CHAPTER X.

‘A’ WILL BE RICHT AGAIN WHEN JAMIE HE’S COME BACK.’

At last, when the late harvest of those days was nearly over, when

Balcairnie was ‘grieving,’ or ‘leading,’ or ‘forking’ in the fields and

in the stack-yards both of Balcairnie and Drumsheugh, before the first

hoar frost had melted in the early rays of the morning sun, till it was

lying again thick and white all around, like the manna of the children

of Israel, in the moon-light; when the mellow russet and yellow apples

had long replaced the delicate pink-and-white apple blossom, and there

were no lingering flowers in the gardens save sun-flowers, marigolds,

and daisies, Drumsheugh and his mother were to come home--not ‘late,

late in the gloamin,’ like Kilmeny, but at a more rational hour of

the afternoon. It would permit a four o’clock tea, or ‘fower hours,’

something perfectly distinct from a modern kettledrum. At the ‘fower

hours’ Peggy’s famous pie was to serve as the _pièce de résistance_,

well balanced by ale and glenlivat. Her maiden efforts in preserves,

elderflower and elderberry, currant, and ginger wines were to keep

company with the butter-bannocks and cakes and honey, the loaf-bread,

the short-bread and the diet-loaf which suited the old lady’s green

tea. The provision was not too ample for the large execution sanguinely

expected from the ravenous appetites of the travellers. Balcairnie,

too, had donned his best coat in honour of the occasion, hurrying

from the harvest-field at the first word of warning that a yellow

post-chaise was seen on the road to Drumsheugh.

It had not been altogether the laird’s careless procrastination, or any

reluctance to return home from a growing fear of what he was to find

there, which had delayed the mother and son so long. There had been

chases by privateers, contrary winds, an illness of Mrs. Ramsay’s, an

accident to the London coach, uncontrollable impediments turning up in

succession and baffling the travellers.

But at last Peggy wore, under happy auspices, one of the new gowns

which had been ordered from Baldie Fuggie. It had been carefully cut

out, made up, and toned down under Primrose’s superintendence; next it

had been brightened up by dexterous touches here and there, of lawn

neckerchief and apron, and bonnie breast-knot. It was a very fair and

gentle-looking young lady, whose trim feet in their rosetted shoes,

under the dainty skirt well tucked through the pocket-hole, tripped

so lightly--though the speed was tremulous, from her post by the

decapitated stone pillars at the head of the fir avenue, into the

middle of the rough road--along which she had jogged with Balcairnie on

the wintry night of her dismal home-coming--to take that first place at

the chaise door to which she was entitled.

Old Mrs. Ramsay’s head, well protected with wraps, though it still

wanted a month to Martinmas, was poked out of the window on her side in

anticipation of her arrival. ‘Eh! can that be you, Peggy, my love?’ she

cried with glad surprise. ‘You’re looking so well I would hardly have

known you.’

But when Drumsheugh leapt from the chaise and took his wife in his

arms, he said the very reverse, though he had not even heard his

mother’s comment, and had no thought of contradicting her. ‘I’m glad to

find my Peggy the same,’ he said fervently, ‘the very same as when I

left her. I’m far gladder of that than to be at hame again, though that

is good, too. I have not seen any leddy like you, Peggy, my doo, since

I quitted Drumsheugh.’

Peggy looked uplifted to the sky as at the very words she would have

liked best to hear.

‘The ungrateful man!’ said Primrose Ramsay to Balcairnie, when the two

were comparing notes together in the recess of one of the drawing-room

windows before he left. ‘The ungrateful woman!’ after all I have done

to make her liker him and her place henceforth.’

He was not sure whether she was most in jest or earnest, and there

was a strain of wistfulness in his reply. ‘But did you not see how

his speech pleased her, Miss Ramsay? She would rather have been told

she was the same to him than that she had grown like the queen on

the throne; yet she would not have been the same to him if she had

not changed with the weeks and months, thanks to you. Do you hear

me, madam, or do you suppose I’m contradicting myself? He has been

learning, almost without his knowledge, to see her with other een all

the time he has been away, and if she had come upon him, just as she

used to be, he would have been startled and flegged. It is these other

een which the improvement in her fits so well, that he was as proud and

happy as a king to see at a glance she was as bonnie and dear to him as

ever. Except for you, Miss Ramsay, this gude end would never have come

to pass.’

‘I’m afraid you’re a flatterer, Balcairnie,’ said Primrose demurely.

‘Na, na,’ he said hastily, with some trouble and agitation laying hold

of him, in consequence of her accusation, ‘I have no saft words. I’m

but a yeoman-farmer. Nobody’s likely to ettle to rub me down--or up,’

he finished, a little sorely.

‘Don’t let them, if there is anybody so conceited and impertinent as

to try,’ she said quickly, with a curious tone of half-smothered

indignation against him rather than against herself, mingling with her

half fun; ‘there is no call for it. You are best as you are; you could

not be better. But why do you let me speak like that? Why do you need

to be told such a plain truth?’

A rush of colour flew into his face, a glow into his eyes; still he

paused doubtfully, as at news too good to be believed. ‘Forgive me for

being a gowk,’ he said humbly, ‘but do you really mean I could not be

better to you, Miss Ramsay?’

She bit her lips, frowned, laughed, and nodded, while she grew as red

as fire herself. ‘Why do you make me say and do such things?’ she

repeated, with an impatient tap of her foot.

‘Well,’ he said eagerly, ‘I’ve gear enough, and if I were to buy a

place like this, and be a laird like Drumsheugh, you and me would never

be equal in anything worth counting--never. Nobody kens that better

than myself; but there would be less outward odds, less descent in the

sight of the world for you.’

‘Please yourself. I daresay it is very natural for a man to wish to

have land of his own,’ she said, with the indulgent sympathy which was

one of her chief charms. ‘Most natural for a man like you who would

know and love every inch of his land, and spend his life in causing it

to wave with corn. But if you please, I have my pride too, and I think

I would rather stoop a little in outward show, if the world likes to

call it stooping, than that you should be in a hurry to rax up (stretch

violently) an idle fancy, to me. I would like fine to try what it is

to be the gudewife of Balcairnie. I’ve a notion it would be a pleasant

place to fill, to stand in your mither’s shoes, and be to you what she

was to her gude man.’

In after years, when Primrose had long been the much-loved,

much-honoured wife of Jock Home, and their love had room and to spare

for merry jesting, he was wont to assure their daughters that he would

never have presumed to approach their mother as a suitor if she had not

given him the first word of encouragement.

On the whole, Balcairnie and Primrose’s _mésalliance_--small by

comparison, though, to be sure, it was a direct result of the first

flagrant transgression of social laws, met with large tolerance. There

were even persons, only slightly acquainted with the future bride,

certainly, who maintained she had done very well for herself--‘a

penniless lass with a long pedigree,’ white-faced, and small to boot,

who had won so braw a bridegroom and so comfortable a down-sitting as

Balcairnie. She had cut her own cloth when she was pretending to be

looking after the interests of others. Even the old Lady of Drumsheugh

grieved over the marriage principally because she was conscious that

here too she had been to blame for the misadventure. And Primrose was

so fine and generous a creature she deserved the very best match in the

country, which, when it came to that, Primrose argued with spirit she

had got.

As for Primrose’s proper guardian, she would not have thought the

Prince of Wales or the Duke of York good enough for her darling, so

that it did not matter so much that Mrs. Purvis should resent the

child’s infatuation, and experience a large amount of chagrin, which

had to be tenderly borne with and persuaded away before the wedding

could take place.

Mrs. Forsyth, though she had set the example, did not clearly perceive

the parallel, and was by no means without several strong private

objections. Balcairnie might have plenty of money and old wheat stacks,

but he was not in a learned profession like Dr. Forsyth, and it would

be a terrible upheaval of the very foundations of gentility if unequal

marriages were to become common, the rule instead of the exception.

