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II
She was the first to waken in the morning, and stealing softly from him, she left the embers of their fire among the rushes and went wandering among the trees, so that when he rose he saw her figure, airy and white, among their columns. She seemed the spirit of the trees to his doting eye, as though ’twas there among them she had always dwelt; the wood was furnished and completed by her presence.
“There is not in the world a sweeter place,” she cried, “and I have never seen such berries! Look, I have brought you some, Sir Sluggard, that we might taste them first together.” She put a spray of the berries between her teeth and let him sweeten the fruit with a kiss as he took his share from her lips with his own.
“The woman tempted me, and I did eat,” said Morar, laughing, and culled the berries with his arms around her. They burst on his palate with a savour sharp and heady. He was about to ask for more when he saw her change. The smile had suddenly gone from her face at his words; for the first time he saw that her eyes were capable of anger.
“Upon my word,” said she in an impatient voice, “I think it a poor compliment to me after my trouble in getting the berries for you that you should have such a thought in your head about me.”
“There you go,” he answered quickly, an unreasonable vexation sweeping through him in a gust. “Did ever any one hear the like, that because I am indifferent to your silly berries you should snarl like a cat?”
“A cat!” she cried, furious.
“Just a cat,” he repeated deliberately. “For God’s sake give me peace, and get your hair up before the men come ashore for us. It is time we were home; I am heart-sick of this sailing. And it ill becomes a woman of your years to play-act the child and run barefoot about island sands.”
The berries she still held in her hand she crushed between her palms till the juice of them stained her gown and ran like blood between her fingers. The perfume rose to her nostrils and seemed to fill her head with a pungent vapour.
“Well? Well?” he said with irritation at her staring. She covered her eyes with her hands and burst into tears.
He only whistled. Someway she appeared a sloven in dress, awkward in gesture, and a figure of insincerity. If he had not a sudden new conviction that she was everything she should not be, there was the accent of her voice, the evidence of his eyesight. For when, in wild exasperation at his manner, she took her hands from her face, she showed a visage stained and sour, tempestuous eyes, and lips grown thin and pallid.
“I hate you! I hate you!” she cried, and stamped with her bare feet on the sand. “I cannot for my life understand what I ever saw in you that I should have married you. Any one with her senses might have hesitated to tie herself for life to a man with so much evil in his countenance.”
“Yours would be none the worse for washing,” said Morar remorselessly, with an eye on her berry-stained face.
“There’s a gentleman!” she cried. “Oh, my grief, that I should have spoiled my life!”
“You knew what I was when you took me,” said Morar. “Lord knows, I made no pretence at angelic virtues, and ’twas there, by my faith, I was different from yourself!”
“And there’s the coward and liar too!” cried his wife. “You were far too cunning to show me what you really were, and it must have been a woeful ignorance of the world that made me take you on your own estimate.”
“Well, then, the mistake has been on both sides,” said Morar. “There’s no one could be more astonished than myself that my real wife should be so different from what till this hour I had imagined her. Madam, you need not be so noisy; if you scream a little louder the crew will be let into a pretty secret. It is like enough they know you already, for I have been singularly blind.”
He put up what seemed to her for the first time an unlovely hand to stifle a forced yawn: she saw an appalling cruelty in the mouth that had so often kissed her and called her sweet names; his very attitude expressed contempt for her.
“What have I done?” she asked, distracted.
“It is not what you have done,” he said with a coarse deliberation, “’tis what you are and what you cannot help being. The repentance must lie with me. I would give, gaily, ten years of my life to obliterate the past six months.”
“Faith, ’tis a man of grace and character says so to his newly-married wife.”
At these words Morar started slightly, and looked for a moment confused. “Newly married!” he said; “Lord help us! so we are. Some way, I fancied we had been married for years. Well, we have not taken long to discover each other, and will have the more leisure to repent. I understand you, madam, into the very core; there is not a vein of your body hides a secret from me. I was mistaken; I thought your beauty something more than a pink cheek; I thought you generous till I saw how generous you could be at my expense, and how much the rent-roll of Morar weighed with you in your decision to marry me. I thought you humble and unaffected, and now I see you posing about this business of bare feet on the sand, the morning breeze in your gown, breakfasts of berries and water.”
