edge, and the rising moon silvers the sea and throws a mournful radiance over turret and pinnacle, as we turn for a last look at the sacred monument of a lost cause and a sacrificed life. rather seemed as if the very sunlight lost its character and became cold, colourless, and faint by contact with that cold stone and grim outline. It was impossible to connect with the sunlight that shone on the grey stones of the Great House, any idea of the warmth and brightness which were THE THIRTEENTH BRYDAIN. so powerful everywhere around. BY MARGARET MOULE. Author of "Catherine Maidment's Burden," "Benefit of Clergy," "Mr. Wingrove's Ways," "The Vicar's Aunt," "Dick's Wife," etc. CHAPTER XXIII. IT was eight o'clock on a lovely May morning at Brydain. The whole aspect of the place presented as complete a contrast as could be imagined to its aspect on that bitter east-windy day, thirteen months before, when Brydain had announced to Mackenzie his intention of going to London. The wind was a soft southwesterly breeze; the sky was of that delicate transparent blue which generally promises a continuance of fine weather; and the only clouds to be seen were two or three little filmy streaks of white, which did but accentuate the blue. It had been a forward spring; as northcountry people estimate forwardness, remarkably so. The trees that grew in the ravine possessed a covering of the tenderest green; and the fronds of bracken which grew at their feet were rapidly uncurling and showing the beautiful green within their rough brown exterior. The gorse was in bloom in large clusters, scattered here and there on the dark hills, and its colour gave even their sombre austerity a look of spring. On the dreary moorland there were traces also of life and growth. These were slight; here and there a patch of fresh-springing grass, or a tuft of the delicate green of young rushes, and one or two rugged, low hawthorn bushes in the glory of their young leaves, constituted all. But the general aspect was the same as that visible everywhere else—an aspect of new life. Even the ragged pine-trees in the avenue leading to the Great House had their share in the spring; their little fresh shoots showed clearly against the darker parts of the branches. The Great House itself was the only thing in all the landscape that showed no change. It was as cold, as dreary, as gaunt as it had looked thirteen months before, under the lowering clouds driven by the bitter east wind. The May morning sunshine shone all across side; but it made no difference to it. one It Chil Down below, in Brydain village, all was cheerfulness, light, and movement. dren were playing in the street, men were whistling on their way back to their work after breakfast, and their wives were lingering on their doorsteps to watch them and enjoy the sunshine. At the end of the village old Elspeth stood at her open door without her shawl, warming her rheumatic old shoulders in the sun. Whistling also, James Macgregor the postman came along the street. He came from Carfrae with the letters, and was now proceeding to deliver them in Brydain and two or three other villages which lay across the moor. Every disengaged person in the street turned to watch him, and to take note of those houses which might receive a letter. It was the general practice in Brydain, having seen a letter delivered, to call, later in the day, as leisure might serve, at its destination, to glean any news that its recipient could and would impart. But to-day James Macgregor passed whistling, and nodding here and there, up the whole street without stopping. He went on, smilingly regardless of the disappointed faces that watched him, until he reached, on his way across the moor, the pine avenue leading to the Great House. Here he stopped short. Evidently waiting for him, though he made a pretence of a critical inspection of the sky, accomplished with his head thrown well back and his whole face upturned, was Mackenzie. He had in no way altered. He was wearing at the moment a rougher suit of clothes, otherwise he looked in every respect and detail precisely the same as he had looked thirteen months before. He brought his face down from the sky with what he intended for a start as Macgregor reached him. "You're early?" he said to the latter in a would-be careless tone, "I'm in my ordinar'," was the answer. "And I've a letter for you-from Brydain, I'm thinking." With this expression of interest in it, the postman handed Mackenzie the letter in question and went on across the moor. He was, though enquir ing, economical of his time, and reflected that he could learn all he wished to learn about Brydain from Mackenzie at their next meeting. Mackenzie settled himself in an easy position against the tree, and having searched for some moments in his coat pocket for his glasses, put them on, and opened his letter. He read it with great deliberation to the end; then he gave a curious incoherent exclamation, intended by him as the expression of intense surprise, and proceeded to read it through again. At the end of this second reading, he pulled off his glasses, and thrusting them and the letter into his pocket, turned and went along the rough road to the Great House with the nearest approach to a run of which he was capable. He went round to the back entrance, and flinging open the heavy door which opened straight into the kitchen itself, he entered and sat down on a chair with a gasp. "Susan Mackenzie !" he called. "Susan! He's coming Thursday! Preserve us all!" he added, with a start, as Mrs. Mackenzie, summoned by his voice, entered hurriedly from the further kitchen where she had been baking; "but this very day is Thursday! And he's coming