But there was great and unmixed joy in the hearts of Drumsheugh and

Peggy over the delightful fortuitousness of the attachment. Drumsheugh

almost shook the bridegroom elect’s hand off, and loudly claimed the

right to be ‘blackfoot’ in turn to his friend. Peggy hugged Primrose as

if they had been very sisters, and cried that now she was not to lose

her, she, Peggy, had little more to desire; she was near the summit

of human bliss. In the end even the few hostile voices were silenced,

for Balcairnie, in the course of a year or two, fulfilled his purpose

of buying a fair estate, was welcomed among the lairds, and held up

his head modestly among them. Then the old Lady of Drumsheugh and Mrs.

Forsyth took him fully to their hearts.

JEAN KINLOCH.

CHAPTER I.

JEAN SCORNED.

‘Ower the muir among the heather,’ Jean Kinloch walked straight and

fast on a sunny sabbath morning in autumn. She was only nineteen years

of age but already she was tall and broad-shouldered, with the perfect

proportions and perfect development of health and strength. She was

nearer to a beautiful woman than to a bonnie lassie. She had the

dark-haired, black-browed, grey-eyed face, with the clear-cut features

and clear complexion which one is accustomed to associate with the

highest type of Norman beauty. But Jean’s white square teeth, and round

somewhat massive chin, were departures from the type as it is usually

to be met with. And if she had the dignity and earnestness which on

occasions break into sunshine--incomparably sweeter, more pathetic,

even more radiant, relieved against the almost sombre background, than

an all-pervading, soulless light-heartedness can be--it was not Norman

dignity and earnestness. It was the self-respect and sedateness of the

Scotch peasant woman, on whom a Hebrew stamp has been deeply impressed,

who is enamoured of duty as other women are enamoured of pleasure, to

whom the sternest doctrines of Calvinism are invested with an awful

beauty. These are the Lord’s decrees, and though He should slay her,

yet will she trust in Him.

Jean’s dress had lost the picturesqueness which would have

distinguished her grand-mother’s, but it was good of its kind--if

somewhat severe in the tone and cut, and only remarkable as worn by

Jean Kinloch. But Jean carried a bible which was no modern, cheaply

printed, cheaply bound Bible Society’s volume: it was a valuable

hereditary possession in a couple of small volumes bound in fine and

lasting russian leather with flaps fastened by burnished silver clasps,

while there was dim gold on the edges of the yellow leaves with their

clear delicate print. A bible not unlike it is to be seen among the

relics of Burns. It was given by the peasant farmer’s son to his

Highland Mary--the girl whom he was to immortalise by two out of the

most exquisite love-laments in any language--in that autumn when she

came down and ‘shore’ the harvest with him among the

‘banks and braes and streams around

The Castle o’ Montgomery.’

But Jean Kinloch’s bible was not a love-gift, on which, as it was held

in the man’s left hand over a running stream, the woman and her lover

clasped hands, and swore in the sight of their God to be faithful to

death. Such bibles with the broken sixpences of a more worldly form of

troth-plight were already gone out of fashion. This book possessed a

different distinction, having been Jean’s mother’s kirking bible.

Jean was bound on a long and fatiguing walk even for her youth and

vigour, so that she had got up by daybreak, before even the minister,

the earliest riser in the manse, had replaced the Greek and Hebrew

studies of ordinary days, by the preparatory devotions peculiar

to the sabbath day, while the rest of the household lay in silent

unconsciousness. She had set out ere the raw mist had cleared away, in

order to reach Logan Kirk in time for the forenoon ‘diet of worship.’

The only sufficient warrant in Jean’s eyes for such a distant

expedition on that ‘sawbath day’ which she had been taught to reverence

so intensely, would have been an exceptional privilege of sitting down

at one of the sacred ‘tables,’ after they had been jealously ‘fenced.’

Then she would have heard it ‘served’ by some grand minister, a very

patriarch and prophet in one, a man famed in Jean’s circle for lofty

austere piety, impassioned zeal, and immense experience with learning

to match, though the latter quality was held in small account compared

to the recommendations which went before it. Such a minister was a fit

successor to ‘Holy Renwick’ and ‘gude Cargill’ and the other heroes and

martyrs who endured to the end--till they were shot down in peat bogs,

or mounted steadfastly and triumphantly the long ladder to the high

gallows in the Grass Market of Edinburgh.

But young Jean was not journeying on so unexceptionable and profitable

an errand. It was her own private affairs which sent her forth to cross

the broad moor on the sabbath morning, and any competent judge might

easily guess that Jean’s affairs were in dire confusion when she took

such a step.

Jean’s story was not unprecedented in her rank of life, though it is to

be hoped that hers was an extreme case. She had been courted for years,

young as she was, and at last trothplighted to a young ploughman.

Their marriage had been fixed to take place in the following spring at

Whitsunday, one of the two great feeing, flitting, and marrying terms

among Scotch agricultural labourers. Jean had been making manifold

happy preparations in her quiet womanly way by little purchases from

pedlars, by seams sewed diligently in the half hours which were

honestly hers, by plans made over and over again with fond deliberation

and reiteration for the laying out of her little savings and her next

half year’s wages. She had been undecided whether she herself should

invest in a chest of drawers, or help Bob to buy an eight-day clock,

either of which would be an ‘honesty,’ that is a standing mark of

respectability in their ‘cot house’ and might descend as an heirloom

to their children.

In the meantime the bridegroom elect had left Dalroy, which was his

native parish as well as Jean’s, and gone ‘to better himself’ on a

farm in the parish of Logan. But it did not seem to her to matter

much--except where their feelings were concerned, that he should have

little communication with her, either personally or by letter in the

interval. He might or he might not, after the pitting of the potatoes,

the last pressing job of the rural year,

tak his stick into his hand

on his sabbath-day out, and cross ten miles of moor, as Jean was doing

now, to visit her for a few hours. He might or he might not send her a

formal letter or two, or a message occasionally by the carrier. What

was his performance or failure in such trifles to Jean’s great trust in

her lad? Yet of all classes of men, perhaps with the single exception

of soldiers, not one is so notoriously fickle in love-making as Scotch

ploughmen, not one is more exposed to special sources of temptation,

and not one, alas! as Jean knew, though her pure mind recoiled from the

grievous knowledge and refused absolutely to connect it with her lover,

is more apt to fall into a particular form of vice.

But it is to be hoped that the class’s frequent fickleness and folly do

not often attain the climax they reached here; for Jean had not only

been courted, a solemn promise of marriage had been exchanged between

her and her lover, and such promises are not broken--either by lord or

lout, lady or lass, without causing such a scandal in their respective

worlds, as proves the comparative rarity of the offence.

Jean had dwelt in her dream of perfect faith and security until two

days before the sabbath in question. Then the sister of the lover, who

was also Jean’s bosom friend, came to the back door of the manse and

called out Jean in the middle of the day at the height of her household

work, to break to her a catastrophe.

‘Oh Jean!’ said Eppie, taking the first word--before Jean could cry

out was there anything wrong with Bob--and speaking with tears and

groans and honest blushes--‘Oh! that ever I should see the day I would

be black ashamed of my ain kith an’ kin--that ever I should have to

say it to you--a lass that mither an’ me were proud to count as are of

the family. There is word by Willie Broon the carrier--and I doubt it

is ower true, for Willie, though he may take a drap, was never given

to leein’--our Bob has played you fause, he has ta’en up with another

lass--ane Leezbeth Red (Reid), a fellow-servant at Blawart Brae. Nae

doubt she has set her cap at him ilka day and hour, ilka kye milking

and horse suppering, and Bob was aye a simple chield--even mair sae

when a fair flattering tongue than when red and white cheeks came in

his way. The upshot is--and I could have seen him, my ain brither,

in the mools afore I had to carry the tidings to you--and I’ll never

speak to the other lass who has stealt him from you--never, be she ten

times my gude sister--but it is richt you should ken at aince; they say

Bob has done her a sair wrang, and there is nothing left for him but

to marry her; so the twa are to be cried together this very incoming

sabbath in Logan Kirk. They may be cried and marriet too,’ protested

the informant in her righteous indignation for Jean, ‘but it’s no his

friends that will ever own them after sic heartless deceit, and sic

disgrace as they have brocht upon us a’.’

