at the moment that information was brought to Lady Clancy of her brother’s non-return from his after-dinner walk with his land-steward. In a state of great alarm, the two ladies had organised a search party, and men with lanterns and ropes had been set to scour every corner of the island. Eventually they were guided to the spot where Euan lay by old Angus’s shouts for help, and almost simultaneously tidings had been brought to the search party that Fay had been seen nearing shore in a boat with Val Thorndyke.
With ropes and a roughly-improvised ambulance they had contrived to lower the laird from the ledge of rock to the beach.
There he lay now, a gaunt, stalwart figure, with old Angus kneeling on one knee still supporting his head and shoulders. His face was ashen grey, his eyes were closed, his white hair, swept back from a massive brow, fluttered in the fresh breeze that the incoming tide brought with it. A silent group of gillies and fishermen stood under the shadow of the rocks in the background. Lady Clancy, rigid-featured, stony-eyed, with a plaid thrown over the evening-dress she had worn all night through, stood beside him, shading her eyes with her hand and peering through the haze of the dawn into the far distance.
As Fay drew near, she advanced to meet her. “Stand back!” she said, drawing herself to her full height, and speaking in a voice that had a ring as of iron in it; “stand back, I say, you who would have been wife and no wife to Euan.”
But Euan’s eyes had suddenly opened, and Fay had seen a look in them—dumb, pleading, pathetic—that made her dare Lady Clancy’s wrath.
“Come near, child,” those eyes had seemed to say, “and bend your ears to my lips,” and she did so.
Life was ebbing fast now, his breath was coming and going in gasps, and when he spoke, his voice sounded weak and faraway.
“Child! child!” he said faintly, between catches of his breath, “if you had but waited—it would not have been for long.”
And then his eyelids drooped never again to be lifted.
So, then, someone had tortured Euan’s dying ears with the story of her untruth! With folded arms and bent brows, Val stood watching her as she knelt beside the dead man.
Love made him bold, and sent him to her side.
“Come away, Fay,” he whispered; “this is no place for you now; see, Fate reverses her decree.”
Fay, kneeling still, upturned her white, tearless face to his.
“Not so she confirms it,” she answered brokenly. She pointed to the dead laird’s face. “This would forever lie between us. Whenever I looked in your face, I should see not your eyes but his, with their last heartbroken look in them. Whenever I touched your hand, I should feel not your warm touch, but his death cold one.”
Here she took the dead-man’s hand reverently in her own.
And Val, having no words wherewith to answer, turned and left her.
Jack
A Mendicant
A white-haired mongrel terrier it was, with flopping ears, and only half a tail—a thin, shadowy sort of thing that used to grub about in the twilight in the gutters, and in odd corners where poor people throw waste and rubbish, picking up its own living as best it could. If it had not known how to “fend for itself,” it must have fared hardly indeed; for though it had a master who loved it, as he would have loved the sun in the heavens could his blind eyes have been lightened for one moment by its beams, and who treasured it as he did the memory of his dead wife, dead daughter, dead grandchild, yet he had nothing but his love to give it, and love, as we all know, though it never faileth, and is greater than faith and hope, in hard times cannot so much as buy an ounce of bread, nor even get a bone for a dog.
Caleb had been blind for more than twenty years. Once he had been a strong skilful workman, who had never known a dinnerless table nor a fireless hearth. Things had gone well with him in early life; he had married a stout young country woman, and had had one child by her—a blue-eyed, fair-haired darling, whom they had christened Martha, but whom everyone loved to call Mattie. She looked as if she had been born to a pet-name, and she stuck to it as a right. Mattie was sent to school and taught embroideries and needlework; she was not to work hard, as her father and mother had done before her, but was to lead the quiet, gentle sort of life God so evidently intended her for; and if, by-and-by, when father and mother were getting old and could no longer work for their darling, some good honest workman were to come along and offer to marry her—well!—then he should have her, and God’s blessing go with her.
But before Mattie was ten years old, or there was any thought of father and mother getting old, Caleb’s great trouble had come upon him. There was a huge fire at the factory where he worked, and Caleb, in his zeal to save his master’s property, was much burnt about his face, arms, and chest. They took him to the hospital, where they did the best they could for him, and he came out of it in a month’s time with limbs patched, face sound though scarred, but eyesight gone forever.
How the stout strong wife would have wept over him if she had had time to weep! But time meant money in those days, and she set to work with a will to get the daily bread. No more embroideries for little Mattie: sewing and stitching will serve her in better stead now, for she can earn a shilling here and a shilling there by plain needlework among her poor neighbours.
And so things went on for ten years or more.
