Land of Heart's Desire

by Catherine Airlie

  Something caught in Christine’s throat. This was what she had sought to deny, and it was something like this that the man standing beside her had come three thousand miles to discover.

  She could come back, though, as she was doing now. She could come back to Croma whenever she liked.

  “None of your islands are the same.” Her companion was scanning the jagged peaks of Croma—Scuirival and Askaval, towering like twin giants against the western sky. “None of them are exactly alike.”

  “My grandmother says that all mountains have their own distinct personality and all the islands, too—Coll and Tiree, so placid and green and smiling; and dark Scarba frowning at the sky. Treshnish is a mystery, and Stafta holds all the world’s music in a single cave. Skye is the romantic isle, with a rainbow trapped for ever across the face of the Cuillin, and Eriskay will always be the island of a song and a dream.”

  She knew that he was looking at her more closely now, but it did not seem to matter if he thought her strange, expressing herself in such an intimate way to someone she barely knew. The spell of the Islands was upon them, stronger now than ever before, and she knew that she could not shake it off. Croma was there and she had come home.

  “Will you stay in Scotland?” she asked. “Do you really mean to spend the rest of your life here?”

  “I’m hoping so.” She thought him strangely noncommittal of a sudden. “I can’t imagine this spot of bother my agent is having at present to be anything really serious, and in any case I’m hoping to buy the adjacent estate, which I believe may be coming on to the market quite soon. That, of course, would solve my problem for me—to own all the land.”

  The words were not exactly arrogant. He had made a statement of things as he found them and decided on his own solution.

  Christine looked beyond him to where the green fields of Croma lay in the shadow of Askaval, the south land, the growing land where most of Croma’s wealth lay. To the north, where the rugged pinnacles of Scuirival stabbed the skyline, there was no such kindness, hardly room, in fact, for a few grazing sheep, but there was a fierce, untamed beauty among those northern hills and corries that stirred all her pride, for this was MacNeill land.

  With a wild ringing of bells from the engine room and a churning of her twin screws, the S.S. Morar hove to, waiting outside the curve of a shallow bay for the tender that would come from the shore to meet them. Two young calves, tied in sacking, their large brown eyes full of apprehension, were lying on the deck ready to be lowered over the side, and there was the usual accumulation of stores and packages that went ashore each trip to sustain the life on Croma—a crate of fowls; fishing tackle; boxes of tinned goods and a bath to be installed in a cottage which had probably just recently had running water laid on. Newspapers and periodicals, tied in neat bundles, were stacked beside a small pile of hand luggage, and, and the tender came alongside, the mail bag was brought to the rail.

  Soft Gaelic voices hailed each other in their native tongue and the sound was like the gentle cadences of a wind that skirts across a summer field. Christine, hearing it, was vaguely aware of all that Croma meant to her, yet, with the wilfulness of youth, she still believed that she could find her happiness elsewhere.

  She turned from the rail to find her companion of the voyage collecting his luggage beside the other articles waiting to be put ashore. He was going with the tender.

  But why to Croma? Why to her island?

  Suddenly, her heart beating swiftly and close to her throat, she was remembering what he had said about buying land, remembering, too, that the Nicholsons who had owned the south of the island for nearly as long as the MacNeills had owned the rugged north had sold their land just over six months ago through an agent in Edinburgh.

  In their day the Nicholsons had been as proud a family as the MacNeills, and now here was this stranger—this usurper—who had taken their place, coming to Croma and talking about buying the whole island. For that was what it amounted to. He had spoken about the adjacent estate, and the only other estate on Croma was Erradale. Not content with humbling the Nicholsons’ pride and taking their birthright, as if money alone had given him the right, he was preparing to make an offer for the MacNeill land too!

  That could be the only explanation which would take him ashore at Scoraig.

  She watched in stony silence as mail and cattle were lowered into the tender, and when the Canadian came to say good-bye she determined savagely not to tell him that she was a MacNeill.

  “I hope we are going to meet again,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “It isn’t likely.” The shock of knowledge had made her voice sound like ice. “I shall be kept fairly busy while I’m here.”

  “We can’t live so very far apart,” he protested, scanning the island-dotted sea.

  She remembered what he had told her about meeting with opposition from his neighbours, and for a fraction of a second she felt ashamed, yet she was forced to snub him.

  “The islands are remote,” she said, “and we value our privacy.”

  It was foolish, of course, because they were going to live on the same island. Their meeting would be inevitable no matter what sort of relationship might develop between them.

  He saluted her and climbed down the ladder to the bobbing tender as a sailor came along the deck towards her.

  “I have your luggage ready, Miss MacNeill,” the man said, and she wondered if her companion had heard.

  What did it matter? What did it really matter, she thought as she turned from the rail. She would not look at the tender forging its way purposefully shorewards, she would not acknowledge the final salute of the man who had shared her journey and her dreams.

  A feeling of loss for which she could not quite account numbed her mind so that she could only stare down at the water racing swiftly along, the steamer’s White hull and wonder what exactly she had told this stranger about herself.