‘Dinna speak in that wild way, Eppie,’ said Jean with a little of her

natural stateliness and reserve after the first deadly spasm of sick

incredulity and terrible pain, when Jean had held her breath for a

moment. ‘If it be sae that Bob has changed his mind without telling

me, even if he has fallen into greater sin, still it is not for you

to refuse to own his wife; though I ken you mean weel, what gude would

that do to me? And now I maun go in, Eppie, for I am in the middle of

ironing the minister’s best sark, and if I tarry longer the irons will

get cauld.’ And the irons must not get cold though Jean’s heart should

break. She must go on ironing in a dazed sort of way, but yet to the

best of her ability, that special sark of the minister’s which he was

to wear when he presided over the Synod next Tuesday.

Then Jean resolved to ascertain for herself, beyond the possibility of

doubt, whether Bob Meffin were a traitor or a true man. It was not a

subject to ask questions about, nor was she the woman to lay bare her

heart to the public gaze. But this coming sabbath was Jean’s sabbath

out, and she could, without saying a word to anybody else, get her

unsuspecting mistress to grant her leave to spend the day in walking

across the moor and attending public worship at Logan Kirk instead of

waiting on the ministrations of her master at Dalroy.

Jean shed no tear nor did she sob and sigh audibly as she walked along

to meet her destiny. But she was utterly unobservant of the nature she

loved in the scene around her, either in its broad outlines or in its

minute details. She had no attention to spare to-day for the spreading

heathery moor, as fresh and free almost as the blue sky above it, on

a sunny morning like this, when what had been the summer’s glistening

dew-drops were just beginning to fall heavily and hoarily in the first

suspicion of frost.

Jean had no notice to give to the sweet pungent smell of the heather,

to the varying hues of the purple milkwort, the yellow rock rose, the

nodding white-flowered grass of Parnassus which diversified the red

ling. She did not listen to the hum of the big bee--a splendid fellow

in black and gold, who was continually crossing her path and sounding

his drone in her ear, or to the twitter of the brown and grey linnet

which brushed her very skirts as he rose from the broom, or to the crow

of the moor cock and to the cry of the plover. Yet all these noises

were made doubly distinct by the sabbath stillness which rendered

itself felt even on the moor when no sportsmen were shooting there, no

quarry men or bands of late shearers taking near cuts to their quarries

and fields.

Now and then Jean roused herself from her painful abstraction,

and tried to control her racked heart and brain, by what she had

always known as the potent spell of duty. It was the sabbath day,

and therefore she was not her own mistress; though it was her ‘day

out,’ she ought not, as a Christian woman, to be engrossed with her

own worldly concerns, however imperative. She should try at least

to engage in some mental exercise befitting the day--since, as Jean

held, its divine obligation was not affected by her human distress.

She made a great effort and prepared to repeat aloud, as she walked,

one of the psalms with which her memory was stored, using it as the

early Christians raised the symbol of the cross for a charm against

distracting worldly thoughts.

She began mechanically to say the first psalm, the earliest learnt by

Scotch children, one of the most familiar throughout life. But

All people that on earth do dwell,

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice,

in its call to universal praise--associated closely as it is with

the noblest, simplest, most moving melody which ever rang rudely yet

thrillingly through barn kirk or along bleak hill-side, faltered and

died away on Jean’s quivering lips.

The staunch-hearted woman began again with the psalm which holds the

second place in the regard of her nation--

The Lord’s my shepherd,

I’ll not want;

and when she had reached the fourth verse, she found that her choice

was more appropriate:

Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale,

Yet will I fear none ill,

said Jean steadfastly--and truly, it was like voluntarily descending

into ‘death’s dark vale’ to go on with the end in view for which Jean

journeyed this day. And if she had got her choice, the girl in her

magnificent bloom of young womanhood, with all her warm interest in

life--which her religion sanctified but did not stifle, would far

rather have lain her down and died, than found Bob Meffin a leear, a

still more cruel sinner against another woman than against Jean herself.

Jean was not well known to the congregation of Logan Kirk; she had not

been there more than once or twice in her life before, and the one

person in the neighbourhood with whom she was well acquainted she did

not expect to see in the kirk this morning.

She reached the little kirk close to the adjoining hamlet, both of

the ‘drystane dyke’ order of architecture, just as the most primitive

of bells commenced to make discord instead of harmony, clattering and

tinkling instead of clashing and booming its summons.

Nobody recognised Jean as she passed through the groups in the

roughly kept kirkyard, and though she did not absolutely shrink from

observation, being too brave and upright to take, as if by natural

instinct, to hiding her head, she certainly did not desire notice.

She was glad to get into a back seat without attracting any further

remark--than what was casually bestowed on a strange face, from the

fellow-worshippers who were equally strange to her.

The country people--most of them farmers and farm-servants with the

village hand-loom weavers--tramped and tumbled in, with the want

of ceremony which used to distinguish a Scotch rural congregation.

The minister and precentor took their places, and Jean fixed mute

imploring eyes on the latter as if the decision of her fate rested

with him. He was a homely, elderly man, distinguished among his

compeers by the _sobriquet_, derived from his office in the kirk, of

‘Singing Johnny,’ a souter by trade, but a less thirsty and a more

theological souter than his great namesake. As he rose for the secular

rite which in Scotland precedes the religious services, even the most

austerely devout listened attentively with human interest. And if

the congregation had only known, so as to watch a young woman in the

obscurity of the back seats, they might have been aroused by the fading

of the rich colour in her face, the rigid set of her mouth, and the

desperate light as of a creature at bay, in what ought to have been

her reasonable grey eyes, to comprehend that her hands were clasped

tight--even clenched--under the shelter of the book-board in an agony.

Johnny dallied with the matter in hand, perfectly unaware of the

torture he was inflicting. He laboured under no press of business as

at Martinmas or Whitsunday; this was a sabbath between terms when

little was doing in Johnny’s line. He was able to rise in a deliberate

manner, to sleek down his stubbly hair as he was wont to do, before

raising the psalm tune, to look around him with even more philosophical

indifference; indeed, the only customary act which he refrained from

doing as if to distinguish his secular from his religious duties,

was that of putting up his hands before his mouth and giving a

preliminary cough behind the screen. At last he proclaimed sonorously:

‘There is a purpose of marriage between Tammas Proodfit and Ailison

Clinkscales--for the second time,’ not that the purpose had been

entertained, dropped and resumed, but that the announcement had been

made before and would ring out once again in the ears of the listening

kirk.

One woman was listening intently with bent head as if she would fain

catch even the sound of a pin’s fall, through the thick tumultuous

beating of her heart. At the words spoken there was the faintest rustle

of relaxation in her attitude. The couple whose intention had been thus

sounded abroad were entire strangers to her. What had she to do with

a Tammas Proodfit and an Ailison Clinkscales, or what had they to do

with her? It was not to hear them ‘cried’ that she had walked ten miles

across the moor.

After the proclamation there was a distinct pause, which had the air

of being instituted for sensational effect, unless Johnny had no

more ‘purposes of marriages’ in the background to fire off at the

congregation.