to-day!" Who is coming, Donald Mackenzie?" she asked hastily. "And why are you out of breath? And what's your hat doing on my floor?" She proceeded to wipe her floury hands on her apron and pick up, with respect solely for the neatness of her domain, Mackenzie's bonnet, which he had thrown off as he sat down. "Let the bonnet bide, woman," he said, "and listen here. I have a letter from Brydain, and he is coming home to-day for a short while!" Mackenzie struggled to find the pocket in which he had placed the letter. "The master is coming, Donald Mackenzie!" said his sister-in-law. "Is that what you're saying?" "No other!" said Mackenzie tersely, still searching for the letter. "The master! To-day, and both the library and the dining-room out o' windows with spring cleaning! To-day, and no fresh joint in the house!" "Have done with your havers, woman, and prepare for him! I can take the cart to Carfrae and bring a whole bullock if you will require it! Brydain is coming, do you understand? And he hasna been home for thirteen months—-” kenzie shortly. She was half irritated at what she considered her own unpreparedness for an unexpected arrival, and half taken aback by her brother-in-law's excitement. "I'm fully aware of that. The more reason he should find all in good order when he does come. Marjory must go and get on with the rooms at once." "Marjory!" called her uncle in stentorian tones, before her mother could collect her remembrance of where she had last sent her daughter. "She's making the beds," said Mrs. Mackenzie, at length. "I'll go and see about it." But before Mrs. Mackenzie could begin to carry out the comprehensive intention embodied in the last phrase, the door that communicated with the long passage was opened, and Marjory herself came in. The past thirteen months had altered Marjory Mackenzie very little, as far as physique is concerned. In the strong Scottish air she had grown about an inch taller, and, perhaps, a little better proportioned as to her slight figure. But the impression she gave was still one of intense, almost fragile thinness and lightness. Her colourless hair was twisted in exactly the same fashion round her small head, and not all the fresh moorland air had been able to bring one tinge of colour to her white cheeks. But the expression of her face-the expression that seemed to centre in those large, light dreamy eyes-had altered; or rather, what had always dwelt there had so developed and intensified as to greatly change that thin face. The far-away, curiously ethereal look had spread from her eyes over her whole face. Every line of it was influenced by it, from the great white brow to the pointed chin and thin lips. Not only her eyes, but her whole face seemed to be always fixed on something out of sight, and to have imprinted on it a reflex from that something. She looked curiously out of keeping with the surroundings of the kitchen, as she stood in the doorway, framed by them, with the darkness of the passage for a background. She was wearing a light cotton working frock, and a white apron; and the effect of her dress, added to her own perfect colourlessness, was to heighten indescribably the air of ethereal unreality about her. She was almost weirdly suggestive of some one walking in sleep; whose eyes are still gazing on their "I'm aware of that," said Mrs. Mac-dreams. "You called me, mother," she said. Her voice was low, and her utterance accorded with her appearance. It was slow, and the unmusical tone seemed to come from far away. "I called you, lass," interpolated Mackenzie. "I believe your mother had the intention also, though. Marjory, you'll need to stir briskly! Brydain intends to be here to-day!" "Brydain ?" began the girl, dreamily. "Is Mr. Brydain coming back from London" she added, with a sudden quickening of her voice. "Is that what you mean, uncle ? " "That is precisely what your uncle does mean," said Mrs. Mackenzie quickly. "And what I mean is, that you must leave those upper rooms and get to work at once on the library and the dining-room, The scrubbing's done, thank goodness, but there's all that oak polishing, let alone the windows to be cleaned. You'd better get your cloths and go on and begin at once in the library, while I get the dinner out of hand." Mrs. Mackenzie paused for breath, and consideration; and the girl, who had stood quite still all this time in the doorway, moved with a quick, sudden turn and went into the other kitchen, apparently in search of the dusters in question. "You'll make it fair and clean for Brydain to see, lass?" Mackenzie called after her in a tone of sharp command, which was, however, not unmixed with a certain vein of pleading. CHAPTER XXIV. THE room which was known in the Great House of Brydain as "the library" was on the ground floor, and constituted the only other sitting-room besides the long dining-room. It was a small square room, opening out of one corner of the hall. It had been seldom used by Keith Brydain and his father except as a smoking-room occasionally, and a place in which to store anything for which it was inconvenient to find an immediate abiding-place-such as guns in temporary disuse, or fishing-rods which needed the attention which could not be afforded them until a rainy day should provide time. Everything of this description had been carefully removed by Mackenzie when Keith Brydain left, and stored in its rightful home. But still the room retained a curiously mixed character. Along one side of it were bookcases, with curious old-fashioned wire fronts in the place of glass, containing an assortment of books that varied from large, leather-bound scientific works placed there by a Brydain of studious inclinations a hundred