  They had reached Rhu Dearg, the point of land that ran down into the sea from the high shoulder of Askaval, before she allowed herself to look at the island again. Behind her lay the quiet fields and deep green valley that spelled prosperity to the south; behind her, too, lay the narrow neck of land that linked her more rugged home to what had once been Nicholson soil. Without that narrow link Croma would really have been two islands, divided by a fury of water rushing in from the Atlantic through a vicious bottleneck between the hills. The ford saved the north of the island from complete isolation, although sometimes at high tide it seemed that the water would never recede and leave the safe causeway high and dry between north and south.

  The tide was high now and she watched the water boiling through the gap with a strange sense of premonition in her heart. Angry and violent waves rushed towards the shore, expending themselves in fury against the harsh rock surface until the whole atmosphere above her island home seemed to echo with the angry sound of conflict. Gulls cried and circled overhead, swerving and darting high above the leaping spray, and the shrill cry of a cormorant rose on a fierce note of warning, flung back and echoing against the jagged peaks of Scuirival.

  There was a violence about it all that might have shocked her if she had not been bora to it, but there was a rough splendour about it, too, which she was already beginning to acknowledge, deep in her heart. Unthinking and impulsive she might have been in the past, but, somehow, to-day the spell of the islands had come very close. Their beauty and wistfulness had touched her as never before; their harshness and savagery made a challenge which she knew herself suddenly prepared to meet.

  The steamer rounded the point, coming, at last, into calmer water and shouldering its way into the tiny harbour which was the only safe anchorage on the island. Almost girdled by the black crags of Scuirival, Port-na-Keal afforded a haven for the tiny fishing fleet which plied from Croma’s rock-girt fastness out into the broad waters of The Minch. It was too small to attract trade as a fishing port, but the smaller island steamers could tie up at its long stone quay an
d it had always seemed to Christine that it cradled all the peace of the romantic West. Storms never broke there, and there was a silence among the foothills that could almost be felt. Tiny, clustering cottages sat with their feet steeped in the tide, their placid white faces reflected in the dark mirror of the sea, the homes of happy people who asked little of life except that they might be able to keep body and soul together and go on living here in the shadow of their native hills.

  It had been like that ever since she could remember, she mused as they drew nearer, and then she found herself looking more closely at the little houses, looking into vacant homes whose uncurtained windows stared back at her like empty eyes gazing sadly into space.

  Shock, sudden and acute, smote her into the awareness of change. Croma had never been like this before. Something had happened, something vital to the well-being of the island had been swept away.

  She could not deny the fact and a strange, unnamed fear rose in her heart, so that she could not reach Erradale House quickly enough, although she did not believe that she would find change there.

  As soon as the gangway was down she was ashore. She was the only passenger and her luggage followed immediately, carried by the blond giant in the blue seaman’s jersey who had spoken to her at Scoraig.

  “Put it down there, Neil,” she said. “And—thank you!”

  She smiled, trying to press half a crown into the palm of his hard brown hand, but he recoiled as if she had offered him some kind of insult. She should have known, of course. Neil was of the island, a native of Croma, and he would not take money from her for services rendered to a MacNeill. He felt honoured to be able to help her, although there was a look at the back of his vividly blue eyes which might have suggested pity. Pity and regret mingled, perhaps.

  “It is indeed good to see you home again, Miss MacNeill,” he told her in the soft Highland accent which made each word sound like a caress. “The island has been missing you these past three years.”

  The island. Not just her grandmother and the household at Erradale, but the island as a whole. The simple, generous people who still lived there and had served the MacNeills for five hundred years!

  The warmth of it, the utter magnificence of it, surged into her heart along with the painful acknowledgement that she was not equal to such a homecoming. She had come reluctantly, and she did not mean to stay.

  Emotion gripped her by the throat for a moment, shaking her, and then she saw an estate car being driven at considerable speed towards the pier.

  She had expected to be met, of course, either by Magnus with the old brake or by Duncan Mor, but this was something new. New and unexpected.

  The man who stepped from the estate car was known to her, however.

  “Rory!” Her voice held the fullness of her surprise as she held out her hand. “I had no idea you were here—back on the island!”

  “If you had written more often you would have known. Even if you had answered your grandmother’s letters with more alacrity! She believes in one letter, one reply—in that order—and I’ve been far too busy to write.”

  “But—you being here! That’s the surprise.” She had allowed him to take both her hands in his, and he held them longer than convention demanded, his dark eyes searching her face for what he wanted to see. “I thought you had gone—some weeks ago.”

  He shook his head and his eyes darkened as he released her and turned towards the brake. Of course, Christine thought remorsefully, she had said the wrong thing. She should have remembered how Rory had always felt about the island, how much the old Nicholson home at Ardtornish had meant to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized with deep contrition in her voice. “But I heard that you had all gone—you and Jane and Hamish.”

