Читать книгу Morag the Seal - J W Brodie Innes - Страница 6

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I ALMOST ejaculated 'Morag the Seal!' so surprised was I at this sudden utterance of the name which had been so prominent in my thoughts, and so often brought to my notice during the last twenty-four hours. Was this gracious lady who walked beside me, welcoming me to her own pleasant sunshiny house, the mysterious seal-woman who lured men to their death, and then laughed at them from the wash of the waves? Could this be the Morag who was shot in the sea with a button from Sandy Macpherson's kilt, and who lay naked on the shining sands at break of day with her great brown eyes wide open, and looking with that long gaze that tugs a man's heart, and who was to be buried in the ruined kirk? It was nonsense; the ideas would not fit. This Morag was alive and real and wholesome, and among eminently real surroundings. Morag the Seal must belong to the dim twilight, moonlit seas, and darksome glens. I could not associate that strange weird legend with this bright kindly-looking house, that breathed of old-world courtesy and refinement, like the sweet scents of potpourri and lavender, any more than I could associate the idea of the cruel inhuman seal-woman with the form of a goddess and the heart of a beast, with the gentle sweetness of disposition that so markedly characterized my companion. These ideas take long to tell, but very rapidly they flashed through my head. My mind must have been reflected in my face, for she looked quickly at me. We were just by a long rose-wreathed French window, and about to enter the house.

'You have heard my name before,' she said. 'Do tell me where. So few know us about here now.'

'It is a beautiful name,' I prevaricated. 'Yes! I have heard it. It is not an unusual name in the West Highlands, is it?'

'It is an old name in my family,' she replied. 'I never heard it anywhere else. Tell me, where did you hear it?'

I thought a moment—I could not tell her of 'Morag the Seal'—then I said:

'I have seen a pastel drawing, a hundred years old, with a tarnished frame and the gilding worn and the glass dusty and stained; but the picture is fresh as ever, and underneath is written in a fine sloping Italian hand the word "Morag" and the date, a century ago.'

'Oh, I know that picture!' she cried. 'I know it! Fancy your having seen it! It is my great-grandfather's youngest sister. There are all sorts of stories about her. But where did you see it?'

'I am staying at Airton House, and the picture is in my bedroom.'

'Oh, how dreadful!' she cried. 'You are not really staying there? Oh, I beg your pardon! I had no right to speak like that, but I can't bear to think of your being with those cruel Bradley brothers.'

As we talked we had entered the room through the French window. It was a library, seemingly, very peaceful and yet bright and cheery—a room wherein it seemed impossible to be in a hurry or angry or anything but calm, with the stately refinement of the best society of the last century. Books were all round, beautifully bound in rich sober-toned morocco. The carpet and furniture were similarly rich and quiet in colour. The somewhat heavy style of decoration was relieved by many flowers arranged with exquisite taste, and on a table beside a deep couch a bright tea-equipage sparkled, and a silver urn was steaming hospitably.

'I'm so sorry you should be anxious on my account,' I said, 'but really I don't think there's much to be afraid of. It's not the Bradley brothers you know, only one of them—Sir John—and he seems a mild and inoffensive old man.'

'Oh, do forgive me!' she said, looking at me with her long steady gaze. 'I ought not to say anything, but somehow I can't look on you as a stranger. I feel as if I had known you all my life. Tell me, why is it that you have been so much in my dreams, though I never saw you before, and now you suddenly appear out of nowhere?'

'I am no psychologist,' I said, 'only a very commonplace lawyer. Still, I have the same feeling. I can't explain it, but I seem to have known you always. I suppose those who believe in such things would say we were together in our last incarnation. To me, I confess, the explanation is almost more puzzling than the fact.'

She was sitting on the couch, and I in a deep comfortable library chair opposite to her. She handed me a cup of delicious tea. Never in my life, I think, have I tasted anything so refreshing.

