“Lord Erradeen!” His appearance was so unexpected, so curiously appropriate and inappropriate, that Oona felt as if she must be under some hallucination, and was beholding an incarnation of her own thoughts instead of an actual man.
And Walter was himself at so high a strain of excitement that the agitation of her surprise seemed natural to him. It scarcely seemed possible that everybody around, and specially that she, did not know the crisis at which he stood. He took the hand which she instinctively put forward, into both his, and held fast by it as if it had been an anchor of salvation.
“I am a fugitive,” he said. “Will you receive me, will you take me with you? Have pity upon me, for you are my last hope.”
“Lord Erradeen—has anything—happened? What—have you done?”
She trembled, standing by him, gazing in his face, not withdrawing her hand, yet not giving it, lost in wonder; yet having come to feel that something he had done, some guilt of his, must be the cause.
“I have done—I will tell you everything. I wish to tell you everything: let me come with you, Oona.”
All this time Hamish, standing behind Walter, was making signs to his young mistress, which seemed to no purpose but to increase her perplexity. Hamish shook his shaggy head, and his eyebrows worked up and down. He gesticulated with his arm pointing along the loch. Finally he stepped forward with a sort of desperation.
“I’m saying, Miss Oona, that we’re in no hurry. There will always be somebody about that would be glad, real glad, of a visit from you. And as his lordship is a wee disturbed in his mind, and keen to get home, I could just put him up to Auchnasheen—it would take me very little time—and syne come back for you.”
Oona stood startled, undecided between the two—alarmed a little by Walter’s looks, and much by the significance of the gestures of Hamish, and his eagerness and anxiety.
“I will no be keeping you waiting long at all—oh, not at all. And my lord will be best at home, being a wee disturbed in his mind—and we’re in no hurry—no hurry,” Hamish insisted, doing his best to place himself between the two.
“Hamish thinks I am mad,” said Walter. “I do not wonder. But I am not mad. I want neither home nor anything else—but you. It is come to that—that nobody can help me but you. First one tries expedients,” he cried, “anything to tide over; but at last one comes—one comes to the only true—”
“You are speaking very wildly,” said Oona. “I don’t know what you mean, Lord Erradeen; and Hamish is afraid of you. What is it? We are only simple people—we do not understand.”
He dropped her hand which he had held all the time, half, yet only half against her will, for there was something in the way he held it which forbade all idea of levity. She looked at him very wistfully, anxious, not with any offence, endeavouring to put away all prepossession out of her mind—the prejudice in his favour which moved her heart in spite of herself—the prejudice against him, and indignant wonder whether all was true that she had heard, which had arisen from Julia’s words. Her eyelids had formed into anxious curves of uncertainty, out of which her soul looked wistfully, unable to refuse help, perplexed, not knowing what to do.
“If you refuse to hear me,” he said, “I have no other help to turn to. I know I have no right to use such an argument, and yet if you knew—I will urge no more. It is death or life—but it is in your hands.”
Oona’s eyes searched into his very soul.
“What can I do?” she said, wondering. “What power have I? How can I tell if it is—true—” she faltered, and begged his pardon hastily when she had said that word. “I mean—I do not mean—” she said confusedly. “But oh, what can I do? it is not possible that I——”
It is cruel to have the burden put upon you of another’s fate. Sometimes that is done to a woman lightly in the moment of disappointment by a mortified lover. Was this the sort of threat he meant, or was it perhaps—true? Oona, who had no guile, was shaken to the very soul by that doubt. Better to risk an affront in her own person than perhaps to fail of an occasion in which sincere help was wanted and could be given. She had not taken her eyes from him, but searched his face with a profound uncertainty and eagerness. At last, with the sigh of relief which accompanies a decision, she said to Hamish,
“Push off the boat. Lord Erradeen will help me in,” with something peremptory in her tone against which her faithful servant could make no further protest.
