit of a modern age amidst the battered emblems of a rougher generation. She had taken a rusty-bladed dirk from the oak wall, and the jeweled hilt glittered in the sunlight.
“And your vassals, my lord?” she asked gayly.
“They're out after a stag,” he said grandly. “And I'm staying for a bit in Kirk Humphries. They aren't expecting me.”
“In Kirk Humphries?” she echoed, and it seemed as if a faint uneasiness had crept into her voice. “Where? Have you a—a place there, too?”
“It's a wee bit of a place—over the shop of McGrab, ye ken?”
In a flash of panic, he had dropped back into his own tongue, and the shadow passed from her face, and she laughed.
“Over a shop?” she exclaimed. “And you could live here? Oh, laird!”
“It's no such a bad shop,” he returned proudly. “The McGrabs are honorable men.”
“I ha'e no doot,” she mimicked him. “With a funny name like that, they ought to be something worthy and respectable. McGrab! I can see the man! And what would he think of a bold, bad actress woman, and a bold, bad laird who can play act like Garrick and a Kean and an Irving all rolled into one? What would all Kirk Humphries think, I wonder?”
There was an oak staircase leading to a door near the ceiling, and impulsively she turned and ran to the little landing, and leaned over to him.
“Well, Romeo?” she laughed
“And if Romeo were called McGrab?" he asked sullenly.
“Why, then”
“What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Their eyes met. What happened then, what wild strain of ancestral blood caught fire in his veins cannot be told. But suddenly the grim old hall vanished, and they were in a flowered garden where roses clamored up the trelliswork to the moon-lit balcony, and a kilted Romeo poured out the richness of his newly wakened passion in verse no less beautiful for the breath of Highland air that scented it. And a fair-haired Juliet, whose fashionable brogues peeped through the balustrade, answered with a poetic verse no less absolute because touched with a bewilderment such as the real Juliet, overtaken by a sudden, undreamed-of emotion, might well have experienced.
Only with the words:
“With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt,
did the realities of the situation break in upon them. There was obviously no method of reaching the psuedo-balcony save by the staircase, which was dramatically unfitting, and for an instant they gazed blankly at each other, brought suddenly to earth and a trifle dazed by the transit. There was a sprig of faded heather in the belt of her dress, and she took it and threw it down to him. He caught it and bent his head over it, and when he looked up again the face of Sandy McGrab matched richly with his hair. But the tension was over.
“Laird,” she began, “if you hadn't been a Scotsman, you'd have been a poet.”
“There's more poetry in half a Scotsman than in ten Englishmen,” he retorted, and was himself again.
“Well, if you hadn't been the great chieftain of a clan, you'd have been a great actor.”
“If I were—plain McGrab, I could play Romeo?”
“If you were John Jones, you could play Romeo better than any man living.”
“And to your Juliet?”
“Ah, if that were possible!”
“Why shouldn't anything be possible?”
Assuredly, Sandy, the son of Andrew, was making fast headway in the direction of perdition. He had one foot on the stairway, and to look down at him was to be transported back a hundred years to a time whey even the McGrabs had been capable of anything and a brave chieftain took what he wanted—from a sheep upward—at the point of the sword. The whilom Juliet caught her breath.
“Laird” she said.
“I'd make it possible,” he interrupted. “I”
And then a motor horn tooted outside the window.
Very slowly, Romeo returned the ascending foot to its starting point. The robber chieftain vanished, and left no greater person than Sandy McGrab himself to face the situation. He faced it grimly and with stour self-possession.
“Maybe it's a guest,” he said. “I was almost expecting some one. I'll go and see”
“Oh, very well—only”
He did not hear the end of the sentence. He was already outside the door and had closed it sharply behind him, setting his shoulders against its polished paneling. Malcolm McPherson's burly figure filled the passage.
“Sandy,” he said, “you're a traitor, mon.”
“I'm worse,” said Sandy McGrab. “I'm the laird.”
“What the devil” McPherson began, and laughed sourly. “It's the whisky bottle you've been at.”
“It's no whisky bottle.” Sandy jerked his head at the door behind him. “There's a lady in there,” he said.