“Pray go on,” cried the lady. “Pray go on. Every word you say confirms the character I now see in your face.”
“I thought you truthful, so you are – in the letter and the word; but the flattery you have for those you would conciliate, the insincerity of your laugh in the presence of those you would please, the unscrupulousness of your excuses for the omission of duties unpleasant to you – what are these but lies of the worst kind?”
“Oh heavens,” she cried, “I was not always so! If I am so now I must be what you made me. I remember – ” she drew her hand across her brow; “I seem to remember some one else I thought was me, that loved you, and could not be too good and pure for you even in her imagination. You seemed a king to that poor foolish girl’s imagination; she loved you so – she loved you so, she was so happy!”
“Just so!” said Morar. “You had, seemingly, well deceived yourself. And now I can tell you that you may cry your eyes out, for I know what a woman gets her tears so readily for. It is that when she is crying and lamenting she may not betray her chagrin and ill-temper in her face. Have done with it, and let us get out of this! I see the men put out the boat; they will be with us in a moment; for Heaven’s sake let us have no more theatricals. The fate of us both is sealed, and we must, I suppose, live the rest of our lives together like the other married fools we know – putting as fair a face as we can on a ghastly business.”
She was standing beside tall blades of shelister – the iris of the isles – and when he spoke like this to her she suddenly plucked a handful and began to tear them wantonly with her fingers.
“I assure you that you have seen the last of my tears,” said she. “I would not cry out if you struck me! There is something almost as sweet as love, and that is hate, and I seem to have come from a race that must have either. I have a feeling in me that I could have loved eternally if I had found the proper object, but now I know that I can always be sure you will keep me hating, and I am not sorry. Yes, yes, you have said it, Morar, a ghastly business; but I will not put any fair face on it to deceive the world, I assure you! It could not be deceived: blind would it be, indeed, if it could not see the sneer in your face, and hear the coward in your voice.”
“Silence, you fool; the men are coming!” he said, clutching at her wrist and twisting it cruelly.
She gave a little shriek of pain, and caught at her breast with the other hand that held the broken blades of shelisters.
“Oh, you have struck me!” she cried. “That is the end of my shame, and I shall make you suffer.”
He saw a poignard glint momentarily in the morning sun that was turning Isle Faoineas’ sands to gold, and before he could prevent her she had plunged the weapon in her bosom. She fell with a cry at his feet, her hair in the ashes of the fire they had last night sat by. The blood came bubbling to her mouth and welled out on her bosom where the poignard rose and fell with her moaning.
For a moment, instead of pity and remorse, there was a feeling of release. Behind him sounded the plash of oars; he turned hastily and saw the men had left the sloop and were approaching land. “Oh Dhia!” he said to himself, “here’s a bonny business to explain!” and then ’twas very far from well with Morar, for he heard the woman moan her wish for water, and he knew she shared the agony of that inward fire that scorched his throat as if the berries he had swallowed had been beads of heated metal. At his feet was the glass they had drunk from on the last night of their happiness; he picked it up and ran to the well that tinkled on the hillock, then hurried to her side and raised her up to let her drink.
The draught, it seemed, revived her; she shuddered and sighed, and turned in his arms; then his own torment mastered him, and he drank too.
Through his whole flesh went a pleasant chill; a gladness danced in him, and he saw a thing miraculous in his bride – the flush come back to her cheek, and all her wild sweet beauty, and her smile, as she leaned against his shoulder like one new waked from sleep, so that he looked into her face and saw himself reflected in her eyes. The berry stains were on her lips, the bosom of her gown was reddened with their juices, and in between her breasts lay the blade of the shelister, sparkling with dew, and glinting in the sunshine as it rose and fell in time with her heart’s pulsations.
“Oh, love!” she said, and put her arms about his neck, “I dreamt – I dreamt a dreadful dream!”
