CHAPTER V—WINTER ON THE MOORS

I. At Hermiston

The road to Hermiston runs for a great part of the way up the valley of a

stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and

pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch. Here and there,

but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt farmhouse may

be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time,

the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of habitation.

Hermiston parish is one of the least populous in Scotland; and, by the

time you came that length, you would scarce be surprised at the

inimitable smallness of the kirk, a dwarfish, ancient place seated for

fifty, and standing in a green by the burn-side among two-score

gravestones. The manse close by, although no more than a cottage, is

surrounded by the brightness of a flower-garden and the straw roofs of

bees; and the whole colony, kirk and manse, garden and graveyard, finds

harbourage in a grove of rowans, and is all the year round in a great

silence broken only by the drone of the bees, the tinkle of the burn, and

the bell on Sundays. A mile beyond the kirk the road leaves the valley

by a precipitous ascent, and brings you a little after to the place of

Hermiston, where it comes to an end in the back-yard before the

coach-house. All beyond and about is the great field, of the hills; the

plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind blows as it blows in

a ship’s rigging, hard and cold and pure; and the hill-tops huddle one

behind another like a herd of cattle into the sunset.

The house was sixty years old, unsightly, comfortable; a farmyard and a

kitchen-garden on the left, with a fruit wall where little hard green

pears came to their maturity about the end of October.

The policy (as who should say the park) was of some extent, but very ill

reclaimed; heather and moorfowl had crossed the boundary wall and spread

and roosted within; and it would have tasked a landscape gardener to say

where policy ended and unpolicied nature began. My lord had been led by

the influence of Mr. Sheriff Scott into a considerable design of

planting; many acres were accordingly set out with fir, and the little

feathery besoms gave a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop

to the moors. A great, rooty sweetness of bogs was in the air, and at

all seasons an infinite melancholy piping of hill birds. Standing so

high and with so little shelter, it was a cold, exposed house, splashed

by showers, drenched by continuous rains that made the gutters to spout,

beaten upon and buffeted by all the winds of heaven; and the prospect

would be often black with tempest, and often white with the snows of

winter. But the house was wind and weather proof, the hearths were kept

bright, and the rooms pleasant with live fires of peat; and Archie might

sit of an evening and hear the squalls bugle on the moorland, and watch

the fire prosper in the earthy fuel, and the smoke winding up the

chimney, and drink deep of the pleasures of shelter.

Solitary as the place was, Archie did not want neighbours. Every night,

if he chose, he might go down to the manse and share a “brewst” of toddy

with the minister—a hare-brained ancient gentleman, long and light and

still active, though his knees were loosened with age, and his voice

broke continually in childish trebles—and his lady wife, a heavy, comely

dame, without a word to say for herself beyond good-even and good-day.

Harum-scarum, clodpole young lairds of the neighbourhood paid him the

compliment of a visit. Young Hay of Romanes rode down to call, on his

crop-eared pony; young Pringle of Drumanno came up on his bony grey. Hay

remained on the hospitable field, and must be carried to bed; Pringle got

somehow to his saddle about 3 A.M., and (as Archie stood with the lamp on

the upper doorstep) lurched, uttered a senseless view-holloa, and

vanished out of the small circle of illumination like a wraith. Yet a

minute or two longer the clatter of his break-neck flight was audible,

then it was cut off by the intervening steepness of the hill; and again,

a great while after, the renewed beating of phantom horse-hoofs, far in

the valley of the Hermiston, showed that the horse at least, if not his

rider, was still on the homeward way.

There was a Tuesday club at the “Cross-keys” in Crossmichael, where the

young bloods of the country-side congregated and drank deep on a

percentage of the expense, so that he was left gainer who should have

drunk the most. Archie had no great mind to this diversion, but he took

it like a duty laid upon him, went with a decent regularity, did his

manfullest with the liquor, held up his head in the local jests, and got

home again and was able to put up his horse, to the admiration of Kirstie

and the lass that helped her. He dined at Driffel, supped at Windielaws.

He went to the new year’s ball at Huntsfield and was made welcome, and

thereafter rode to hounds with my Lord Muirfell, upon whose name, as that

of a legitimate Lord of Parliament, in a work so full of Lords of

Session, my pen should pause reverently. Yet the same fate attended him

here as in Edinburgh. The habit of solitude tends to perpetuate itself,

and an austerity of which he was quite unconscious, and a pride which

seemed arrogance, and perhaps was chiefly shyness, discouraged and

offended his new companions. Hay did not return more than twice, Pringle

never at all, and there came a time when Archie even desisted from the

Tuesday Club, and became in all things—what he had had the name of almost

from the first—the Recluse of Hermiston. High-nosed Miss Pringle of

Drumanno and high-stepping Miss Marshall of the Mains were understood to

have had a difference of opinion about him the day after the ball—he was

none the wiser, he could not suppose himself to be remarked by these

entrancing ladies. At the ball itself my Lord Muirfell’s daughter, the

Lady Flora, spoke to him twice, and the second time with a touch of

appeal, so that her colour rose and her voice trembled a little in his

ear, like a passing grace in music. He stepped back with a heart on

fire, coldly and not ungracefully excused himself, and a little after

watched her dancing with young Drumanno of the empty laugh, and was

harrowed at the sight, and raged to himself that this was a world in

which it was given to Drumanno to please, and to himself only to stand

aside and envy. He seemed excluded, as of right, from the favour of such

society—seemed to extinguish mirth wherever he came, and was quick to

feel the wound, and desist, and retire into solitude. If he had but

understood the figure he presented, and the impression he made on these

bright eyes and tender hearts; if he had but guessed that the Recluse of

Hermiston, young, graceful, well spoken, but always cold, stirred the

maidens of the county with the charm of Byronism when Byronism was new,

it may be questioned whether his destiny might not even yet have been

modified. It may be questioned, and I think it should be doubted. It

was in his horoscope to be parsimonious of pain to himself, or of the

chance of pain, even to the avoidance of any opportunity of pleasure; to

have a Roman sense of duty, an instinctive aristocracy of manners and

taste; to be the son of Adam Weir and Jean Rutherford.

2. Kirstie

Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor. Long of

limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden

hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had but caressed

and embellished her. By the lines of a rich and vigorous maternity, she

seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother of their

children; and behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her

youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman.

The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and

disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury

of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she

washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one

with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and

wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours, and with

the others not much more than armed neutrality. The grieve’s wife had

been “sneisty”; the sister of the gardener who kept house for him had

shown herself “upsitten”; and she wrote to Lord Hermiston about once a

year demanding the discharge of the offenders, and justifying the demand

by much wealth of detail. For it must not be supposed that the quarrel

rested with the wife and did not take in the husband also—or with the

gardener’s sister, and did not speedily include the gardener himself. As

the upshot of all this petty quarrelling and intemperate speech, she was

practically excluded (like a lightkeeper on his tower) from the comforts

of human association; except with her own indoor drudge, who, being but a

lassie and entirely at her mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of

“the mistress’s” moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets

or caresses according to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus

situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit

to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie’s presence.

She had known him in the cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and

yet, as she had not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and

had his last serious illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather

melancholy young gentleman of twenty came upon her with the shock of a

new acquaintance. He was “Young Hermiston,” “the laird himsel’”: he had

an air of distinctive superiority, a cold straight glance of his black

eyes, that abashed the woman’s tantrums in the beginning, and therefore

the possibility of any quarrel was excluded. He was new, and therefore

immediately aroused her curiosity; he was reticent, and kept it awake.

And lastly he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female, the

everlasting fountains of interest.

Her feeling partook of the loyalty of a clanswoman, the hero-worship of a

maiden aunt, and the idolatry due to a god. No matter what he had asked

of her, ridiculous or tragic, she would have done it and joyed to do it.

Her passion, for it was nothing less, entirely filled her. It was a rich

physical pleasure to make his bed or light his lamp for him when he was

absent, to pull off his wet boots or wait on him at dinner when he

returned. A young man who should have so doted on the idea, moral and

physical, of any woman, might be properly described as being in love,

head and heels, and would have behaved himself accordingly. But

Kirstie—though her heart leaped at his coming footsteps—though, when he

patted her shoulder, her face brightened for the day—had not a hope or

thought beyond the present moment and its perpetuation to the end of

time. Till the end of time she would have had nothing altered, but still

continue delightedly to serve her idol, and be repaid (say twice in the

month) with a clap on the shoulder.

I have said her heart leaped—it is the accepted phrase. But rather, when

she was alone in any chamber of the house, and heard his foot passing on

the corridors, something in her bosom rose slowly until her breath was

suspended, and as slowly fell again with a deep sigh, when the steps had

passed and she was disappointed of her eyes’ desire. This perpetual

hunger and thirst of his presence kept her all day on the alert. When he

went forth at morning, she would stand and follow him with admiring

looks. As it grew late and drew to the time of his return, she would

steal forth to a corner of the policy wall and be seen standing there

sometimes by the hour together, gazing with shaded eyes, waiting the

exquisite and barren pleasure of his view a mile off on the mountains.

When at night she had trimmed and gathered the fire, turned down his bed,

and laid out his night-gear—when there was no more to be done for the

king’s pleasure, but to remember him fervently in her usually very tepid

prayers, and go to bed brooding upon his perfections, his future career,

and what she should give him the next day for dinner—there still remained

before her one more opportunity; she was still to take in the tray and

say good-night. Sometimes Archie would glance up from his book with a

preoccupied nod and a perfunctory salutation which was in truth a

dismissal; sometimes—and by degrees more often—the volume would be laid

aside, he would meet her coming with a look of relief; and the

conversation would be engaged, last out the supper, and be prolonged till

the small hours by the waning fire. It was no wonder that Archie was

fond of company after his solitary days; and Kirstie, upon her side,

exerted all the arts of her vigorous nature to ensnare his attention.