'Oh, I don't know,' she said; 'I've never studied those things. I am very ignorant, I fear. Have we really lived before? I only know my dreams. I have been delicate all my life, I think, and I am often so tired I can't work like the others, and they pet me, and I dream and dream. I wonder where mother is,' she said, with a sudden change of tone, and she went to the window and called, 'Mother! dear mother!'

I thought I heard a faint answering call, but she clearly did not, for she called through the door again:

'Mother! dear mother! Oh, she is so busy! She'll come presently. I hope she will come while you are here. I should so like you to know my mother. You see, she and my sisters have to work so hard. We keep very few servants, and I am just a drag on them. It's only in the water that I feel really alive. Don't you love to swim by moonlight?'

'Rather!' I replied, for she had unwittingly touched one of my favourite diversions. 'Do you know, I once swam from Sestos to Abydos by moonlight—a glorious Grecian moonlight, too.'

She was looking at me with that long steady look of hers, her deep magnetic eyes gleaming with enthusiasm.

'How splendid! Leander's swim! Oh, how I should have loved it! I couldn't have done it, though. Even in the water I soon tire, though I am far better there than on land. Ay di me! what a poor useless creature I am, and my spirit is so strong! I just long to do all the things that other people do—to ride, and run, and dance, and excel in all sorts of games. I do it all in imagination. I wonder why on earth I should have all these fancies, when I can never in this world gratify them. But from a child I have always loved the dear sea, to see it flashing all its jewels like a bride in the sunshine; or at sunset, when the colours of the sky melt into the sea, and you can't tell which are islands and which are clouds, and Tir nan Oig seems so close—the land of honeymoon, you know; but best of all by moonlight, when the ripples break the silver light into silver lances. Oh, you must think I am raving, but it was the one thing my dear old father, who is now in Tir nan Oig, allowed me to do freely. He was a great swimmer himself, and I might bathe and swim whenever I would; and as quite a child I used to dive into the rock-pools and bring up beautiful shells for him and my dear mother. Do you know, they used to say that picture you saw was like me.'

'It is very like,' I replied—'so like that, when I first saw you, I thought you were certainly the original, forgetting for the moment that it was a hundred years old.'

'I am hardly so much as that yet; but it was a great compliment, for she—my great-grand-aunt, wasn't she?—I never can quite remember how those puzzling relationships go—was supposed to be very beautiful.'

'She must have been beautiful as a dream,' I said.

'The very phrase they used about her, though they said she was a witch. In some of our old letters it was said that if she had lived a hundred years earlier she would have been burnt. It used to be said that she sat on the rocks and sang, and the sailor-boys were so in love with her that they jumped overboard and died at her feet. I don't believe a word of it myself. The only things really authentic about her were stories of her wonderful power of healing. You know, it was just about the time of the French Revolution that she lived, and people were wild about Mesmer then; and we have sheaves of letters from Paris begging her to go over there to heal along with the great Master, as they called him, for they said she had the same power. I have always felt drawn towards this weird ancestress of mine.'

'But, pardon me,' I said; 'you speak of your ancestress. Surely you are not——'

'Morag Cameron. Why, of course, I am! Who did you think I was? I am the eldest daughter of the last Cameron of Ard na Righ, the point or headland of the King, for in the long ago days we were really Kings here—long before there was such a thing as a King of Scotland; and now the Bradley brothers have taken it all, and we have only this little bit that we can call our own, and they covet that.'

'Then this is——?'

'The old Dower House, they call it.'

'How extraordinary!' I exclaimed. 'The very place of all others I wanted to see—the old Dower House—and you who seem like an old friend in it, and here we are talking so familiarly, as if we had known each other for years.'

'I believe we have,' she interpolated.

'It is like a dream,' I continued—'like the prosaic commonplace of life melting into a dream too delicious to be true.'

'Say, rather, like a dream becoming real,' she said. 'But if you are interested in these old-world stories, I can show you something that I think you will like, if you will just move this tea-table away, and bring up that card-table with the big book on it.'

I did so, and in bringing it up in front of her I naturally sat down on the couch beside her as she opened the book, which was apparently a collection of most exquisite etchings of the neighbourhood.