“A lady? Muckle I care! There's that Englishman outside, and I canna shoot him. The weakness of the generation is in my blood. Go out, Sandy, mon, and tell him if he sets foot inside my door, I'll”
“I canna do it,” Sandy interrupted. “The lady is his guest.”
“His guest? Who brought her here?”
“I did. It was for the laird she took me.”
“And you let her believe that—you young scoundrel!”
Sandy McGrab sighed.
“I dinna ken how it was,” he said. “Almost I believed it myself.” Then he looked the laird squarely in the eye. “Laird, I'm a scoundrel, but ye'll no make fools of us both to that red-faced, bull-necked Englishman? Ye'll no do it.”
“I”
At that crucial moment two things happened. Sir John Hodge ambled in at the open hall door, and the door of the banqueting room was sharply opened. The laird looked from one direction to another, then his eyes returned to Sandy McGrab's set, white face. For an instant they did battle together.
“Ye'll no do it!” said Sandy, between his teeth. “Ye'll no give him the laugh over me”
The laird turned slowly.
“Sir John,” he said, with a suavity that was the McPhersons' war signal, “you've come in the nick of time. A guest of yours has honored us with her presence here. We were just showing her the banqueting hall”
Sir John came slowly forward, the uncertain smile in his square face fading to a look of bewilderment.
“Sir John Hodge,” said Sandy McGrab desperately, “Donna Eleonora Dolamora.”
Fortunately, the baronet did not look at him. He was staring at the lady, who held out her hand with a gracious condescension that suggested intimate acquaintanceship. The color in her cheeks deepened.
“You do not remember me, Sir John?” she said reproachfully. “Have I so much changed?”
“Madame—Donna" He made a hopeless gesture. “You forget—I never had the pleasure of meeting you—I am horrified There has been some mistake—I understood that I was to expect you—next week”
“There is no mistake,” she interrupted lightly. “I arrived in your village a few days in advance, for a little rest cure of silence and solitude. It happened that the laird and I became acquainted, and he was kind enough to forestall your hospitality. The mystery is no greater than that, Sir John.”
She was looking smilingly at Sandy, while Sir John glared at the laird. A slow resentment was beginning to make way through his confusion.
“I am grateful to the laird, I am sure,” he muttered.
The clouds on the great brow of the McPherson vanished as before a gust of wind. The signs of his enemy's discomfiture were as honey to his soul. In the direction of Sandy McGrab he winked solemnly.
“The honor is here with us,” he said. “You'll stay and join us in our frugal meal?”
Sir John shook his head. He had come to be gracious, to bury the hatchet and to spread out his magnificence. In some subtle way he had been outdone, and he was very angry.
“My time is limited,” he said stiffly. “I only passed on my way to Glen Every, to ask if it would not be possible for you to keep your side of the river in better order, laird” He broke off. “But that is business, and we have a lady with us. Donna Eleonora, if I might take you back to Glen Every with me?”
“Next week, Sir John. And for to-day the laird has still much to show me.”
“Till next week, then!”
He bowed over her hand after the manner he considered due to a foreigner, he nodded at the laird, he ignored Sandy. Throughout, Sandy had scarcely moved. Save for the lady's glance and McPherson's solemn wink he had passed unnoticed. Now, as Sir John stalked out of the front door, McPherson turned to him with a slow smile.
“And now, laird,” he said sweetly, “will ye no introduce your poor cousin to the lady before we go in to lunch?”
III.
UNMASKED.
Sandy McGrab trimmed his lamp with a hand that in the last few days had lost its steadiness. He took the shabby coated book from its shelf and, opening it at random, sat down by the window and stared at the closely printed pages. There was a sprig of heather in a tiny vase standing immediately in front of him. He did not look at it, but presently he pushed it out of sight behind the lamp. For a few minutes, he fought its malign influence stoically, then he drew it out again from its hiding place and set it before him, folded his arms and gazed at it with hollow, miserable eyes.
“Sandy McGrab,” he said, “ye're no Romeo and no Antony and no laird. Ye're a mean, sneaking, lying Lowlander, and ye maun tell her so.”
