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“Stephen! Stephen! what has happened?” cried the girl, her lips upon his cheek.

“It – it caught me,” gasped the lad. “I ran from The Peel, and it caught me, clawed upon my thrapple, and left me here. I pinned my neckcloth on the dog.”

He leaned upon the woman, helpless in his terror. “Bring me the wine!” she bade her master, and old Wanlock stumbled back to fetch it.

“Oh, Stephen! Stephen! what were ye doing at The Peel?” she asked. “Ye know ye promised me – ”

“I could not help myself,” he answered, “knowing what was in the well. ’Twas that that kept me in the country. I got it out and was making off with it when I heard the eerie laugh again. I dropped the plunder at the very door of Mellish when the de’il was on me. He was no bigger than a bairn, but he kept upon my heels till I got here, and then he leaped.”

“My Stephen! oh, my Stephen!” cried the woman, fondling him upon her breast, and he hung within her arms. A snarl came from the shadows: a creature smelling of mould and rotten leafage, clothed as in ragged lichens, contorted like a pollard willow, leaped at the throat of Stephen and crushed it like a paste, then fled with the bittern call.

Old Wanlock heard the woman shriek: he tottered with the goblet from the lodge and came within the circuit of the candles where she knelt beside her lover.

“He’s gone! he’s gone!” she cried, demented. “The devil has strangled him,” and at the moment passed the ghost of Stephen Wanlock.

“I knew it,” said the father – “very well I knew it: the sixth blow! There is no discharge in this war!” His head seemed filled with wool: his blood went curdling in its channels, and he staggered on his feet. Raising the goblet till it chattered on his teeth, he drained it at a draught, and the woman, heedless, straightened out the body of his son.

She heard her master choke: she turned to see his face convulsed, his eyeballs staring, and the empty flagon falling from his hand.

“The brooch! the brooch!” she screamed: a gleam of comprehension passed for a moment over Wanlock’s purpling visage: he raised his arms, and stumbling, fell across the body of his son!

THE FIRST-FOOT

I

THE husband, with an eye of warm alacrity and a welcome manner that should have made his fortune in some livelier hostel than the dreary inn of Flanders Moss, regarded the stranger with compassion. The wife, an acrid peevish body, ill-content to be roused from bed at such an hour, plucked at the strings of her night-cap, loosened and fastened them half a dozen times as if they bridled a wroth that choked her, and looked with candid disapproval on the customer standing in the kitchen with the rain running from his wrap-rascal coat on the fresh-caumed flagstones of her floor.

“H’m!” she coughed; “it’s no’ a time o’ the year when we’re lookin’ for many visitors to the Flanders Moss.”

“But still-and-on ye’re welcome,” said the husband hastily, tender of the stranger’s feelings. “I think there’s an egg or twa, Jennet, isna there? And – and the hen; or – or yon ham?”

But Jennet tied her cap more tightly down upon her ears.

“I was making for the port o’ Menteith,” explained the stranger in a breath, compassing the chamber and the characters before him at a gled’s glance, feeling himself master of them both, flinging off the wrap-rascal and throwing his bonnet on the hearth to dry. It struck the stone with a sodden slap that would have made plain the kind of night from which he had escaped, even if the ear had not more eloquently indicated that the house was in the very throat of tempest.

“Ye’ll no hae pack nor powney?” said the dame sourly, with a pursed mouth, surveying the young man’s hose, the clinging knee-breeches, the stained red waistcoat, and the shabby green cutaway coat, but more intent upon the dissipation of his shaven boyish countenance, the disorder of his hair, and his reckless eye.

“Tut, tut! It’s no’ a nicht for a cadger’s dog, let alane a powney,” said the amiable host; and then, in a beseeching tone that told the nature of their partnery, “Am I richt or am I wrang, Jennet? At least there maun be an egg or twa.”

The wife scowled at her mate, and said emphatically that eggs were out of the question, and the hour was quite ridiculous.

“I’m no heedin’,” said the stranger; “I had a meal of a kind at Fintry. What I want’s a bed.”

“Ye’ll get that!” cried the landlord heartily, glad to be assured of a speedy return to his own blankets. “There’s a snug bed ben, and ye’ll hae a’ the better appetite for breakfast.”

“But what’s your security?” demanded madam, and the goodman sighed.

Her customer shrugged his shoulders, threw himself in a chair, and thrust his feet out to the fire of turf.

“God,” said he.