'Here,' she said, 'is a view of the old castle. You know it, of course, as it is now. This is, I fancy, largely imaginative, but it shows the castle as it was when it was complete and inhabited. That man on horseback before the door is supposed to be meant for my great-great-grandfather, the father of the witch. Here is what they called the Gipsy Glen. You must have passed it. Then there is this house, the Dower House—that is about as it is now.'

We bent together over the book and, I know not how, I found my arm was round her, and her little head almost rested on my shoulder.

'I hardly have the courage to look at this book when I am alone,' she said, and there was a certain quiver in her voice as she spoke. 'It seems such a change from what we were to what we are now, and there seems no hope. Oh, don't think me a mean coward! It must sound so like that. Indeed, I don't complain usually, but you are you, and I feel that you will understand.'

'I do,' I said; 'I understand perfectly, and I only wish it were in my power to do something more than sympathize.'

I know not by what magic of sympathy it was that it seemed then the most natural thing in the world that I should bend and kiss the soft cheek that lay so confidingly close to my lips, and that she should take the action as a perfectly natural one. We were in a strange world, however it were to be accounted for.

'I am sure you will,' she said. 'My dreams have been always of you bringing great help to us; always our strong help and stand-by in all trouble.'

She seemed to cling closer to me as she spoke, and I felt as though my one mission in life was to shelter her against every ill and every trouble.

'Listen,' she murmured at last, 'I know you have lost the documents proving our pedigree before my great-grandfather, and the story of the Bradley brothers. Isn't it so?'

'It is,' I answered, in great wonder where she could have got this information from.

'I can tell you,' she said. 'They are in the old castle, but no one, not even Sir John Bradley, has the slightest idea that they are there.'

'Can you tell me where—how to find them?'

'I fear not. There is a secret hiding-place behind the turret stair, where you enter by the little door at the top of that stair at the back. I used to play there when I was a tiny child. Some day I'll meet you there, and show you. I have seen it all in my dreams.'

'But how in the world did they ever get there? They were in the old kirk, were they not?'

'Yes, they were, but the kirk fell into ruin. A new one was built, but the poor old minister got into some trouble. Our people took pity on him, and brought him to stay at the castle. We protected him, and he brought his records with him till they should be asked for; but before they were he died, so no one knew where he had hidden them. The story went about that he had burnt or destroyed them, and the memory of them faded; but I know and now you will help me, won't you?'

'With my life, dear,' I said.

'Now you must go,' she said. 'I am sorry to drive you away, but it is the time that I have to go and lie down. Tell me first what is your name? Isn't it strange, so like a dream, that I who know you so well and trust you so entirely to help us should not even know your name.'

'My name is Ralph Kingsburgh.'

'Ralph! It is a nice name, a good name, and Kingsburgh. Let me see: Ard na Righ—the headland of the King, the King's headland, the King's burgh. The old prophecy! Yes! you are he who had to come. You must come and see me again, and you must know my mother.'

We had walked towards the window. In the shadow behind the curtain I once more clasped her close, and kissed her unresisting lips; then I passed out again on to the sunny lawn, and took my way through the wicket-gate out into the forest-path.

I suppose I retraced my steps, but it was quite mechanically. My brain whirled with the adventure, and presented picture after picture, recalling all the graciousness of that sweet lady, and re-enacting the whole scene, till somehow or other I found myself again beside my bicycle, on the spot from which I had started on that afternoon's quest.

It was getting late, so I mounted at once and rode back along the forest way to the main road, and so round the loch; and now, strange to say, the glamour began to fade and questions presented themselves. Who could be this odd unconventional lady whom I had thus met in such strange fashion? She had spoken of mother and sisters, yet no other human soul had I seen or heard. A queer person too, truly, to throw herself into the arms of the first passing man who dropped in, and whose very name she did not know. Then, again, how on earth could she or anyone live there? No one knew of their presence seemingly, or I should surely have heard of it, and how on the face of all the earth did they get provisions over, the merest necessaries of life? There was no path, no way to the house. Altogether the thing was mysterious, and I wondered that it had not struck me in that light before.