One fainting heart leapt up with half wild relief and joy. After all

it was a base report without a word of truth in it. Bob was to be

proved innocent as the babe unborn.

Woe’s me! Johnny was even then fumbling with another set of lines in

his horny fingers; he lifted up his voice afresh and called all present

to witness that there was also a purpose of marriage ‘between Robert

Meffin and Leezbeth Red for the first time.’ Having discharged his lay

functions, he stopped abruptly to look up, in expectation of the folded

paper which the minister rose and bent over the pulpit to hand to him,

taking Singing Johnny into his confidence as it were, with regard to

the psalms and paraphrases appropriate to the sermon, which were to

be sung during the service, for which the precentor was to find the

fitting tunes on the spur of the moment.

Even after the commencement of the second proclamation, the formal

employment of the full christian name struck so unfamiliarly on Jean’s

ears, as to stay the flood of anguish for an instant longer, till the

enunciation of the surname in company with the name she had heard given

to her rival, rendered doubt no longer possible. It was all over, as

Jean had heard said after her father and mother had drawn their last

breath. It was too true: this was her Bob Meffin and no other whom she

had heard cried with another woman in order to repair as far as might

be a shameful wrong.

Jean felt like the rest of us when the catastrophe we have most dreaded

has come upon us, that she had not known how much she had hoped against

hope--how hard a battle hope had fought for bare life, till it lay

slain stark and cold at her feet.

For she had not come there with any intention of protesting against the

marriage which would be celebrated within the next few weeks. Such a

step is even rarer in Scotland than in England; neither could there be

any appeal under the circumstances. It was only that Bob Meffin had

lied to her and before the Lord, had fallen from what Jean had judged

to be the glory of his manhood and dragged down another with him in his

fall. Thenceforth the two who had been all in all could be less than

nothing to each other.

Jean had listened to the sentence which blighted her youthful hopes,

crushed her tenderest affections, and left her in the flower of her

beauty, in all her sense and goodness, for no fault of her own, a lass

‘lichtlied’--scorned before the world--that sorest humiliation to a

woman. And it was all for the wiles of another lass with regard to whom

Jean knew full well, without any vanity or arrogance on her part, that

Leezbeth Red and such as she were not worthy to be named in the same

breath with her--Jean, since they could not save either themselves or

the men whom they had never loved with a noble unselfish love, from

gross sin and degradation.

But unless in the involuntary shiver which ran through her--while long

rays of sunshine were finding their way into the kirk windows and into

the open door, lighting up and warming even the remotest corner--and in

the breath drawn in and let out again with a dry inaudible sob, Jean

gave no sign. She neither screamed nor fainted, she made no ‘dust’ or

disturbance in the kirk of all places, she would have thought that

neither maidenly--‘wiselike’ she would have called it--nor reverent.

Bob Meffin was a fallen sinner, that was all, though it was enough

for her to carry branded on her heart to her dying day. And she would

never see or speak with him again, though she had loved him with all

her heart. And what power of passion and depth of tenderness existed

in that heart may be fairly conceived in the light of a biblical

compliment which her master the minister once paid her. He had been

watching Jean with his younger children when he exclaimed suddenly,

‘Jean, your mistress is right, you’re a fine young woman; you remind me

of that riddle of Samson’s, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.”’

CHAPTER II.

BOB MEFFIN’S AMENDS.

Fourteen years passed--not without their changes. It was a fine frosty

winter afternoon when two knots of homely men and women--forming two

distinct coteries--were gathered at one end of Dalroy village, where,

on the right side of the little street stood the Dalroy ‘smiddy,’ and

on the left was ‘the smiddy well’--a dipping-in-well famous throughout

the village for the excellence of its ‘tea-water.’ Horses were waiting

to be shod round the smiddy door, while their temporary owners--dark

figures in the ruddy glow of the furnace, prepared to hold their rustic

parliament. At the centre of attraction over the way maids and matrons

took their turn in filling their cans and pitchers.

Very nearly at the same moment Jean Kinloch came in sight--emerging

from the blue haze made up of the frost and the gloaming, while there

was heard, with the peculiar distinctness of such a sound in such

weather, the rumbling of a cart, with cart, horse, and driver still

unseen, sounding louder and louder as it drew near in the opposite

direction.

Jean had a plaid pinned over her cap, and carried a bright pitcher

dangling lightly from one wrist; she was sniffing with satisfaction

‘the caller air,’ which sent her rich blood coursing through her veins,

and yet not refusing to welcome the hot blast which met her as she

crossed in front of the smiddy door.

Of course, Jean’s arrival was hailed before she was within ear-shot by

a double chorus of half-approving, half-ironical comments--the purport

of which she could very well guess--beginning with ‘Here comes the Miss

Fraser’s Jean.’

Jean had remained in the service of the Manse family all these years,

though both the minister and his wife were dead, and the Manse was no

longer the home of the remnant of the household. Impoverished as such

remnants usually are, and consisting only of Jean’s young ladies, they

could hardly have continued to live on, in genteel poverty, if Jean,

who was so closely allied to them as to be styled theirs by inalienable

possession, had not worked their double work on diminished wages.

‘Jean’s true to a minute,’ said another speaker, a man in the smiddy.

‘She’s nae daidler either at meat or wark.’

‘Ay, lasses, ye may stand about,’ a woman at the well took up the

theme, without hearing the man’s contribution to the subject. ‘Jean

Kinloch’s no sma’ graith--least of a’ in her ain opinion.’ It was like

a version of that climax of commendation pronounced on the virtuous

woman in Proverbs, ‘Let her own works praise her in the gates,’ with

the grudging qualification that must have mingled with the praise.

Jean did not mind much either the concentrated scrutiny or the sifting

analysis of her merits and demerits, to which, with her knowledge of

the world, she knew she was exposed. Like a pillar of strength in her

self-reliance and composure, her fine presence was unimpaired by her

servant’s costume, and her goodly prime untouched by any token of

decay. Though she had not risen in worldly rank and prosperity, this

was a very different Jean from the miserable lass, high-souled and

innocent as she was, who had sat in a back seat in Logan Kirk to hear

Bob Meffin cried with another woman.

Before Jean could say ‘Gude day’ to anybody, while she was still coming

forward in the mingled lights of a cold primrose in the western

sky behind her, and a warm saffron from the glare of the smiddy at

her right hand, the cart--the rumble of which had been constantly

increasing--rattled up, bringing cart, horse, and driver into the

illumination. And even before the din of its progress had ceased or the

half-dazzled eyes could distinguish the face of the new comer, a voice,

which seemed to issue from the past, suddenly called in eager excited

tones, ‘Jean Kinloch!’

Jean turned startled, and with a shock even to her well-strung nerves,

at the imperative summons. In spite of changes in the speaker, to which

those in herself were infinitesimal, she recognised, without a moment’s

hesitation, her old lover. She had not seen him since six months before

that day in Logan Kirk, on the last occasion when the two had parted

a fond loving lad and lass--a plighted bridegroom and bride. She had

heard little of him in the interval, for his sister Eppie had married

a soldier and ‘followed the drum,’ while with her departure Jean had

lost all chance of news of her recreant lover.

Taken by surprise as she was, Jean cried out with shaken accents, in

turn, ‘Bob Meffin!’ Then she recalled, as any true woman would have

recalled, instantaneously, the whole circumstances, the scene, the

spectators. Some of them had known the two in their green youth, and

were doubtless speculating already, with keen interest and a sense of

the ridiculous, how Jean Kinloch would meet Bob Meffin now that the

pair had reached the years of discretion--after what had once been

between them, after the falseness of Bob which had separated them.