years before, to a shelf of novels, collected on different occasions by Keith. The intervening gradations were composed of indiscriminate works, among which both Shakespeare and a treatise on the rearing of cattle found a place. In one corner was an old cabinet piano, the cracked and quavering notes of which were the only accompaniment to which Keith had been used to sing, and also two or three chairs covered in faded needlework, a relic of the days when the room had been used as a drawing-room for David Brydain's young wife. Over the mantelpiece were various photographs of Keith, which his father had collected and hung there with his own hands. Very few of these details were visible, however, as Marjory Mackenzie entered the room ten minutes after she had received her uncle's news and her mother's orders. The larger pieces of furniture were, one and all, covered in white dustsheets; and the smaller were placed in indiscriminate confusion in the middle of the floor. Marjory threw down the cloths she carried, and looked around her vaguely. Her light cotton sleeves were rolled up high above her elbows, in a practical fashion; and this trifling detail, by accentuating her occupation, seemed to increase the incongruity between it and her appearance. After a moment's inspection, she crossed the room to the fireplace, and unfastening the dust sheet which was covering the photographs, let it fall on the floor, and rested her elbows on the mantel-shelf, while her large brown eyes fixed themselves on a photograph. It was the last that had been taken of Keith Brydain during his father's lifetime. It was a large one, and very good. He was leaning against one of the stone door-posts of the Great House; and the photograph had caught at once his most handsome and his most natural expression. Marjory looked at it with eyes so intent, that it might almost have seemed as if she expected some response from the pictured face. But no expectation was written on her face. There was nothing in those great eyes but intent concentration. She did not move or change her position in the least. Through the open windows of the library came the voices of children on the moor, the bleat of the lambs, and the cry of a cuckoo. And the contrast between the world represented by these simple sounds of life outside, and the curious little scene being enacted in the lonely library within, was startling in its force. The pale girl, immoveable and concentrated, hardly looked as if she were alive at all, far less as if she ever had, or ever could have a share in the cheery, stirring life of the world without. At length she moved slightly, and as she moved, she spoke. "To die," she said, with a long-drawn intonation. "He doesn't look like death," she said, with a shudder, and a pause before the last word. "And he's coming, coming himself to-day." She spoke almost under her breath as if she were afraid of the sound of her own voice, and for a moment she took her eyes from the photograph and glanced round the room fearfully. But this was only for a moment; the next, her large eyes were again centred on the deep-set eyes in the photograph. his child. She was too delicate and shrinking to make companions of other children, and she was therefore thrown back upon herself for everything. Under this loneliness, her imagination developed more rapidly than ever. The child would sit alone for hours, gazing into the fire in winter, or up into the clouds in summer, living an intense, lonely life, in a world the inhabitants, surroundings, and motives of which were all the creation of her own brain. Then came a pause, in which the repressed physical nature seemed to make an effort; and the child shot up into a tall, thin girl. But the outward change in her made no corresponding inward change. Her imaginativeness gained ground more and more. To her mother, Marjory became inexplicable. One day she would be both intelligent and capable; on another she would be almost childishly useless and incomprehending; and on the next, she would be out of reach, and far away in a world that was practically inaccessible, apparently. As the months went by she became more and more dreamy and visionary, and the interludes of capable During the thirteen months that had gone by since she first came to the Greatness grew fewer and fewer. House, Marjory Mackenzie's thoughts had been fixed on one subject; her mental vision had been concentrated on one figure. The first was the doom of the Brydains; the last, Keith Brydain himself. Marjory possessed an organisation which was both curious and complex. Her father had had a quick, inventive brain and an unusual share of the vein of romanticism often latent in the Scottish character. All that could be defined as hereditary in the child came plainly from him, and none of her character bore the slightest affinity to that of her capable, matter-of-fact mother. Marjory had been very delicate indeed as a baby, and the fragility lasted on into her childhood. She had one childish illness after another, and was undersized, ailing, and fretful, always. But apparently the weak physical nature that made no effort to gather force and assert itself, left all the more force in her personality to be used in mental developement. Mrs. Mackenzie, when she found that Marjory did not grow out" of her dreaminess, and was only temporarily roused from it even by the shock of her father's death, which occurred through an accident, gave up all plans for the girl's future as hopeless. She resolved in despair, that Marjory would be 66 never no good at anything." And she therefore decided, on the death of her husband, to obtain a caretaker's situation for herself, and to keep Marjory