Land of Heart's Desire

by Catherine Airlie

  He looked amused.

  “Then the little flare-up I stumbled on at the end of the drive this afternoon was purely a personal matter,” he suggested, “between you and Sutherland?”

  “There was nothing personal about it,” she flashed. “I told him he wouldn’t be able to buy Erradale at any price. That was all.”

  In the dim grey light that poured down from the deeply-set windows he turned her to face him, smiling in his charming way.

  “Not at any price, Christine!” he said softly, kissing her full on the lips. “But take care, my love! He looks to me a man who might get his own way, sooner or later!”

  When he had left her she felt shaken and unsure. The day had held far too much conflict to be dismissed with the lightheartedness of other days, and Hamish’s abrupt kiss had held no more promise than the one he had given her at fifteen beneath the rowan on the edge of the Ardtornish burn. She did not understand why he had come back to Croma. Certainly not to kiss her again nor to set out in Archie Campbell’s boat in search of sharks. Not entirely.

  An hour ago she might have been eager enough to hope that Hamish, with all his other loves forgotten, had returned to Croma to find her, but some strange inner sense suggested that this was not quite so. The fact that he had come should have been enough, of course, and she tried to tell herself that it was, but the uncertainty persisted.

  She found it impossible to go back to the turret room immediately, with Hamish’s light kiss burning on her lips, and two hours stretched between her and their evening meal. The moor seemed to be the answer to her restlessness, but she did not go back along the drive to reach it.

  Instead, she took the path that went along the cliff top to the shore, and after a moment she realized that she was going in search of Callum.

  For years Callum McKinnis—Callum of the Second Sight—had been her mentor and friend. She had gone to him when she had found it difficult to appeal to her grandmother or when Dame Sarah and she had not been able to see eye to eye, and Callum had given her advice. His wisdom was infinite, his slowly considered judgments infallible.

  Apart from all that, there was an excitement about visits to Callum’s cottage in the corrie beside the sea which had never failed to attract her. He had taught her all the songs of the Islands that she knew and recited the old legends to her until she, too, could repeat them by heart. A bond existed between them that could never be broken, forged as it was from mutual understanding and trust and deep love of the things they shared.

  Long before she reached the cottage she saw him on the shore, picking his way slowly and carefully between the weed-strewn rocks in his search for the driftwood he burned on his fire when the peats were scarce. From that distance it was difficult to believe that Callum was partially blind. His rapidly fading eyesight did not deter him from leading a full and useful life, though he could not go so far afield now as he once had done. His fishing days on a grand scale were over, but he could still handle a dinghy within the safer limits of Loch Erradale, and he had an unerring way with sheep.

  Apart from these things, he lived what some might consider was a lonely and isolated existence. Only Callum—and perhaps Dame Sarah—could have told them how much he still got out of life. The birds and sea creatures were his friends; he fed the kittiwakes and the gulls daily, and even the shy little puffins would stand arrested beside his door while he talked to them.

  Christine hailed him from a distance and was glad when she saw his face light up in recognition of her voice.

  “Indeed, it is you, cailleag bheag!” he said gently. “I would be knowing your step anywhere!”

  She took the bundle of driftwood from his arms, adding it to the pile he had already made on the shore.

  “You’ve enough here to light a bonfire, Callum!” she teased, laughing.

  “And it’s one that should be lit,” he told her. “Seeing that you will soon be coming of age.”

  “They don’t do that for girls!” she laughed, picking up more wood. “We’re not so important.”

  “I would not be saying that now,” he contradicted, halting to lean against a rock and draw out his ancient pipe. “You are the last MacNeill—Erradale’s only hope.”

  Christine’s face sobered.

  “I think my grandmother feels that way about it,” she said. “But she gave me a choice, Callum.”

  “So she would,” he answered, nodding. He did not ask what her choice had been. He seemed to know, or at least to take it for granted that she would remain on Croma. “You are very like her,” he said.

  “I wish I could think that!” Christine sighed. “I didn’t come back with the intention of staying, Callum,” she went on to confess. “I thought I had other things to do in the world.”

  “All things are planned for us,” he returned with slow conviction. “Drawn in the sand—hidden in the wind—spun like a web before our time and tide. We may think that our puny wills can alter them, but it is not so. We have a way to tread, long or short, difficult or easy, which we cannot escape, and if we are wise we will not seek to turn away from it.”

  “But here—on Croma—what way can there be for me?” she asked, no longer attempting to hide her indecision from those wise old eyes. “What can I really do on the island, Callum?”

  “Your time will come.” The pale, almost opaque blue eyes under their grey, beetling brows went beyond her for a moment. “It will come sooner than you believe,” he added in the voice of prophecy which no one on Croma had ever dared to refute. “You will shoulder a great responsibility and know a great love. That will sustain you, even if everything else should fail.”

  She waited, hoping for more, but Callum rose and led the way back along the shore. They stood at his cottage door, feeding the gulls and laughing at the antics of the busy little puffins crowding the rocks beneath them. Christine could not forget the prophecy Callum had made, although she knew that he would not refer to it again. She was free to accept or reject it at will.