“Sir?” she queried.

“I said God was my security,” remarked the stranger.

“Ye couldna hae better!” cried the innkeeper, and drawing a chopin of ale for the pious gentleman, beat down by the very gust of his geniality the rising opposition of the woman’s manner.

Twenty minutes later Black Andy went to bed in the ben. He went with his boots on, for he had, in the very act of stooping to unlace them by the light of a tallow candle, seen that which led at the end to the rout of any thought of sleep. The candle, which he had placed on the floor the better to see his knots untied, threw a beam under a heavy oaken kist in the corner, and glinted on a ring of brass that oddly hung from the bottom of the box. He threw up the lid, to find no more than a pile of homespun blanketing; then turned the kist quietly on its side, to learn that the ring was on the latch of a secret bottom. He opened it: the shallow space between the false bottom and the real one seemed at first to hold no more than rags; but fumbling through them, he found a leather pouch with three-and-twenty guineas – madam’s private hoard! As he counted the money silently on the covering of the bed, the storm that held the Flanders Moss in its possession seemed for the while to hold its breath, as he did his own, so that he could hear the thud of his heart and each reluctant tick of the kitchen clock.

For an hour he lay in darkness, wide awake, with the pouch in his breast. The murmur of voices in the kitchen ceased, its light went out; the lonely inn on the edge of the moor was black, and wholly lost in the privacy of the night.

The innkeeper, easy man! turned his face to the box-bed wall in the kitchen, and counted sheep going through a dip-tank till the fleece of the last of them spread, and spread, and spread, like a magic counterpane, and fell on him at last, smothering him to sleep. It was his goodwife’s elbow. For she lay on her back, her hands hollowed behind her ears, her cap-strings loose, and listened for some other sound than the creak of the roof-cabars, the whistle of the thatch, and tempest’s all-pervading symphony. Ah! it would have been an easier night for her if she had had some chance to put her money elsewhere; it was her evil star that had surely brought this man to Flanders Moss on a Hogmanay, the very night when all honest bodies ought to be at their own fire-ends!

A sound in the room where he lay brought her sitting up in bed with every sense alert. A sash squeaked: she shook her husband out of the fleece of sleep, and they jumped together to the chamber door. It opened to a gale that blew right through it from an open window: their lodger was gone!

“I kent it!” cried the woman furiously, and shrieked to realise, by a feel of the hand in the dark, that her hoard had been discovered.

“Dod, now, that’s droll!” said her husband, scratching his head. “And him had such good security!”

II

Black Andy, with the pouch of guineas comforting the breast of him like liquor, so that he hardly missed his wrap-rascal or his bonnet that were drying by the kitchen fire, ran along the broken road for Kippen. It was like the bed of a burn, and like a rested monster rose the storm afresh from the Hieland hills. One glance he gave behind him at a step or two from the window whence he burst; so dark was the night that the inn in the womb of it was quite invisible. He looked over his shoulder for a second time, having run for a little, and saw the bobbing of a lanthorn. His amiable host was already on his track, and Kippen was plainly no place for Black Andy.

With an oath he quitted the road, ran down through a clump of hazel, and launched on the rushy moss that (as the story goes) had once been a part of the sea that threshed on Stirling rock.

Like many another man, this scamp, unskilled in thievery, had no sooner escaped the urgent danger of arrest than he rued his impulsive fall to the temptation of a bag of clinking coins. He had drunk through an idle youth, and others had paid the lawing; he had diced and cheated; he had borrowed and left unpaid; he had sold bad cattle and denied his warrandice; he had lived without labour – all of which is no more different from theft than tipsyness is different from drunkenness. But hitherto he had stopped on the verge of crime denominate, and it was his mother’s only glad reflection when the thought of his follies haunted her pillow. Had the temptation of the inn-wife’s gold come to him on another night, and elsewhere, he could have turned the broad of his back on it, and mustered conquering hosts of fear and of expedience to his support; the misfortune was that it found him in a desperate hour. For a week he had been in a most jovial company with some Campsie lairds; he had spent the price of his father’s horse to the last plack royally, as if he had been a bonnet-laird himself, and New Year’s Day should have seen him back at Blaruisken with the price of the horse, or else it meant disaster. Even that consideration scarcely would have made a thief of him (as he thought now), but for the wife in the Moss of Flanders inn; she had so little deserved to be the sole possessor of such gold. A comely wife, a civil wife, a reasonably hospitable wife (as he argued with himself), might have kept her money on the doorstep, and he would have been the last to meddle with it; but this one deserved some punishment, and he was, in a fashion, Heaven’s instrument. The husband – true, he was a kindly soul (and here the instrument of Heaven found his sophistry weak a little at the knees); but Black Andy had an intuition that the hoard was secret, even from the husband, and he guessed aright the wife would never report the actual nature of her loss.

