It was Allan's nature to drift with events, and to easily accommodate
himself to circumstances. In France he had been a gay, fashionable
trifler; in Germany cloudy philosophies and musical ideas had fascinated
him; in Rome he had dreamed in old temples, and painted and smoked with
the artists in their lofty shabby studios. He was equally ready to share
the stirring danger and freedom of the fisher's life, for he was yet
young enough to feel delight in physical exertion, and in physical danger.
When the boat went hammering through cheerless seas, and the lines were
heavy with great ling fish, it was pleasure to match his young supple
thews with those of the strongest men. And it was pleasure, when hungry
and weary, to turn shoreward, and feel the smell of the peat smoke on the
south-west wind, bringing the cottage hearth, and the welcome meal, and
the beautiful face of Maggie Promoter nearer. Even when the weather was
stormy, and it was a hurl down one sea, and a hoist up the next, when the
forty foot mast had to be lowered and lashed down, and the heavy mizzen
set in its place, Allan soon grew to enjoy the tumult and the fight, and
his hand was always ready to do its share.
Very soon after going to the Promoters he procured himself some suits of
fishers' clothing; and Maggie often thought when he came in from the sea,
rosy and glowing, with his brown hair wet with the spindrift, nets on his
shoulders, or lines in his hands, that he was the handsomest fisher-lad
that ever sailed the Frith of Forth. David and Allan were much together,
for David had gone back to the boats as the minister bade him, yet the
duty had been made far easier than he expected. For when Allan understood
how the Promoters' boat had failed them, he purchased a fishing skiff of
his own, and David, and the men whom David hired, sailed her for her
owner. David had his certain wage, the men had the fish, and Allan had a
delight in the whole situation far greater than any mere pleasure yacht
could possibly have given him.
Where there is plenty of money, events do not lag. In a couple of months
the Promoters' cottage was apparently as settled to its new life as ever
it had been to the old one. The "Allan Campbell" was a recognized craft in
the fishing fleet, and generally Allan sailed with her as faithfully as if
his life depended upon the catching of the gray fish. And when the
sea-mood was not on him, he had another all-sufficing occupation. For he
was a good amateur painter, and he was surrounded by studies almost
irresistible to an artistic soul.
The simple folk of Pittenloch looked dubiously at him when he stood before
his easel. There was to them something wonderful, mysterious, almost
uncanny, in the life-like reproduction of themselves and their boats,
their bits of cottages, and their bare-footed bairns--in the painted
glimpses of the broad-billowed ocean; and the desolate old hills, with
such forlorn lights on their scarps, as the gloom of primeval tempests
might have cast.