  After a while he walked back along the narrow cliff path with her. It was so close to the edge of the sea that she wondered if Callum was really safe, living here alone with the affliction of his blindness to contend with, but he knew every step of the way. This was his place and he would not leave it. She knew that as surely as she knew that he would never leave Croma itself.

  In the gently-fading light, with his almost sightless eyes turned to the west, the old man seemed part of another world, the vast, hidden world of the Nameless Ones where he alone might walk with impunity.

  The world about them was very still, with rock and cliff and pinnacle hanging reversed in the waveless sea. Slowly the sky turned from turquoise and flame to the pale, still yellow of the gloaming hour. The light was like some unearthly illumination as it hovered on the distant horizon’s rim where it would linger, arrested, all through the short summer night, fading to a thin opalescent glow when all that the Islands knew of darkness crept over the west. Callum would go to bed by its light, scorning the lamps which he never lit till the long winter set in, and Christine knew a strange reluctance to turn away from its peace and beauty.

  They walked in silence to the end of the bay, standing arrested, of a sudden, to look out towards the west, to the distant horizon where a vague and shadowy shape seemed to materialize out of nowhere even as they watched.

  Her breath held, her eyes slowly dilating, Christine watched it take on the outline of a ship—a Viking ship, with a white, billowing sail. As they stood there, transfixed, it seemed to come slowly towards them, graceful and unhurried on the incoming tide, its sail slowly flushing to a faint, warm pink as the afterglow caught it in a noose of light.

  Reaching out, Christine grasped her companion’s arm. “Look!” she whispered. “Callum—look!”

  He turned towards her, searching her face.

  “What is it you see?” he asked.

  “The Viking Ship!” Her lips would scarcely frame the words, but when she looked back towards th
e sea the ship had gone. “It was there,” she said unevenly, “a moment ago—”

  For a split second Callum did not answer her, and then he said in an ordinary voice:

  “If you look again you will see that it was no more than a cloud—an evening cloud, riding away to the west.”

  She could see that now, but she also knew about the old superstition, still firmly accepted on the island. The Viking Ship had been seen before. It was the sure premonition of death. “Callum!” she cried passionately, “why do we believe these things? Who is to die before the moon is full again? Who is the ship to come back for—and sail away for ever?”

  He led her to the edge of the moor road that went back to Erradale House.

  “You are not to distress yourself,” he said. “You have seen that it is only a cloud.”

  “I suppose it was foolish of me,” she admitted, trying to smile. “Callum, when you go to the shore again will you try to find me some of your stones? We used to collect them for you when we. were children, remember? We made work-boxes, sticking them on the lid between the shells. I would like to make one for my grandmother—”

  He nodded his white head as she walked away.

  “Yes,” he said. “I will find them for you, so that you can make your gift without delay.”

  CHAPTER III

  For several days after her visit to Callum of the Second Sight Christine contented herself with various tasks about the house, mostly connected with her own coming-of-age. Her birthday was to be the occasion for a general celebration at Erradale and her grandmother planned a dinner and dance for the evening. People from the mainland were to be invited and put up for the night afterwards, so that there was a good deal of ordering to do and an allocating of rooms which did not prove too easy.

  They were more than glad, therefore, when Jane Nicholson answered their appeal for help by return of post, saying that she would reach the island before the following week-end.

  “Which means she’ll be coming on Friday,” Christine said, going in search of Rory to break the news to him.

  He was helping to dip sheep in the pens halfway up the glen, and she stood watching as the struggling ewes were forced down the narrow gangway and through the tank. In that moment, and perhaps for the first time, she was aware of the strength of Rory’s curiously shaped hands and the power of his short, thickly-set body as he bent to his task. Then he looked up and smiled at her, as a child might smile. There was none of the dark bitterness in his face which had been there that first day of her homecoming, and he seemed content.

  Content to work for her? She supposed that was what it amounted to. “Rory,” she called to him, “Jane’s coming!”

  He called something back, which she did not hear, and when the last ewe was safely through the tank he dried his great hands on the rough towel lying over the fence and came towards her.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m glad she’s coming. Jane isn’t happy where she is. Edinburgh isn’t the sort of place she would ever take to.”

  “I wish there was something she could do here,” Christine said, “but there’s so little to offer, Rory. All the young people have gone from the island. The work they need and the life they, want are to be found elsewhere.”

  “If the weaving was started again,” he said abruptly, “there might be something for them to do. But, up here, there aren’t enough sheep.”

  “We can’t afford any more,” she said. “At least, I don’t think so.” She looked about her at the sparse flock scattered on the adjoining hillsides and at the ewes huddled in the. drying pens. “It would be a risk to buy any more, I expect.”

  “Not if we could take them across the causeway,” Rory said. “There’s rich grazing land over there that hasn’t been in proper use for years.”

  “We couldn’t afford to rent it.” Her mouth was suddenly tight. “And we couldn’t ask for concessions, Rory. Not from a stranger.”