She would keep back some piece of news during dinner to be fired off with

the entrance of the supper tray, and form as it were the _lever de

rideau_ of the evening’s entertainment. Once he had heard her tongue

wag, she made sure of the result. From one subject to another she moved

by insidious transitions, fearing the least silence, fearing almost to

give him time for an answer lest it should slip into a hint of

separation. Like so many people of her class, she was a brave narrator;

her place was on the hearth-rug and she made it a rostrum, mimeing her

stories as she told them, fitting them with vital detail, spinning them

out with endless “quo’ he’s” and “quo’ she’s,” her voice sinking into a

whisper over the supernatural or the horrific; until she would suddenly

spring up in affected surprise, and pointing to the clock, “Mercy, Mr.

Archie!” she would say, “whatten a time o’ night is this of it! God

forgive me for a daft wife!” So it befell, by good management, that she

was not only the first to begin these nocturnal conversations, but

invariably the first to break them off; so she managed to retire and not

to be dismissed.

3. A Border Family

Such an unequal intimacy has never been uncommon in Scotland, where the

clan spirit survives; where the servant tends to spend her life in the

same service, a helpmeet at first, then a tyrant, and at last a

pensioner; where, besides, she is not necessarily destitute of the pride

of birth, but is, perhaps, like Kirstie, a connection of her master’s,

and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship

with some illustrious dead. For that is the mark of the Scot of all

classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to

Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good

or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead

even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance could

be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott. They were all, and

Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars

of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed

down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification of that

tree there dangled a halter. The Elliotts themselves have had a

chequered history; but these Elliotts deduced, besides, from three of the

most unfortunate of the border clans—the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the

Crozers. One ancestor after another might be seen appearing a moment out

of the rain and the hill mist upon his furtive business, speeding home,

perhaps, with a paltry booty of lame horses and lean kine, or squealing

and dealing death in some moorland feud of the ferrets and the wild cats.

One after another closed his obscure adventures in mid-air, triced up to

the arm of the royal gibbet or the Baron’s dule-tree. For the rusty

blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice, which usually hurt nobody but

jurymen, became a weapon of precision for the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and

the Crozers. The exhilaration of their exploits seemed to haunt the

memories of their descendants alone, and the shame to be forgotten.

Pride glowed in their bosoms to publish their relationship to “Andrew

Ellwald of the Laverockstanes, called ‘Unchancy Dand,’ who was justifeed

wi’ seeven mair of the same name at Jeddart in the days of King James the

Sax.” In all this tissue of crime and misfortune, the Elliotts of

Cauldstaneslap had one boast which must appear legitimate: the males were

gallows-birds, born outlaws, petty thieves, and deadly brawlers; but,

according to the same tradition, the females were all chaste and

faithful. The power of ancestry on the character is not limited to the

inheritance of cells. If I buy ancestors by the gross from the

benevolence of Lyon King of Arms, my grandson (if he is Scottish) will

feel a quickening emulation of their deeds. The men of the Elliotts were

proud, lawless, violent as of right, cherishing and prolonging a

tradition. In like manner with the women. And the woman, essentially

passionate and reckless, who crouched on the rug, in the shine of the

peat fire, telling these tales, had cherished through life a wild

integrity of virtue.

Her father Gilbert had been deeply pious, a savage disciplinarian in the

antique style, and withal a notorious smuggler. “I mind when I was a

bairn getting mony a skelp and being shoo’d to bed like pou’try,” she

would say. “That would be when the lads and their bit kegs were on the

road. We’ve had the riffraff of two-three counties in our kitchen,

mony’s the time, betwix’ the twelve and the three; and their lanterns

would be standing in the forecourt, ay, a score o’ them at once. But

there was nae ungodly talk permitted at Cauldstaneslap. My faither was a

consistent man in walk and conversation; just let slip an aith, and there

was the door to ye! He had that zeal for the Lord, it was a fair wonder

to hear him pray, but the family has aye had a gift that way.” This

father was twice married, once to a dark woman of the old Ellwald stock,

by whom he had Gilbert, presently of Cauldstaneslap; and, secondly, to

the mother of Kirstie. “He was an auld man when he married her, a fell

auld man wi’ a muckle voice—you could hear him rowting from the top o’

the Kye-skairs,” she said; “but for her, it appears she was a perfit

wonder. It was gentle blood she had, Mr. Archie, for it was your ain.

The country-side gaed gyte about her and her gowden hair. Mines is no to

be mentioned wi’ it, and there’s few weemen has mair hair than what I

have, or yet a bonnier colour. Often would I tell my dear Miss

Jeannie—that was your mother, dear, she was cruel ta’en up about her

hair, it was unco’ tender, ye see—‘Houts, Miss Jeannie,’ I would say,

‘just fling your washes and your French dentifrishes in the back o’ the

fire, for that’s the place for them; and awa’ down to a burn side, and

wash yersel’ in cauld hill water, and dry your bonny hair in the caller

wind o’ the muirs, the way that my mother aye washed hers, and that I

have aye made it a practice to have wishen mines—just you do what I tell

ye, my dear, and ye’ll give me news of it! Ye’ll have hair, and routh of

hair, a pigtail as thick’s my arm,’ I said, ‘and the bonniest colour like

the clear gowden guineas, so as the lads in kirk’ll no can keep their

eyes off it!’ Weel, it lasted out her time, puir thing! I cuttit a lock

of it upon her corp that was lying there sae cauld. I’ll show it ye some

of thir days if ye’re good. But, as I was sayin’, my mither—”

On the death of the father there remained golden-haired Kirstie, who took

service with her distant kinsfolk, the Rutherfords, and black-a-vised

Gilbert, twenty years older, who farmed the Cauldstaneslap, married, and

begot four sons between 1773 and 1784, and a daughter, like a postscript,

in ’97, the year of Camperdown and Cape St. Vincent. It seemed it was a

tradition in the family to wind up with a belated girl. In 1804, at the

age of sixty, Gilbert met an end that might be called heroic. He was due

home from market any time from eight at night till five in the morning,

and in any condition from the quarrelsome to the speechless, for he

maintained to that age the goodly customs of the Scots farmer. It was

known on this occasion that he had a good bit of money to bring home; the

word had gone round loosely. The laird had shown his guineas, and if

anybody had but noticed it, there was an ill-looking, vagabond crew, the

scum of Edinburgh, that drew out of the market long ere it was dusk and

took the hill-road by Hermiston, where it was not to be believed that

they had lawful business. One of the country-side, one Dickieson, they

took with them to be their guide, and dear he paid for it! Of a sudden

in the ford of the Broken Dykes, this vermin clan fell on the laird, six

to one, and him three parts asleep, having drunk hard. But it is ill to

catch an Elliott. For a while, in the night and the black water that was

deep as to his saddle-girths, he wrought with his staff like a smith at

his stithy, and great was the sound of oaths and blows. With that the

ambuscade was burst, and he rode for home with a pistol-ball in him,

three knife wounds, the loss of his front teeth, a broken rib and bridle,

and a dying horse. That was a race with death that the laird rode! In

the mirk night, with his broken bridle and his head swimming, he dug his

spurs to the rowels in the horse’s side, and the horse, that was even

worse off than himself, the poor creature! screamed out loud like a

person as he went, so that the hills echoed with it, and the folks at

Cauldstaneslap got to their feet about the table and looked at each other

with white faces. The horse fell dead at the yard gate, the laird won

the length of the house and fell there on the threshold. To the son that

raised him he gave the bag of money. “Hae,” said he. All the way up the

thieves had seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the hallucination

left him—he saw them again in the place of the ambuscade—and the thirst

of vengeance seized on his dying mind. Raising himself and pointing with

an imperious finger into the black night from which he had come, he

uttered the single command, “Brocken Dykes,” and fainted. He had never

been loved, but he had been feared in honour. At that sight, at that

word, gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding mouth, the old

Elliott spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons. “Wanting the hat,”

continues my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly follow, for she told

this tale like one inspired, “wanting guns, for there wasna twa grains o’

pouder in the house, wi’ nae mair weepons than their sticks into their

hands, the fower o’ them took the road. Only Hob, and that was the

eldest, hunkered at the doorsill where the blood had rin, fyled his hand

wi’ it—and haddit it up to Heeven in the way o’ the auld Border aith.

‘Hell shall have her ain again this nicht!’ he raired, and rode forth

upon his earrand.” It was three miles to Broken Dykes, down hill, and a

sore road. Kirstie has seen men from Edinburgh dismounting there in

plain day to lead their horses. But the four brothers rode it as if Auld

Hornie were behind and Heaven in front. Come to the ford, and there was

Dickieson. By all tales, he was not dead, but breathed and reared upon

his elbow, and cried out to them for help. It was at a graceless face

that he asked mercy. As soon as Hob saw, by the glint of the lantern,

the eyes shining and the whiteness of the teeth in the man’s face, “Damn

you!” says he; “ye hae your teeth, hae ye?” and rode his horse to and fro

upon that human remnant. Beyond that, Dandie must dismount with the

lantern to be their guide; he was the youngest son, scarce twenty at the

time. “A’ nicht long they gaed in the wet heath and jennipers, and whaur

they gaed they neither knew nor cared, but just followed the bluid stains

and the footprints o’ their faither’s murderers. And a’ nicht Dandie had

his nose to the grund like a tyke, and the ithers followed and spak’

naething, neither black nor white. There was nae noise to be heard, but

just the sough of the swalled burns, and Hob, the dour yin, risping his

teeth as he gaed.” With the first glint of the morning they saw they were

on the drove road, and at that the four stopped and had a dram to their

breakfasts, for they knew that Dand must have guided them right, and the

rogues could be but little ahead, hot foot for Edinburgh by the way of

the Pentland Hills. By eight o’clock they had word of them—a shepherd

had seen four men “uncoly mishandled” go by in the last hour. “That’s

yin a piece,” says Clem, and swung his cudgel. “Five o’ them!” says Hob.

