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                         A PRINCESS OF THULE.

                                  BY

                            WILLIAM BLACK,

                               AUTHOR OF

            “A DAUGHTER OF HETH,” “MADCAP VIOLET,” “STRANGE
                    ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON,” ETC.

                               NEW YORK:
                        JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY,
                         14 & 16 VESEY STREET.




                         A PRINCESS OF THULE.

                           By WILLIAM BLACK.




CHAPTER I.

“LOCHABER NO MORE.”


On a small headland of the distant island of Lewis, an old man stood
looking out on a desolate waste of rain-beaten sea. It was a wild and
wet day. From out of the lowering Southwest fierce gusts of wind were
driving up volumes and flying rags of clouds, and sweeping onward at the
same time the gathering waves that fell hissing and thundering on the
shore. Far as the eye could reach, the sea and the air and the sky
seemed to be one indistinguishable mass of whirling and hurrying vapor,
as if beyond this point there were no more land, but only wind and
water, and the confused and awful voice of their strife.

The short, thick-set, powerfully-built man who stood on this solitary
point paid little attention to the rain that ran off the peak of his
sailor’s cap, or to the gusts of wind that blew about his bushy gray
beard. He was still following, with an eye accustomed to pick out
objects far at sea, one speck of purple that was now fading into the
gray mist of the rain; and the longer he looked the less it became,
until the mingled sea and sky showed only the smoke that the great
steamer left in its wake. As he stood there, motionless and regardless
of everything around him, did he cling to the fancy that he could still
trace out the path of the vanished ship? A little while before it had
passed almost close to him. He had watched it steam out of Stornoway
Harbor. As the sound of the engines came nearer and the big boat went
by, so that he could have almost called to it, there was no sign of
emotion on the hard and stern face, except, perhaps, that the lips were
held firm and a sort of frown appeared over the eyes. He saw a tiny
white handkerchief being waved to him from the deck of the vessel; and
he said, almost as though he were addressing some one there:

“My good little girl!”

But in the midst of that roaring of the sea and the wind how could any
such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the
land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the
engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and
visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the
man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his
own--as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be
broken--were now trying, through overflowing and blinding tears, to send
him a last look of farewell.

The gray mists of the rain gathered within their folds the big vessel
and all the beating hearts it contained, and the fluttering of that
little token disappeared with it. All that remained was the sea,
whitened by the rushing of the wind and the thunder of waves on the
beach. The man, who had been gazing so long down into the Southeast,
turned his face landward and set out to walk over a tract of wet grass
and sand toward a road that ran near by. There was a large wagonette of
varnished oak and a pair of small powerful horses waiting for him there;
and having dismissed the boy who had been in charge, he took the reins
and got up. But even yet the fascination of the sea and of that sad
farewell was upon him, and he turned once more, as if, now that sight
could yield him no further tidings, he would send her one more word of
good-by. “My poor little Sheila!” That was all he said; and then he
turned to the horses and sent them on, with his head down to escape the
rain, and a look on his face like that of a dead man.

As he drove through the town of Stornoway the children playing within
the shelter of the cottage doors called to each other in a whisper and
said: “That is the King of Borva.”

But the elderly people said to each other, with a shake of the head, “It
iss a bad day, this day, for Mr. Mackenzie, that he will be going home
to an empty house. And it will be a ferry bad thing for the poor folk of
Borva, and they will know a great difference, now that Miss Sheila iss
gone away, and there is nobody--not anybody at all--left in the island
to tek the side of the poor folk.”

