My eyes came to rest on the two men, standing side by side. I looked deep into Alasdair’s face, his stoic eyes red but dry, then over to Iain, his expression serious and full of tender compassion. My eyes flitted back and forth several times between them.
My heart began to pound with what was a sudden and stunning realization. Oh, my goodness! I thought as chills swept through me.
But I had no leisure to think about it. Mrs. Urquhart stepped forward, paused at the casket a moment, and went around it and to Alasdair’s side.
Then I did the same.
Oh, Gwendolyn, you dear child of God! I said to myself as I rested my hand briefly on the coffin. Then I took my place beside Iain, who nodded to the sexton and his assistant. They came forward and slowly lowered the casket into the ground. I cried again. Then Iain and Alasdair led us to the waiting hearse. We stepped up and the four of us sat on the bench seats that ran lengthwise on either side, flanking the open space between where the coffin had lain.
The carriage jerked into motion. As we began making our way through the crowd and away from the church, the villagers slowly inched forward and began passing the open grave in a long, silent processional, each one as he or she passed tossing in a rose or whatever autumn blossom they had been able to find for the occasion. By the time the last of the mourners passed by, the coffin was covered with fragrant and colorful tokens of a community’s belated expressions of love.
Chapter Sixty-three
The Great Tide of Love
Oh, the summertime is coming, and the trees are sweetly blooming.
And the wild mountain thyme, grows around the blooming heather,
Will ye go, lassie, go?
And we’ll all go together, to pluck wild mountain thyme.
All around the blooming heather, will ye go, lassie, go?
—“Wild Mountain Thyme”
The ride in the carriage back to the castle grounds, behind the steady clomping of the horse’s shod hooves, was mostly silent, as befitted the occasion. Alasdair spoke softly to Iain, thanking him for his handling of everything and his words at Gwendolyn’s graveside. I was feeling very uncomfortable, however… for reasons other than Gwendolyn.
Something incredible was happening inside me!
I know I should have been thinking of poor Gwendolyn. And of course I was.
But whenever I glanced up and saw Alasdair and Iain sitting side by side so close opposite me, two men brought together by the death of the little girl who was the daughter of a woman both had loved, I could not help goose bumps rising up the back of my neck.
This had suddenly become intolerable. I had to be alone. I had to think!
We arrived back at the castle, where tables were being set throughout the grounds and gardens with meats and cheeses and breads and cakes and fruits, along with more tea and coffee and ale than would be possible for an entire community to consume in a week. After helping with a few final preparations and as the townspeople began to arrive, I found Alasdair and told him I needed to leave for a while. The surprise on his face was evident.
“You will be back?” he said hesitantly.
“I don’t know, Alasdair,” I replied. “This is, you know, an emotional time. I need to be alone for a while. I hope you don’t mind.”
“But I had hoped—I need you here with me.”
“I will come back as soon as I am up to it,” I replied.
I went to find Mrs. Urquhart.
“Mrs. Ur—Olivia,” I said. “I am leaving. I just wanted to say… that is, I want you to know how sorry I am about Gwendolyn, and—”
I felt myself beginning to cry again.
Unexpectedly, I stepped forward and hugged her. I was as surprised as she was.
She stood stiffly unresponsive. Then I turned and walked to where I had parked my car.
I cast one final glance around me. Already Alasdair was surrounded by people as they arrived, giving everyone warm handshakes and friendly greetings. Dozens of people I didn’t recognize were clustered about him offering their condolences and renewing old friendships.
I needn’t worry about Alasdair, I thought. He would be fine without me. The people of the community were anxious to love him. All they had needed was for him to open the door.
Twenty minutes later, a swirl of turbulent emotions racing through me, I was on my way out of Port Scarnose walking along the headland trail. The town was virtually empty. No walkers were out. Everyone was at the castle.
As I went, I was thinking of Gwendolyn. I realized that despite all the other attachments I had formed, she had been the main thing keeping me here during the last two months. Without her, I would have found myself in this predicament long before now. At least I might have recognized it before this!
Now what? It was sure to become awkward. Gwendolyn had diverted the focus from what had been in front of my nose for weeks.
I had somehow rationalized everything that was going on with the thought that I had just been developing two very close and interesting friendships. But suddenly an explosion had gone off in my brain. They weren’t mere “friendships” at all! The fact had jolted me with stunning force when sitting in the carriage, it could no longer be ignored:
I was in love with two men.
There—I said it!
As I reached my favorite bench and sat down, I had to say it out loud before it really sank in. First I thought the words. Then I whispered them. At last I said them out loud.
“I am in love with two men.”
And with the realization in all its clarity, I knew I had a problem.
I stared down at the water from the same place where my odyssey here had begun, watching the waves flowing in and out on the tide. The coast along here was so rocky. I never tired of watching the waves come in, crashing now against maybe a small rock and then against one as tall as a house, and go splashing up against it or completely obliterating it in white spray and foam, and then flow out again, leaving the rock exposed until the next wave came crashing in.