Jean was equal to the occasion; she stepped up to the cart, to which

Bob sat nailed, with the intention of speaking to him, and doing her

part in the interchange of such light questions and answers, as might

be expected between old acquaintances who had known each other well

in youth, and who happened to encounter each other in later years. As

to any nearer relation which had ever existed between them, Jean’s

attitude showed that she, at least, meant to behave as if she had

forgotten it as utterly as the most trifling incident of her girlish

days.

But unfalteringly as Jean carried out this line of conduct, in the few

paces that intervened between her and Bob Meffin, which she crossed

steadily with every eye upon her, and with her own eyes not fixed on

the ground, but raised to catch his, she took in at a glance the whole

man--including every indication of the transformation he had undergone

since the last time she had seen him.

That Bob Meffin had been a gallant-looking young fellow in his degree,

stalwart, lithe, fit to heave up the biggest sheaves on the stack which

was in the process of building--as Jean had shorn foremost on her

harvest rig--and to dance longest and with lightest foot at harvest

home or bridal.

This Bob Meffin was a broken-down, fast-ageing man, while Jean was

still in her prime. His back was bent, while hers was straight; his

hair had grown thin, and hung in uncared-for grey locks under his faded

cap, while hers, in its undiminished profusion and without one dead

white thread, was carefully disposed beneath her spotless white cap.

His cheeks and forehead were weather-worn, dragged, and wrinkled, while

hers remained fresh, round, and smooth. His working clothes had lost

all the smartness with which the Bob Meffin of old had worn his most

patched jacket and most clay-clogged shoon. Before that lightning-flash

of womanly observation, they gave evidence of such untidiness and

neglect in absent buttons, ragged cuffs, and the frayed, dangling ends

of his neckerchief, as not only cast the utmost discredit on the wife

who had supplanted Jean, but told in graphic language that Bob had

lost all personal pride and even proper sense of what was due in the

dress of a respectable ploughman, who had risen to be foreman over the

younger men on the farm.

Here were the wrong doer and the wrong sufferer. A fine moral could

have been pointed from the difference between them, even though a

hair-splitting casuist might have urged that it was not a case of

retribution alone, since the constant exposure and the coarse fare

of a ploughman, even when he carries the clearest of consciences

within his bosom, is apt to tell upon him betimes, and make him look

elderly before he is forty. As for Jean, though she had undergone

‘a disappointment,’ having continued in domestic service, she had

of necessity missed such parallel drudgery and lack of sufficiently

nourishing food, as she had once looked forward to willingly and

cheerfully. But such causes make the ploughman’s wife keep pace with

her husband in ageing prematurely.

Still Bob Meffin had altered with a vengeance; and Jean could hardly

believe the testimony of her eyes and was impressed by the change. For

surely nobody will say that because Adam delved and Eve span, because

Jean had been a servant lass and Bob a ploughman all their respective

lives, they had not the feelings of their kind, so that Jean should

fail to have a sensitive perception that her former hero had lost, in

the rough battle of life, all the glamour with which he had once been

surrounded?

Was Jean pleased that it should be so? That she had lived to see how

Bob Meffin had been punished for his desertion of her and degradation

of another? She could not tell, there was such a tumult of pride and

pain in her heart.

But she went up to him where he sat and said with the easiest manner

imaginable, ‘Is this you, Bob? How are you, and how are your wife and

bairns?’

‘My wife!’ cried Bob aghast. ‘Do you no ken, Jean, she’s dead and gane

a year and a half syne?’

Jean received another shock in which there were appalling elements.

The dead woman had been one against whom Jean--Christian woman as

she was--had borne a sore grudge for many a day. Nay, only a moment

ago, Jean had been sharply summing up, with rising disdain and not

without a sense of bitter satisfaction, what she had reckoned as so

many unanswerable proofs of Leezbeth Red’s wifely incompetency, while

all the time Jean’s successful rival had passed away long months ago

without Jean’s knowledge, to give in her--Leezbeth’s--account to the

Great Judge.

‘Poor woman!’ said Jean more softly; ‘she had gotten her ca’ early.’

‘She was never a strong woman,’ said Bob, speaking without the

awkwardness which must have accompanied the discussion of his living

wife’s qualities with Jean. He spoke also with that little hush of

reverence, which is found in every man or woman with a spark of

generosity and awe in the soul, when he or she refers to the dead--once

so near, but who has gone far beyond all kindly communion and familiar

every-day life.

In addition Bob showed that grave composure of regret which might be

expected from a reasonable man and a widower whose grief was a year

and a half old. ‘Leezbeth was silly from the time of our marriage,’

continued Bob, not uttering a supercilious reflection on the limited

mental capacity of his wife, simply expressing himself in the

vernacular for delicate health. ‘She had mostly to keep her bed, for

the last year or twa of her life.’

That sentence explained much. The misfortune of having married a

sickly wife doomed to die prematurely, may only serve to call forth

the deeper tenderness of the rich man whose personal independence and

the necessaries--nay, the soothing solaces of whose life, remain

altogether untouched by the calamity. But it is a crushing blow to

the poor man, however faithfully and gallantly he may bear it. Bob’s

slouching gait, haggard face, grey hair and uncared-for clothes were

all easily accounted for now, without farther severe reflection either

on himself or on his dead wife. They spoke of hard work doubled when

rest should have come; of the son of the soil returning from his day’s

darg,

Wat, wat, wat and weary,

with neither a blazing ingle nor a clean hearth-stone, not a single

creature-comfort to sustain him; of ill or uncooked food such as a

dainty townbred beggar would have turned from in supreme disgust; of a

father who had to be father and mother in one to his helpless children;

of long nights of waking and watching for the labouring man whose sleep

ought to have been sweet.

Jean, who understood the circumstances so well, was not the woman

to be unmoved by them. ‘But your bairns, Bob?’ she suggested kindly,

turning instinctively to what seemed to her the single prospect of

better days for the speaker. ‘They will be getting on, and rising up to

be a blessing to you?’

‘They are that already, woman,’ said Bob heartily, while his careworn

face brightened inexpressibly, ‘though the auldest of the two lasses,

Lizzie and Peggy, is but growing thirteen, and they have to take turn

and turn about at their schulin’ and at keepin’ the house. They are

as gude and clever, though I should na say sae, as lasses can be. My

word! Jean, they can kindle a fire and put out a bannock that would not

disgrace yoursel’.’

Here was a trace of the old Bob with his impetuosity and sanguineness.

Jean smiled faintly in listening to him, even while she asked herself

sternly, how she could be such a weak and wicked sinner as to feel a

pang of jealous resentment shoot through her. It was because she heard

this poor man who had suffered so much, refer in terms which proved

his high esteem for the only thing of value that remained to him--his

bairns and Leezbeth Red’s--not Jean’s--to her, who must go a lone woman

to her grave through his treachery.

‘For the bit laddie,’ continued Bob with a slight fall and wistful

yearning in his voice, ‘he’s but a wee chappie of three years. We

lost twa weans between him and the lasses. He’s no stout--I’m whiles

frightened that he has his mither’s constitution. But his sisters and

a gude auld body of a wife in our cotton do the best they can for

him, and wha kens but that we’ll be permitted to pu’ him through--and

live to see him a braw man some day?’ Bob lifted his bent head with

glistening eyes at the remote but inspiring prospect.

Jean thought of a manse child that had died in its infancy, on

which she had doted as women like her are apt to lavish passionate

affection on little children. ‘I hope sae too, Bob, my man,’ she said

in the kindly phraseology of her class, and addressing him all the

more gently, because she sought, in her own mind, to atone for the

unreasonable, unrighteous anger she had felt stirring in her heart

against him, for his very fatherliness, only a moment before. ‘I’ll be

right glad to hear that your laddie has thriven.’

Bob’s face brightened more and more, as he leapt down from the

cart-head, and stood by Jean’s side. But in spite of the decided action

a certain hesitation and agitation began to appear in his manner.

