IV
The next day dawned clear and chill, with a little frost to whiten the heather; but by midday the sun had turned August to June, and sea and land drowsed in a mellow heat. Maitland was roused from his meditations with a pipe on a garden-seat by the appearance of Claire, her eyes bright with news. He had taken her in to dinner the night before, and for the first time in his life had found himself talking easily to a woman. Her interest of the afternoon had not departed; and Despencer in futile disgust shunned the drawing-room, his particular paradise, and played billiards with Clanroyden in the spirit of an unwilling martyr.
“We are going out in the yacht,” Claire cried, as she emerged from the shadow of a fuchsia-hedge, “to the Isles of the Waves, away beyond the Seal’s Headland. Do you know the place, Mr. Maitland?”
“Eilean na Cille? Yes. It used to be dangerous for currents, but a steam-yacht does not require to fear them.”
“Well, we’ll be ready to start at twelve, and I must go in to give orders about lunch.”
A little later she came out with a bundle of letters in her hands. “Here are your letters, Mr. Maitland; but you mustn’t try to answer them, or you’ll be late.” He put the lot in his jacket pocket and looked up at the laughing girl. “My work is six hundred miles behind me,” he said, “and today I have only the Eilean na Cille to think of.” And, as she passed by, another name took the place of the Eilean, and it seemed to him that at last he had found the link which was to bind together the two natures his boyhood and his prime.
Out on the loch the sun was beating with that steady August blaze which is more torrid than midsummer. But as the yacht slipped between the horns of the land, it came into a broken green sea with rollers to the north where the tireless Atlantic fretted on the reefs. In a world of cool salt winds and the golden weather of afternoon, with the cries of tern and gull about the bows and the foam and ripple of green water in the wake, the party fell into a mood of supreme contentment. The restless Claire was stricken into a figure of contemplation, which sat in the bows and watched the hazy blue horizon and the craggy mainland hills in silent delight. Maitland was revelling in the loss of his isolation. He had ceased to be alone, a leader, and for the moment felt himself one of the herd, a devotee of humble pleasures. His mind was blank, his eyes filled only with the sea, and the lady of his devotion, in that happy moment of romance, seemed to have come at last within the compass of his hopes.
The Islands of the Waves are low green ridges which rise little above the highest tidemark. The grass is stiff with salt, the sparse heather and rushes are crooked with the winds, but there are innumerable little dells where a light wild scrub flourishes, and in one a spring of sweet water sends a tiny stream to the sea. The yacht’s company came ashore in boats, and tea was made with a great bustle beside the well, while the men lay idly in the bent and smoked. All wind seemed to have died down, a soft, cool, airless peace like a June evening was abroad, and the heavy surging of the tides had sunk to a distant whisper. Maitland lifted his head, sniffed the air, and looked uneasily to the west, meeting the eye of one of the sailors engaged in the same scrutiny. He beckoned the man to him.
“What do you make of the weather?” he asked.
The sailor, an East-coast man from Arbroath, shook his head. “It’s ower lown a’ of a sudden,” he said. “It looks like mair wind nor we want, but I think it’ll haud till the morn.”
Maitland nodded and lay down again. He smiled at the return of his old sea craft and weather-lore, on which he had prided himself in his boyhood; and when Claire came up to him with tea she found him grinning vacantly at the sky.
“What a wonderful lull in the wind,” she said. “When I was here last these were real isles of the waves, with spray flying over them and a great business to land. But now they might be the island in Fountainblue lake.”
“Did you ever hear of the ‘Ocean Quiet?’ ” he asked. “I believe it to be a translation of a Gaelic word which is a synonym for death, but it is also a kind of natural phenomenon. Old people at Cairnlora used to talk of it. They said that sometimes fishermen far out at sea in blowing weather came into a place of extraordinary peace, where the whole world was utterly still and they could hear their own hearts beating.”
“What a pretty fancy!” said the girl.
“Yes; but it had its other side. The fishermen rarely came home alive, and if they did they were queer to the end of their days. Another name for the thing was the Breathing of God. It is an odd idea, the passing from the wholesome turmoil of nature to the uncanny place where God crushes you by His silence.”
“All the things to eat are down by the fire,” she said, laughing. “Do you know, if you weren’t what you are, people might think you a poet, Mr. Maitland. I thought you cared for none of these things.”
“What things?” he asked. “I don’t care for poetry. I am merely repeating the nonsense I was brought up on. Shall I talk to you about politics?”
“Heaven forbid! And now I will tell you my own story about these isles. There is a hermit’s cell on one of them and crosses, like Iona. The hermit lived alone all winter, and was fed by boats from