“And I, sweetheart,” said Morar, looking aghast at the berry stains, and the mark of his fingers on her wrist, and on the iris blade that were evidence it had been no dream. “I dreamt, too, love – my God! such dreaming! I do not wonder now the world holds far aloof from this Island of Illusion. God bless the well, the holy well; but the curse of curses on the berries of Ealan Faoineas!”
Together, hand in hand, they fled to the shore and waded out on the sandy shallow to meet the boat; the sloop shook out her sails like some proud eager bird; from her deck, together waist-encircled, they saw the blue tide rise on the yellow sands, the trees nod, the birds flit among the thickets of the glen, and heard the tinkle of the well in Ealan Faoineas.
THE TUDOR CUP
WHEN the Tudor Cup was sold at Sotheby’s in the year 18– for the sum of £7000, the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer echoed round the world – at all events, round the world of men who gather bibelots. There were only three such treasures in existence – this one now destined for America, which was understood to have come from Holland; another in the national collection in Paris; and a third in Scotland, the property of Sir Gilbert Quair, whose ancestor had acquired it one hundred and fifty years before by winning a game of cards in a London coffee-house.
Among those people who were profoundly moved by this record price for a quite unimpressive-looking battered silver tankard was the firm of Harris and Hirsch, the Bond Street art-dealers; and two days after the sale in London, Mr Harris hastened up to Scotland, quartered himself at an inn in Peebles, and pushed some discreet inquiries. Sir Gilbert Quair, he discovered, was in a state approaching penury, living an almost hermit life in the House of Quair beside the Tweed, with a deaf old housekeeper, a half-daft maid who never came out of doors, and an equally recluse man whose duty it was to act as guide to the numerous tourists who flocked to the house for the sake of its place in Ballad Ministrelsy and its antiquarian collection. If the gossips of Peebles could be trusted, the baronet lived upon the shilling fees his guide exacted from the visitors, dodging, himself, from room to room of his mansion for fear of encountering Americans and English, whom he hated – resenting their intrusion on his privacy, but counting their numbers eagerly as from his window he watched them coming up the long yew avenue.
Harris, the Bond Street dealer, modestly bent on hiding his own importance in the commercial world of art – for the nonce a simple English gentleman with a taste for miniatures – called next day at the House of Quair, whose crenellated tower looked arrogantly over ancient woods and fields where lambs were bleating piteously and men were walking along the furrows scattering seed.
The avenue of yews, which led from the highway into Peebles through neglected and dishevelled grounds, brought the Bond Street dealer to the forlorn façade of the mansion and the great main door. He rapped upon the iron knocker; the sound reverberated as through a vault, with hollow echoes such as come from vacant chambers. Far back in the dwelling’s core there was a clatter of something fallen, but no one answered to the summons of the visitor; and having rapped in vain again, he ventured round the westward wing, to find himself confronted by a door on the side of which was hung the evidence that this was properly his entrance. It was a painted board, with the legend —
QUAIR COLLECTION
Open to the Public Tuesdays and Thursdays
ADMISSION ONE SHILLING
Now this was neither a Tuesday nor a Thursday, and Harris swore softly. He was just on the point of making his retreat when a footstep sounded on the gravel of a little walk that led to a bower upon the terrace, and turning, he found himself face to face with Sir Gilbert Quair.
“The collection is not on view to-day, sir,” said the baronet, an elderly thickset gentleman wearing a shabby suit of tweed.
Mr Harris took off his hat – not to the wearer of the shabby tweed suit, but to the owner of the Tudor Cup.
“I am most unfortunate,” he stammered. “I was not aware that the collection was only on view on certain days, and, unhappily, I must return to England this evening. It happens that I am something of an amateur in miniatures, fortunate in the possession of a few choice examples, and, being in this neighbourhood, I could not resist the temptation to see the celebrated collection of Sir Gilbert Quair, which is rich in miniatures.”
He passed the baronet his card, to which the name of a well-known London club contributed the proper degree of uncommercial importance. Sir Gilbert turned it over in his fingers with a little hesitation, shot a shy glance of the keenest scrutiny from under his bushy eyebrows at the visitor.