“God’s death, but the faither was a man! And him drunk!” And then there

befell them what my author termed “a sair misbegowk,” for they were

overtaken by a posse of mounted neighbours come to aid in the pursuit.

Four sour faces looked on the reinforcement. “The Deil’s broughten you!”

said Clem, and they rode thenceforward in the rear of the party with

hanging heads. Before ten they had found and secured the rogues, and by

three of the afternoon, as they rode up the Vennel with their prisoners,

they were aware of a concourse of people bearing in their midst something

that dripped. “For the boady of the saxt,” pursued Kirstie, “wi’ his

head smashed like a hazelnit, had been a’ that nicht in the chairge o’

Hermiston Water, and it dunting it on the stanes, and grunding it on the

shallows, and flinging the deid thing heels-ower-hurdie at the Fa’s o’

Spango; and in the first o’ the day, Tweed had got a hold o’ him and

carried him off like a wind, for it was uncoly swalled, and raced wi’

him, bobbing under brae-sides, and was long playing with the creature in

the drumlie lynns under the castle, and at the hinder end of all cuist

him up on the starling of Crossmichael brig. Sae there they were

a’thegither at last (for Dickieson had been brought in on a cart long

syne), and folk could see what mainner o’man my brither had been that had

held his head again sax and saved the siller, and him drunk!” Thus died

of honourable injuries and in the savour of fame Gilbert Elliott of the

Cauldstaneslap; but his sons had scarce less glory out of the business.

Their savage haste, the skill with which Dand had found and followed the

trail, the barbarity to the wounded Dickieson (which was like an open

secret in the county), and the doom which it was currently supposed they

had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination.

Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the

last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit

was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the

degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to

make of the “Four Black Brothers” a unit after the fashion of the “Twelve

Apostles” or the “Three Musketeers.”

Robert, Gilbert, Clement, and Andrew—in the proper Border diminutives,

Hob, Gib, Clem, and Dand Elliott—these ballad heroes, had much in common;

in particular, their high sense of the family and the family honour; but

they went diverse ways, and prospered and failed in different businesses.

According to Kirstie, “they had a’ bees in their bonnets but Hob.” Hob

the laird was, indeed, essentially a decent man. An elder of the Kirk,

nobody had heard an oath upon his lips, save perhaps thrice or so at the

sheep-washing, since the chase of his father’s murderers. The figure he

had shown on that eventful night disappeared as if swallowed by a trap.

He who had ecstatically dipped his hand in the red blood, he who had

ridden down Dickieson, became, from that moment on, a stiff and rather

graceless model of the rustic proprieties; cannily profiting by the high

war prices, and yearly stowing away a little nest-egg in the bank against

calamity; approved of and sometimes consulted by the greater lairds for

the massive and placid sense of what he said, when he could be induced to

say anything; and particularly valued by the minister, Mr. Torrance, as a

right-hand man in the parish, and a model to parents. The

transfiguration had been for the moment only; some Barbarossa, some old

Adam of our ancestors, sleeps in all of us till the fit circumstance

shall call it into action; and, for as sober as he now seemed, Hob had

given once for all the measure of the devil that haunted him. He was

married, and, by reason of the effulgence of that legendary night, was

adored by his wife. He had a mob of little lusty, barefoot children who

marched in a caravan the long miles to school, the stages of whose

pilgrimage were marked by acts of spoliation and mischief, and who were

qualified in the country-side as “fair pests.” But in the house, if

“faither was in,” they were quiet as mice. In short, Hob moved through

life in a great peace—the reward of any one who shall have killed his

man, with any formidable and figurative circumstance, in the midst of a

country gagged and swaddled with civilisation.

It was a current remark that the Elliotts were “guid and bad, like

sanguishes”; and certainly there was a curious distinction, the men of

business coming alternately with the dreamers. The second brother, Gib,

was a weaver by trade, had gone out early into the world to Edinburgh,

and come home again with his wings singed. There was an exaltation in

his nature which had led him to embrace with enthusiasm the principles of

the French Revolution, and had ended by bringing him under the hawse of

my Lord Hermiston in that furious onslaught of his upon the Liberals,

which sent Muir and Palmer into exile and dashed the party into chaff.

It was whispered that my lord, in his great scorn for the movement, and

prevailed upon a little by a sense of neighbourliness, had given Gib a

hint. Meeting him one day in the Potterrow, my lord had stopped in front

of him: “Gib, ye eediot,” he had said, “what’s this I hear of you?

Poalitics, poalitics, poalitics, weaver’s poalitics, is the way of it, I

hear. If ye arena a’thegither dozened with cediocy, ye’ll gang your ways

back to Cauldstaneslap, and ca’ your loom, and ca’ your loom, man!” And

Gilbert had taken him at the word and returned, with an expedition almost

to be called flight, to the house of his father. The clearest of his

inheritance was that family gift of prayer of which Kirstie had boasted;

and the baffled politician now turned his attention to religious

matters—or, as others said, to heresy and schism. Every Sunday morning

he was in Crossmichael, where he had gathered together, one by one, a

sect of about a dozen persons, who called themselves “God’s Remnant of

the True Faithful,” or, for short, “God’s Remnant.” To the profane, they

were known as “Gib’s Deils.” Bailie Sweedie, a noted humorist in the

town, vowed that the proceedings always opened to the tune of “The Deil

Fly Away with the Exciseman,” and that the sacrament was dispensed in the

form of hot whisky-toddy; both wicked hits at the evangelist, who had

been suspected of smuggling in his youth, and had been overtaken (as the

phrase went) on the streets of Crossmichael one Fair day. It was known

that every Sunday they prayed for a blessing on the arms of Bonaparte.

For this “God’s Remnant,” as they were “skailing” from the cottage that

did duty for a temple, had been repeatedly stoned by the bairns, and Gib

himself hooted by a squadron of Border volunteers in which his own

brother, Dand, rode in a uniform and with a drawn sword. The “Remnant”

were believed, besides, to be “antinomian in principle,” which might

otherwise have been a serious charge, but the way public opinion then

blew it was quite swallowed up and forgotten in the scandal about

Bonaparte. For the rest, Gilbert had set up his loom in an outhouse at

Cauldstaneslap, where he laboured assiduously six days of the week. His

brothers, appalled by his political opinions, and willing to avoid

dissension in the household, spoke but little to him; he less to them,

remaining absorbed in the study of the Bible and almost constant prayer.

The gaunt weaver was dry-nurse at Cauldstaneslap, and the bairns loved

him dearly. Except when he was carrying an infant in his arms, he was

rarely seen to smile—as, indeed, there were few smilers in that family.

When his sister-in-law rallied him, and proposed that he should get a

wife and bairns of his own, since he was so fond of them, “I have no

clearness of mind upon that point,” he would reply. If nobody called him

in to dinner, he stayed out. Mrs. Hob, a hard, unsympathetic woman, once

tried the experiment. He went without food all day, but at dusk, as the

light began to fail him, he came into the house of his own accord,

looking puzzled. “I’ve had a great gale of prayer upon my speerit,” said

he. “I canna mind sae muckle’s what I had for denner.” The creed of

God’s Remnant was justified in the life of its founder. “And yet I dinna

ken,” said Kirstie. “He’s maybe no more stockfish than his neeghbours!

He rode wi’ the rest o’ them, and had a good stamach to the work, by a’

that I hear! God’s Remnant! The deil’s clavers! There wasna muckle

Christianity in the way Hob guided Johnny Dickieson, at the least of it;

but Guid kens! Is he a Christian even? He might be a Mahommedan or a

Deevil or a Fire-worshipper, for what I ken.”

The third brother had his name on a door-plate, no less, in the city of

Glasgow, “Mr. Clement Elliott,” as long as your arm. In his case, that

spirit of innovation which had shown itself timidly in the case of Hob by

the admission of new manures, and which had run to waste with Gilbert in

subversive politics and heretical religions, bore useful fruit in many

ingenious mechanical improvements. In boyhood, from his addiction to

strange devices of sticks and string, he had been counted the most

eccentric of the family. But that was all by now; and he was a partner

of his firm, and looked to die a bailie. He too had married, and was

rearing a plentiful family in the smoke and din of Glasgow; he was

wealthy, and could have bought out his brother, the cock-laird, six times

over, it was whispered; and when he slipped away to Cauldstaneslap for a

well-earned holiday, which he did as often as he was able, he astonished

the neighbours with his broadcloth, his beaver hat, and the ample plies

of his neckcloth. Though an eminently solid man at bottom, after the

pattern of Hob, he had contracted a certain Glasgow briskness and

_aplomb_ which set him off. All the other Elliotts were as lean as a

rake, but Clement was laying on fat, and he panted sorely when he must

get into his boots. Dand said, chuckling: “Ay, Clem has the elements of

a corporation.” “A provost and corporation,” returned Clem. And his

readiness was much admired.

The fourth brother, Dand, was a shepherd to his trade, and by starts,

when he could bring his mind to it, excelled in the business. Nobody

could train a dog like Dandie; nobody, through the peril of great storms

in the winter time, could do more gallantly. But if his dexterity were

exquisite, his diligence was but fitful; and he served his brother for

bed and board, and a trifle of pocket-money when he asked for it. He

loved money well enough, knew very well how to spend it, and could make a

shrewd bargain when he liked. But he preferred a vague knowledge that he

was well to windward to any counted coins in the pocket; he felt himself

richer so. Hob would expostulate: “I’m an amature herd.” Dand would

reply, “I’ll keep your sheep to you when I’m so minded, but I’ll keep my

liberty too. Thir’s no man can coandescend on what I’m worth.” Clein

would expound to him the miraculous results of compound interest, and

recommend investments. “Ay, man?” Dand would say; “and do you think, if

I took Hob’s siller, that I wouldna drink it or wear it on the lassies?