He seemed the more contemptible a thief to himself, because in one particular he had blundered like a fool. For yonder, beiking before the innkeeper’s fire, were his wrap-rascal and his bonnet – the first, at least, a clue to his identity. There was not another wrap-rascal than his own in his native parish; the very name of the coat had seemed too sinister for his mother, and the garment made him kenspeckle over half the shire. Though the folk in the inn of the Flanders Moss might never before have cast an eye on him, they had but to hang that garment on a whin-bush at their door to learn his history from scores of passers-by.

Thinking thus – not any penitent in him, but the poltroon that is in all of us at the thought of discovery by the world of what we really are – the woman’s money coldly weighed upon his bosom like a divot. By God! a rotten bargain had he made – to swap the easy mind of innocence for three days’ drinking with numskull bonnet-lairds in a Campsie tavern.

But the thing was done, with no remedy; there was nothing for it but to tramp home and meet his obligation to his father.

So busily did his mind engage with these considerations that the increase of the tempest for a little never touched his comprehension. He came to himself with a start at a stumble in a hag whose water almost reached his knees, and realised that he was ignorant of the airt he moved to, and that the passion of the night was like to shake the world in tatters. The very moss below him seemed to quiver like a bog; no rush, no heather shrub, but had its shrieking share in the cacophony of that unco hour upon the curdled spaces of the ancient sea. Black Andy put out his cold-starved hand before his face, and peered for it in vain; it might have been a hand of ebony.

For hours he laboured through that windy desert, airting, as he judged by the wind, for the north, as far away as possible from the inn of his misdoing, and weariness seemed to turn his blood to spring-well water, and his flesh to wool, so that the earthy cushion of the hags in which he sometimes stumbled tempted him to lie and sleep. The last sheuch would have done his business if he had not, sitting on its edge, beheld a glimmer of light from a window. He dragged with an effort towards it, climbed a dry-stone dyke, and felt with his hands along the back of some dwelling which he took for a shepherd’s hut, until he came upon the door. Breathlessly he leaned his shoulder to it and loudly rapped.

“First-foot!” he heard a voice exclaim, and remembered it was the New Year’s Day as the bolt shot back and he fell in the arms – of the innkeeper!

“Ye’re back, my man!” cried the innkeeper’s wife, with a face as white as sleet. “It’ll be to pay your lodging?”

“Tut, tut! never mind the lawin’. It’s the New Year’s Day, and here’s your dram,” said the genial landlord. “But, man, yon was a bonny prank to play on us! We thought ye were awa’ wi’ the wife’s best blankets.”

“But a lodgin’s aye a lodgin’,” said the wife nervously; and Andy laughed, knowing her perturbation.

“Here’s the lawin’,” he exclaimed, and banged her pouch of guineas in her hand. “Ye’ll can count it later, and I’m awa’ to my bed again. Were ye really feared I was gaein’ to cheat ye?”

It was the innkeeper who answered; his wife was off with her hoardings.

“Not me!” he said. “I kent ye had Grand Security.”

ISLE OF ILLUSION

I

MACDONNELL of Morar, on the summer of his marriage, and when the gladness of it was still in every vein, sailed his sloop among the Isles. He went from sound to sound, from loch to loch, anchoring wherever the fancy took his lady, and the two of them were seeking what no one ever found nor shall find – that last and swooning pang of pleasure the Isles in summer weather, either at dawn or dusk, seem always to promise to youth and love. At night they lay in bays in the dim light of the cool north stars, or in the flush of the sunken sun that made wine of the sea-waves, and the island cliffs or the sandy shores seemed populous with birds or singing fisher-people.

It was very well then with Morar.