“In the circumstances – ” he began, and taking a key from his pocket, unlocked the door which led to the collection, but before he let his visitor through he held out to him a little wooden box with a slit in the lid of it. “In the absence of the usual guide,” said he, “I’ll collect your shilling for him, Mr Harris.”
Five minutes later Harris was manifesting the most rapturous appreciation of Sir Gilbert’s miniatures, which in truth were nothing wonderful; but at every opportunity, when unobserved by his host, his eyes went ranging in search of the Tudor Cup. It was his host who finally called attention to it under glass in a corner cupboard.
“If you had been interested in old English silver, Mr Harris, this piece might have had some attraction,” said Sir Gilbert, drenching his flaring nostrils with a pinch of snuff from a tiny ivory spoon. “I’m no great judge myself, but my father highly prized it.”
The Bond Street dealer, with a thudding heart, peered through the glass at the very counterpart of that tarnished goblet which had fetched £7000 in Sotheby’s. He was wondering if the dry, old, shabby gentleman looking over his shoulder, and odorous with macconba, was aware that this was a Tudor Cup, or if he had read the newspapers carefully and knew what Tudor Cups were worth in Sotheby’s.
II
“But Himmel! did you not make him an offer?” demanded Hirsch next day in the Bond Street shop – they called it gallery – to which his partner had returned from Tweedside with the profound depression a man might have who had for a fleeting moment seen the only woman he could ever love and then had lost her in a panic.
“Offer, Joel!” he replied in accents of despair. “I offered him five thousand, and he only chuckled. He would not even take it from the cupboard. ‘No, no, Mr Harris,’ he said with his head to the side, flicking up his abominable snuff; ‘it is an heirloom older than any here, and I am not selling.’ And the galling thing is that he doesn’t even know he has a Tudor Cup, nor what a Tudor Cup can fetch in Sotheby’s.”
“Ah, you should have had the money with you, Harris,” said his partner. “Always show the money, I say; it talks for you through a speaking-trumpet. By heavens, I will go myself to Scotland and have that Tudor Cup, if I have to steal it!”
III
A spirit of romance and a solemn homily on mutability were in the scene when Hirsch walked into the grounds of Quair, though he was not the man to understand. Six hundred years of history cried from the old bastion; still in its shelter men sowed oats, and their shabby dwellings clustered, no way changed, to look at, since the Borderland was vexed with wars and Quair was lord and warden; but vassals no more, save to that grim seigneur Commerce, who took from them triple-tithes and children instead of the service of the sword, which was all the old lords claimed. A valley of peace, and nights untroubled, and the old bold fighting Quairs in their resting graves, and their troopers’ dust at the roots of English pastures; surely at eve in the woods of Quair, or riding spirit horses through the passes of the hills, a thousand ghosts went seeking lost passions, old delights.
It was Thursday afternoon. Hirsch stepped in at the door which led to the Quair Collection, to find the man in charge of it had all the customary cicerone’s dull loquacity. He dribbled dates and gushed details of family history as if he were a gargoyle who had never got refreshment from the currents pouring through him. Thick-set, short, and rasped upon the chin from too-close shaving, he looked the very figure of a man to fill one of the empty suits of mail that flanked the entrance to the gallery, and even to the shopman’s eye of Hirsch he had an air of truculence that somehow seemed to accord with the situation.
“You do not appear to have many visitors to-day,” said the picture-dealer, having looked perfunctorily at dingy tapestry and pictures, and now with eyes, in which the fires of covetousness were with difficulty restrained, upon the tarnished Tudor Cup in its corner cupboard.
“Ye’re the first this week,” said the guide with acerbity, as if the shilling feed were a more personal matter than the gossips of the countryside believed; and Hirsch the dealer, rubbing his hook-nose to conceal the tremulous avidity of his mouth, saw that disappointed avarice was in this creature’s eyes.