And, anyway, my kingdom is no of this world. Either I’m a poet or else

I’m nothing.” Clem would remind him of old age. “I’ll die young, like,

Robbie Burns,” he would say stoutly. No question but he had a certain

accomplishment in minor verse. His “Hermiston Burn,” with its pretty

refrain—

“I love to gang thinking whaur ye gang linking,

Hermiston burn, in the howe;”

his “Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotts of

auld,” and his really fascinating piece about the Praying Weaver’s Stone,

had gained him in the neighbourhood the reputation, still possible in

Scotland, of a local bard; and, though not printed himself, he was

recognised by others who were and who had become famous. Walter Scott

owed to Dandie the text of the “Raid of Wearie” in the _Minstrelsy_; and

made him welcome at his house, and appreciated his talents, such as they

were, with all his usual generosity. The Ettrick Shepherd was his sworn

crony; they would meet, drink to excess, roar out their lyrics in each

other’s faces, and quarrel and make it up again till bedtime. And

besides these recognitions, almost to be called official, Dandie was made

welcome for the sake of his gift through the farmhouses of several

contiguous dales, and was thus exposed to manifold temptations which he

rather sought than fled. He had figured on the stool of repentance, for

once fulfilling to the letter the tradition of his hero and model. His

humorous verses to Mr. Torrance on that occasion—“Kenspeckle here my lane

I stand”—unfortunately too indelicate for further citation, ran through

the country like a fiery cross—they were recited, quoted, paraphrased,

and laughed over as far away as Dumfries on the one hand and Dunbar on

the other.

These four brothers were united by a close bond, the bond of that mutual

admiration—or rather mutual hero-worship—which is so strong among the

members of secluded families who have much ability and little culture.

Even the extremes admired each other. Hob, who had as much poetry as the

tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand’s verses; Clem, who had no more

religion than Claverhouse, nourished a heartfelt, at least an

open-mouthed, admiration of Gib’s prayers; and Dandie followed with

relish the rise of Clem’s fortunes. Indulgence followed hard on the

heels of admiration. The laird, Clem, and Dand, who were Tories and

patriots of the hottest quality, excused to themselves, with a certain

bashfulness, the radical and revolutionary heresies of Gib. By another

division of the family, the laird, Clem, and Gib, who were men exactly

virtuous, swallowed the dose of Dand’s irregularities as a kind of clog

or drawback in the mysterious providence of God affixed to bards, and

distinctly probative of poetical genius. To appreciate the simplicity of

their mutual admiration it was necessary to hear Clem, arrived upon one

of his visits, and dealing in a spirit of continuous irony with the

affairs and personalities of that great city of Glasgow where he lived

and transacted business. The various personages, ministers of the

church, municipal officers, mercantile big-wigs, whom he had occasion to

introduce, were all alike denigrated, all served but as reflectors to

cast back a flattering side-light on the house of Cauldstaneslap. The

Provost, for whom Clem by exception entertained a measure of respect, he

would liken to Hob. “He minds me o’ the laird there,” he would say. “He

has some of Hob’s grand, whunstane sense, and the same way with him of

steiking his mouth when he’s no very pleased.” And Hob, all unconscious,

would draw down his upper lip and produce, as if for comparison, the

formidable grimace referred to. The unsatisfactory incumbent of St.

Enoch’s Kirk was thus briefly dismissed: “If he had but twa fingers o’

Gib’s, he would waken them up.” And Gib, honest man! would look down and

secretly smile. Clem was a spy whom they had sent out into the world of

men. He had come back with the good news that there was nobody to

compare with the Four Black Brothers, no position that they would not

adorn, no official that it would not be well they should replace, no

interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which would not immediately

bloom under their supervision. The excuse of their folly is in two

words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them from the peasantry. The

measure of their sense is this: that these symposia of rustic vanity were

kept entirely within the family, like some secret ancestral practice. To

the world their serious faces were never deformed by the suspicion of any

simper of self-contentment. Yet it was known. “They hae a guid pride o’

themsel’s!” was the word in the country-side.

Lastly, in a Border story, there should be added their “two-names.” Hob

was The Laird. “Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne”; he was the laird of

Cauldstaneslap—say fifty acres—_ipsissimus_. Clement was Mr. Elliott, as

upon his door-plate, the earlier Dafty having been discarded as no longer

applicable, and indeed only a reminder of misjudgment and the imbecility

of the public; and the youngest, in honour of his perpetual wanderings,

was known by the sobriquet of Randy Dand.

It will be understood that not all this information was communicated by

the aunt, who had too much of the family failing herself to appreciate it

thoroughly in others. But as time went on, Archie began to observe an

omission in the family chronicle.

“Is there not a girl too?” he asked.

“Ay: Kirstie. She was named for me, or my grandmother at least—it’s the

same thing,” returned the aunt, and went on again about Dand, whom she

secretly preferred by reason of his gallantries.

“But what is your niece like?” said Archie at the next opportunity.

“Her? As black’s your hat! But I dinna suppose she would maybe be what

you would ca’ _ill-looked_ a’thegither. Na, she’s a kind of a handsome

jaud—a kind o’ gipsy,” said the aunt, who had two sets of scales for men

and women—or perhaps it would be more fair to say that she had three, and

the third and the most loaded was for girls.

“How comes it that I never see her in church?” said Archie.

“’Deed, and I believe she’s in Glesgie with Clem and his wife. A heap

good she’s like to get of it! I dinna say for men folk, but where weemen

folk are born, there let them bide. Glory to God, I was never far’er

from here than Crossmichael.”

In the meanwhile it began to strike Archie as strange, that while she

thus sang the praises of her kinsfolk, and manifestly relished their

virtues and (I may say) their vices like a thing creditable to herself,

there should appear not the least sign of cordiality between the house of

Hermiston and that of Cauldstaneslap. Going to church of a Sunday, as

the lady housekeeper stepped with her skirts kilted, three tucks of her

white petticoat showing below, and her best India shawl upon her back (if

the day were fine) in a pattern of radiant dyes, she would sometimes

overtake her relatives preceding her more leisurely in the same

direction. Gib of course was absent: by skreigh of day he had been gone

to Crossmichael and his fellow-heretics; but the rest of the family would

be seen marching in open order: Hob and Dand, stiff-necked,

straight-backed six-footers, with severe dark faces, and their plaids

about their shoulders; the convoy of children scattering (in a state of

high polish) on the wayside, and every now and again collected by the

shrill summons of the mother; and the mother herself, by a suggestive

circumstance which might have afforded matter of thought to a more

experienced observer than Archie, wrapped in a shawl nearly identical

with Kirstie’s, but a thought more gaudy and conspicuously newer. At the

sight, Kirstie grew more tall—Kirstie showed her classical profile, nose

in air and nostril spread, the pure blood came in her cheek evenly in a

delicate living pink.

“A braw day to ye, Mistress Elliott,” said she, and hostility and

gentility were nicely mingled in her tones. “A fine day, mem,” the

laird’s wife would reply with a miraculous curtsey, spreading the while

her plumage—setting off, in other words, and with arts unknown to the

mere man, the pattern of her India shawl. Behind her, the whole

Cauldstaneslap contingent marched in closer order, and with an

indescribable air of being in the presence of the foe; and while Dandie

saluted his aunt with a certain familiarity as of one who was well in

court, Hob marched on in awful immobility. There appeared upon the face

of this attitude in the family the consequences of some dreadful feud.

Presumably the two women had been principals in the original encounter,

and the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel by the ears, too

late to be included in the present skin-deep reconciliation.

“Kirstie,” said Archie one day, “what is this you have against your

family?”

“I dinna complean,” said Kirstie, with a flush. “I say naething.”

“I see you do not—not even good-day to your own nephew,” said he.

“I hae naething to be ashamed of,” said she. “I can say the Lord’s

prayer with a good grace. If Hob was ill, or in preeson or poverty, I

would see to him blithely. But for curtchying and complimenting and

colloguing, thank ye kindly!”

Archie had a bit of a smile: he leaned back in his chair. “I think you

and Mrs. Robert are not very good friends,” says he slyly, “when you have

your India shawls on?”

She looked upon him in silence, with a sparkling eye but an

indecipherable expression; and that was all that Archie was ever destined

to learn of the battle of the India shawls.

“Do none of them ever come here to see you?” he inquired.

“Mr. Archie,” said she, “I hope that I ken my place better. It would be

a queer thing, I think, if I was to clamjamfry up your faither’s

house—that I should say it!—wi’ a dirty, black-a-vised clan, no ane o’

them it was worth while to mar soap upon but just mysel’! Na, they’re

all damnifeed wi’ the black Ellwalds. I have nae patience wi’ black

folk.” Then, with a sudden consciousness of the case of Archie, “No that

it maitters for men sae muckle,” she made haste to add, “but there’s

naebody can deny that it’s unwomanly. Long hair is the ornament o’ woman

ony way; we’ve good warrandise for that—it’s in the Bible—and wha can

doubt that the Apostle had some gowden-haired lassie in his mind—Apostle

and all, for what was he but just a man like yersel’?”