The movement served to remind Jean of what she had been losing

consciousness of, that she and Bob Meffin were central figures in an

attentive circle scrutinising their proceedings, and probably catching

scraps of their conversation.

‘Jean,’ said her old lover, lost to, or careless of, their public

position, a broken red rising in his face while his eyes fell before

hers, ‘I’m pleased to have seen you here, lass; and I own I had a

notion we might forgather, after I had been with the cart for draff

at the brewery, and made up my mind to come this way, because I had a

doubt about a nail in ane of Bruce the horse’s shoon--the back fit on

the hinder side--which Jamie Caird could put richt. Jean, I leed to

you when we were young, I’ll never deny it; but oh! woman, ye dinna

ken what it is for a man to own to a lee, whether to man or woman.

And ye dinna ken how I was tempted--a thochtless lad as I was, in the

same place with a bonnie fulish young lass who took a liking to him,

and would let him see her heart richt or wrang. Jean, I’ll no say ill

of the dead to whom I did wrang, who was the mither of my bairns. She

did her best, puir feckless thing, when she had gotten me--no sic a

bargain after all, since I was neither so clever nor so handy as to

make up for her lack of pith and experience--and she was a tried woman,

racked wi’ pain and faint with heart sickness, longing to be gane to

her rest, her worst enemy might have pitied her, puir Leezbeth! long

before she gaed aff the face of the earth. I would be a muckle brute

to blame her at this time of the day, and to throw a’ the wyte of my

faut on her. Still, Jean, the truth must be spoken, and gin ye had

kenned, even at the time, there was some puir excuse for a moment’s

madness of passion and its miserable consequences--you were aye so

strong yoursel’ that you micht hae had some mercy on the weak--and

we were weak as water, baith Leezbeth and me. But it’s a’ ower now,

Jean, and you are to the fore and a “wanter” yet. Woman, gin you would

suffer me to make some amends--a’ that’s in my power. I’ve keepet my

place and risen to be foreman at Blawart Brae in spite of a’. I’ve

gude thirty pounds a year o’ wages, and I’ve paid up my debt this last

twalmonth. If I had onybody to manage for me I micht do weel yet. It’s

not to certain puirtith I’m bidding you, Jean. And there’s my little

cummers,’ continued the infatuated man, with a flash of exultant hope,

well-nigh conviction, at the mention of his young daughters; ‘they will

be proud to do your will, and wait on you like a queen; you could rear

them into fine women like yoursel’. The wee chappie would be a fash to

you, no doubt, but you are never the woman to heed sic fash, and oh!

lass, you dinna ken what a takin’ way he has wi’ him, how he is the pet

of ilka body that comes near him, though he’s ill-grown and weakly. He

tholes his trouble like a bit man, and when he’s no clean knocked on

the head wi’t, and wallied like the young grass in simmer-time when

there has not been a shower to slocken its drouth for sax weeks, he’s

the plaisantest o’ God’s creatures you ever saw. Jean, you would like

Jockie as gin he were your ain, and you micht be the saving of my

laddie,’ pleaded Bob passionately, as he had never pled before, not

even for Jean’s young love.

Jean was so confounded at the turn matters had taken, and the advantage

Bob Meffin was seeking to wrest from her pity, and the softening of

her heart towards him and his, that she hardly gave their full meaning

to the first words of this second suit, and it was not for a moment

that the extent of their presumption struck her. ‘The deil’s in the

man!’ Jean said under her breath, in spite of her principles, her

decorum, and the recollection that she had served in a minister’s

family for a large part of her life. Was there no end to the conceit

of men, in themselves and their bairns? And so he thought he could

make her amends! Doubtless he imagined she was still hankering after

his fickle love, and pining for his sake, while she being an honest

woman had banished him from her thoughts, as a married man, fourteen

years before. By his careless use of the slighting term ‘wanter,’ which

complaisant contemptuous married couples applied to single men but

particularly to single women, he betrayed that he shared in the coarse

popular scorn of old maids, and the mean opinion that they would be

only too glad to snatch at any--the most wretched, chance of changing

their condition and escaping from its reproach. He, the middle-aged,

battered, and broken-down ploughman with his two forward hempies of

lasses, and his heavy handful of a sick bairn, concluding impudently

that any husband was better than none, judged himself a fit match for

an independent well-esteemed woman like Jean Kinloch! And he had been

the very man, the leear, as he had rightly called himself, to the one

woman, the worst enemy to the other, of the two who had trusted him.

He had wrung Jean’s heart when it was young and tender, and lichtlied

her for a lass like Leezbeth Red, leaving Jean to be the mark for the

jests and scoffs of mocking tongues.

Jean was burning with indignation, and looking at it in her light,

greater provocation could not have been given her. ‘Are you daft, Bob

Meffin?’ She turned upon him with a pale face set like iron, and words

which cut like swords. ‘Do you think I would have a gift of you, after

what has come and gane? If I had been brodent on a man, I might have

had my wale of a hantle better than you ever were, without waiting so

long. Man, I’m weel content to be an auld maid, it’s no sic a forlorn

lot as you marriet folk in your crouseness fancy. But I would be keen

to get marriet gin I could consent to stand in a dead woman’s shoon, a

lass who was like to have had “a misfortune”’--Jean used the apologetic

phrase with strong contempt--‘who had so little truth and honesty in

her that she could steal the fickle man’s heart and word which were

not worth the taking, though they had been flung at her feet, kennin’

a’ the time they belonged to another woman--would I be plaguet wi’ her

brats o’ bairns, think ye?’

Bob heard the terms of her answer with as much amazement as she had

experienced at his proposal, with consternation added to the amazement,

and with the pain of a great disappointment in the crestfallen and

wounded expression of his face.

But at the last scornful words the man’s spirit kindled within him. He

faced Jean, and replied to her with volleys of wrath: ‘Jean Kinloch,

you may cast laith at me, you’ve ower gude richt, though I thocht--I

was wrang--a’ the same I had a fulish notion it would be grander to

forgi’e and forget, and that the lass I had lo’ed sae weel, when there

was naebody to come atween us, micht be fit to play the grander

part. But to cast laith at the silent dead for the wrong-doing of her

youth, after she has paid the heavy cost--to cast laith, to my face,

at my innocent bairns, my twa gude lasses and my stricken laddie, Jean

Kinloch, you were na blate.’

‘Na, Bob, I didna mean--’ began Jean hesitatingly, but he would not

hear her.

‘You’ve done what I’ll stand frae no man or woman born, no frae the

woman I aince lo’ed as I lo’ed my life, and whom even when I gaed her

up, because I couldna say “na” either to mysel’ or to anither, I would

hae focht ony mither’s son in braid Scotland who would have dared to

say that she was not amaist worthy to be worshipped. I thocht you were

ower gude for me, and it was a comfort in repenting o’ my folly, that

you were weel rid o’ me. But I tell you where you stand glowering

there, you’re not the woman I thocht you; you’re not gude enough for

the gift o’ my bairns that you have spoken tantingly o’--Jean Kinloch,

you’re a hard, cauld woman this day.’

This was turning the tables in truth, and an astounding effect followed.

Bob Meffin’s words could hardly be called reasonable, and yet the

utterance of them seemed to lift him above his fall and to lend a

homely dignity to the sinner, as he walked away from the old love to

whom he had not been true.

Jean felt it with a curious force. She had the strongest conception

that Bob Meffin, who had jilted her in the past and was insulting her

in the present--as she had thought only a moment before, who defended

his dead wife and loved his children so fondly, was having the best of

it in their contest. He had been foolish and false in word and deed, he

might be what she had called him--the most conceited and audacious of

men. He might share in the low views current as to ‘wanters’ and old

maids, yet could it be that Bob Meffin had grown a better man than Jean

was a woman, while he had been the sinner and she the sinned against?