His wife was still a girl. In the mornings, when she came on deck with her hair streaming and the breeze making a banner of her gown, her gaiety surging to her breast in song, she seemed to him and to his men like one of the olden sea princesses told about in Gaelic stories, born from foam for the happiness and hurt of the hearts of men. She was lovely, tender, and good, and he himself, with those that knew him best, was notable for every manly part. One thing only he had a fear of in his bride – that, as had happened with others before, and perhaps with himself, a day might come to him when the riddle of her would be read, her maidenly sweet mystery revealed; when he could guess with certainty what was in the deep dark wells of her eyes, and understand, without a word, the cause for every throb of her bosom. To have her for ever with a part to baffle and allure, as does the sea in its outer caves, and as do the dawns in Highland glens – that was the wish of Morar.

The captain of the yacht, who, having no passion for her, knew her, some ways, better than her husband, perhaps, said she had what, westward in the Barra Isle he hailed from, they call the Seven Gifts for Women – content and gentleness, looks and liking, truth, simplicity, and the fear of God. To him and to his men – gallant fellows from Skye, and somewhat jealous of her that she was not of the isles herself, but a stranger – she was at least without a flaw. One time they thought it might be temper was her weakness, for she walked the deck with pride and had a noble carriage of the head, but the tiniest cloud of temper never crossed her honeymoon. Indeed, it was well with Morar.

And it seemed that summer as if the very clime befriended him, for there never blew but the finest breezes, and the sun was almost constant in the sky. Round all the remoter isles they sailed – even Harris and the Uists, and the countless lesser isles that lie to the west of Scotland, – an archipelago where still are dwelling the ancient Gaelic gods, whereto at least they come at sunset and sit upon the sands communing, so that sailors knowing the language, and having the happy ear, can sometimes catch far off at sea deep murmurs of the olden world that others take for the plash of waters.

Morar’s wife put the yacht into every creek. She loved the little creeks, she doted on the burns going mourning through the darkness, and on the sound of tides on shallow shores; it was her great delight sometimes to sleep on land below a canvas shelter, bathe at morning in the inner pools, walk barefooted on the sand, or stand on rocky promontories facing the rising sun, with her hair tumultuous. Her first breakfast then was the wild berry, her morning drink the water from island wells.

“I could live on the berries,” she would say to her husband. “Oh, I love them!”

“Doubtless, mochree,” would he answer her, laughing. “Faith! it’s my notion they have been growing all these years in the islands waiting just for you; their bloom is on your cheek; it’s the berry stain that was on your lips since ever I knew you. But for a common person like myself there is a certain seduction in a sea-trout or a herring. Madam, I wish you joy of your wild berries, and indeed I love the taste of them – on your lips, – but let me press on you a simple cabin-biscuit, though it suffers from having been baked by the hand of man.”

“And the berry comes straight from God,” would be her answer. “It’s the fruiting of the clean wild wind; I sometimes think that if I could eat it always I should live for ever.”

“Then, faith, I’ll grow it in Morar garden by the pole, and you shall eat berries at every meal,” said her husband. “Perhaps I’ll acquire the taste myself. Meanwhile, let me recommend the plain prose of our cooking galley.”

“And I declare that I can find in pure water something as intoxicating as wine and far more subtle on the palate.”

“A noble beverage, at least they tell me so, as the piper says in the story,” said Morar, “yet God forbid that a too exclusive diet of berries and water should send Macdonnell back a widower to Morar! I take leave to help you to another egg,” and so saying he would laugh at her again, and she would laugh also, for the truth was that she never brought to the cabin table but a yachtsman’s appetite.

One thing she missed in all these island voyagings was the green companionship of trees. She came from a land of trees, and sailing day after day past isles that gave no harbour to so little as a sapling, she fretted sometimes for the shady deeps of thicket and the sway of boughs. Often she sat on deck at nightfall and imagined what the isles must have been before disaster overtook them.

“Can you think of us wandering in the avenues, sitting in the glades? Barefoot or sandal, loose light garments, berries and water, the bland sea air, shade from the sun and shelter from the shower, and the two of us always young and always the same to each other” – it was a picture she put before him many times, half entranced, as if she once had known a life like that before far back in another age and climate than in Scotland of the storms. Kissing her lips, wet from some mountain well, her husband got to look on her now and then as some Greek girl of the books, and himself as an eternal lover who had heard the wind blowing through boughs in Arcady.

Loving trees as she did, it was strange that so long they should have failed to visit Island Faoineas, for often in their voyagings it lay before them on the sea – green, gracious, and inviting, its single hill luxuriant with hazel-grown eas or corrie, its little glen adorned with old plantations. It lies behind Bernera, south of Harris, hiding coy among other isles and out of the track of vessels, and for reasons of his own the captain of the yacht sailed always at a distance from it, keeping it in the sun’s eye so that its trees should seem like black tall cliffs with the white waves churning at their feet. But one day Morar and his wife came to him with the chart. “This island here,” they said together. “We have not seen it close at hand; let us go there to-night.”

