The Motor Maids by Rose, Shamrock and Thistle Part 28

"Why, they would probably have been arrested and taken to the next town as suspicious characters," pursued Feargus.

The excuse seemed rather far-fetched, Billie thought, but then Feargus had a great sympathy for poor people and perhaps it would not have done any good to send the detective down into the little quiet dell to destroy the peace of the wanderers, as Feargus had called them.

What would she have said, if she had known that their young Irish courier left the hotel that night at bedtime on a horse hired in the village and did not return until near dawn?

CHAPTER XVIII.-"AULD LANG SYNE."

Two women, one well past middle age and the other just turned seventeen, walked along Princes Street in Edinburgh one morning, taking in deep breaths of the warm heather-scented breeze from the inland hills.

Perhaps they were exiles, restored to their native land after long wanderings in distant countries. Who could tell? At least a pa.s.ser-by might have thought as much from the expressions of intense pleasure that animated their two faces. And, as if it were not enough to be treading the soil trod by one's ancestors, there came to them the sound of a bagpipe (bagpipes are not so plentiful in Edinburgh as of yore), actually playing their own stirring ancestral chant:

"The Campbells are coming, Oh, ho! Oh, ho!"

"Well of all the strange coincidences, my dear Wilhelmina," exclaimed the elder of the two women, none other than Miss Helen Eustace Campbell.

"Isn't it, cousin?" cried Billie, her soul fired with the martial strains of her ancestors.

But stranger than the coincidence of the bagpipe was the condition of the weather. It was a bright and beautiful day!

"When I was here more than thirty years ago it rained perpetually,"

remarked Miss Campbell. "As much as I loved Edinburgh and valued its a.s.sociations with former generations of my family, I will admit to you privately, my dear, that I was glad to leave."

There was a subdued excitement in Miss Campbell's voice, but Billie did not notice it. She smiled dreamily.

"I think I could love it even in rainy weather," she said. "It is the most picturesque and beautiful city I was ever in."

She raised her eyes with wors.h.i.+pful reverence to Edinburgh Castle, old and gray, perched on the summit of a bold rock in the distance, like an ancient sentinel always on duty.

The two wanderers, who had by some accident of fate been born in a foreign land when they might just as well have been born in Scotland where they really belonged, walked on the air of expectancy.

Behind them followed those three alien persons of Irish and English descent who regarded the sights like any common tourists and experienced only tourists' palpitations.

Miss Campbell pulled out her watch nervously.

"Did our Cousin Annie say that half past one was the lunch hour?" she asked.

"Yes," answered Billie. "The note said, 'It would felicitate me if you, my dear Cousin Helen, and my younger cousin, Wilhelmina, and your three American friends, will lunch with me this afternoon at half past one.'"

"A very unusual woman, my dear," said Miss Campbell. "Thirty years ago she was the very pink of propriety--"

"Meaning as stiff as a ramrod?" asked Billie.

"Well, yes, a little stiff, to the free and easy American type. We must mind our manners this afternoon and be very careful what we do and say."

"In the meantime, we'll enjoy life," cried Billie. "We'll look at the Old Town and the Castle and when the time comes for lunch, we'll bottle up our spirits and pretend we are just Scotch spinsters and members of the Presbyterian Church. And, by the way, Cousin Helen, are you going to mention that in the last hundred years we've turned Episcopal?"

"We sha'n't thrust it on her, child," replied the little lady. "If she brings up the subject, of course we will have to tell her the truth."

"We might say," went on Billie, "that the only Presbyterian preacher in West Haven is, to speak plainly, fairly dull."

"Oh, my dear child, never confess a thing like that to your Cousin Annie Campbell. It is just possible she might consider it wicked to be anything else but dull."

"Are we going to the Castle now?" demanded Mary Price, running up breathlessly.

"We are so," answered Billie. "We are on the way and Cousin Helen's going to walk because she loves every inch of Edinburgh soil."

And walk they did up the steep hill, and Miss Helen never once made her usual complaint:

"My dears, I'm afraid I'm getting to be an old woman."

At the top they paused to look at the view,-and there is hardly a more beautiful one in all the world: first the irregular roofs of the Old Town, once the center of fas.h.i.+on in Edinburgh; then a sheer drop into the New Town, gay and airy and highly picturesque, diversified with its terraced gardens, its spires and steeples; and farther on still, the sea, s.h.i.+mmering blue and dotted with white sails.

Then they crossed the drawbridge over the ancient moat and pa.s.sed under a portcullis. Here Mary paused and burst out with:

"'What, warder, ho! Let the portcullis fall!

The steed along the drawbridge flies Just as it trembles on the rise; Not lighter does a swallow skim Along the smooth lake's level brim.'"

The girls giggled freely over this exhibition of Mary's enthusiasm and an old gentleman who happened to be entering the castle at the same time smiled with great amus.e.m.e.nt, and, lifting his hat, said to Miss Campbell:

"It warms an old heart to hear young lips recite the good old rhymes."

But, after all, the exterior of the grand old building and the view interested the girls more than the Crown Room inside or even the museum, and it was not long before they were on their way to the Old Town whose tortuous narrow streets and toppling houses, some of them ten stories high and more, were the most picturesque tenements the Motor Maids had ever seen. Through the crooked alleys they wandered, peeping under dark arches and up long flights of steps. Occasionally at the end of a tunnel-like street, narrow enough to touch the walls on either side, they caught a glimpse of a white sail on a deep blue strip of water.

At last, entirely unconscious that they were footsore and weary to the point of shedding tears, they descended by one of the quaint streets to Holyrood Palace, gray and silent, where the rooms of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots are still preserved.

How many murders were done behind those old walls! What a nest of intrigue and plots it had once been! Suddenly, Miss Helen Campbell began to feel her nerves. Hunger and fatigue had done their work.

"Billie," she exclaimed in a weak voice, "I am sure Holyrood Palace feels no older than I do this minute. I am ready to crumble into a handful of dust. If it's not lunch time, we must go back to the hotel and rest a bit."

Billie looked at her watch.

"Heavens!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "We haven't but two minutes to reach Cousin Annie's. Oh, dear! And we did want to be on time."

They tried to find two cabs, but the Palace is in a mean quarter of the city and there was no cab in sight. They tried to hasten the lagging footsteps of the little lady, but for some inexplicable reason she lagged the more.

"I will not be rushed along," she cried. "Annie Campbell can wait. She's been waiting for sixty years. It won't hurt her to wait a little longer."

"Waiting for what, Cousin Helen,-a husband?" asked Billie, who also was weary and hungry to the point of extreme exasperation.

But Miss Campbell did not reply.

By dint of inquiring at every street corner and much impatient studying of maps, they finally found the house wherein lived this spinster relic of the Campbell family. Nearly twenty minutes late for lunch, they sounded the knocker with the desperate determination to see the thing through if death or imprisonment resulted.

If you have ever been a tourist in Europe, you will recall having felt the same way when you have been seeing sights all day and forgotten the lunch hour.