Hamish proceeded accordingly to push off the boat into the water, and presently they were afloat, steering out for the centre of the loch. They were at some distance from the isle on the other side of the low, green island with its little fringe of trees, so different from the rocky and crested isles about, which is known on Loch Houran as the Isle of Rest. The low wall round about the scattered tombs, the scanty ruins of its little chapel, were all that broke the soft greenness of those low slopes. There was nothing like it all around in its solemn vacancy and stillness, and nothing could be more unlike that chill and pathetic calm than the freight of life which approached it in Oona’s boat: she herself full of tremulous visionary excitement—the young man in his passion and desperation; even the watchful attendant, who never took his eyes from Lord Erradeen, and rowed on with all his senses on the alert, ready to throw himself upon the supposed maniac at a moment’s notice, or without it did the occasion require. There was a pause till they found themselves separated by a widening interval of water from the shore, where at any moment a chance passenger might have disturbed their interview. Here no one could disturb them. Walter placed himself in front of Hamish facing Oona: but perhaps the very attitude, the freedom and isolation in which he found himself with her, closed his lips. For a minute he sat gazing at her, and did not speak.
“You wished—to say something to me, Lord Erradeen?”
It was she again, as Katie had done before, who recalled to him his purpose—with a delicate flush colouring the paleness of her face, half in shame that after all she had to interfere to bring the confession forth.
“So much,” he said, “so much that I scarcely know where to begin.” And then he added, “I feel safe with you near me. Do you know what it means to feel safe? But you never were in deadly danger. How could you be?”
“Lord Erradeen, do not mystify me with these strange sayings,” she cried. “Do they mean anything? What has happened to you? or is it only—is it nothing but——”
“A pretence, do you think, to get myself a hearing—to beguile you into a little interest? That might have been. But it is more serious, far more serious. I told you it was life or death.” He paused for a moment and then resumed. “Do you remember last year when you saved me?”
“I remember—last year,” she said with an unsteady voice, feeling the flush grow hotter and hotter on her cheek, for she did not desire to be reminded of that self-surrender, that strange merging of her being in another’s which was her secret, of which she had been aware, but no one else. “I never understood it,” she added, with one meaning for herself and one for him. The hidden sense was to her more important than the other. “It has always been—a mystery——”
“It was the beginning of the struggle,” he said. “I came here, you know—don’t you know?—out of poverty to take possession of my kingdom—that was what I thought. I found myself instead at the beginning of a dreary battle. I was not fit for it, to begin with. Do you remember the old knights had to prepare themselves for their chivalry with fasting, and watching of arms, and all that—folly——” A gleam of self-derision went over his face, and yet it was deadly serious underneath.
“It was no folly,” she said.
“Oh, do you think I don’t know that? The devil laughs in me, now and then, but I don’t mean it. Oona—let me call you Oona, now, if never again—I had neither watched nor prayed——”
He made a pause, looking at her pitifully; and she, drawn, she knew not how, answered, with tears in her eyes, “I have heard that you—had strayed——”
“That means accidentally, innocently,” he said. “It was not so. I had thought only of myself: when I was caught in the grip of a will stronger than mine, unprepared. There was set before me—no, not good and evil as in the books, but subjection to one—who cared neither for good nor evil. I was bidden to give up my own will, I who had cared for nothing else: to give up even such good as was in me. I was not cruel. I cared nothing about worldly advantages; but these were henceforward to be the rule of my life—pleasant, was it not?” he said with a laugh, “to a man who expected to be the master—of everything round.”
At the sound of his laugh, which was harsh and wild, Hamish, raising himself so as to catch the eye of his mistress, gave her a questioning, anxious look. Oona was very pale, but she made an impatient gesture with her hand to her humble guardian. She was not herself at ease; an agonizing doubt lest Walter’s mind should have given way had taken possession of her. She answered him as calmly as she could, but with a tremor in her voice, “Who could ask that, Lord Erradeen? Oh no, no—you have been deceived.”
“You ask me who! you who gave me your hand—your hand that was like snow—that had never done but kindness all your life—and saved me—so that I defied him. And you ask me who?”
He put out his hand as he spoke and touched hers as it lay in her lap. His face was full of emotion, working and q............