To say that I was seriously discomposed would be an understatement. After I had rounded the head of the loch, and was riding directly towards Airton House, the whole adventure through which I had passed in the afternoon began to assume a distinctly unreal aspect. It was as though a fantastic and bizarre patch, irrelevant and unconnected with the rest of my life, had been suddenly intruded upon it. A patch, moreover, which in itself was full of unexplained and unnatural elements.

I had the habit, frequent with lawyers, especially those whose practice lies mainly in chambers, whenever I met with a difficult knot to unravel, of mentally arranging all the circumstances which I knew, and grouping them so as to see what points were missing, and what possible conclusion could be drawn from those which were ascertained. Almost mechanically now I began to review all that had occurred to me since my arrival at Ard na Righ, and I found that many of them had some sort of bearing on the strange experience of that afternoon, though many clues were still missing.

There was the ruined kirk, the tappings of the mysterious carpenter in the house where Donald said that no one lived, and that the wright had died; the grave being dug; and Donald's story of the burial of Morag the Seal, confirmed to some extent by the doctor; and Sir John's curious excitement at the mention of the legend. Here, then, the only three people I had as yet met each in his own way regarded the story as more than a mere fairy-tale; also they mentioned others. Clearly some sort of appearance whose description all agreed in was commonly believed to occur.

It is unlikely that a number of people should all have the same belief without any ground whatsoever, and so far as I could see the possible grounds resolved themselves into two—namely, either what is commonly called supernatural, or some living person playing a trick. Now, though I was far from being superstitious, and generally took very little interest in stories of wraiths and ghostly appearances, which I looked on as quite out of my line, yet I was well aware that sensible and clear-headed men, who did investigate such things, considered the evidence of their reality to be very strong; and in the face of this I felt it would be premature to deny absolutely either solution, though certainly all my predisposition prompted me to exhaust all natural explanations before accepting one with which I was wholly unfamiliar, and in which I saw an enormous liability to fraud and delusion.

Leaving, then, these two possible explanations to wait for further evidence, there were other points to be considered—the pastel drawing of Morag, and the shadow burial outside my room last night. One line of evidence connected Morag with the weird seal stories, with mysterious drownings and uncanny burials; another with the old family of Camerons. I preferred the latter as being more within my own experience; but this, too, had its difficulties.

Then in a calm and judicial spirit I looked at my experience of the afternoon. Many of the previous points had been repeated or come up in a new shape, but most curious of all had been my own state of mind from the moment when I left my bicycle and walked along the wood-path. I had been astonished at nothing, and yet in sober earnestness there had been enough to astonish me—the house to which the path had not been trodden for ages, the people who lived alone there, and whom no one knew of. People, did I say? I had only seen one, and that one certainly unusual enough. She had spoken of mother and sisters and servants, yet I had seen none. How could I in cool blood have conceived myself thus being entertained by a strange young lady, in a strange empty house, seemingly dropped from nowhere into a pathless wood, and not being at all surprised! It was barely thinkable.

Again, these were apparently the old Cameron family, living at their old home—the Dower House. How came it that no one knew they were there?—not even the gossiping doctor, who knew every one's business; not even Donald the groom-boy.

I had not thought of the house being the Dower House when I came to it, though it seemed really obvious that it must be, and I was not surprised at anything I heard. I seemed to have been so bewitched and hypnotized by the beauty of Morag, and by the sweet endearments that had passed between us, that I had accepted all manner of absurdities as if they were real, just as one does in a dream. Could this be the solution? Was it a dream? If so, it was a most extraordinary psychic phenomenon; for though I had dreamed, as most people have, I had never had experience of anything so strangely real and detailed. This looked unlikely. Then there was the quaint old legend of Morag. The thought would recur in spite of me, could this possibly be true? There was the weird fascination—I could not conceal from myself that I had been fascinated; that had it been possible I would have stayed there talking to Morag, and exchanging caresses till—well, I hardly knew, in sooth, what would have torn me away, so long as she had allowed me to stay. Indeed, in a sense the glamour was on me still. In spite of all my cool reasoning I knew well enough that if I had the chance I would go back, and that I was even then hoping for a chance to do so. Then her enthusiasm over swimming by moonlight, and, in faith, the great brown eyes, with their steady gaze, were much more the eyes of an animal than of a human being.

