Land of Heart's Desire

by Catherine Airlie

  LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE

  Catherine Airlie

  Christine was of two minds about her future. Although she loved her beautiful, Scottish island home, she wanted to live in the south to follow her career as an artist.

  An arrogant stranger challenged her to make a decision. And strangely enough, it was only when she had given up her ambitions that she found true happiness!

  “Land of heart’s desire, I love you;

  Dear Western isle, gleaming in sunlight.”

  SONGS OF THE HEBRIDES

  (M. Kennedy-Fraser & Kennedy MacLeod)

  “Truth is hid deep in the heart,

  Love is the magnet which draws it forth.

  Service is the tool which burnishes it.”

  Z.

  CHAPTER I

  As the S.S. Morar sailed across the Firth of Lorne towards the narrow Sound of Mull, Christine MacNeill wondered if she had put the past behind her with absolute finality. It was something she did not want to do, a possibility against which she rebelled inwardly, yet she had come, as if at a command.

  She thought of all her grandmother’s requests as commands, because Dame Sarah was that sort of person. Strong-willed and fiercely proud of her inheritance, the grand old woman who was now the head of the family had decided that her granddaughter should come back to the island of Croma for her coming-of-age. Everything had been arranged. It was almost as if Christine had indeed been the male heir which the MacNeills of Erradale had never lacked in five generations until now.

  She stirred restlessly, leaning her arms along the ship’s rail, her thoughts probing the future, her fine grey eyes holding a suggestion of conflict as she considered the two years behind her which had seemed to be the culminating point of all her dreams. She was, she protested inwardly, an artist, first and foremost, and only the accident of two wars had made her an heiress. It was incongruous, she felt, that a girl not quite twenty-one should be the prospective “laird” of Erradale, although she had to admit that her grandmother had carried out her duties in that capacity with an energy and sense of dedication which made her feel humble and suddenly ashamed.

  Thoughts of Dame Sarah came tumbling back as they turned into Tobermory Bay and tied up at the pier. Her grandmother’s summons had come in a letter three weeks ago and there had been a sense of urgency about it which had brooked no delay. Dame Sarah rarely quibbled. Her decisions and requests were as definite and straightforward as her brisk approach to life, and she was not unreasonable. She had made no demur, for instance, when Christine had begged to study in Rome or Paris, although she had gone to considerable trouble to make sure that her granddaughter’s contacts abroad were above reproach. The Michauds, with whom Christine had lodged in Paris, bore no resemblance to the denizens of the Left Bank. They were commercial artists, hard-working people who had little time for sitting in endless debate round the cafe tables, and Dame Sarah had known Denise Michaud for many years. The letter which she had written to her old friend suggested that Christine might still be in need of considerable guidance, having inherited her own strong will and a good deal of the MacNeill spirit, but she had considered that the years in France would do little harm. She was still, she wrote, old-fashioned enough to believe in the “Auld Alliance”, the affinity which drew their two nations so strongly together, but when the time came she had not hesitated to call Christine back to Scotland.

  Here, where I belong, Christine thought idly as the steamer’s twin screws thrashed the placid water of the bay into a churning foam and headed for the open sea. Was that true? Was there really a “divinity that shapes our ends”?

  As she turned away along the deck she felt that she did not want to answer such a question, but already the answer was hammering at her heart. The wind had lifted the mists away and the Highland hills were taking shape all about her. Purple shadows lay in the glens and the growing crops of Mull were green in the slanting sunlight pouring down between the clouds. Morven of the black hills and Sunart of the silence lay behind them and suddenly they were sailing into the wide spaces of the Western Ocean with the magic of the Hebrides brushed in faintly against the northern sky—Canna and Rum and Eigg, and the long grey outline of Coll and Tiree merging into the southern blue. They were names to conjure with, Christine thought, like the ripple of a melody; they were names that had always lain close to her heart.

  And beyond them, against the distant peaks of Skye, lay Croma; the island that had given her birth.

  As they rounded the dark grey bastion of Ardnamurchan with its soaring birds and beating waves, the wind became a savage genie, tearing at her silk head-scarf and whipping it away on a gleeful gust to cast it across the deck at the feet of the only other passenger who had ventured so far forward in a rapidly freshening sea.

  Christine had been vaguely aware of him ever since Tobermory, although she did not think that he had joined the steamer there. He had come on at Oban, she supposed, off the Glasgow train.

  He came across the deck with her scarf in his hand. “Better let the wind have its way!” he suggested with a brief smile. “Any sort of headgear seems inadequate under these conditions.”

  He had taken off his own hat, a wide-brimmed felt which suggested its American origin at a glance, and his red hair stood amusingly on end. Christine held out her hand for the scarf.

  “I shouldn’t have liked to have lost it,” she confessed. “I brought it from France, but I ought to have known about Ardnamurchan’s winds.”

  He did not move back to his own side of the deck, and she was suddenly aware of how tall he was, a giant of a man well over six feet, with a corresponding breadth of shoulder that made him appear to tower over her, accentuating her lack of inches to a remarkable degree. He had a square, pleasant face which had known much exposure to sun and wind, and the keenest eyes she had ever seen. In the direct sunlight they were almost startlingly green, and they surveyed her with frank curiosity as their owner leaned across the rail by her side.