Had the simple, manly patience with which he had paid the penalty

reversed the result in character, in the subtle workings by which good

may triumph over evil? Had Bob become less and she more worldly-minded

since they parted? Had his nature been softened, mellowed, purified in

his ceaseless toil for his sick wife and helpless children, while she

in her comparative ease, her leisure for her bible and her kirk, had

lost sight of magnanimity and mercy and learnt only vindictiveness and

malice? And if so, had she not been doubly defrauded? Was Bob to cheat

her not only of earthly, but of heavenly happiness?

Jean’s sense of justice rebelled against the merest bewildered

suspicion of such a sentence. But she was sorry for the words she

had spoken; she had been mean enough to cherish the recollection of

Bob’s offence after all these years, and, with a full knowledge of the

apples of Sodom it had borne, to cast it up to the offender. And he had

been perfectly right in his accusation--she had ‘cast laith’ at the

dead wife whose soul had gone before the great tribunal--at Leezbeth

Red’s and Bob Meffin’s innocent bairns, thus outraging the most sacred

feelings of humanity. As Jean was a good woman she must take back her

words in part, she must say she was sorry for having uttered them.

‘Forgi’e me, Bob,’ she said in a low tone, her handsome face working

with suppressed emotion. ‘It was sma’ of me and unworthy of a Christian

woman to let on about byganes--no to say it was cruel to say an

unbecoming word o’ your dead wife and your living bairns.’

Alas! the original mercurial temperament of the man which no suffering

had altogether subdued, leapt up on the slightest encouragement from

the depth of alienation and despondency to the height of fresh love

and hope. He was not merely propitiated, he was elevated by a single

word of regret so as to be ready to repeat the affront he had given.

‘Will you no think better of it, Jean, lass, and make me a prood and

happy man at last?’ he called out loudly and recklessly. Jean’s recent

remorse for her harshness was nipped in the bud, and she was furious at

the renewed outrage. ‘No me, niver, niver,’ she proclaimed to him and

to all who might choose to listen.

CHAPTER III.

JEAN’S REPRISALS.

Eppie Meffin had returned with her soldier, a full-blown sergeant

in possession of a comfortable pension, to settle in her native

village. And Jean went to congratulate her old friend, but found that

condolences instead of congratulations were in requisition.

Eppie stood bathed in tears with her good bonnet and shawl thrown on

anyhow, in her haste to set out for the Dalroy railway-station, which

was now within three miles of the village, while the train stopped for

five minutes at another station a mile from Logan, on its way to a

place of greater note.

‘Come a bittie with me, Jean, it’s lang since we’ve seen ane anither,

lass. I take your early visit very kind, and am fain to hear your

cracks, ‘but I canna stop to speak to you,’ said Eppie, without waiting

to be questioned on the cause of her distress.

Jean complied with the petition, excited almost out of her staid

maidenly composure. And her companion was not slow to pour forth her

lamentations over the misfortune that had befallen her, through all

that was left of her kindred.

‘Oo, aye, it’s that unlucky Bob: you may be satisfied now, Jean, you

ha’e lived to see vengeance execut’ on him--as they say, it’s aye

ta’en--even in this world, on the deceivers and deserters o’ women.’

‘Me satisfied!’ cried Jean in unfeigned horror; ‘what do you tak me

for, Eppie Meffin? Do you think I wish, or ha’e ever wished, an ill

wish on your brither? You’re speakin’ like an unregenerate heathen.

Is’t his ae bit laddie?’ inquired Jean almost tenderly.

‘It’s a hantle waur than the bairn,’ groaned Eppie. ‘I canna help

liking the wee thing who is no accountable for a’ the fash he gies; but

’deed he would be weel awa’, at rest from a’ his pains.’

‘Oh! Eppie, Eppie,’ said Jean reproachfully, ‘when Bob’s heart is set

on this bairn, and ane can never tell what the silliest callant may

come through, and live, and grow to; you a mither yoursel’ to speak sic

words!’

‘You speak o’ me bein’ a mither,’ said Eppie with a half-choked voice,

‘woman, you dinna ken what the outcome o’ a mither’s love may lead to,

though you’re gude--you were aye a gude lass, Jean Kinloch. There’s

my ain brisk mannie Peter. Do you think if I had the choice, and if I

kenned I was to be ta’en away frae him, and his father was to forfeit

his pension and become superannuate’, I wouldna rather choose to have

a’ the briskness ta’en out of my laddie, and see him lying still--never

to stir mair--only fit for the mools, than look forward to a chance of

his comin’ to want, and fa’n on the parish, and being knocked about and

scorned, and treated to a dog’s life?’

‘Then it’s Bob himsel’,’ said Jean briefly.

‘Wha else should it be?’ demanded Eppie, made peevish by her grief.

‘Ye dinna say he’s dead?’ said Jean, with white lips.

‘No dead outricht,’ said Eppie, not so grateful as she ought to have

been for the great respite, never having contemplated the extremity,

‘but he is no muckle better, so far as being a bread-winner is

concerned. He was trying to break in a maisterfu’ horse, when it turned

and flung at him, and struck him atween the elbow and the shouther.

His arm--and it’s his richt ane--is that melled the doctor is feared

the banes will never gang thegither again, and he may have to cut it

aff bodily. If poor Bob survive the operation, and be left an ae-armed

man, he’ll no even be fit for a hag man’ (the used-up man who is the

cattle-feeder on a farm). His maister may do something for him, so long

as he lives, since the hurt was got in his service, but Bob cannot be

allowed mair than will provide for his ain bite and sup, and what is

to become of his bairns even in his lifetime Gude can tell. Me and my

man micht take ane o’ the halflin lassies, but we could do nae mair;

and little as the like o’ her is gude for, she’s like to be ill spared

with her faither as weel as her little brither thrown on her and her

sister’s care. Pity me! for the care, wi’ the auldest of the twa hardly

in her teens. Now, Jean, when you’ve heard a’ will you flee out on me

again for wishing the weary wean were safe in a better place?’

Jean was silent in the magnitude of the calamity.

At this moment Eppie had only one complaint to make of the victim,

and she did not dream of including Jean in it, for Eppie was a loyal

friend as well as an attached sister. She had heard already how Bob

as a widower had ventured to make up to Jean Kinloch again, and so

far from approving of the venture, Eppie, in fairness to her sex, and

still more in fairness to Jean, had said stoutly, unswayed by family

interest and partiality, that Bob was rightly served in the repulse he

had received. He had no reason to count on any other answer. He was

both bold and simple to speer Jean Kinloch’s price a second time. There

had always been a simplicity about him, poor chap, though he was no

fool either. Doubtless that had been the cause of his falling an easy

victim to the wiles of that light-headed cutty Leezbeth Red--that Eppie

should miscall the dead. But Eppie’s auld mother, who had a great work

with Jean, could never abide Leezbeth. Thus Eppie took refuge from any

self-reproach for the disparaging criticism on her late sister-in-law,

by regarding it as a mark of filial respect.

‘You ken, Jean, it’s a mercy, “there was never a silly Jocky but

there was aye as silly a Jenny,” and some canny woman, a wee bit up

in years, wi no muckle to lippen to, micht have drawn up wi’ Bob and

his foreman’s house and wages. And what though, she had been a thocht

ill-faured?’ speculated Eppie boldly, ‘she would not ha’e made a waur

wife and step-mither because of the shape of her nose or the colour of

her skin. Of course I dinna mean a weel-to-do, weel-looking woman like

you, Jean,’ broke off Eppie in perfect sincerity; ‘a match like that

was no longer to be thought of for him. If you were inclined to change

your state, you micht aspire as high as a butler or a schulemaister.

