She is a true daughter of Nature, but--she is also the daughter of Mrs. Bal.
Can Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald have been such a one when she was eighteen? No, in spite of the haunting, almost impish likeness, I'm sure she cannot. But I think Somerled wonders, and that now and then the relationship and the resemblance creep between him and his instinctive perception of truth in the girl.
She came to us with Somerled on the night of our first sight of her, leading him as Una might have led her lion.
It was a blow to Aline, a blow over the heart, and I felt it for her on mine. She managed her affairs badly next day, but I didn't blame her. I couldn't. Somerled and I had already lost our heads.
I scarcely believe Somerled was in love with the girl then; perhaps he isn't even now. He merely felt the call of youth, and a strange beauty and a stranger vitality. His life needed this call. It waked up the sleeping youth in his own heart. It set his old enthusiasms singing like birds uncaged. It made him want to be again all the things he had decided not to be. It brought back beliefs in realities that he had feared were illusions. In other words, it freed the temperamental artist and dreamer from the spoilt and successful millionaire. But he could have let the bright vision go, perhaps, and have been pleasantly contented later to remember it, if--it hadn't been for Aline. Because she wanted to part them and make him forget the girl's existence, she took the very way to throw them together. Then, when she had done her worst, she turned to _me_ for help.
I was horribly sorry for her, and the keen hurt of my sympathy made me fear for myself. The girl had got hold of me too, of course. When I found that she was going away from us with Somerled, I felt physically sick with the sense of loss. It was as if, with Barrie gone, everything was gone. I knew that poor Aline must be suffering exactly the same dumb tortures in regard to Somerled, whom she had thought so nearly hers. And that is why, when she begged me to help--somehow, anyhow--I wasn't sure whether I promised to please her or myself.
I was able to do very little toward keeping the promise, either way, until Edinburgh. It was there, really, that Aline and I first seriously took up the rôle of villains--if we are villains. But two persons less well cut out by Nature for such parts can hardly exist. We want to be good and happy, and we want each other to be happy, and all those whom we love to be happy; but we want them to be happy with us and through us. This is where Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald comes into the plot. Without her, nothing could have happened as it is happening.