CHAPTER VI—A LEAF FROM CHRISTINA’S PSALM-BOOK

Archie was sedulous at church. Sunday after Sunday he sat down and stood

up with that small company, heard the voice of Mr. Torrance leaping like

an ill-played clarionet from key to key, and had an opportunity to study

his moth-eaten gown and the black thread mittens that he joined together

in prayer, and lifted up with a reverent solemnity in the act of

benediction. Hermiston pew was a little square box, dwarfish in

proportion with the kirk itself, and enclosing a table not much bigger

than a footstool. There sat Archie, an apparent prince, the only

undeniable gentleman and the only great heritor in the parish, taking his

ease in the only pew, for no other in the kirk had doors. Thence he

might command an undisturbed view of that congregation of solid plaided

men, strapping wives and daughters, oppressed children, and uneasy

sheep-dogs. It was strange how Archie missed the look of race; except

the dogs, with their refined foxy faces and inimitably curling tails,

there was no one present with the least claim to gentility. The

Cauldstaneslap party was scarcely an exception; Dandie perhaps, as he

amused himself making verses through the interminable burden of the

service, stood out a little by the glow in his eye and a certain superior

animation of face and alertness of body; but even Dandie slouched like a

rustic. The rest of the congregation, like so many sheep, oppressed him

with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day following day—of physical labour

in the open air, oatmeal porridge, peas bannock the somnolent fireside in

the evening, and the night-long nasal slumbers in a box-bed. Yet he knew

many of them to be shrewd and humorous, men of character, notable women,

making a bustle in the world and radiating an influence from their

low-browed doors. He knew besides they were like other men; below the

crust of custom, rapture found a way; he had heard them beat the timbrel

before Bacchus—had heard them shout and carouse over their whisky-toddy;

and not the most Dutch-bottomed and severe faces among them all, not even

the solemn elders themselves, but were capable of singular gambols at the

voice of love. Men drawing near to an end of life’s adventurous

journey—maids thrilling with fear and curiosity on the threshold of

entrance—women who had borne and perhaps buried children, who could

remember the clinging of the small dead hands and the patter of the

little feet now silent—he marvelled that among all those faces there

should be no face of expectation, none that was mobile, none into which

the rhythm and poetry of life had entered. “O for a live face,” he

thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he

would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see

himself go on to waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death

come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the

Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.

On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had

come at last. It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made the

warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered and

tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth arrested

Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication. The grey

Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from the

sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an

essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in

particulars but breathing to him from the whole. He surprised himself by

a sudden impulse to write poetry—he did so sometimes, loose, galloping

octo-syllabics in the vein of Scott—and when he had taken his place on a

boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree that was

already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he

should have nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in time to some

vast indwelling rhythm of the universe. By the time he came to a corner

of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so lingered by the way that

the first psalm was finishing. The nasal psalmody, full of turns and

trills and graceless graces, seemed the essential voice of the kirk

itself upraised in thanksgiving, “Everything’s alive,” he said; and again

cries it aloud, “thank God, everything’s alive!” He lingered yet a while

in the kirk-yard. A tuft of primroses was blooming hard by the leg of an

old black table tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random

apologue. They stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of

contrast; and he was struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day,

the season, and the beauty that surrounded him—the chill there was in the

warmth, the gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp

earthy smell that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice

of the aged Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. And he wondered if

Torrance also felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring

morning; Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must

come so soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his

rheumatisms, while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from

his own familiar pulpit? The pity of it, and something of the chill of

the grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.

He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew with

lowered eyes, for he feared he had already offended the kind old

gentleman in the pulpit, and was sedulous to offend no further. He could

not follow the prayer, not even the heads of it. Brightnesses of azure,

clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling water and singing birds, rose

like exhalations from some deeper, aboriginal memory, that was not his,

but belonged to the flesh on his bones. His body remembered; and it

seemed to him that his body was in no way gross, but ethereal and

perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it an exquisite

tenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of beautiful instincts and

destined to an early death. And he felt for old Torrance—of the many

supplications, of the few days—a pity that was near to tears. The prayer

ended. Right over him was a tablet in the wall, the only ornament in the

roughly masoned chapel—for it was no more; the tablet commemorated, I was

about to say the virtues, but rather the existence of a former Rutherford

of Hermiston; and Archie, under that trophy of his long descent and local

greatness, leaned back in the pew and contemplated vacancy with the

shadow of a smile between playful and sad, that became him strangely.

Dandie’s sister, sitting by the side of Clem in her new Glasgow finery,

chose that moment to observe the young laird. Aware of the stir of his

entrance, the little formalist had kept her eyes fastened and her face

prettily composed during the prayer. It was not hypocrisy, there was no

one further from a hypocrite. The girl had been taught to behave: to

look up, to look down, to look unconscious, to look seriously impressed

in church, and in every conjuncture to look her best. That was the game

of female life, and she played it frankly. Archie was the one person in

church who was of interest, who was somebody new, reputed eccentric,

known to be young, and a laird, and still unseen by Christina. Small

wonder that, as she stood there in her attitude of pretty decency, her

mind should run upon him! If he spared a glance in her direction, he

should know she was a well-behaved young lady who had been to Glasgow.

In reason he must admire her clothes, and it was possible that he should

think her pretty. At that her heart beat the least thing in the world;

and she proceeded, by way of a corrective, to call up and dismiss a

series of fancied pictures of the young man who should now, by rights, be

looking at her. She settled on the plainest of them,—a pink short young

man with a dish face and no figure, at whose admiration she could afford

to smile; but for all that, the consciousness of his gaze (which was

really fixed on Torrance and his mittens) kept her in something of a

flutter till the word Amen. Even then, she was far too well-bred to

gratify her curiosity with any impatience. She resumed her seat

languidly—this was a Glasgow touch—she composed her dress, rearranged her

nosegay of primroses, looked first in front, then behind upon the other

side, and at last allowed her eyes to move, without hurry, in the

direction of the Hermiston pew. For a moment, they were riveted. Next

she had plucked her gaze home again like a tame bird who should have

meditated flight. Possibilities crowded on her; she hung over the future

and grew dizzy; the image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with

the inscrutable half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a chasm. “I

wonder, will I have met my fate?” she thought, and her heart swelled.

Torrance was got some way into his first exposition, positing a deep

layer of texts as he went along, laying the foundations of his discourse,

which was to deal with a nice point in divinity, before Archie suffered

his eyes to wander. They fell first of all on Clem, looking

insupportably prosperous, and patronising Torrance with the favour of a

modified attention, as of one who was used to better things in Glasgow.

Though he had never before set eyes on him, Archie had no difficulty in

identifying him, and no hesitation in pronouncing him vulgar, the worst

of the family. Clem was leaning lazily forward when Archie first saw

him. Presently he leaned nonchalantly back; and that deadly instrument,

the maiden, was suddenly unmasked in profile. Though not quite in the

front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain artful Glasgow

mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed her to great

advantage. Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart-burning, and

almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company. Mrs. Hob had said

her say at Cauldstaneslap. “Daft-like!” she had pronounced it. “A

jaiket that’ll no meet! Whaur’s the sense of a jaiket that’ll no button

upon you, if it should come to be weet? What do ye ca’ thir things?

Demmy brokens, d’ye say? They’ll be brokens wi’ a vengeance or ye can

win back! Weel, I have nae thing to do wi’ it—it’s no good taste.”

Clem, whose purse had thus metamorphosed his sister, and who was not

insensible to the advertisement, had come to the rescue with a “Hoot,

woman! What do you ken of good taste that has never been to the ceety?”

And Hob, looking on the girl with pleased smiles, as she timidly

displayed her finery in the midst of the dark kitchen, had thus ended the

dispute: “The cutty looks weel,” he had said, “and it’s no very like

rain. Wear them the day, hizzie; but it’s no a thing to make a practice

o’.” In the breasts of her rivals, coming to the kirk very conscious of

white under-linen, and their faces splendid with much soap, the sight of

the toilet had raised a storm of varying emotion, from the mere unenvious

admiration that was expressed in a long-drawn “Eh!” to the angrier

feeling that found vent in an emphatic “Set her up!” Her frock was of

straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the

ankle, so as to display her _demi-broquins_ of Regency violet, crossing

with many straps upon a yellow cobweb stocking. According to the pretty

fashion in which our grandmothers did not hesitate to appear, and our

great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our

great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to mould the contour of both

breasts, and in the nook between, a cairngorm brooch maintained it.

Here, too, surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of

primroses. She wore on her shoulders—or rather on her back and not her

shoulders, which it scarcely passed—a French coat of sarsenet, tied in

front with Margate braces, and of the same colour with her violet shoes.

About her face clustered a disorder of dark ringlets, a little garland of

yellow French roses surmounted her brow, and the whole was crowned by a

village hat of chipped straw. Amongst all the rosy and all the weathered

faces that surrounded her in church, she glowed like an open flower—girl

and raiment, and the cairngorm that caught the daylight and returned it

in a fiery flash, and the threads of bronze and gold that played in her

hair.

Archie was attracted by the bright thing like a child. He looked at her

again and yet again, and their looks crossed. The lip was lifted from

her little teeth. He saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny

skin. Her eye, which was great as a stag’s, struck and held his gaze.

He knew who she must be—Kirstie, she of the harsh diminutive, his

housekeeper’s niece, the sister of the rustic prophet, Gib—and he found

in her the answer to his wishes.

Christina felt the shock of their encountering glances, and seemed to

rise, clothed in smiles, into a region of the vague and bright. But the

gratification was not more exquisite than it was brief. She looked away

abruptly, and immediately began to blame herself for that abruptness.

She knew what she should have done, too late—turned slowly with her nose

in the air. And meantime his look was not removed, but continued to play

upon her like a battery of cannon constantly aimed, and now seemed to

isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as on a

pillory, before the congregation. For Archie continued to drink her in

with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain, and

stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In the cleft of

her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale florets of

primrose fascinated him. He saw the breasts heave, and the flowers shake

with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much discompose the girl.