“I should like, a little later on, to see Sir Gilbert,” said the dealer, who had five thousand pounds in his pocket, and a Jew’s conviction that an impecunious Scot could never resist the delicious crackle of English notes.
“Ye canna; he’s from home,” explained the guide. “He’s awa’ to Edinburgh for a month.”
A thought came there and then to the dealer which made him pale. Avarice and cunning were in the old man’s face; his shillings plainly meant a lot to him; his clothing was in poor accord with the guardianship of treasure.
“Look here,” said Hirsch in a confidential whisper. “If your master is to be away for a month, there is no reason why the matter I meant to arrange with him should not be arranged with you, and put a handsome sum of money in your pocket. I have taken a fancy to this silver jug, and though I know Sir Gilbert will not part with it, I thought he might at least agree to let me have it copied. It’s a thing that is often done, Mr – ”
“Meldrum,” said the guide with a promising air of equanimity.
“In two or three weeks I could have my copy made in Paris, and this cup returned to you in safety, and no one else except ourselves need be a bit the wiser, Mr Meldrum.”
The guide gave a laugh that was half a sneer, and checked it suddenly with a hand upon his mouth. “It’s a maist singular proposition,” he remarked reflectively. “In the four-and-twenty years I have been showin’ folk the Quair Collection I havena heard the like of it. And it comes from a total stranger!”
“I represent one of the most reputable firms in London,” Hirsch hastened to explain, with the simultaneous production of his business card.
Meldrum looked at it with interest. “Harris & Hirsch. I take it that you are Mr Hirsch? There was a Mr Harris calling on Sir Gilbert, I was tell’t, some days ago.”
“Exactly,” answered Hirsch. “My partner. He had almost completed negotiations for the loan of the cup for the purpose I have mentioned. But really there seems no need for us to be troubling Sir Gilbert. The cup will be back before his return from Edinburgh, and – ”
“Just that!” said Meldrum dryly. “And what about my security?”
Delighted with such apparent pliability, Hirsch produced his English notes, which brought a very passion of greed to Meldrum’s eyes.
“Let us not be calling it security, Mr Meldrum,” he remarked insidiously. “If a hundred pounds – ”
Again the guide ironically chuckled. “If I could trust ye for a hundred pounds, Mr Hirsch, I could trust ye mair for ten times that,” he said. “I take your word for’t that we needna ca’t security: if I’m to risk my job and my reputation, the cost of three weeks loan o’ that siller tankard is exactly a thousand pounds!”
…
Three weeks later, the Quair Cup and its duplicate came back from Tregastel of Paris, so much alike that Hirsch would have been beat to see a difference had it not been that he found on one a private microscopic mark he had put on it himself.
But it was not the cup so marked that he returned to the accommodating Meldrum.
Two months more, and the curio world was shaken once again by the intimation of another Tudor Cup for sale at Sotheby’s. Amongst the host of possible bidders who examined the precious piece of tarnished metal taken out impressively from Sotheby’s strongest safe some days before the sale, was Barraclough, the expert who had bought its fellow earlier in the season for his client in America.
“A brilliant forgery,” he exclaimed on careful scrutiny – “one of Jules Tregastel’s charming reproductions,” and departed.
Harris and Hirsch were sent for by the auctioneer. “Nonsense!” they protested – and Hirsch satisfied himself again that the microscopic mark of the veritable cup from Quair was there. “Tregastel never had a tool on it.”
“Hadn’t you better ask?” said the auctioneer, and they asked by telegram, with astounding consequences.
“The cup you sent was a copy made a year ago by myself for another client. I thought you knew,” replied Tregastel.
“Mein Gott!” cried Harris, appalled. “Tregastel has made so cunning a job of it he has even copied your private mark, and you have sent the original back to Quair.”
“I will not believe it! I will not believe it!” said his partner, almost weeping with chagrin.
That night the two of them went to Scotland, and in the morning Harris went out from Peebles to the House of Quair to see Sir Gilbert.
“Might I have another look at the cup?” he asked without periphrasis, and the baronet snuffed and chuckled.
