The Portcullis Room

1 AS they cleared the harbour mouth of Port Phadric on the mainland, Hans, chef of the S.Y. Ariel, was putting on the fresh herrings to grill for breakfast. Now the sun of a wan September day was high in the heavens and the smoky blue cloud on the horizon for which the Ariel's bowsprit was pointed had sharpened to the grey hogback of Toray rising stark and steep out of the sea. For more than four hours Shamus the pilot had shared the bridge with Captain McKenzie in a stony silence. Philip Verity, Stephen Garrison's European manager, to whom Garrison had entrusted all arrangements for the cruise to Toray, was responsible for Shamus. He had picked him up on the quays at Port Phadric and, on discovering that his home was at Toray, had engaged him on the spot to take the yacht across to the island. An undersized, Gaelic-speaking fisherman, monosyllabic and shy, 'the English,' as he called it, was evidently a foreign tongue to Shamus. His guttural, singsong utterance, his awkward way of framing his sentences, had rung strangely in the ears of the party of New-Yorkers when Verity brought him to the saloon to present him to Garrison. They found his English not even as intelligible as the cook's Hoboken variety, and much less fluent. Middle-aged and modern-minded and, through long expatriation, probably more sophisticated than the bulk of his fellow Americans, Philip Verity was not in the least inclined to the metaphysical. But in the deep-set, ultramarine eyes of this secretive stranger he seemed to discern an inner light that spoke of second sight and a belief in pookas, pixies, banshees, and other manifestations of the supernatural with which Gaelic folklore is filled. From the first Verity had set his face against this harebrain adventure of Garrison's, urging the extreme danger of navigation along those perilous shores at the season of the equinoctial gales. Although it was he who had brought Shamus on board, he found something vaguely ill-omened in the appearance on the Ariel of this eldritch creature. Shamus was their first contact with the mystic islands for which they were headed and which, strung out along the West Coast of the Scottish Highlands, seem, behind their perpetual curtain of mist, still to dwell in the Celtic twilight. In Verity's uneasy mind the pilot's arrival on board seemed to stress the fact that they were turning their backs on the trolley-cars, telephones, and automobiles of the mainland for the primitive isolation of the outer isles. In and out of the swiftly moving cloud-wrack a sun of pale primrose slanted down upon the Ariel labouring in the choppy seas of Toray Minch. Since the white cabins and brown nets of the little fishing port had dropped in their wake, Shamus had opened his lips only to give a curt direction to the helmsman at his elbow or to squirt a stream of tobacco juice over the rail. But Captain McKenzie, the sturdy Nova-Scotian who skippered the Ariel for Stephen Garrison, was in nowise disconcerted. Highland himself by origin and habituated to the ways of mariners by a life spent at sea, he appeared to find nothing extraordinary in the spectacle of a man remaining silent who had nothing to say. And so, eyes fixed on the yacht's bows as she shipped it green in the foaming tide race, captain and pilot, two identical silhouettes in sou'westers and oilskins, stood side by side in silent harmony. Installed in wicker chairs under a shelter abaft the bridge, Garrison and Verity smoked their pipes in the thin sunshine and watched the rugged outline of Toray slowly harden through the haze. For the hundredth time since his employer had first broached to him his crazy idea of leasing or even buying Toray Castle, Verity, listening to the melancholy whistling of the wind in the stays, wondered for how long Steve would put up with the utter remoteness of the fastness they were approaching, one of a chain of similarly savage islets scattered among the boiling Atlantic combers. To a fellow with an income of five thousand dollars a day, of course, all caprices were permitted; but, 'if I had a tenth of Steve's money,' Verity, with a shake of his grizzled head, reflected, 'Newport and Miami would be good enough for me!' The voices of sea birds crying shrilly in their wake seemed to enhance the brooding silence of the coastline they were nearing. The sun went in and a brisk mizzle of rain enveloped them. Islands, such as these, Verity remembered, were the Ultima Thule of the ancients. It was not hard to imagine, he mused as he gazed at the cloud of spray marking the shore and at the beetling mountain looming above, that the world ended on the far side of that desolate rock. The air was full of noise, the boom of the breakers, the screaming of the birds—with Nature so harshly vocal, it was not surprising that man was given to moody silence. Instinctively his eye shifted to the bridge. Noting the direction of his companion's glance, Garrison laughed. By contrast with Verity's brand-new yachting cap, immaculate blue serge and brown-strapped deck shoes, his attire was lamentably disreputable. An old reefer jacket gaped open upon a grubby white sweater and, as he sprawled in his chair, the peak of his battered cap was tilted forward on the bridge of his nose. As though reading the other's thoughts, 'I don't believe your friend Shamus has addressed a solitary word to the skipper since we pulled out of Port Phadric!' he said. Verity shrugged. 'Mac won't notice the difference. Come to think of it, he's not such a chatterbox himself!' Garrison yawned vastly. 'They might do worse than recruit barbers from the Hebrides,' he observed flippantly. 'Why don't you do something about it, Phil? Come back with us to New York and open the Hebridean Tonsorial Parlor— Silence Guaranteed. I'll stake you. It'd be a wow!' The other smiled indulgently. Steve could rag like a college boy—it wasn't always easy to remember that he was thirty- two. 'I'd rather have Shamus pilot me than shave me. If you think I'd trust a wild man like him with a razor, even a safety!' With a grunt his companion shifted his position. 'There's something in it, all the same! I've a good mind to fire Dwight and take your Gaelic pal home in his place. Dwight talks too much, anyway. He started telling me all about King Haco and the Vikings when he was shaving me this morning— mugged it up out of one of Mrs. Dean's guide-books, I guess!' He yawned again, stretched and, tipping back his cap, sat up. 'I wonder where Phyllis and her mother are!' Verity laughed. 'I fancy Toray Minch was too much for Mrs. Dean— at least I saw Marie bringing away her breakfast tray untouched. I haven't seen Phyllis yet this morning!' 'Then find her for me like a good chap, will you, Phil?' said Garrison with a smile as he stood up. 'I'm going on the bridge. We ought to be in pretty soon. Gosh, will you look at those birds!' The mouth of the loch was opening up between lofty dark brown crags. The rocks were alive with sea birds. At the yacht's approach they swooped aloft in dense white clouds, shrieking wildly, their wings glinting coral-pink against the light. Verity staidly descended the companion to fulfill his errand while Garrison mounted to the bridge.