And Christina was conscious of his gaze—saw it, perhaps, with the dainty

plaything of an ear that peeped among her ringlets; she was conscious of

changing colour, conscious of her unsteady breath. Like a creature

tracked, run down, surrounded, she sought in a dozen ways to give herself

a countenance. She used her handkerchief—it was a really fine one—then

she desisted in a panic: “He would only think I was too warm.” She took

to reading in the metrical psalms, and then remembered it was

sermon-time. Last she put a “sugar-bool” in her mouth, and the next

moment repented of the step. It was such a homely-like thing! Mr.

Archie would never be eating sweeties in kirk; and, with a palpable

effort, she swallowed it whole, and her colour flamed high. At this

signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense of his ill-behaviour. What

had he been doing? He had been exquisitely rude in church to the niece

of his housekeeper; he had stared like a lackey and a libertine at a

beautiful and modest girl. It was possible, it was even likely, he would

be presented to her after service in the kirk-yard, and then how was he

to look? And there was no excuse. He had marked the tokens of her

shame, of her increasing indignation, and he was such a fool that he had

not understood them. Shame bowed him down, and he looked resolutely at

Mr. Torrance; who little supposed, good, worthy man, as he continued to

expound justification by faith, what was his true business: to play the

part of derivative to a pair of children at the old game of falling in

love.

Christina was greatly relieved at first. It seemed to her that she was

clothed again. She looked back on what had passed. All would have been

right if she had not blushed, a silly fool! There was nothing to blush

at, if she _had_ taken a sugar-bool. Mrs. MacTaggart, the elder’s wife

in St. Enoch’s, took them often. And if he had looked at her, what was

more natural than that a young gentleman should look at the best-dressed

girl in church? And at the same time, she knew far otherwise, she knew

there was nothing casual or ordinary in the look, and valued herself on

its memory like a decoration. Well, it was a blessing he had found

something else to look at! And presently she began to have other

thoughts. It was necessary, she fancied, that she should put herself

right by a repetition of the incident, better managed. If the wish was

father to the thought, she did not know or she would not recognise it.

It was simply as a manœuvre of propriety, as something called for to

lessen the significance of what had gone before, that she should a second

time meet his eyes, and this time without blushing. And at the memory of

the blush, she blushed again, and became one general blush burning from

head to foot. Was ever anything so indelicate, so forward, done by a

girl before? And here she was, making an exhibition of herself before

the congregation about nothing! She stole a glance upon her neighbours,

and behold! they were steadily indifferent, and Clem had gone to sleep.

And still the one idea was becoming more and more potent with her, that

in common prudence she must look again before the service ended.

Something of the same sort was going forward in the mind of Archie, as he

struggled with the load of penitence. So it chanced that, in the flutter

of the moment when the last psalm was given out, and Torrance was reading

the verse, and the leaves of every psalm-book in church were rustling

under busy fingers, two stealthy glances were sent out like antennæ among

the pews and on the indifferent and absorbed occupants, and drew timidly

nearer to the straight line between Archie and Christina. They met, they

lingered together for the least fraction of time, and that was enough. A

charge as of electricity passed through Christina, and behold! the leaf

of her psalm-book was torn across.

Archie was outside by the gate of the graveyard, conversing with Hob and

the minister and shaking hands all round with the scattering

congregation, when Clem and Christina were brought up to be presented.

The laird took off his hat and bowed to her with grace and respect.

Christina made her Glasgow curtsey to the laird, and went on again up the

road for Hermiston and Cauldstaneslap, walking fast, breathing hurriedly

with a heightened colour, and in this strange frame of mind, that when

she was alone she seemed in high happiness, and when any one addressed

her she resented it like a contradiction. A part of the way she had the

company of some neighbour girls and a loutish young man; never had they

seemed so insipid, never had she made herself so disagreeable. But these

struck aside to their various destinations or were out-walked and left

behind; and when she had driven off with sharp words the proffered convoy

of some of her nephews and nieces, she was free to go on alone up

Hermiston brae, walking on air, dwelling intoxicated among clouds of

happiness. Near to the summit she heard steps behind her, a man’s steps,

light and very rapid. She knew the foot at once and walked the faster.

“If it’s me he’s wanting, he can run for it,” she thought, smiling.

Archie overtook her like a man whose mind was made up.

“Miss Kirstie,” he began.

“Miss Christina, if you please, Mr. Weir,” she interrupted. “I canna

bear the contraction.”

“You forget it has a friendly sound for me. Your aunt is an old friend

of mine, and a very good one. I hope we shall see much of you at

Hermiston?”

“My aunt and my sister-in-law doesna agree very well. Not that I have

much ado with it. But still when I’m stopping in the house, if I was to

be visiting my aunt, it would not look considerate-like.”

“I am sorry,” said Archie.

“I thank you kindly, Mr. Weir,” she said. “I whiles think myself it’s a

great peety.”

“Ah, I am sure your voice would always be for peace!” he cried.

“I wouldna be too sure of that,” she said. “I have my days like other

folk, I suppose.”

“Do you know, in our old kirk, among our good old grey dames, you made an

effect like sunshine.”

“Ah, but that would be my Glasgow clothes!”

“I did not think I was so much under the influence of pretty frocks.”

She smiled with a half look at him. “There’s more than you!” she said.

“But you see I’m only Cinderella. I’ll have to put all these things by

in my trunk; next Sunday I’ll be as grey as the rest. They’re Glasgow

clothes, you see, and it would never do to make a practice of it. It

would seem terrible conspicuous.”

By that they were come to the place where their ways severed. The old

grey moors were all about them; in the midst a few sheep wandered; and

they could see on the one hand the straggling caravan scaling the braes

in front of them for Cauldstaneslap, and on the other, the contingent

from Hermiston bending off and beginning to disappear by detachments into

the policy gate. It was in these circumstances that they turned to say

farewell, and deliberately exchanged a glance as they shook hands. All

passed as it should, genteelly; and in Christina’s mind, as she mounted

the first steep ascent for Cauldstaneslap, a gratifying sense of triumph

prevailed over the recollection of minor lapses and mistakes. She had

kilted her gown, as she did usually at that rugged pass; but when she

spied Archie still standing and gazing after her, the skirts came down

again as if by enchantment. Here was a piece of nicety for that upland

parish, where the matrons marched with their coats kilted in the rain,

and the lasses walked barefoot to kirk through the dust of summer, and

went bravely down by the burn-side, and sat on stones to make a public

toilet before entering! It was perhaps an air wafted from Glasgow; or

perhaps it marked a stage of that dizziness of gratified vanity, in which

the instinctive act passed unperceived. He was looking after! She

unloaded her bosom of a prodigious sigh that was all pleasure, and betook

herself to run. When she had overtaken the stragglers of her family, she

caught up the niece whom she had so recently repulsed, and kissed and

slapped her, and drove her away again, and ran after her with pretty

cries and laughter. Perhaps she thought the laird might still be

looking! But it chanced the little scene came under the view of eyes

less favourable; for she overtook Mrs. Hob marching with Clem and Dand.

“You’re shürely fey, lass!” quoth Dandie.

“Think shame to yersel’, miss!” said the strident Mrs. Hob. “Is this the

gait to guide yersel’ on the way hame frae kirk? You’re shiirely no

sponsible the day! And anyway I would mind my guid claes.”

“Hoot!” said Christina, and went on before them head in air, treading the

rough track with the tread of a wild doe.

She was in love with herself, her destiny, the air of the hills, the

benediction of the sun. All the way home, she continued under the

intoxication of these sky-scraping spirits. At table she could talk

freely of young Hermiston; gave her opinion of him off-hand and with a

loud voice, that he was a handsome young gentleman, real well mannered

and sensible-like, but it was a pity he looked doleful. Only—the moment

after—a memory of his eyes in church embarrassed her. But for this

inconsiderable check, all through meal-time she had a good appetite, and

she kept them laughing at table, until Gib (who had returned before them

from Crossmichael and his separative worship) reproved the whole of them

for their levity.

Singing “in to herself” as she went, her mind still in the turmoil of a

glad confusion, she rose and tripped upstairs to a little loft, lighted

by four panes in the gable, where she slept with one of her nieces. The

niece, who followed her, presuming on “Auntie’s” high spirits, was

flounced out of the apartment with small ceremony, and retired, smarting

and half tearful, to bury her woes in the byre among the hay. Still

humming, Christina divested herself of her finery, and put her treasures

one by one in her great green trunk. The last of these was the

psalm-book; it was a fine piece, the gift of Mistress Clem, in distinct

old-faced type, on paper that had begun to grow foxy in the warehouse—not

by service—and she was used to wrap it in a handkerchief every Sunday

after its period of service was over, and bury it end-wise at the head of

her trunk. As she now took it in hand the book fell open where the leaf

was torn, and she stood and gazed upon that evidence of her bygone

discomposure. There returned again the vision of the two brown eyes

staring at her, intent and bright, out of that dark corner of the kirk.

The whole appearance and attitude, the smile, the suggested gesture of

young Hermiston came before her in a flash at the sight of the torn page.

“I was surely fey!” she said, echoing the words of Dandie, and at the

suggested doom her high spirits deserted her. She flung herself prone

upon the bed, and lay there, holding the psalm-book in her hands for

hours, for the more part in a mere stupor of unconsenting pleasure and

unreasoning fear. The fear was superstitious; there came up again and

again in her memory Dandie’s ill-omened words, and a hundred grisly and

black tales out of the immediate neighbourhood read her a commentary on

their force. The pleasure was never realised. You might say the joints

of her body thought and remembered, and were gladdened, but her essential

self, in the immediate theatre of consciousness, talked feverishly of

something else, like a nervous person at a fire. The image that she most

complacently dwelt on was that of Miss Christina in her character of the

Fair Lass of Cauldstaneslap, carrying all before her in the

straw-coloured frock, the violet mantle, and the yellow cobweb stockings.

