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Ian says that he won me by a kind of fraud, as the first Somerled won his Pictish princess; because we weren't really married by that game we played with the photograph people at Gretna Green. Only, he made up his mind even then, that if the wrong man ever got a hold upon me, he would use the episode to frighten him away. How thankful I am that it happened!
The times of peace had not absolutely arrived however, for he was not long after murdered, and wild confusion and wholesale slaughter ensued. Another Milesian prince, Thuathal, shortly afterwards returned from North Britain, and, assisted by a body of Pictish soldiers, defeated the rebels, restored order, and re-established the seat of his monarchy in Meath.
The only buildings or structures existing in Cat in Pictish and early Norse times were a few vitrified forts, some underground erde-houses, hut-circles innumerable, and perhaps a hundred and fifty brochs, or Pictish towers as they are popularly called, which had been erected at various dates from the first century onwards, long before the advent of the Norse Vikings is on record, as defences against wolves and raiders both by land and sea, and especially by sea.
The darker race prevailed, and, the supply of fathers of pure Norse blood being renewed only at intervals, the children of such unions soon came to be mainly of Celtic strain, and their mothers doubtless taught them to speak the Gaelic, which had then for at least a century superseded the Pictish tongue.
"Besides, I am running off with you, as Uncle Ju says the Pictish women always did!" And Stair humbly obeyed, for the thing he heard was too marvellous for him to believe. Though his heart beat hard, he kept his head, and did not allow his imagination to run away with him. He scented one of Patsy's jests.
The King, though no scholar, would seem to have been a linguist in his way, since he spoke both languages, that is the Saxon, and the Celtic or Pictish, again a most difficult question to determine with a smattering of Latin; and was thus able to act as Margaret's mouthpiece in her arguments.
Just such scenes were enacted, with at least as much of tragic earnestness, when Patrick worsted the Druid Lochra in the hall of Tara, or when Columba baffled the devices of Broichan, the arch-Druid of Brude, the Pictish king.
The Pictish monarch was so impressed with a sense of his wisdom and worth that he held him in the highest honor, and the neighboring chiefs and princes sought his counsel and availed themselves of his judgment in settling their disputes. When Columba landed on lona he was attended by twelve followers whom he had formed into a religious body of which he was the head.
All his instincts told him to clasp her to him and take the consequences. But unfortunately Stair reasoned, which is the wrong method with a woman, especially with such a Pictish daughter of impulse as Patsy Ferris. He remembered what she had said to him the night before, as if that could have any bearing on her mood of to-day. But so the chance passed. The fine morning gold was dimmed.
We have supplemented, but hardly given more life to, his picture of the first beginnings, by evidence drawn from a thousand sources then unknown or unexplored from coal-measures and mud-deposits, Pictish barrows and lacustrine middensteads, remote tribes of hidden Africa and islands of the Pacific Sea.
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