  “No,” he said, “I suppose not,” and turned away.

  Christine walked on, wondering why he had mentioned the land on the south side of the ford which had so recently belonged to his own family. The high cliff pasturage was no use for a dairy herd and very little use for cattle of any sort, but it would be ideal for the sturdy little black-faced sheep they reared here in the north of Croma. They would have thrived on it, and more sheep would mean more wool, and more wool...

  Her eyes had the distant look of a dreamer’s as she walked rapidly towards the cliff, and as always her impulsive thoughts ran ahead of her. They were thoughts of Croma now as she looked into the island’s more prosperous past.

  Long ago there had been a tweed mill on the island and the local cloth had sold at a handsome profit. It had been enough to sustain life for several weavers and their families, and as a child she had watched the spinning and dyeing of the wool with an excitement which came back vividly now as she thought of it. She remembered how she had listened to the weavers as they had sat at their hand looms or sang the waulking songs out on the machar on a bright spring morning with the crotal gathered and the smell of peat smoke in the air.

  It was all so clear, yet it had all died on the island before she had really grown up. People had gone away, the younger people they needed most.

  Walking on, she followed the narrow cliff path for over a mile, with all the wide panorama of the western seaboard at her feet. It was a clear day and she could see the outer islands dotted along the horizon like a phantom armada drifting idly in the sun. There was no reason for her to turn back, no urgent demand on her time, as there would surely be in a day or two, so that she walked leisurely, finding herself, at last, within sight of the ford and the causeway which divided north from south.

  The tide was out and the narrow neck of land glistened in the sun. How often she had run across it, skipping lightly from one sea-worn stone to the next, aware of the tide’s swift challenge as it came slowly in again!

  In those days Scoraig and Ardtornish had been her second home.

  Impulsively, unthinkingly, she ran down the path and out on to the causeway. It was broken and dangerous in places, but she did not notice. The years seemed to be slipping away from her and she knew a child-like abandonment to adventure. When she had missed the tide in the old days she had stayed at Scoraig overnight, sure of her welcome at Ardtornish House whenever she liked to go there.

  Shining back from the wet patches of stone, the sun was dazzlingly bright and the water was very blue. The world seemed particularly her own, wide and stretching away endlessly on either side. For a moment she paused, looking back, but there was no consciousness of trespass in her heart. It was a day to be alone, with the sea birds and the high winds and the white clouds circling round Askaval!

  Once more she was running, with the wind in her hair and the salt tang of spray on her lips. The tide was out and the white sand was jewelled with pools, left behind by the sea. In them were a million treasures—sea-anemones and delicately-tinted shells and little scuttling white crabs—and above them the gulls circled, crying endlessly. Far up on the cliff top the grass was very green.

  There was a path up there, a right of way to Scoraig village, which went close along the edge of the cliff, high and free above the rocks two hundred feet below. When they were children, to sit up there had been like being on the prow of a ship.

  She reached the other side of the ford. It was years since she had come this way to Scoraig, but nothing had changed. Each curve of the path was known to her, each breathtaking view that met her by the way.

  Clambering across the rocks, she found the path which led upwards towards the cliff. It had been little used, she supposed, since the new road had been made, the road that went straight across the fields to Scoraig. In an hour, if she had been going to Ardtornish House to visit the Nicholsons as she had done so often in the past, she could be in the Ardtornish policies.

  She thought of the new owner of Ardtornish and dismissed him summarily from her mind. It was not a day for
conflicts or even for doubts about the impulses of the past. It was a day to walk and be free, with the wind blowing strongly against you as the path rose steeply to the summit of the headland—

  And stopped abruptly! She found herself confronted by a barred stile and a notice bearing the bold, black lettering NO ROAD.

  For several minutes she stared at the sign in bewilderment, which was swiftly followed by incredulity. No road? But there always had been a road along the cliff, right round the island. It was an ancient right of way whose origin went back hundreds of years, so that no one really knew who had granted it in the first place—Nicholsons or MacNeills.

  And now there was a notice which said, quite baldly, that the well-worn path was closed.

  She could not believe it, and for a moment longer she continued to stare. She knew, without doubt, who had put the notice up there and barred the stile.

  Overwhelming anger took possession of her. How dared he do such a thing! It had never been done before, and for a complete stranger to walk in and bar the whole population of Croma from a favourite walk was insufferable. Finlay Sutherland had no more right to erect that notice board than she had to close the facilities of Port-na-Keal to the handful of fishermen who still used it. They were the islanders’ rights. The very term accentuated the fact. A public right of way—a path over which no one had absolute control!

  He must not be allowed to do it! Without stopping to think, without taking any other factor into consideration, she marched angrily on up the path until she reached the offending notice and, without a moment’s hesitation, tore down the warning and dropped it on the turf beside the stile.

  The stile itself was no obstacle to her. She negotiated it easily and strode on to the top of the cliff. How dared he! she fumed. Did he honestly think he could do these things and get away with them, even if he had bought Ardtornish a thousand times over? This was the road MacNeills had taken to Scoraig for hundreds of years!