  “You belong here,” he said. “You are going home.”

  It had been more statement than question, and Christine, caught off her guard, drew in a deep breath before she answered.

  “I was born here—yes,” she agreed. “But why should one be expected to stay in a place where one ‘belongs’? It seems to me to be a cramping sort of attitude to life that doesn’t get you very far.”

  He thought about it for a moment, his eyes on the far horizon’s rim as he breathed in the sharp, salt tang of the sea.

  “Strangely enough,” he said at last, “you didn’t look as if you thought that way, standing there. You looked like someone who was coming home for good, someone who had been away too long.”

  Christine glanced up at him, only half understanding what he meant.

  “I am on my way home,” she admitted, “but not for good.”

  “To one of the islands?”

  “Yes.” She did not think it necessary to tell him about Croma in that moment. They were, after all, strangers. “I have been studying in Paris, but my grandmother has sent for me. She has never grudged me anything in all my life, so I could not refuse to come home for my twenty-first birthday. She has no other grandchild.”

  She felt his look suddenly critical and a hot colour ran up into her cheeks. Why should a stranger presume to judge her actions, however remotely and silently?

  “Which means that the old lady is hoping you will stay,” he observed. “What else do you want to do?”

  “I want to draw—to paint. Just before I came away from Paris I had a chance to start as a commercial artist with a French magazine. There simply isn’t any scope for that sort of thing here,” she added, looking resentfully towards the distant islands taking shap
e against the blue. “It is all so remote—so far away from what I want.”

  “Which is half, if not all, of its charm,” he said as if he had been speaking to himself.

  “That’s all very well,” she argued defiantly, “when you are seeing it as a tourist, perhaps for the first time, but I have my own life to lead.”

  She turned her eyes away from the beckoning islands to find him regarding her with a generous smile.

  “One day, perhaps, when you are a little older,” he said, “you will think differently.”

  “You’ve travelled all over the world, I suppose,” she challenged.

  “Pretty nearly,” he agreed. “And now I guess I’m more than ready to settle down.”

  “In America?”

  “I’m a Canadian,” he informed her.

  His accent had not been strong enough, she realized, to place his new-world assurance with complete accuracy, but Canadian or American seemed all the same at the moment. Either way, his life must be vastly different from her own.

  “Is this the end or the beginning of a continental tour?” she asked, not quite sure whether she was really curious or not until his answer surprised her into a new awareness of him.

  “Neither,” he told her. “Like you, I am coming home.”

  Her eyes widened as she looked at him.

  “Anyway, that’s how I feel about it,”, he added. “My people were Scots, you see. They left the old country by no desire of their own to make a new life in Canada.” His mouth tightened a little and his eyes looked grey rather than green as they scanned the sunlit sea. “They were successful, but they never quite forgot where they belonged. The Islands kept pulling them back, although they never came. It has been left to me, I guess, to fulfil their wish.”

  “I see.” Christine’s heart was beating suddenly hard and fast against her breast. She knew what he meant. The pull of the Islands could ensnare her, too, but she was determined to resist it.

  “I’ve bought a place here,” her companion went on, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that they should be sharing confidences on such a trip. “A bit of land that came into the market six months ago. These old places seem to change hands quite frequently, I guess—I thought I might have trouble when I was ready to buy, but it was easy enough. I even got the place I wanted, which was something.”

  She said briefly, coldly: “That is part of the Islands’ tragedy these days. So many people are forced to sell their inheritance to meet one sort of tax or another—chiefly death duties.”

  “Yes.” His eye remained on the distant horizon, but she saw how dark they were now, colder, more grey, as if this thing had touched him, too. “There are so many reasons for the breaking up of a home, though I can hardly be held responsible for this one. From what I could gather at the time, it had lain empty for the best part of two years. Someone did not want to come back to the Highlands. That appears to be all there was to it.”

  “Perhaps—he could not come.” Christine defended the unknown owner of the lost estate.

  “Oh, yes,” he contradicted. “It appears, though, that he preferred to stay abroad and was really eager to sell. Y’know,” he added whimsically, “I always did think the Prodigal Son got a lot of undeserved sympathy. After all, he had his ‘riotous living’.”

  She flushed, sensitive at the thought of her own adamant rejection of Croma.

  “But he was sorry afterwards,” she pointed out. “One can have second thoughts, you know!”

  He turned, looking at her fully, the searching green eyes all but demanding as he said,

  “That might be the way with you.” He swept a hand towards the limitless horizon. “All this is far too lovely to waste. Besides,” he added, “I think you belong here, whether you realize it or not. Tell me more about your island.”

  “There isn’t a lot to tell,” she began reluctantly. “It’s quite small, and rocky in the north, where we live, but in the east and south it is fertile, where the land slopes gradually to the sea. It has never been a tourist centre because it’s too far off the beaten track. The steamer only calls twice a week in summer and sometimes in winter we are cut off for days, with no communication with the mainland except by radio, and even that can be uncertain at times.”