Confound it! No, that explanation will not do till we have exhausted every other possible one.

There remained the possibility that these were, indeed, the old Camerons; that Miss Morag was a playful girl full of practical jokes, who masqueraded as the traditional seal of her family legends, and traded on the likeness to her far-away ancestress. Had she heard of my coming, and planned out this stage-play for my benefit? Perhaps to lure me away from my professional investigations on behalf of my client, whom she must regard as the supplanter of her race?

In some ways this idea presented more difficulties than any other, yet it appealed to me. Possibly my vanity was flattered by the thought that this comedy had been played for my benefit. True, it wasn't convincing; it wasn't really very well done, but all the same I had accepted it, swallowed every absurdity, just because a pretty girl had looked at me, and had let me kiss her. Well! well! all men are gullible, I suppose, when a pretty girl is in question, and why not I as well as another? It had never chanced to me before, but then I expect all the sons of Adam must come to it sooner or later. So let that remain for the solution—for the present, at all events—and that being so, Miss Morag had perhaps given me a valuable hint as to where the missing records were. She had said, too, that she would meet me in the old castle. This would be an assignation worth keeping; perhaps Miss Morag would yet turn up trumps. I must certainly go and see her again, but I would let her know next time that I wasn't to be gulled with these commonplace tricks. We would talk sensibly. Sensibly! Well, a kiss or so would not be out of the way. Oh, hang it! Whenever I thought of Morag there was that confounded fascination coming over me. It was like an uncanny malaria.

To change the current of my thoughts I began reviewing the case of Sir John Bradley, and the various points we had cleared so far, and by a natural sequence I remembered the doctor's letter. I was now just passing the stables, which lay close to the road as it skirted the policies between the house and the sea. Here I saw my friend Donald, busy washing down the pony-cart that had brought me yesterday evening from the station. I turned in to have a talk with him.

'Sir John has not come back yet, I suppose?' I said.

'No, sir! I'm not expecting him till rather late. He's gone a long way out beyond Alt na Crois, and the coachman is sure to take the pair slowly coming back. I heard the cook say it would be eight o'clock before they would have dinner to-night.'

'Tell me, Donald,' I queried, 'do you know a queer old character called Allan Kerr?'

'Do you mean the little loonie, sir? Strange that you should be asking that now.'

'Why is it strange, Donald?'

'Well, sir, because the poor little loonie has disappeared.'

'Disappeared! What on earth do you mean, Donald?'

'Well, sir, gone—that's what I mean.'

He spread out his hands with an inimitable gesture.

'I suppose you mean that he has gone away on a visit, or something. Well, that's not unusual. He'll come back, I suppose. I would like to see him when he does. I fancy he could tell me some things I want to know.'

'Many people think that,' said Donald, with rather a meaning intonation. 'I've heard folk say that the loonie knew too much for his own safety, poor wee man! There was some that wanted him out of the way for fear of what he knew.'

'Oh, but I suppose he has simply gone away on some business, and is coming back soon. Don't you think so, Donald?'

'No, sir; to be plain, I don't. You see, the poor loonie couldn't travel—not, that is, beyond the district where he lived—and every day he was seen about, just never more than half a dozen miles from his own cottage. But now since three days past he has never been seen, and his cottage is empty, and the fire cold; and I never remember such a thing since I've known the loonie, and that's about all my life.'

'Perhaps he's gone to help bury Morag the Seal,' I said, half in jest, but half to see what Donald would say to this insinuation.