The captain’s face changed; he made many excuses. “A shabby, small place,” he told them, “with a poor anchorage. And the wind is going westward with the sun. I think myself Lochmaddy better for an anchoring this night than Ealan Faoineas.”

“What does the name mean – this Ealan Faoineas?” asked Morar’s wife, looking out toward the island that was too distant yet to show its trees.

“It means,” said Morar, “the Isle of Seeming – that is to say, the Isle of Illusion.”

“What a dear name!” she cried, clapping her hands. “I should love to see it. Are there trees?” Her eyes were on the captain’s face: he dared not lie.

“What you might be calling a sort of trees,” he grudgingly admitted. “Oh yes, I will not be saying but what there are two or three trees, or maybe more, for I have not paid much attention to Ealan Faoineas myself.”

“Indeed!” said she. “Then it is time you were amending your knowledge of it. I think we will risk the anchorage for the sake of the trees.”

It was her own hand put down the helm and herself who called the men to the sheets, for the captain had a sudden slackness in his office and was forward murmuring with his crew.

“What ails him?” the lady asked her husband.

“You have me there!” he answered her, as puzzled as herself. “I think it is likely there may be some superstition about the island; the name suggests as much, and now that I come to think of it, I remember I once heard as a boy that sailors never cared to land on one or two of the Outer Isles, believing them the domain of witchcraft. We must have passed that island frequently and the captain always kept us wide of it. I will ask him what its story is that makes him frightened for it.”

He went forward by-and-by and talked with the captain.

“I am a plain man; I have not the education except for boats,” said the seaman, “and I would not set foot on Faoineas for the wide world. You will not get a man in all the Outer Islands, from Barra Head to the Butt of Lewis, who would step on Faoineas if the deck of his skiff was coming asunder in staves below the very feet of him. I am brave myself – oh yes! I come of people exceeding brave and notable for deeds, but there is not that much gold in all the Hebrides, no, nor in the realm of Scotland, would buy my landing in that place yonder.”

“Come! come! what is wrong with the island that you should have such a fear of it?” asked Morar, astounded at so strong a feeling.

“It is bad for men, and it is worse for women,” said the Captain.

“Is it something to hurt the body?”

“If it was but the body I would be the first ashore! I have not so much money put past me that I have any need to be afraid for my life,” said the captain.

“Are there ghosts there, then?” said Morar, determined to be at the root of the mystery.

“Ghosts!” cried the captain. “Where are they not, these gentlemen?”

By this time the sloop that Morar’s wife was steering had drawn closer on the island, breaking her way among the billows striving into Harris Sound; and to the gaze of Morar’s wife, and to her great bewilderment, she saw the little glen with its bushes climbing high on either side of it, and the tall, great, dark old Highland trees beyond, and thickets like gardens to the south, and under all the deep cool dusk of shadows she had longed for all those days that she and her husband had sought for the last pang of pleasure in their honeymoon among the Outer Isles. She leaned upon the tiller and stared entranced and unbelieving, for it seemed a fairy isle, such as grows fast in dreams and sinks to the sea-depths again when dawn is on the window. Only when she saw rooks rise with cawings from the branches, and heard the song of birds unknown on the treeless islands, was she altogether convinced of its reality.

“Darling,” she cried to her husband, “look! Were we not right? Here’s a forgotten paradise.”

“If paradise it be, then may you have your share of it,” said the captain as he put them ashore. “Myself, I would not risk it so long as this world has so many pleasant things to be going on with. All I can tell you of Island Faoineas is that, paradise or purgatory, it depends on what one eats and drinks there. I heard it from a priest in Eriskay, a noble and namely man through all the islands of the West. Once he had landed here and known some wonders. He died in Arisaig, and in his dying blessed with the seven blessings one well upon this island, but which of all that run there I never learned.”

That night Morar and his bride slept out in the shelter of hazel-bushes and shelisters. They built a fire and drank out of the same glass from a burn that sang through the shelisters, and as they slept there were many wells that ran merrily through their dreams, but one particularly that rose from a hillock beside them, and tinkled more sweetly than golden jewels streaming down a golden stair.