Archie’s image, on the other hand, when it presented itself was never

welcomed—far less welcomed with any ardour, and it was exposed at times

to merciless criticism. In the long vague dialogues she held in her

mind, often with imaginary, often with unrealised interlocutors, Archie,

if he were referred to at all came in for savage handling. He was

described as “looking like a stork,” “staring like a caulf,” “a face like

a ghaist’s.” “Do you call that manners?” she said; or, “I soon put him

in his place.” “‘_Miss Christina_, _if you please_, _Mr. Weir_!’ says I,

and just flyped up my skirt tails.” With gabble like this she would

entertain herself long whiles together, and then her eye would perhaps

fall on the torn leaf, and the eyes of Archie would appear again from the

darkness of the wall, and the voluble words deserted her, and she would

lie still and stupid, and think upon nothing with devotion, and be

sometimes raised by a quiet sigh. Had a doctor of medicine come into

that loft, he would have diagnosed a healthy, well-developed, eminently

vivacious lass lying on her face in a fit of the sulks; not one who had

just contracted, or was just contracting, a mortal sickness of the mind

which should yet carry her towards death and despair. Had it been a

doctor of psychology, he might have been pardoned for divining in the

girl a passion of childish vanity, self-love _in excelsis_, and no more.

It is to be understood that I have been painting chaos and describing the

inarticulate. Every lineament that appears is too precise, almost every

word used too strong. Take a finger-post in the mountains on a day of

rolling mists; I have but copied the names that appear upon the pointers,

the names of definite and famous cities far distant, and now perhaps

basking in sunshine; but Christina remained all these hours, as it were,

at the foot of the post itself, not moving, and enveloped in mutable and

blinding wreaths of haze.

The day was growing late and the sunbeams long and level, when she sat

suddenly up, and wrapped in its handkerchief and put by that psalm-book

which had already played a part so decisive in the first chapter of her

love-story. In the absence of the mesmerist’s eye, we are told nowadays

that the head of a bright nail may fill his place, if it be steadfastly

regarded. So that torn page had riveted her attention on what might else

have been but little, and perhaps soon forgotten; while the ominous words

of Dandie—heard, not heeded, and still remembered—had lent to her

thoughts, or rather to her mood, a cast of solemnity, and that idea of

Fate—a pagan Fate, uncontrolled by any Christian deity, obscure, lawless,

and august—moving indissuadably in the affairs of Christian men. Thus

even that phenomenon of love at first sight, which is so rare and seems

so simple and violent, like a disruption of life’s tissue, may be

decomposed into a sequence of accidents happily concurring.

She put on a grey frock and a pink kerchief, looked at herself a moment

with approval in the small square of glass that served her for a toilet

mirror, and went softly downstairs through the sleeping house that

resounded with the sound of afternoon snoring. Just outside the door,

Dandie was sitting with a book in his hand, not reading, only honouring

the Sabbath by a sacred vacancy of mind. She came near him and stood

still.

“I’m for off up the muirs, Dandie,” she said.

There was something unusually soft in her tones that made him look up.

She was pale, her eyes dark and bright; no trace remained of the levity

of the morning.

“Ay, lass? Ye’ll have yer ups and downs like me, I’m thinkin’,” he

observed.

“What for do ye say that?” she asked.

“O, for naething,” says Dand. “Only I think ye’re mair like me than the

lave of them. Ye’ve mair of the poetic temper, tho’ Guid kens little

enough of the poetic taalent. It’s an ill gift at the best. Look at

yoursel’. At denner you were all sunshine and flowers and laughter, and

now you’re like the star of evening on a lake.”

She drank in this hackneyed compliment like wine, and it glowed in her

veins.

“But I’m saying, Dand”—she came nearer him—“I’m for the muirs. I must

have a braith of air. If Clem was to be speiring for me, try and quaiet

him, will ye no?”

“What way?” said Dandie. “I ken but the ae way, and that’s leein’. I’ll

say ye had a sair heid, if ye like.”

“But I havena,” she objected.

“I daursay no,” he returned. “I said I would say ye had; and if ye like

to nay-say me when ye come back, it’ll no mateerially maitter, for my

chara’ter’s clean gane a’ready past reca’.”

“O, Dand, are ye a lecar?” she asked, lingering.

“Folks say sae,” replied the bard.

“Wha says sae?” she pursued.

“Them that should ken the best,” he responded. “The lassies, for ane.”

“But, Dand, you would never lee to me?” she asked.

“I’ll leave that for your pairt of it, ye girzie,” said he. “Ye’ll lee

to me fast eneuch, when ye hae gotten a jo. I’m tellin’ ye and it’s

true; when you have a jo, Miss Kirstie, it’ll be for guid and ill. I

ken: I was made that way mysel’, but the deil was in my luck! Here, gang

awa wi’ ye to your muirs, and let me be; I’m in an hour of inspiraution,

ye upsetting tawpie!”

But she clung to her brother’s neighbourhood, she knew not why.

“Will ye no gie’s a kiss, Dand?” she said. “I aye likit ye fine.”

He kissed her and considered her a moment; he found something strange in

her. But he was a libertine through and through, nourished equal

contempt and suspicion of all womankind, and paid his way among them

habitually with idle compliments.

“Gae wa’ wi’ ye!” said he. “Ye’re a dentie baby, and be content wi’

that!”

That was Dandie’s way; a kiss and a comfit to Jenny—a bawbee and my

blessing to Jill—and goodnight to the whole clan of ye, my dears! When

anything approached the serious, it became a matter for men, he both

thought and said. Women, when they did not absorb, were only children to

be shoo’d away. Merely in his character of connoisseur, however, Dandie

glanced carelessly after his sister as she crossed the meadow. “The

brat’s no that bad!” he thought with surprise, for though he had just

been paying her compliments, he had not really looked at her. “Hey!

what’s yon?” For the grey dress was cut with short sleeves and skirts,

and displayed her trim strong legs clad in pink stockings of the same

shade as the kerchief she wore round her shoulders, and that shimmered as

she went. This was not her way in undress; he knew her ways and the ways

of the whole sex in the country-side, no one better; when they did not go

barefoot, they wore stout “rig and furrow” woollen hose of an invisible

blue mostly, when they were not black outright; and Dandie, at sight of

this daintiness, put two and two together. It was a silk handkerchief,

then they would be silken hose; they matched—then the whole outfit was a

present of Clem’s, a costly present, and not something to be worn through

bog and briar, or on a late afternoon of Sunday. He whistled. “My denty

May, either your heid’s fair turned, or there’s some ongoings!” he

observed, and dismissed the subject.

She went slowly at first, but ever straighter and faster for the

Cauldstaneslap, a pass among the hills to which the farm owed its name.

The Slap opened like a doorway between two rounded hillocks; and through

this ran the short cut to Hermiston. Immediately on the other side it

went down through the Deil’s Hags, a considerable marshy hollow of the

hill tops, full of springs, and crouching junipers, and pools where the

black peat-water slumbered. There was no view from here. A man might

have sat upon the Praying Weaver’s stone a half century, and seen none

but the Cauldstaneslap children twice in the twenty-four hours on their

way to the school and back again, an occasional shepherd, the irruption

of a clan of sheep, or the birds who haunted about the springs, drinking

and shrilly piping. So, when she had once passed the Slap, Kirstie was

received into seclusion. She looked back a last time at the farm. It

still lay deserted except for the figure of Dandie, who was now seen to

be scribbling in his lap, the hour of expected inspiration having come to

him at last. Thence she passed rapidly through the morass, and came to

the farther end of it, where a sluggish burn discharges, and the path for

Hermiston accompanies it on the beginning of its downward path. From

this corner a wide view was opened to her of the whole stretch of braes

upon the other side, still sallow and in places rusty with the winter,

with the path marked boldly, here and there by the burn-side a tuft of

birches, and—two miles off as the crow flies—from its enclosures and

young plantations, the windows of Hermiston glittering in the western

sun.

Here she sat down and waited, and looked for a long time at these

far-away bright panes of glass. It amused her to have so extended a

view, she thought. It amused her to see the house of Hermiston—to see

“folk”; and there was an indistinguishable human unit, perhaps the

gardener, visibly sauntering on the gravel paths.

By the time the sun was down and all the easterly braes lay plunged in

clear shadow, she was aware of another figure coming up the path at a

most unequal rate of approach, now half running, now pausing and seeming

to hesitate. She watched him at first with a total suspension of

thought. She held her thought as a person holds his breathing. Then she

consented to recognise him. “He’ll no be coming here, he canna be; it’s

no possible.” And there began to grow upon her a subdued choking

suspense. He _was_ coming; his hesitations had quite ceased, his step

grew firm and swift; no doubt remained; and the question loomed up before

her instant: what was she to do? It was all very well to say that her

brother was a laird himself: it was all very well to speak of casual

intermarriages and to count cousinship, like Auntie Kirstie. The

difference in their social station was trenchant; propriety, prudence,

all that she had ever learned, all that she knew, bade her flee. But on

the other hand the cup of life now offered to her was too enchanting.

For one moment, she saw the question clearly, and definitely made her

choice. She stood up and showed herself an instant in the gap relieved

upon the sky line; and the next, fled trembling and sat down glowing with

excitement on the Weaver’s stone. She shut her eyes, seeking, praying

for composure. Her hand shook in her lap, and her mind was full of

incongruous and futile speeches. What was there to make a work about?