  “But you love it, all the same,” he suggested.

  “Of course I love it!” There was no doubt in her mind where her affection for Croma was concerned. “It has always been part of me, and I like to think that I have it to come back to at any time.”

  “But supposing you hadn’t?” he queried unexpectedly. “Supposing you were suddenly faced with the prospect of losing it—being without the Complete security of all these things you have known and expected to be there all your life?”

  “That couldn’t happen,” she objected.

  “It could happen to anyone,” he said with finality.

  “Well—” She threw her defiance at him with a small, proud lift of her head. “I’d do something about it.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know.” Her flashing eyes came up fully to meet his. “This is all rather ridiculous, isn’t it—arguing about the impossible?”

  He smiled.

  “As you say,” he conceded. “We will talk only about pleasant things. How long are you going to stay in the Isles?”

  “At least for two months. It’s beautiful here in the summer,” she added, her eagerness lighting her face like a lamp from within so that her eyes deepened to the colour of the sea in quiet places. “That is when I love it most—when the seathrift is out and the seals bask on the warm rocks and all the air is gentle and soft—like a benediction.”

  Her voice dropped into a long silence. She could not look at him because she was half ashamed that she should have bared the feelings of her inmost heart to a stranger whom she had known for little more than an hour.

  “That is what I have come to see,” he said. “I was never doubtful about it, for I suppose I felt it in my bones, but we have to make a journey now and then to make sure of what we want.”

  “Someone—your mother, perhaps, was very fond of Scotland?” she suggested.

  “She was never really happy after she left it,” he said briefly. “She brought up six sons in Canada. I was the only one who was actually born here.”

  “And so the Isles have called you back!” Christine said, not feeling it to be at all strange.

  “That’s about it.” He turned from her, gazing ahead to where a faint grey shadow had begun to take definite shape on the skyline, and then another and another. “ ‘The Isles of Youth!’ ” he quoted. “Although my father used to say that the real meaning of Tir-nan-Og was the Land of the Ever Young.”

  “There’s so much mystery attached to the Islands,” Christine agreed. “It becomes part of you. One seeps it up right from one’s earliest childhood, I think.”

  “Or is born with it,” he suggested. “Anyway, that’s another reason why I may feel that I am coming home.” The islands lying ahead of them were taking on detailed shape now, although he had not told her that he was heading for one of them. He might even be going on to Stornaway in the Outer Hebrides, far past her own destination, which had suddenly come near.

  “I’m almost nervous about this,” he confessed presently. “You see, I’ve had an agent acting for me up here for the past six months and he’s been meeting with a whole packet of trouble. Fact is, he’s been having difficulty with the locals. They’ve not offered him any co-operation or friendliness, and I gather that they’ve been downright obstructive at times.”

  His mouth tightened, giving him a harsher look of a sudden, so that he seemed older than she had taken him to be.

  “And you mean to remedy that?” she suggested.

  “I shall do my best.” His mouth was still grim. “I’ve got to make a success of this thing—for several reasons.”

  She did not ask him what his reasons were, but she offered a warning.

  “Don’t try
to do it all at once. You can’t change the Highlands. My people resent nothing more strongly than a patronizing attitude where their country is concerned.”

  “You forget that they are my people, too,” he reminded her. “Now more than ever.”

  “This land you have bought,” she asked. “Will you farm it?”

  “There’s cattle on it now, and I mean to expand, of course. My father made his money out of wheat in Alberta, but—six brothers were too much on one ranch.”

  “You were the eldest, though,” she pointed out, remembering what he had said about being born in Scotland.

  “That doesn’t matter quite so much in Canada,” he told her. “We’re a young country and there isn’t the same sense of passing on a heritage. It’s every man for himself, so to speak. What a man is, not what he has. I was the one who could leave Alberta with the least number of regrets. The others were all married—or about to be.”

  Suddenly she knew that this was part of his reason for coming to Scotland. He had not left Canada without some regret, and a moment ago he had told her that the success of his present venture was essential to him. He had burned all his bridges behind him, emotionally, perhaps, as well as in the wider sense, and the future had to hold the promise he expected of it.

  Looking up at him, she felt that he would see that it did. There was a steely determination about the set of his jaw that was unmistakable, a look in his eyes which reflected something which she might have detected in her own.

  Some sort of spark had been kindled between them at the impact of their meeting, part of a consuming flame that had no right to die out in the commonplace of a swift parting such as theirs must inevitably be, but already they were within sight of Croma.

  The island had taken shape before them, clearly silhouetted against the amethyst and flamingo of the western sky. A drift of rain had passed down the narrow defile of Glen Erradale, like a jewelled curtain lifting on a new scene, and suddenly the whole island stood revealed, as if it had been washed clean and bright for their coming. It was there, as it had always been, gentle and smiling in the south, scarred and black and triumphant where the perilous and savage crags scowled down in the north. Beaten by storm and the fury of waves, tunnelled by resounding caverns where the tumult of the wide Atlantic rushed in, and skirted by smiling beaches of pure white sand, it looked all that it was and ever had been—a land of heart’s desire.