  “You thought, in fact, that the island had been cleared of Nicholsons!” He turned smouldering, resentful eyes to hers. “Well, it hasn’t. Jane is in Edinburgh, but I am still here, and Hamish is still in London. Nothing very much has changed,” he added bitterly, “except the fact that Ardtornish doesn’t belong to us any more.” His dark face flushed angrily. “We have Hamish to thank for that,” he said. “It was his land, his birthright, and he sold it for—for whatever he finds to do in London!”

  The hand Christine laid on his arm trembled a little. “I know how you must feel, Rory,” she sympathized, “and I wish more than anything else that it needn’t have happened to you. The island has always been ours—MacNeills and Nicholsons living peacefully, side by side—and it was a shock to me to hear that Ardtornish had been sold. But we can’t blame Hamish,” she added firmly. “There were the debts—death duties and the heavy taxes he couldn’t afford.”

  Her cheeks burned as she mentioned Hamish Nicholson’s name. He was ten years her senior, the laird of Ardtornish and the most romantic figure of a man she had ever met. But not the laird of Ardtornish now! That had all gone, the glory and the splendour had been wrested from him by a harsh and unsympathetic fate, and he had remained in London, probably because he was too heartbroken to return.

  Yet she remembered him as arrogant and proud, always taking what he wanted without question. She remembered the way in which he had kissed her that first time, years ago, beside the rowan tree overhanging the Ardtornish burn. It was a kiss that had left its mark. She had felt it sear her lips, again and again, in the years between, although she had been little more than fifteen at the time. It had been the summer before Hamish had gone away, and he had only returned at intervals after that.

  Now, it seemed, he had gone for good—or that appeared to be what Rory was trying to say.

  She looked into her companion’s dark face, thinking how different he and his elder brother were in every way. Even in outward appearance they were unlike, and the sharp contrast seemed to bring Hamish very near. Tall and fair and broad-shouldered, Hamish Nicholson suggested all the haughty grandeur and fearlessness of the sturdy Viking race from which he had sprung, and nature seemed to have expended all her bounty upon him so that there had been little left to offer at Rory’s birth, seven years later.

  Small, even undersized in many ways, with dark visage and curiously misshapen hands, it was, only in Rory’s eyes that any beauty lay, and at the present moment even they were made ugly by hate and resentment.

  “Hamish could have tried harder,” he said. “He could have given up all these other things for Ardtornish—to keep it, even if it had only been for a year or two. He let it go easily.” He stepped back to let her get into the driver’s seat, but she shook her head. “Some people won’t make sacrifices, though, when they interfere with their way of life,” he added harshly.

  “But Ardtornish was Hamish’s way of life,” Christine protested. “He had been brought up with the thought of belonging, of being the laird when your father died. He liked coming here—”

  “When it suited him,” Rory put in fiercely. “He liked other things more—freedom and excitement and the sort of people he met in London.”

  “You’re bitter,” Christine said as he let in his clutch. “Don’t be, Rory! Perhaps—the person who has bought Ardtornish won’t stay for very long. Perhaps he won’t weather the feeling of resentment there’s bound to be now that Hamish has been forced to leave his home.”

  Rory glanced at her in a perplexed sort of way, as if he feared that he would never make her understand, but she had been offering him understanding. She had been trying to point out that Hamish was not to blame for what had happened to Ardtornish while at the same time accepting his own personal bitterness as something to be expected and excused. After all, Rory had never left the island except to finish his education on the mainland, and those, she was well aware, had been the most unhappy years of his life. He was passionately attached to Croma; he would have given his life for it if such a sacrifice had been asked of him, and the depths of his resentment stemmed from the fact that Hamish had not asked. He had made his own decision and carried it through, swiftly and ruthlessly, and now Ardtornish was in
the hands of a stranger, its future utterly dependent upon a stranger’s whim.

  She thought of the man who had shared the journey from Oban with her, driving her thoughts away from any lingering kindness in that direction. If he had not come, if his wealth, of which he had not made any secret, had not been on hand at the right moment, Hamish might not have been tempted to sell Ardtornish quite so easily.

  “Tell me about my grandmother, Rory,” she asked, thrusting the memory of the voyage from her. “Is she well enough?”

  He shook his head.

  “That is another thing,” he told her gloomily. “The old lady is not the same. It doesn’t show because she does her best to hide it, but she’s suffering now most of the time. It’s over two months since she left her room, and I don’t think she’ll ever walk about the shore again.”

  Christine drew in a deep breath.

  “Why wasn’t I told?” she demanded. “Nobody wrote about this—nobody told me anything. Jane might have written—”

  “Jane has been in Edinburgh,” he said, “looking for a job.”

  “I see.” She bit her lip, trying to remember how changed everything was and not to go on blundering like this, hurting Rory and perhaps Jane, when they met. “But you knew, Rory. Couldn’t you have written?” she asked.

  His lips drew together and he fixed his gaze on the narrow road ahead.

  “There was too much to write,” he said. “I’m no hand with a pen, and I didn’t know what you wanted to do.”

  “But if you thought I was needed,” she protested, “I should have been told.”