He repeated the statement, not once, but many times, and then he took up pen and paper and began to write. On the other side of the road, the lights of the rival clothier's window burned brightly, and from time to time a woman's head outlined itself sharply against the cheerful background. Sandy McGrab took no heed. He wrote feverishly:
- I'm no laird, just a mean, lying little shopkeeper, and I have to tell you.
Then, in the distance, the noisy brass band of the traveling show caught his attention. He sat back and listened with the sweat gathering on his forehead. “A mean, little shopkeeper!” he repeated dully.
“Sandy, mon!”
It was Saunders on the other side of the road. Jeannie Saunders, with a shawl over her head, hung on her father's arm, and her eyes shone as she looked up at the lighted window, though no one saw their shining.
“Aye!” said Sandy absently.
“Are you no coming to the show, laddie? It's no so bad, I've heard. To-night it's for some charity, and the laird's to be there, and the minister, and the Englishman, though I ken he's no warrant for respectability. I've a ticket here. Ye'll no come?”
“No,” said Sandy curtly. “I canna come.”
Jeannie Saunders looked back reluctantly as she followed her father down the street. She caught just a glimpse of a red curly head bowed low under the lamplight.
Sandy McGrab wrote for an hour, and then, when he had finished, methodically tore up all that he had written and started a second time.
“I'd almost forgotten again,” he muttered. “I'm no laird—and she's a grand lady. I've got to remember.”
Footsteps sounded on the quiet street. It was Saunders again—Saunders unusually moved from his phlegmatic serenity—with Jeannie, who hung her head as if beneath a burden of shame.
“Sandy!”
“Aye?”
“Ye were a wise laddie to bide awa'! It was awful! There was a brazen hussie with no more on her than a pair of pink stockings and a flimsy skirt and a string of beads. She sang. I dinna ken what she sang, for I put my fingers in my ears; but I saw the laird and the Englishman give each other a look of horror as if the devil himself had risen up amongst us, and they went out, and I've heard say there were high words between them, and that—the laird”
Sandy McGrab slammed down the window. He wrote on:
- I cannot tell you why I did it. It all seemed true to me
He stopped again. Something had creaked outside his door; there was a blind, timid trying of the handle, and a faint knock. He strode impatiently across.
“If it's yourself, Saunders” he shouted fiercely.
Then the door opened, and he stumbled back a step, his hand gripping the chair behind him.
He recognized her at once—in spite of the loose, disordered hair, the painted lips and eyes, the ugly, disguising cloak that she held about her. She threw back her head almost defiantly, but for all that she seemed to have shrunk together, to have lost height.
“Donna Eleonora!” he stammered stupidly.
“Don't mock me, laird,” she burst out, “for pity's sake!”
He saw then that there were tears carving their channels down the powdered cheeks, but he could not speak or move, and she came in, closing the door behind her.
“I had to come,” she said. “I know it's mad and foolish—anything you like—but I had to. When I saw Sir John and your cousin, I realized what I had done—what you would think and suffer—and I had to make you understand—to explain. There's not many men I could explain to—but you are different. Those who understand goodness and greatness understand folly and meanness and misery”
“Donna Eleonora!” he repeated.
She lifted her eyes to his face. She saw then that he was looking at her feet—at two small, pink feet. Her hands dropped limply, and the coat fell apart. Sandy McGrab turned away with a smothered groan.
“You—you weren't there?” she stammered.
“No, I wasn't there.”
He dropped down by the table with his face buried in his hands, and suddenly she laughed shrilly, harshly.
“There's irony in that, isn't there? I might have gone to-morrow, and you would never have known—never have guessed. I should just have been a mystery. You would have thought of me as Juliet—as Jessica—as Cleopatra—you would have seen me as I was with you up on the moors—on Juliet's balcony—and now you've seen me—like this—a child of the devil, as you'd say—a wandering outcast, a failure! I've flung the truth at you—all for nothing—gratis. It would be screamingly funny, only”
She stopped short. Her dry, miserable eyes had caught sight of the sprig of heather, and passed on to the bowed head, the heaving shoulders. And suddenly she was beside him, her hands clasped over his.