'Can't say, sir,' he replied after a pause. 'The Good Book tells us that the dead bury the dead, but I don't know. They tell me there's been folk that was dead seen burying Morag, and they say that Niell Cameron the wright would be making her coffin, but, indeed, I never saw it myself.'

Donald was cautious evidently, and not to be drawn.

'Tell me, Donald, was Morag buried last night?'

'And, indeed, sir, I can't tell you that. You, maybe, know that the Fiscal came, and Sandy Macpherson and his son swore they had never said a word about Morag. Sandy he says to me afterwards that there was no manner of sense in letting fool-bodies like that know everything. But for me, I would not be saying the Fiscal was a fool exactly, though he's from the South country, and they don't seem to learn much sense there; still, but all the same, I'm thinking there was a burial of some sort last night. I sleep over the stables, you know, and I heard a tramping, and I peeped out through the loft door, and there were some of those gipsy trash that the laird allows to live up the glen carrying a coffin—at least, it looked like that to me.'

'What time was that, Donald?'

'It would be just after the stable clock struck twelve, sir. Of course I'm not saying it would be Morag. Indeed, I never heard that Morag was buried anywhere but in the ruined kirk. Still, they did say that Morag was to be buried last night, and certainly that gipsy trash were burying something or other about the time. Perhaps it was one of themselves, but dear knows where they were going to put it anyhow.'

My mind recurred at once to the shadow pantomime opposite my window at twelve o'clock the previous night. I did not think well to say anything about this to Donald, but here was another clue. This mysterious business was somehow or other connected with the gipsies, and also, perhaps, with this strange and elusive Morag.

I said good night to Donald and rode on, but my theory did not look so clear now. If Miss Morag Cameron were the perpetrator of practical jokes that I had assumed, she could scarcely carry them so far as to be buried by a gipsy tribe and be alive again to fascinate and mystify me the following afternoon.

The possibility remained that this incident of the burial seen by Donald from the loft, seen by me in shadow, was a wholly disconnected fact, whose solution was yet to be found. In the meantime I was disposed to favour this idea; it promised a possibility of a material explanation. The seal-legend was picturesque, redolent of the soil, and as a bit of folk-lore I loved it; but I could not bring myself to believe it an actual fact. A ghost I might possibly accept, if there were no other solution, on the authority of many sane and reliable men who had studied such matters. I could not think that, being in perfectly sound physical health, I had dreamed such an astoundingly realistic dream. No wonder I clung to the material explanation as long as it would hold water as the one reliable plank in an ocean of wild absurdity.

Sir John came in tired with his long drive, and after dinner we had but a short sederunt over the papers. Only one new point came up this time. The papers we were examining related to the legal transfer of the estate to the elder Sir John, consequent on the non-payment of the loans. All were in order, and the proceedings, as usual in such cases, were purely formal; but among the printed forms was a page apparently torn from a counsel's jotting-book, roughly scribbled, and full of references to authorities and cases, bearing that some question had been raised at some time by the Cameron of that day, or on his behalf, as to the receipt of the money alleged to have been lent to him. His acknowledgment was all in proper form, sufficiently stamped and duly signed, but it seemed that there was no evidence either in the banking account of Sir John Bradley or of Mr. Cameron of any such payment. However, the receipt was evidence enough, and as a lawyer I was not surprised to find that this point was entirely dropped, for it never appeared again.

It was, however, sufficiently curious and interesting for me to ask Sir John if he knew of its having been raised. His memory was vague—I thought unusually so, considering how plainly he remembered most points, even minute ones, connected with his title. On this he seemed embarrassed and ill at ease, but he promised to look up his father's bank-books and satisfy me entirely. He was sure the objection had been answered, only he couldn't quite recall how.

Just as we were about to part for the night came a note from Dr. MacCulloch, brought by his man, asking me to dine with him on the morrow.

'Go, by all means,' said Sir John. 'I look on the doctor as our greatest stand-by in our investigations. He will tell you more than any other living man can.'

So we said good night, and I retired to my room.