CHAPTER I

THE GIFT OF THE SEARCH

The Student and Fiona lived in a little gray house on the shores of a gray sea-loch in the Isle of Mist. The Student was a thin man with a stoop to his shoulders, which old Anne MacDermott said came of reading books; but really it was because he had been educated at a place where this is expected of you. Fiona, when she was doing nothing else, used to help Anne to keep house, rather jerkily, in the way a learned man may be supposed to like. She was a long-legged creature of fifteen, who laughed when her father threatened her with school on the mainland, and she had a warm heart and a largish size in shoes. Sometimes they had dinner; sometimes nobody remembered in time, and they had sunset and salt herrings, with a bowl of glorious yellow corn-daisies to catch the sunset.

It was Anne who saw the old hawker crossing the field behind the house, and burst in on the bookroom to inform the Student that he wanted buttons. She was met by a patient remonstrance on her ambiguous use of language:

"For," said the Student, "if you mean that buttons are lacking to me, there may be something to be said for you; but if you mean that I desire buttons, then indeed I do not desire buttons; I desire . . ."

Whereon Anne fled, and went out to meet the hawker. The frail old man, bending under his pack, was crossing the meadow behind the house, brushing his way through the September clover. His white hair was uncovered save for the huge umbrella which he carried alike in sun and rain; but youth still lingered in his eyes, which were bright as the dawn and deep as the sea-caves. Behind him followed a little rough-haired terrier, black as jet, his inseparable companion. At the door he unslung his pack, and, leaving Anne to select her buttons, passed straight through, knocked at the bookroom door, and went in.

The Student wheeled round in his chair and began to grope about.

"Have you seen my spectacles?" he said. "I can't see who you are till I put them on, and I can't put them on till you find them for me, for I can't see to find them myself unless I have them on. Pardon this involved sentence."

The old hawker picked up the missing spectacles and handed them over.

"You wouldn't remember me, in any case," he said. "I last saw you twenty-five years ago, when you were trying to dig at Verria. There was an old man there, do you remember, being beaten by armed Bashi-Bazouks, and you held them up with an empty revolver, and took the old man to your camp and nursed him, and you said things to the Turkish Governor, and . . ."

"My excavations came to an untimely end," said the Student. "I always owed that old man a grudge for being beaten before my tent. Why couldn't he have been beaten somewhere else? I should like to meet him again and tell him precisely what I thought of his conduct."

"You have done both now," said the hawker. "And it is his turn."

"Impossible," said the Student. "He was as old twenty-five years ago as you are now."

"At my age," said the old man, "one grows no older. No one who walks the world as I do need ever grow any older. You can walk thirty miles on Monday when you are twenty years old; good. If you can do it on Monday you can do it on Tuesday; and if on Tuesday, then on Wednesday; therefore, by an easy reckoning, you can do it as well at eighty years old as at twenty. Thus you never age."

"There's a flaw in that somewhere," said the Student. "I know; it's the Heap. How many grains of sand make a heap?"

"How many buttons do you want?" said the hawker. "You saved my life once; you shall have all the buttons you want for nothing."

"I thought you couldn't answer my question," said the Student. "But we are getting on much too fast; we haven't really begun yet. I suppose you came here to sell things? Anne seemed to know you, and she said I wanted buttons. I pointed out to her that her statement was either an untruth or a truism, and equally objectionable in either sense; and now you repeat it, just as I was beginning to consider you quite an intelligent person. By the way, who are you?"

"I have a different name in most countries which I visit," said the old man. "But by profession I sell buttons--and other things."

"What sort of things?" said the Student.

"I have dreams," said the old man, "dreams and the matter of dreams; imaginings of the impossible come true; the wonder of the hills at sunrise; the quest of unearthly treasure among the moon-flowers; the look in the eyes of a child that trusts you."

The Student took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes hard, and settled his shoulders.

"I desire something very much," he said. "If you can do all that, you can give me what I desire."

The hawker frowned.

"You are a scholar," he said, "and I can do nothing for scholars. You need no ideal, for you have one. You need no dreams, for your life is one. For you, the earth pours out hidden treasure, and the impossible comes true day by day. What you desire just now is a long definite inscription to settle a controverted point in your favor. And if I could give it you, just think how miserable you'd be. Nothing further to argue about, there; and several quite happy and contentious professors would be reduced to such straits that I don't know what crimes you might all commit. You might even take to making money."

