And there before them, as they looked across the deck from the side up which they had come, were seated three people--a man of stately presence, gray-headed and erect, a lady of doubtful years and charms not wholly departed--and Barra.
The old man rose and came forward towards Kate with a strange expression of apology and appeal on his face.
"My father!" cried the girl, taking, however, no step towards him, but keeping her hold of Wat Gordon's hand.
But Wat was staring at the lady who sat beside Barra.
"My Lady Wellwood!" he said, in utter astonishment.
Barra smiled his thin, acrid, unmoved smile.
"You mistake, sir," he said; "not now my Lady Wellwood, but the fair bride of Roger McGhie and the very charming mistress of his mansion of Balmaghie."
For a little we must leave both the narrow, sea-barriered, rock-girt bounds of Suliscanna and the flat, hard-won, and yet more hardly kept fields and polders of the Netherlands for the moorish pastures, the green, changeful woodlands, the flowery water-meadows of Balmaghie. It is necessary at this point to take a cast back in our story and tell of the strange things which have befallen Roger McGhie since we saw him at our tale's beginning, making his farewells by the stirrup-leather of my Lady Wellwood.
It was perhaps natural that the laird of Balmaghie, delicate of body, retiring of habit, a recluse from the society of roaring bears like Lag and Baldoon, who were his immediate neighbors, should succumb readily enough to the fascinations of my Lady Wellwood. It is not so obvious, on the other hand, why she found pleasure in the company of Roger McGhie.
It may be that the caustic kindliness, the flavor of antique chivalry, which had compelled to more than liking the unwonted heart of John Graham of Claverhouse, also had power to fascinate the widow of the Duke of Wellwood. That title had been one of the late king's making, and in the absence of heirs direct, it had lapsed immediately on the death of the king's minister and administrator in Scotland, while the original impoverished earldom of Wellwood had gone back to a kinsman remotely collateral. So my lady never forgot that she was not "the dowager" merely, but still, in the face of all--Susannah, first and only Duchess of Wellwood.