She could take care of herself, she supposed! There was no harm in

seeing the laird. It was the best thing that could happen. She would

mark a proper distance to him once and for all. Gradually the wheels of

her nature ceased to go round so madly, and she sat in passive

expectation, a quiet, solitary figure in the midst of the grey moss. I

have said she was no hypocrite, but here I am at fault. She never

admitted to herself that she had come up the hill to look for Archie.

And perhaps after all she did not know, perhaps came as a stone falls.

For the steps of love in the young, and especially in girls, are

instinctive and unconscious.

In the meantime Archie was drawing rapidly near, and he at least was

consciously seeking her neighbourhood. The afternoon had turned to ashes

in his mouth; the memory of the girl had kept him from reading and drawn

him as with cords; and at last, as the cool of the evening began to come

on, he had taken his hat and set forth, with a smothered ejaculation, by

the moor path to Cauldstaneslap. He had no hope to find her; he took the

off chance without expectation of result and to relieve his uneasiness.

The greater was his surprise, as he surmounted the slope and came into

the hollow of the Deil’s Hags, to see there, like an answer to his

wishes, the little womanly figure in the grey dress and the pink kerchief

sitting little, and low, and lost, and acutely solitary, in these

desolate surroundings and on the weather-beaten stone of the dead weaver.

Those things that still smacked of winter were all rusty about her, and

those things that already relished of the spring had put forth the tender

and lively colours of the season. Even in the unchanging face of the

death-stone, changes were to be remarked; and in the channeled lettering,

the moss began to renew itself in jewels of green. By an afterthought

that was a stroke of art, she had turned up over her head the back of the

kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious and yet pensive

face. Her feet were gathered under her on the one side, and she leaned

on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round, tapered to a slim

wrist, and shimmered in the fading light.

Young Hermiston was struck with a certain chill. He was reminded that he

now dealt in serious matters of life and death. This was a grown woman

he was approaching, endowed with her mysterious potencies and

attractions, the treasury of the continued race, and he was neither

better nor worse than the average of his sex and age. He had a certain

delicacy which had preserved him hitherto unspotted, and which (had

either of them guessed it) made him a more dangerous companion when his

heart should be really stirred. His throat was dry as he came near; but

the appealing sweetness of her smile stood between them like a guardian

angel.

For she turned to him and smiled, though without rising. There was a

shade in this cavalier greeting that neither of them perceived; neither

he, who simply thought it gracious and charming as herself; nor yet she,

who did not observe (quick as she was) the difference between rising to

meet the laird, and remaining seated to receive the expected admirer.

“Are ye stepping west, Hermiston?” said she, giving him his territorial

name after the fashion of the country-side.

“I was,” said he, a little hoarsely, “but I think I will be about the end

of my stroll now. Are you like me, Miss Christina? The house would not

hold me. I came here seeking air.”

He took his seat at the other end of the tombstone and studied her,

wondering what was she. There was infinite import in the question alike

for her and him.

“Ay,” she said. “I couldna bear the roof either. It’s a habit of mine

to come up here about the gloaming when it’s quaiet and caller.”

“It was a habit of my mother’s also,” he said gravely. The recollection

half startled him as he expressed it. He looked around. “I have scarce

been here since. It’s peaceful,” he said, with a long breath.

“It’s no like Glasgow,” she replied. “A weary place, yon Glasgow! But

what a day have I had for my homecoming, and what a bonny evening!”

“Indeed, it was a wonderful day,” said Archie. “I think I will remember

it years and years until I come to die. On days like this—I do not know

if you feel as I do—but everything appears so brief, and fragile, and

exquisite, that I am afraid to touch life. We are here for so short a

time; and all the old people before us—Rutherfords of Hermiston, Elliotts

of the Cauldstaneslap—that were here but a while since riding about and

keeping up a great noise in this quiet corner—making love too, and

marrying—why, where are they now? It’s deadly commonplace, but, after

all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.”

He was sounding her, semi-consciously, to see if she could understand

him; to learn if she were only an animal the colour of flowers, or had a

soul in her to keep her sweet. She, on her part, her means well in hand,

watched, womanlike, for any opportunity to shine, to abound in his

humour, whatever that might be. The dramatic artist, that lies dormant

or only half awake in most human beings, had in her sprung to his feet in

a divine fury, and chance had served her well. She looked upon him with

a subdued twilight look that became the hour of the day and the train of

thought; earnestness shone through her like stars in the purple west; and

from the great but controlled upheaval of her whole nature there passed

into her voice, and rang in her lightest words, a thrill of emotion.

“Have you mind of Dand’s song?” she answered. “I think he’ll have been

trying to say what you have been thinking.”

“No, I never heard it,” he said. “Repeat it to me, can you?”

“It’s nothing wanting the tune,” said Kirstie.

“Then sing it me,” said he.

“On the Lord’s Day? That would never do, Mr. Weir!”

“I am afraid I am not so strict a keeper of the Sabbath, and there is no

one in this place to hear us, unless the poor old ancient under the

stone.”

“No that I’m thinking that really,” she said. “By my way of thinking,

it’s just as serious as a psalm. Will I sooth it to ye, then?”

“If you please,” said he, and, drawing near to her on the tombstone,

prepared to listen.

She sat up as if to sing. “I’ll only can sooth it to ye,” she explained.

“I wouldna like to sing out loud on the Sabbath. I think the birds would

carry news of it to Gilbert,” and she smiled. “It’s about the Elliotts,”

she continued, “and I think there’s few bonnier bits in the book-poets,

though Dand has never got printed yet.”

And she began, in the low, clear tones of her half voice, now sinking

almost to a whisper, now rising to a particular note which was her best,

and which Archie learned to wait for with growing emotion:—

“O they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane,

In the rain and the wind and the lave,

They shoutit in the ha’ and they routit on the hill,

But they’re a’ quaitit noo in the grave.

Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotte of

auld!”

All the time she sang she looked steadfastly before her, her knees

straight, her hands upon her knee, her head cast back and up. The

expression was admirable throughout, for had she not learned it from the

lips and under the criticism of the author? When it was done, she turned

upon Archie a face softly bright, and eyes gently suffused and shining in

the twilight, and his heart rose and went out to her with boundless pity

and sympathy. His question was answered. She was a human being tuned to

a sense of the tragedy of life; there were pathos and music and a great

heart in the girl.

He arose instinctively, she also; for she saw she had gained a point, and

scored the impression deeper, and she had wit enough left to flee upon a

victory. They were but commonplaces that remained to be exchanged, but

the low, moved voices in which they passed made them sacred in the

memory. In the falling greyness of the evening he watched her figure

winding through the morass, saw it turn a last time and wave a hand, and

then pass through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if something went

along with her out of the deepest of his heart. And something surely had

come, and come to dwell there. He had retained from childhood a picture,

now half obliterated by the passage of time and the multitude of fresh

impressions, of his mother telling him, with the fluttered earnestness of

her voice, and often with dropping tears, the tale of the “Praying

Weaver,” on the very scene of his brief tragedy and long repose. And now

there was a companion piece; and he beheld, and he should behold for

ever, Christina perched on the same tomb, in the grey colours of the

evening, gracious, dainty, perfect as a flower, and she also singing—

“Of old, unhappy far off things,

And battles long ago,”

of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their

weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their

descendants, who lingered a little in their places, and would soon be

gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour. By one of

the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together

in his memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes

indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being

something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of

things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that in all

ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor

pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs were made

ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.

In the same moment of time that she disappeared from Archie, there opened

before Kirstie’s eyes the cup-like hollow in which the farm lay. She

saw, some five hundred feet below her, the house making itself bright

with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry. For they were

only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship which

rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the

relaxation of supper. Already she knew that Robert must be within-sides

at the head of the table, “waling the portions”; for it was Robert in his

quality of family priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who

officiated. She made good time accordingly down the steep ascent, and

came up to the door panting as the three younger brothers, all roused at

last from slumber, stood together in the cool and the dark of the evening

with a fry of nephews and nieces about them, chatting and awaiting the

expected signal. She stood back; she had no mind to direct attention to

her late arrival or to her labouring breath.

“Kirstie, ye have shaved it this time, my lass?” said Clem. “Whaur were

ye?”

“O, just taking a dander by mysel’,” said Kirstie.

And the talk continued on the subject of the American War, without

further reference to the truant who stood by them in the covert of the

dusk, thrilling with happiness and the sense of guilt.

The signal was given, and the brothers began to go in one after another,

amid the jostle and throng of Hob’s children.

Only Dandie, waiting till the last, caught Kirstie by the arm. “When did

ye begin to dander in pink hosen, Mistress Elliott?” he whispered slyly.

She looked down; she was one blush. “I maun have forgotten to change

them,” said she; and went into prayers in her turn with a troubled mind,

between anxiety as to whether Dand should have observed her yellow

stockings at church, and should thus detect her in a palpable falsehood,

and shame that she had already made good his prophecy. She remembered

the words of it, how it was to be when she had gotten a jo, and that that

would be for good and evil. “Will I have gotten my jo now?” she thought

with a secret rapture.

And all through prayers, where it was her principal business to conceal

the pink stockings from the eyes of the indifferent Mrs. Hob—and all

through supper, as she made a feint of eating and sat at the table

radiant and constrained—and again when she had left them and come into

her chamber, and was alone with her sleeping niece, and could at last lay

aside the armour of society—the same words sounded within her, the same

profound note of happiness, of a world all changed and renewed, of a day

that had been passed in Paradise, and of a night that was to be heaven

opened. All night she seemed to be conveyed smoothly upon a shallow

stream of sleep and waking, and through the bowers of Beulah; all night

she cherished to her heart that exquisite hope; and if, towards morning,

she forgot it a while in a more profound unconsciousness, it was to catch

again the rainbow thought with her first moment of awaking.