“Laird,” she said, “don't—don't! It's hurting me. If I'd done it for a joke, it would have been cruel, but it wasn't that. You took me so for granted—and I've been buffeted and knocked about so badly! It was good to have a man look at me as you did—so fairly and honestly. You never saw the cheap, tawdry clothes. You never criticized the outside. You saw the best, and I couldn't—couldn't make you see the worst.” She was breathing brokenly, but the clenched hand under hers had relaxed, and she went on with a little sob: “Laird, it isn't the shoes or the clothes that make the woman—and—and it wasn't a song you'd have minded. It was just—'Robin Adair'”
He lifted his head, and instinctively she drew the old cloak about the scanty, chiffon dress. Then, with a movement that was not defiant, but only wearily resigned, she let it drop again, and stood before him, a figure half beautiful, half painfully pathetic.
“And it might have been so different!” she went on huskily. “In a year or two, I might have come back what you thought me—what perhaps is, after all, the truth. Look!”
She had laid a crumpled telegram on the table before him, and he picked it up and stared at it dully.
“I don't understand”
“It's from Braithwaite—the manager of The King's. He's producing 'Romeo and Juliet' to-morrow night, and his star has fallen ill and I could have had the part. It was my chance—what he'd promised me. And now it's too late!”
“Why?” he demanded.
“The telegram went astray. The last rehearsal is to-morrow morning. If I'm not there, I've lost it, and the Edinburgh express is gone. You see—I've missed everything all round.”
He got up heavily, and for an instant kept his head averted. Then he looked at her full.
“It's Juliet for all that,” he said. He took up his tam-o'-shanter from the table, and threw a cloak over his shoulders. “You'll wait here. Don't answer if any one knocks. I'll put the light out. You're not afraid?”
“There's nothing left to be afraid of, is there?”
He made no answer. He went down the narrow stairs, through the deserted shop, and across the street to the rival clothier.
“I'll take the seventy,” he said to Saunders, who opened the door. “But I want it now.”
“Ye can have it, laddie.”
He was gone an hour. When he came back, she was still sitting where he had left her, an old plaid of his about her shoulders, her chin resting in her hand. He could just see the delicate profile, clean cut against the half light from the street below, and her free hand playing idly with the letter that he had written her. He remembered it, and came across and tore it in half. No one need know now. He was going to be the laird—the great man—to her to the end.
“It's all right,” he said quietly. “There's a special train leaving Inverness in an hour. I've a cart waiting to take you in. You'll have time to—to change—and to-morrow morning you'll be in London.” Still she did not speak, and suddenly he took a step toward her. “You're crying,” he said. “Why do you cry ss
She turned her head. In the half darkness he saw that she was quivering with a stifled passion.
“I can't play Juliet again—not now. Don't you understand? I was so proud and happy. The way you looked at me—your respect—your admiration—I was Juliet, I was your equal—and now you're good and generous—but I'm in the dust”
For an instant he did battle with himself. Then he was across the room and on his knees beside her
“It's no true. It's I who am in the dust. I'm no laird. no great man. I'm just a poor, lying, cheating fool—a shopkeeper—a nobody! Only I didn't mean to cheat. It was all true to me. I was really Antony and Romeo and the laird”
He bowed his burning face on her hands, and there was a little silence. Her voice came at last scarcely above a breath.
“You're just—just”
“Sandy McGrab.”
She freed one hand, and laid it on his shoulder. She laughed a little, and the laugh ended in a sob.
“Oh, Sandy McGrab, how glad I am! Play actors, both of us—children living their dreams! And now the curtain's gone down and the play's over. Only I don't need to be ashamed. I can look you in the eyes, Sandy McGrab, and you will look at me” She stopped, and lifted his face gently to hers. “It was all true, wasn't it? Just for a little hour we rose above our circumstances and were ourselves. And you were Romeo and the laird, and I was Juliet and a great actress. And one day perhaps”
“We shall be ourselves again.”
She laughed a little, and it was a laugh quivering with triumph.
“To-morrow night I shall be Juliet!”
“And one night I shall be your Romeo,” he said, between his teeth.
She bent and kissed him on the forehead.
But it was only an hour later, when Sandy McGrab's special express had steamed out of Inverness, that he realized that he did not even know her name.