“It seems to have wonderfully taken your fancy, Mr Harris,” he remarked with an ironic cough. “Again you are unfortunate in the day you call, for this is Wednesday. And in any case I thought I made it clear that the cup was bound to stay here in spite of your most tempting offers.”
“I know,” replied the dealer; “but I should like to see it – that is all.”
“Ah! you mad collectors!” said Sir Gilbert humorously. “Ye can be as crazy over a bashed old siller cup as I might have been mysel’ at one time over a bonny lassie! Well, come your ways in and you shall see it. It is aye another shillin’!”
Harris not only saw the cup, but this time got it into his hands. In a fever of apprehension he turned it up and down and sought for a microscopic mark like that which Hirsch had pointed out upon the other, – it was not there!
At the sight of the blank look on his face Sir Gilbert chuckled and took snuff. “I see you have discovered, Mr Harris,” he remarked with his eyebrows twitching. “You connoisseurs are not to be deceived so easily!”
“Then – then you know it is a forgery!” cried Harris with amazement.
“I would not use that word for it exactly, Mr Harris,” said the baronet with a gesture of distaste. “A copy – and a wonderful copy too, by Tregastel of Paris. The truth is, I sold the original some months ago in London, having first had this one made. You see my possession of a Tudor Cup is notorious, and if it got about that the Quair Collection was being in any way depleted, where would our shillin’s come from, Mr Harris?” and he jocosely poked his visitor in the ribs.
Harris flew back to the inn at Peebles, an object of unutterable despair.
“Mein Gott! these Scotch!” cried Hirsch, wringing his hands. “But I will have my money back from that Meldrum man if I have to take him to the courts.”
“Harris and Hirsch would cut a funny figure in the courts in the circumstances, Joel,” said his partner. “It is better that we go out together to-morrow, when your Meldrum’s place is open, and compromise.”
The entrance to the Quair Collection had been hardly opened on the morrow when the dealers tried to push their way within. Harris was perturbed when he saw who checked them on the threshold – Sir Gilbert Quair himself, who greeted him with a crafty smile, only a little shabbier in dress than when he had seen him hitherto, and with the box for the admission shillings hanging round his neck.
“It might be the flowin’ bowl, Mr Harris,” he exclaimed ironically. “Ye come back so often to it.”
“I want a word or two with you,” said Mr Hirsch peremptorily, finding the old man barred their further passage. “Did you know that cup you lent me was an imitation?”
“I could hardly fail to be aware of it,” said the baronet. “You surely didna think a paltry thousand pounds would be security for a genuine Tudor Cup, and a’ the world sae keen on them at Sotheby’s.”
“I have been deceived; I must have my money back!” said Hirsch, and the old man shrugged his shoulders and took snuff.
“Na, na!” he said. “A bargain’s aye a bargain, and ye canna get your money back. The best I can dae for ye is to swop the cup ye sent for the one I lent ye.”
“Look here, Meldrum – ” Hirsch began, and Harris, with surprise, corrected him.
“Not Meldrum,” he remarked. “Sir Gilbert Quair.”
“Ye’re both of ye right, and ye’re both of ye wrang,” said the old man with a chuckle. “For twa years back I’ve been guide to my own collection; it’s the only way to keep an eye upon the shillin’s.”
“You d – d old rogue!” exclaimed the partners simultaneously, and he grinned at them, with his stout old breast across the doorway like a cliff. For a little he gloated on their fury, then took them by the arms and led them out upon the terrace.
“You see this land,” he said, and indicated all the hills and valleys, verdant woods and furrowed fields, and the river sounding at the bend below the mansion. “The greed of English thieves brought them here marauding for good six hundred years, and it seems ye’re no done yet! My forefolk fought you with the sword, but Gilbert Meldrum Quair must fight you with his wits!”
“But, Gott in Himmel! we are not English; we are Hebrews!” protested Hirsch with his hands palm upwards and his neck contracted.
“That is worse,” replied Sir Gilbert, making for his door. “We Scots are still at feud wi’ the Jews for what they did out yonder in Jerusalem.”
