"It"s the best I"ve done yet," he said to himself; "that dodge of the bread-pellet eyes with the shot in the middle of them gives the old devil quite a live look."
He was not yet twenty-one, and boy enough to be proud of the ingenuity which had converted some sandwich crumbs and the lead off a cast into a pair of evil eyes. Man enough, however, to whistle "Who is Sylvia?"
as he leant back against the cairn, smiling at Numbo Jumbo and thinking of Lady Maud.
"Rick! you bad boy!" cried his aunt"s eager voice just as he was beginning to forget everything in drowsiness. "You promised you wouldn"t when I threw the last into the Minch, and this is worse, ever so much worse!"
"Better, you mean. It"s the best I"ve done. Look at its eyes!" Miss Willina pretended to shudder as her hand, instinct with righteous vengeance, went out towards the idol.
"You might leave it there till we go," pleaded Rick. "It really is the best I"ve done by a long way. Then you could take it home Aunt Will, and have a real _auto-da-fe_. It"s more orthodox than drowning; besides, it will help the peats to a blaze when we go in."
She burst out suddenly into an amused laugh. "Peats!" she echoed. "Ah, Rick! if you had only seen them at Roederay. The room full of smoke, that lovely girl--she is beautiful, my dear--full of apologies. They took so long to kindle, she said. "Excuse me," said I, "but you mustn"t miscall a peat fire. It is the most hospitable one in the world." They were all lying crisscross like a crow"s nest, and you should have seen her relief when I had them standing shoulder to shoulder and they flared up like a Highland regiment at the skirl of the pipes. A little thing that, Rick, but so it was in all. I laughed till I cried. That house full of telephones, electric bells, hot-water pipes--all the modern whims--the factor says people won"t take a shooting unless there is a fixed bath nowadays. Well! downstairs Kirsty and Janet the herd; four willing hands and no knowledge. I tell you, Kirst is just terrified of the dampers. "Will it be blowing down the house, Miss Willina?" she says."
"Skip, please."
The remark met with a scornful neglect.
"Then upstairs those three with the knowledge but never a hand.
Brains--at least two of them had, for the husband seemed fickless and no action. There they couldn"t understand each other, and Mr. Wilson went about with his hand in his pocket, asking if a five-pound note would do any good.
"My dear sir," said I, "neither five, nor ten, nor fifteen will help us if the _Clansman_ can"t put in to-morrow. So let us pray for fine weather. Then I promised to lend them our cook, and we became great friends. Only, I don"t know why, I felt all along as if something was going to happen; a sort of conviction things were going wrong; a kind of doubt whether we were in our right places; a description of--"
Miss Macdonald"s presentiments were apt to embrace all things visible and invisible, so Rick made haste with a remark.
"And what did you think of the other man,--Eustace?"
The shot was lucky. She paused and sat looking out over moor and sea with a mysterious expression of self-complacent sagacity.
"Well, auntie? you think--"
"Nothing, my dear. Gracious goody! past four o"clock! the chickens not fed, the cows out in the wind, the ducklings still at the stream, the whole blessed Noah"s Ark."
She had risen with the first word, and started off like a lapwing, so that, ere she finished, distance deadened her voice.
"Wait! please wait," shouted Rick; "the animals went in two by two, remember!"
It was of no avail; so he caught up his rod and ran after her, leaving the idol to fulfil Miss Willina"s role of sphinx.
It had been dark some hours before she dropped her knitting with a purposely dramatic start.
"Oh, Rick! didn"t I say I had a presentiment? Now I"ve gone and left that wicked idol on the _harp_--on the Alt na heac _harp_ of all places in the world, and you a descendant of the Vikings!"
Rick, at work on an infant Samuel for his aunt"s room, looked up cheerfully.
"Well, what has that to do with it?"
"What? why, everything. Don"t you know the legend? Everything left on that _harp_ disappears. The dead take it as a tribute, and if they don"t like it, they send it back to work evil to the living for a month and a day."
"Willina!"
Mr. John Macdonald was a silent man, but when he did speak, his meaning was clear. "Where the devil you get all that rubbish pa.s.ses me. I"ve lived longer in this island than you, I"ve seen more of the people than you, yet I never heard such trash."
He dived back into his book as suddenly as he had emerged from it, and there was a dead silence.