When I came to my bench at low tide, the entire look was different than at high tide. Different rocks were more noticeable wherever the tide was, and the waves did different things. It was like watching the tide rise and fall over Florimel’s Rock at the western end of Crannoch Bay just off the Bore Crag. Sometimes the rock was invisible, completely submerged by high tide. But at low tide you could walk right out to it and climb on it.
On this day, with so much on my mind, one particular rock about twenty feet out from the shore caught my eye. The tide was about halfway between high and low. Some two feet of this rock was visible above the waterline. Slowly a wave came in and submerged it for a second or two. Then slowly the mussel-encrusted surface reappeared as the wave continued on to shore.
Something about that rock, watching the waves approach it, cover it, then go on by, reminded me of me. I had come here spiritually empty. I didn’t know it. But now I realized that’s exactly what I was.
Then I met Iain Barclay. Meeting him had been like a wave of life coming in and crashing over me in the same way that waves were spilling over that rock out there. Life had come awake within me because of him. I had been filled, covered with the incoming water of life.
Maybe it was a stupid analogy—the waves and rocks, and my spiritual emptiness and then my waking. But as I sat there on that day, such was the progression my thoughts took. Spiritual waking, it struck me, was a moving and flowing thing, like the waves and the tide. Wakefulness had flowed into me and over me through Iain Barclay.
But then the water continued on from that rock out there. The flow didn’t stop. It came in, kept going, and moved on. And remarkably, after I had begun to come awake myself, somehow something within me—the music of my harp at first—began to awaken new things within Alasdair. As he had come awake, his relationship with Gwendolyn had come back to life, then his friendship with Iain.
The incoming tide of wakefulness had swept in and covered us all!
As my e
yes gazed out over the water, I realized that we were all like the rocks out there, and that the great love of God’s Fatherhood was the whole sea, slowly sweeping in as a great tide to cover us. Some, like Iain, felt that tide sweep over them sooner in life than others. Then the tide had overtaken me. After me, life had come to Alasdair. It was a moving, swelling tide surrounding and inundating us all, each in our own way and our own time.
Timings were different, circumstances were different. But the water of life rose and fell, surging in, flowing out, splashing, covering, and laying bare what had been hidden before.
Many awakenings were taking place!
And with them, love, too, had come alive and blossomed.
For what is love but the flowering of God’s life? What can be more lovely in all the world than a mind and a heart coming awake to life, to the people nearby, to the goodness of the Father who is waiting for us to arise and return to him?
Nothing is quite so wonderful in all the world as an individual waking.
I felt more alive than I had ever been.
I loved Iain. The life within him had sparked life within me. I had been asleep and had come awake. How could I not love him for helping me wake up? And I loved being with him. He was fun, like a best friend.
But Alasdair’s waking, the tearful look in his eyes as he took Gwendolyn in his arms and kissed her and she kissed him and said, “I love you, Daddy,”… it, too, had smitten my heart. It felt right to stand beside him. In that moment weeks before, I realized now that I had begun to love the man, love him with all the love that was in me.
As unlikely as it seemed when I thought back to the first moment I had laid eyes on him… I had grown to love Alasdair with a woman’s love.
I also loved Alasdair for his courage to grow, for the humility that had lately blossomed in his character. I had witnessed something within me spark life awake in him! And I loved him.
Iain had helped awaken life in me. I had helped awaken life in Alasdair.
Both were responses of love. Love flowing into me from another, love flowing out of me into another. Like the tide—inflowing and outflowing, but the same water moved by the same tide of love. How could I not love them both? And presumptuous as it was to think it—I realized that they both loved me.
With the realization of what was happening in my heart, I knew a decision had been reached. It was a decision I did not even realize I was facing until the decision was made.
With Gwendolyn gone, I was not about to put Iain and Alasdair in the same predicament that had torn them apart so many years before.
I could stay in Scotland no longer.
I would not allow Iain and Alasdair to again be pitted against each other by either loving or being loved by the same woman. After the healing that had taken place between them, I would not allow myself to come between them. I loved both too much to become a second Fiona.
It would be better never to see either of them again than to disrupt the precious flowering of their friendship. If it took my leaving to preserve the healing, it would be a price I must pay.
My loves would have to remain in my heart, known only to God and myself.
It was time for me to go.
Chapter Sixty-four
Diamond Necklace
Can ye lo’e me weel, lassie, to this heart then swiftly flee;
There ye aye shall dwell, lassie, mair than a’ this world to me.
When the moon-beams shine sae clear, at that hour by levers blest;
At the gloaming, lassie, dear, haste to meet this faithful breast.
—“Can Ye Lo’e Me Weel, Lassie”
Love always brings complications.
The divine ecstasy of loving cannot be separated from the pain that is its inevitable counterpart. My agony was now to diplomatically get out of Port Scarnose without divulging the full extent of my reasons for leaving.
Saying good-bye to both men, knowing how much I loved them, and at last knowing the nature of the love in my heart, but knowing I could say nothing, would be the hardest thing I had ever done in my life.
