Such a song she carolled forth now, high and right merrily, till the old mountains, whose massive sides seemed better suited to resound the roll of artillery, threw it back at her in a hundred echoes. And as she sang Val, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed full on her sweet, childlike face upturned in the moonlight, said to him self over and over again: “Did God ever mould a more dainty, exquisitely lovely child-angel? And she is mine—mine only! Mine forever!”
Drifting, drifting, drifting, easily, lightly, pleasantly over the swaying waves, they went. Now into the pathway of silver light that the moon threw athwart the waters, anon into the black shadows of the gaunt mountains, which here and there kissed the opposite shore. Out of Loch Rhuy at last they went, and for a moment the waves seemed to lose a little of their laziness, and a light breeze ruffled Val’s dark hair. Almost, however, before he had time to say in his heart, “Thank heaven, we are drifting towards Mull!” a current, setting in from an opposite quarter, had taken charge of their little boat, and they were hurried past some jutting point and swept into a loch once more. Here the hot, hazy darkness seemed to press down upon them again. Fay’s voice began to lose a little of its light, joyous ring, and, as if unconsciously, she drifted into a low, crooning lullaby sort of song that kept time with the lazy, swaying motion of the boat.
It was difficult for them to make out their exact whereabouts, or to give a name to the loch in which they found themselves now. The shores of these lochs have many natural features in common.
On either side of them black mountains seemed to stretch right up into the darkness of the skies; on either side the shore, at the base of those mountains, lay hidden with the drowsy haze of heat.
Fay’s voice, little by little, was losing its lullaby croon for a note that had something of a wail in it.
Once, quite suddenly, she broke off to make, what seemed to Val, an utterly irrelevant remark. It was:
“I think if my mother had been a different woman I should have grown up into something better than I am!”
And again, a little later on, she suddenly said: “I wish I had not looked up into Euan’s face yesterday and told him that lie.”
To which Val replied promptly and without that touch of bitterness which he generally showed when Euan’s name was mentioned: “Why let that man’s name pass your lips, darling? he has utterly gone out of your life now.”
Presently the moon went down behind the mountains, and then thicker, hotter, blacker than ever, the darkness seemed to press down upon them once more.
Fay ceased singing. “I am so sleepy,” she said, speaking like a tired child; “I know there is a storm coming; I can feel it in the air.”
Val said nothing. He, too, knew that a storm was coming. He had scouted alike the curlew’s warning cry and old Angus’s prophecy, but there was no mistaking what the black, lowering sky, the hot mist, the heavy air meant.
He knew what a storm in these mountain districts was, and how little mercy it would show to their cockleshell of a boat. One by one his hopes of sighting his yacht or a passing ocean steamer were vanishing; their only chance he felt now lay in the possibility of day—dawn outstripping the thunderstorm so rapidly travelling towards them, and of its revealing to them some shallow coast or sheltering hollow where he could land, and, dragging the boat into safety, there await the passing of the storm.
Yet, with all sorts of tragic possibilities looming now into view, not for one instant did he regret the wild promptness with which he had acceded to Fay’s suggestion to leave their lives to the decision of chance.
“Better death a thousand times over,” he said to himself, “than the life of protracted torture, that otherwise must have been his in the future with Fay—like the princess of fairy legend enclosed in her crystal mountain—so near and yet so far.”
Every moment the darkness seemed to grow denser and deeper. Not alone was the sky blotted out, the sullen, lazy, lapping waves had also disappeared. Even Fay’s form, her face, her white hand seemed gradually being enshrouded in a hazy veil. He took out his watch, but it was too dark to see the hands. He tried to feel the time with his fingers and conjectured, for he could not be sure, that there was yet another hour and a half to be lived through before those black mountain tops caught the light of dawn. The tide would turn, he knew, half an hour before that; Heaven help them if it were to carry them out into the broad Atlantic, and the storm in all its fury were to burst upon them there!
Fay had grown very silent. Her thoughts were becoming tumultuous and chaotic. She felt, rather than thought, “Here are we doing just exactly what we have been doing all our lives through—drifting on an unseen sea to an unknown goal! Heaven help us! how will it end?” And to her fancy the lazy, lapping, unseen waves seemed to take up her cry and to repeat it in heavy, dull, monotonous fashion as they washed the keel of the boat.
Of necessity the same question was ringing the changes in Val’s brain. His nerves were held at tension now; it was with difficulty that he kept himself under control. Moment by moment his excitement seemed to grow more intense, and the horrible suspense to become more insupportable. He began to lose count of time; it seemed as if they had been shut