"If I wanted money," said the Student, "I should, being an intelligent person, at once proceed to make it. Then I should have to live in the big house again, instead of letting it, and my precious time would be spent in arguing with my gardener and endeavoring to conceal my ignorance from my chauffeur. As it is, we live anyhow, and I am happy."

"Happiness doesn't score any points in the game," said the hawker. "What good do you and your inscriptions do, anyway?"

"That's not my job here," said the Student. "That will come on afterwards. Besides, I don't want to do good. I am old-fashioned; why should I take my neighbor by the throat and say, 'Let me do good to you, or it shall be the worse for you and yours'? Besides, I can't do good. You can't dot the wilderness with prosperous homesteads when half the years the oats don't ripen till the year after. Besides, I do do good; I have let the big house to shooting tenants, and it's excellent for their health. Besides seventeen other reasons, which I can enumerate if you are able to bear them. Besides, Fiona is fond of me."

"Yes," said the old man softly, "that's your real justification. And it's a great deal more than I could give you; my hawker's licence doesn't cover the big things. How many buttons do you want?"

Fiona came scrambling through the open window, and curled herself up on the rug with her head on the Student's knee. The Student stroked her hair.

"Tell me what it's all about," she said.

"This gentleman," he said, "once interrupted a very important piece of work which I was doing, and I was just about to tell him exactly what I thought of him when you interrupted me."

The old hawker had risen and bowed courteously to the girl.

"My dear young lady," he said, "I have been searching my pack for a present for your father, and found nothing suitable. But perhaps I could find something for you."

Fiona jumped up.

"Have you a hedgehog?" was her question.

"I do not carry them with me, as a general thing," said the old man. "No doubt one could be got. But why a hedgehog?"

"I want one for the Urchin," she said. "You see, it's his namesake."

"I see," said the old man, quite gravely. "And who is the Urchin?"

"The Urchin," said the Student, "is a young rascal who is the son of my shooting tenant. He plunders my daughter of all her possessions, and she abets him in every form of villainy."

"I do try to stop him throwing stones at things," said the girl.

"Here are hedgehogs," said the hawker. "Isn't that lucky, now?"

Past the window came five hedgehogs in a solemn row, two big and three little. Behind them, marshalling the procession, walked the black terrier, with an eye of happy drollery.

"There's something wrong about those hedgehogs," said the girl. "They don't do things like that. I don't think I want a hedgehog any more, thank you. How did you make them do that? Is your dog a conjurer?"

"I never harm anything," said the old man, "so that many creatures will come to me when I call. But I have better presents than that."

"Choose for her, my friend," said the Student.

The old man began talking to himself in a low voice.

"Youth she has," he said, "and freedom, and the joy of life. Wonder also, and dim imaginings of unseen things. And of the things which men desire, fame and power are not worth giving, and love is not mine to give. I have it. I give you the Search," he said. "The search for the treasure of the Isle of Mist. Others have searched for it before; and some have found; but the treasure never grows less."

"That's splendid," said the girl. "And when I find the treasure I will buy my father seven great books which no one else wants to read, and he will be perfectly happy."

"But I did not promise treasure," said the old man. "I promised a search."

Fiona's face fell.

"Then am I not to find anything at the end of it?" she asked.

The old man chuckled quietly.

"I did not say that either," he said. "There _is_ a treasure, and you shall search for it; and you will find it if you are able. Many there are who helped to build it up. Cuchulain and the forgotten heroes who fought before Cuchulain; Ossian and the forgotten bards who sang before Ossian; Columba and the forgotten saints who died before Columba; each has added something to the pile. It is their treasure which you shall seek for; that is my gift to you."

"How shall I know where to begin?" asked the girl. "And may I take the Urchin with me?"

"Whether you can take the Urchin with you or not depends on his capacity to go," said the old man. "And as to beginning, I think you will find that the Search will begin itself, independently of you. It always does. But I can give you something that will help you," and he took out of his pocket a red copper bangle, rudely hammered out with some rough implement, which he slipped over her wrist. "That was made long ago," he said, "made by men to whom metal was a new toy, men who perhaps were nearer to the heart of things than we are."

"You will stay and have some dinner, will you not?" said the Student. "At least, if this is a dinner night. Fiona, is this a dinner night?"

"I have my doubts," said the girl. "Oat cake and honeysuckle, I expect."

"And what better?" said the old man. "But I fear I could not dine with you, were it ortolans and Tokay. For I may never eat beneath a roof. The open moor is my dining hall, and the stars serve me. And the long white road is calling me even now. But I think that before the treasure is found you will see me again."