with her. And just then occurred the train of circumstances that brought the two to Brydain. This developement showed itself chiefly in the rapid growth of an abnormally vivid imagination, an imagination which had in the child's life no outlet whatever. Mrs. Mackenzie had no comprehension of, or sympathy for what she called "the child's whims and fancies," and her father was too fully occupied with his trade as a cabinet-maker, to give much heed to With the first evening of her arrival there, and the account given in the firelit kitchen to her and her mother, by Mackenzie, of the doom of the Brydains, Marjory's mind received an impress that was to be life-long. It was as if the object that her imagination had unconsciously sought all her life had suddenly been presented to it; and there and then her mind fastened on the weird story with a hold that was never to weaken. Everything in the girl's nature that was sympathetic rose and assimilated the story to itself; all her imaginativeness rose in a powerful wave, and washed away every other train of thought to leave room for the Brydain doom. Then and there the thought of that weird, unearthly, ap parently unconquerable fate entered her mind and dwelt there alone. The girl was wholly fascinated and overwhelmed by it; and the weird fascination was driven slowly home, as it were, by the almost simultaneous sight of Brydain himself. Ever since that moment Keith Brydain's face had been before Marjory's eyes, and he and his destiny had become absolutely interwoven with her life. She admired him; she pitied him; and finally, though she did not know it, and her weak, imaginative mind could never have so defined the fact to herself, she had fallen in love with him. That is to say, she had fallen in love with the fascinating position in which he stood; with him, not as a man, but as the centre of it-the pivot on which her daily and hourly imaginings turned. She had collected, during these months, every scrap of information that could be gleaned about him and his story. First, from her uncle, who had shown her the chart, and explained to her, with a sort of pride in it, every terrible instance of the fulfilment of the doom; then, from old Elspeth and various people in Brydain village. These were at first inclined to resent curiosity in an "English-born lass" on a subject which was to them as their own affair; but, finally, finding her earnestly eager for information, they gave her every detail she could ask. Many a scolding from her mother for "gossiping" fell to Marjory's lot after. a much-delayed return from an errand in Brydain. Every detail in the Great House itself that was in the remotest way connected with any one concerned in the doom, the silver which was engraved with the names of the dead men, pictures of them, scraps of handwriting in old books, all were known to and dwelt on by Marjory. And the crowning point of all these details had been hitherto Keith's photograph. She had looked at it every day, with eyes of fascination and longing; and now this morning she was looking at it with the indescribable emotion awakened in her by the news that he himself would be here that very day. The sunlight crept into the library window; it shone coldly, but it broadened rapidly on the floor, and an experienced eye would have known that the broad riband of light meant eleven o'clock, but Marjory had neither moved nor glanced at it, when steps sounded outside the library door. Marjory faced round with a start, as the door opened quickly, and her mother came in. "You don't mean to tell me you've never begun?" she exclaimed. "Eleven o'clock, and you've not touched a thing, and the master coming to-night! You've been reading them books again! Oh, who would have a girl so little use as you are, Marjory?" With many more words to the same effect, Mrs. Mackenzie took up the cloths and began to make a rapid change in the dismantled room. Marjory meanwhile, without a word in answer, assisted her, slowly and mechanically. All through the remaining hours of that day she helped her mother in the preparations for Brydain's arrival with a curious, indefinable elation. She moved as if she were in a dream. She arranged furniture, prepared supper, lighted fires, all in the same dream, and in the dream moved incessantly the figure of Brydain. It was not until late in the dusk of the May evening that Mackenzie's uncontrollable excitement at length was. able to find some relief in harnessing the horse to the dog-cart with his own hands, and setting off to Carfrae station, fally an hour too soon for the train. It. was nearly two hours later when the crunching of the wheels on the r.ugh stones was heard by Mrs. Mackenzie and Marjory. The dog-cart stopped at the stone doorway, and Mrs. Mackenzie came forward, curtsying, into the hall. dain jumped down lightly and ran up the doorsteps. Bry "How do you do, Mrs. Mackenzie ?" he said cheerily. "What a beautiful fire you've got in the dining-room! It's good to be at home!" Mrs. Mackenzie moved a little to let him pass into the dining-room. But he did not move; he started, and almost dropped the Gladstone bag he was carrying. Behind her mother, in a clean light frock, stood Marjory Mackenzie. The firelight, shining out of the open diningroom door, caught her great eyes, and lit them alone, while the rest of her figure was a dim, luminous outline in the dusky hall. "I couldn't think who it was!" he said, recovering himself and laughing. "I hope you are well, Marjory!" The Right of Translating Articles from ALL THE YEAR ROUND is reserved by the Authors. Published at the Office, 12, St. Bride St., Ludgate Circus. Printed by CHARLES DICKENS & EVANS, Crystal Palace Press, |