He looked neither to the right nor to the left, though he was known to
many of the people, as he drove away from the town into the heart of the
lonely and desolate land. The wind had so far died down, and the rain
had considerably lessened, but the gloom of the sky was deepened by the
drawing on of the afternoon, and lay heavily over the dreary wastes of
moor and hill. What a wild and dismal country was this which lay before
and all around him, now that the last traces of human occupation were
passed! There was not a cottage, not a stone wall, not a fence, to break
the monotony of the long undulations of moorland, which in the distance
rose into a series of hills that were black under the darkened sky. Down
from those mountains ages ago, glaciers had slowly crept to eat out
hollows in the plains below; and now in those hollows were lonely lakes,
with not a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere
around were the traces of this glacier drift--great gray boulders of
gneiss fixed fast into the black peat moss, or set amid the browns and
greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of
rock and morass was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and
turbid, that plunged down their narrow channels to the sea.

The rain now ceased altogether, but the mountains in the far south had
grown still darker, and to the fishermen passing by the coast it must
have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the
lowering clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for
the first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along this lonely
route sometimes cast a glance down toward this threatening of a storm,
but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the backs of the
horses, and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising
and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy
lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of
water--The Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the
Fine Sand, and so forth--to measure the distance he had traversed; but
he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was
with a glance of something like surprise, that he suddenly found himself
overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in
which was his home.

He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Gara-na-hina. At
the door, muffled up in a warm woolen plaid, stood a young girl,
fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.

“Mr. Mackenzie,” she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation
that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in
the schools, “it was Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she said
I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help to you
in the house.”

The girl was crying, although the blue eyes looked bravely through the
tears as if to disprove the fact.

“Ay, my good lass,” he said, putting his hand gently on her head, “and
it wass Sheila wrote to you?”

“Yes, sir, and I hef come down from Suainabost.”

“It is a lonely house you will be going to,” he said, absently.

“But Miss Sheila said I wass--I wass to--” But here the young girl
failed in her effort to explain that Miss Sheila had asked her to go
down to make the house less lonely. The elderly man in the wagonette
seemed scarcely to notice that she was crying; he bade her come up
beside him; and when he had got her into the wagonette he left some
message with the innkeeper, who had come to the door, and drove off
again.

They drove along the high land that overlooks a portion of Loch Roag,
with its wonderful network of islands and straits, and then they stopped
on the lofty plateau of Callernish, where there was a man waiting to
take the wagonette and horses.

“And you would be seeing Miss Sheila away, sir?” said the man; “and it
was Duncan Macdonald will say that she will not come back no more to
Borva.”

The old man with the big gray beard only frowned and passed on. He and
the girl made their way down the side of the rocky hill to the shore,
and here there was an open boat awaiting them. When they approached, a
man considerably over six feet in height, keen-faced, gray-eyed,
straight-limbed and sinewy in frame, jumped into the big and rough boat
and began to get ready for their departure. There was just enough wind
to catch the brown mainsail, and the King of Borva took the tiller, his
henchman sitting down by the mast. And no sooner had they left the shore
and stood out towards one of the channels of this arm of the sea, than
the tall, spare keeper began to talk of that which made his master’s eye
grow dark. “Ah, well,” he said, in the plaintive drawling of his race,
“and it iss an empty house you will be going to, Mr. Mackenzie; and it
iss a bad thing for us all that Miss Sheila hass gone away; and it iss
many’s ta time she will hef been wiss me in this very boat--”

“---- ---- ---- ---- you, Duncan Macdonald!” cried Mackenzie, in an access
of fury, “what will you talk of like that? It iss every man, woman and
child on the island will talk of nothing but Sheila! I will drive my
foot through the bottom of the boat if you do not hold your peace!”

The tall gillie patiently waited until his master had exhausted his
passion, and then he said, as if nothing had occurred: “And it will not
do much good, Mr. Mackenzie, to tek ta name o’ God in vain; and there
will be much more of trinking in ta island, and it will be a great
difference mirover. And she will be so far away that no one will see her
no more--far away beyond ta sound of Sleat, and far away beyond Oban, as
I hef heard people say. And what will she do in London, when she has no
boat at all, and she will never go out to ta fishing? And I will hear
people say that you will walk a whole day and never come to ta sea, and
what will Miss