"Never mind, auntie," whispered Rick sympathetically; for these outbreaks were almost the only things which upset Miss Willina"s majesty. "I"ll go first thing and bring Numbo Jumbo back to be burnt."
"Pray do not trouble," she replied with an audible sniff. "If I am foolish, I am foolish. If it is rubbish, I suppose it is rubbish. Only if anything happens, perhaps you will be considerate enough to admit that I foretold it."
Her hurt dignity, however, vanished before Rick Halmar"s face, when he came in to breakfast next morning minus the idol.
"Gone! Oh, Rick! you don"t mean it isn"t there?" she cried, in not displeased excitement. "John! _do_ you hear? It"s gone, and you said it was rubbish. What do you say now?" Mr. Macdonald affected not to hear.
"Yes, it"s gone," said Rick. "Numbo Jumbo"s on the loose. I expect, really, that some of the crofter"s children have taken it for a doll."
"It is all very well for your uncle to scoff, Eric, but the young should have more reverence for the wisdom of their elders," retorted his aunt severely.
"But Aunt Will!--you don"t really believe--"
"I am not responsible for my beliefs to _you_, Eric, whatever you may be to _me_, and perhaps if you have no respect for me as your aunt, you will please to recollect that I am also your G.o.dmother. It all comes of disobedience. "Thou shalt not make to thyself--""
Rick leant back in his chair and roared.
"And if you can"t even remember that," she went on, bristling with dignity, "you might recollect the punishment meted out to the children who mocked at the bald heads."
She paused, her hand went up suddenly to her coils of hair, she tried hard to keep her countenance, failed, and Mr. Macdonald"s deep-toned laughter made a ba.s.s to her treble and Rick"s tenor. That, nine times out of ten, was the end of Miss Willina"s wrath.
II
"I found it," said Professor Endorwick, laying Numbo Jumbo on the drawing-room table at Roederay, "as I was coming over the moor this morning, in order, Lady Maud, to finish a delightful walking tour by a still more delightful visit. Oddly enough, I found something similar on the Grada Sands yesterday, but this, I fear, is genuine, and therefore quite uninteresting. I have it in my knapsack if you will allow me. There! from the fracture you will observe that it has formed part of a handle, probably the paddle of a war canoe, as this grotesque, which represents the savage conception of ate or Fate, is generally used for that purpose. It has drifted here, doubtless in the Gulf Stream, is therefore, as I said before, uninteresting, since most museums possess something of the sort. This, however, is very different. It is, you will again observe, of very recent construction.
This, joined to the fact that I found it on a _harp_ or Viking"s tomb famous in local tradition, points, to my mind, conclusively towards the survival amongst this primitive people of some, if not the original, cult of Fate. I need scarcely say that nothing is more difficult to track home than the faint footstep of a discredited belief, simply because rash inquiry results in prompt denial. I must therefore be careful, and I will ask you also, for the present at least, to preserve a kindly silence on my discovery."
He looked round his company as if it were a full meeting of the British a.s.sociation after lunch. As a matter of fact, it consisted of Lady Maud, her husband, and Eustace Gordon.
They had barely finished breakfast when the professor, ignorant of their discomfort, walked in on them according to previous arrangement.
Mr. Wilson, a slight, pleasant-looking man with a short beard covering his chin,--or want of chin,--had been moving restlessly from window to fireplace and back again during this speech, now drumming with his fingers on the sill, now transferring his attention to a fisherman"s barometer on the mantelpiece, again slipping his hands to his pockets as if to force himself to quiet. Lady Maud, meanwhile, stood by the table looking at Numbo Jumbo and the despised original.
"So you think the one with the eyes most interesting? and I don"t."
She raised the flotsam jetsam in her slender hands, scanning it more closely. "I wonder if you would give me this, professor," she said suddenly. "I"ve taken a great fancy to it."
"My dear lady! I am only relieved to find you have not chosen the other," he replied with a gallant bow. "In either case, however, your desire is my law."
"I believe that beast of a thing is going down again," muttered Mr.
Wilson from the mantelpiece. "The _Clansman_ will never be able to come in to-morrow. It"s too bad of Hooper, upon my soul it is."
"My dear fellow," remonstrated Eustace, "anything will go down if it is continually thumped. It"s a lovely day, a bit blowy, but it always blows on this coast. The warmth of the Gulf Stream."