In the days following the funeral, though I saw Alasdair daily, I was able to hide my thoughts and deepest feelings behind the quiet melancholy that was natural after Gwendolyn’s death. I made my flight arrangements, and notified Mrs. Mair that I would beleaving her cottage at the end of the week. It tore me up inside knowing that I would be leaving Alasdair in the midst of his grief.
A quagmire of relational complications was sure to result if I stayed longer. I could not tell Alasdair the why of my decision. Yet the anticipation of it was killing me. He had become such a tender man. I feared for the pain my leaving would cause him. I did not want to hurt him.
But it had to be done. He was now strong enough to weather it. A clean, quick break, though painful, would be best.
With Iain it would be easier. He would never say, but I knew he would understand my motives.
He could not be unaware of the terrible irony that once again a woman had entered both his life and Alasdair’s. I knew that was why I had seen less of him in recent weeks.
One thing I knew Iain Barclay would never do was vie for a woman’s affections. Even if he loved me, he would not fight for me. It was not his way. He believed too much in allowing God to unfold his will to grasp for something he might want for himself.
My leaving would not crush Iain. His life would go on. He would still have his church, his ministry, and his faith. He had not become dependent on me as Alasdair had. Nor had he just lost a daughter.
I waited until two days before I planned to drive from Port Scarnose to Inverness where I would catch the train south. I told Alasdair I needed to talk to him about something important. He asked if I would come for dinner the next evening. I agreed.
When I arrived at the castle the following afternoon about five-thirty, it was already nearly dusk. The hours of daylight changed so rapidly in Scotland.
Alasdair was dressed casually, in tan corduroy trousers and a bluish Shetland pullover sweater. He and I walked awhile in the gardens, then went inside. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had spent the day packing and cleaning up the cottage and saying good-bye to all my favorite local walks and haunts.
How would I summon the courage to tell him that by this time tomorrow, I would be gone?
We talked informally, though quietly, through dinner. Gwendolyn had been with her other Father almost two weeks. Occasionally a smile returned to Alasdair’s face.
“I have wanted to talk to you, too,” said Alasdair when dinner was over. “These last couple of weeks, I know it’s been difficult for all of us. But I want to thank you again for everything, and for being here with me during this time. It means the world to me, Marie. Gwendolyn loved you so much, and… I—”
He stopped and drew in a deep breath. My heart was pounding. If I didn’t get said what I had to say pretty soon, it would be too late! What if he said something that went further than I wanted this to go?
He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small oblong black box.
“This necklace belonged to my mother,” he said. “I have been saving it all this time for Gwendolyn, hoping that… well, she will not be able to wear it now, and I would like you to have it, Marie.”
He opened the box, then reached out and set it across the table in front of me. It must have contained twenty diamonds!
I gulped, struggling to find my voice.
“Alasdair, it’s… I’ve never seen anything so lovely,” I said, fumbling for words. “It’s so kind of… I mean, you needn’t… but… how could I possibly… I can’t accept it, not a family heirloom.”
“It would mean more than I can say for you to take it.”
“I… I just can’t.”
Alasdair looked away. The open box with the necklace sparkling on a black velvet bed sat on the table between us. A heavy silence fell.
“It’s Iain, isn’t it?” said Alasdair softly after a minute.
The words jolted me.
“I’ve seen it all along,” he continued, smiling a little sadly. “I knew you loved him. And I… you need have no worry about me. He is a fine man. You could not do better. Even so, even if you wear it as Iain’s wife, I would like you to have this necklace… as a reminder of happy times, times you once spent with a man who cared for you very much, and—”
He drew in a deep breath and smiled again. “And to remember Gwendolyn,” he added.
Again it was silent.
“It is not because of Iain,” I said softly. My voice was husky.
This was much harder than I had anticipated.
“What then? Please,” implored Alasdair. “Say you will accept the necklace, as a token of my—”
“Oh, Alasdair,” I said, at last bursting into tears. “I am leaving tomorrow!”
I glanced away, tears falling from my eyes in earnest now. I couldn’t look at him.
For a moment all was dead silence. I stared down at my lap.
After a minute I heard his chair slide across the floor. He got up and I heard him walking around the table to where I sat. I stood, and the next moment I was swallowed in his embrace and sobbing uncontrollably.
Alasdair’s great hand stroked my hair as he spoke softly.
“I knew this day would come,” he said. “It had to come eventually.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” I whispered.
“No, no, it’s not your fault,” he said. “I know you were just thinking of me. I tried to pretend there would not have to be a day of farewell. But inside I knew I was just fooling myself. This will be one of the most painful partings of my life. But you needn’t worry. I will be fine. Things are different now. I am a changed man. I have known you and loved you and I will never forget you. I have just one final request to make.”
I nodded through my tears.
“Please,” he said, “if you can, don’t forget me. And, when you remember, perhaps you might occasionally say a prayer for me.”
I burst into sobs again, mingled with laughter as I pulled back and gazed deeply into his eyes.
Angel Harp: A Novel Page 38