But about the woman that might ha’e done for our Bob afore this

mischanter--if she had not been a fule o’ a lassie--caring only for

idleset and a reive at whatever pleasure came in her way--she would not

ha’e been that ill aff. Puir Bob has learnt to serve hissel’ and to be

easy served, and his patience wi’ these bairns o’ his, and his pleasure

in them, is jist extraordinar’.’

‘Yes,’ Jean said half abstractedly, ‘he seemed to think a deal o’ his

bairns.’

‘Nae doubt, ilka craw thinks its ain bird whitest, and Bob’s birds

were aye birds o’ Paradise. No that I would deny they’re fine lasses

as lasses gang, but will that prevent them being frichtet out o’ their

wits if Bob has to get his arm chapped aff? and if he come round, how

long will they be, think ye, of forgetting the trouble and getting out

their heads? And how can I, wi’ a man and bairns and a house o’ my ain

to look after, and a railway journey atween me and Bob’s family, keep

the lasses out of a’ but good company, and set them down and haud them

on their seats, at their seams and their knittin’, and teach them to be

orderly and punctual and weel-mannered,’ said the sergeant’s wife with

emphasis. ‘No that it matters muckle since it has come to the warst,’

she added the next moment, sinking back into dejection. ‘I see nae way

now for them but they maun gang on the parish--that ever ony o’ my folk

should come to this!’ Eppie ended with fresh tears of mingled personal

mortification and grief for ‘our Bob.’

Jean tarried a couple of weeks, hearing various reports of Bob’s

keeping up or giving way--of the youngest of his doctors maintaining

that he would both save the arm and restore it to usefulness, only

months of suffering and helplessness must intervene--of the eldest

of his doctors swearing that Bob’s arm, if it were not amputated at

once, would cost him his life at no distant day. Jean could bear it no

longer. Her punishment, not Bob’s, was more than she could bear. She

would ‘take her foot in her hand,’ go across the moor, and ask how Bob

Meffin fared. She was an old enough woman to decide for herself on the

desirability of such a step. She was old enough in her rank of life to

be her own chaperon, and dispense with the presence of Eppie on her

visit.

Jean was not accustomed to railways as her travelled friend was, so it

did not occur to her to lessen the fatigue of the expedition by having

recourse to the station, nearly three miles off, and being carried by

the iron horse and deposited a mile from her destination. To Jean, by

far the simpler and less troublesome course was to ‘take her foot in

her hand’ and walk the ten miles to Logan.

It was already the month of February, and the days were lengthening,

though spring was making little show in the woods and fields, and least

of all on the moor.

Jean accomplished this journey as she had accomplished that other,

with the frost-bitten instead of the blooming heather under her feet,

and the former summer sky still grey with wintry clouds over her head.

It was not the sabbath day, so Jean was not called upon to redeem the

holy time by speaking to herself in psalms and hymns and spiritual

songs, as she trod the long and hard road; but she caught herself

muttering involuntarily half aloud more than once, ‘God be gude to

Bob Meffin and his mitherless bairns.’ And she was conscious, through

her anxiety, that peace with God and man, instead of restless misery,

filled her breast.

Jean passed the kirk where she had sat and heard Bob ‘cried’ with

another woman, as it seemed to her an age ago--passed the kirkyard

where Leezbeth Red lay sleeping. She knew the road to Blawart Brae

perfectly well. Had she not learnt its every turning by heart in the

days when she had thought of the farm in the light of her home as a

young wife? Bob’s present house was not, indeed, the house which

that young wife would have dwelt in, the last was tenanted by one of

the junior ploughmen and his wife--no older than Jean would have been

if she had come to Blawart Brae a married woman by the time she was

twenty. Jean caught a glimpse of a young lass whose brown hand was

already invested with the dignity of a wedding-ring, as she looked up

and paused in the act of pulling up a curly green kail-stock from her

‘yaird.’ Jean stared wistfully at the fresh contented face as at a

picture of what her own face might have been like, if Bob Meffin had

not broken his vows more than a dozen of years before.

Bob’s cottage was that of the foreman on the farm, but the little

advantages which the promotion secured had all been lost in the

grinding poverty to which he had been subjected.

Bob himself opened the door to Jean’s knock, for he was able to walk

about the house, though his arm was still in an early precarious stage

of recovery.

‘Eh! Jean, is this you? Come in by; it’s kind of you to look in and

speer for me in the by-going, since you maun ha’e some other errand at

Logan.’ He cried with such glad surprise, that Jean had no more cause

to fear the nature of her welcome.

He insisted upon her occupying the one arm-chair, and he would break

up with his left hand the little fire gathered on the hearth, while

he kept repeating, as in a wonderfully pleasant dream, ‘Is’t possible

you’ve come aince errand to see me? Woman, the sicht of you is gude for

a sick man;’ and Jean knew that he admired her fine carriage and fine

face as of old--that to him, as to the rest of the world, she was still

the well-endowed, the well- not the ill-favoured woman whom Eppie had

proposed as a fit wife for her brother.

As for him, he looked fifty times more haggard and worn than when Jean

had seen him sitting, still able-bodied and active, on the head of

his cart between the smiddy and the well, in the winter gloaming. His

cheeks were more sunken, his hair had received an additional white

powdering, his very voice piped a little with weakness, his fustian

clothes naturally were worse--not better, attended to, while his

right arm, that sign and seal of a working man’s independence, hung

pathetically incapable of service in its sling.

But he was eager, even cheerful, in his greetings to Jean. At the

same time it was clear that though he had no regrets to spare for his

personal appearance, he was full of apologies for his house which might

throw discredit on the management of his young house-keepers. Both

of them were absent for the moment, since Lizzie had carried out her

little brother, and Peggy, who had returned to the parish school, was

not come back for the day.

To tell the truth, Jean saw Bob’s house when it was about its best,

while he remained constantly at home to give directions to his lasses,

and when his sister Eppie came over, once a fortnight, expending her

surplus energy and emotion in scouring not only the family wardrobe,

but the windows and the grate.

But it was a house bare and barren in its small space, as the great

ward of a poor-house, while it was liable to the squalor the absence of

which is the redeeming feature of the poor-house. Here there was not

one of the articles which are the pride of a well-to-do ploughman’s

heart, and which make all the difference between ‘couthiness’ (plenty

and comfort combined) and dreariness in his homely dwelling. In Bob’s

house there was no chest of drawers rubbed by proud patient hands--such

as Jean had been once laying by ten shillings of her wages at a

time to buy; no grandiose eight-day clock with perhaps a wreath of

brilliant pink roses and gorgeous blue convolvuluses painted round its

broad face, to which Bob in the heyday of his fortunes had aspired;

no coarse but gay earthenware, for show as well as for use, in the

cupboard with its glass door; no resplendent coloured engravings of

worse than doubtful merit as works of art, but bright suggestive spots

relieving the staring or dingy blankness of the white-washed walls; no

exquisitely patched quilt--a marvel of womanly ingenuity and industry,

such as Jean had once stitched together and sung over, and laid aside

to fade in her kist--adorning the box-bed. There was not even a cat

purring about the ‘clean hearth-stane,’ or a bird chirping in its

cage, or a growing plant on the ledge of the small window. Yet Bob as

a young man had been fond of animals and plants. Only there had been

hard times in his history. Then a cat, if it did not cast aside its

domestic habits and run wild about the stack-yard and barn, killing

rats and mice which Bob might have been tempted to grudge it, for its

own consumption, would have grown as lean in flesh and as unthrifty in

coat as Bob himself. The pence to be paid for an ounce of bird-seed

might have formed a far larger sum than he, with any conscience, would

have dared to abstract from the family capital. The burdened man could

not have given the moment’s thought and time necessary to supply the

‘flooer’ with the common sunshine, air, and water--all that it craved.

Jean, who had been thinking much of late of her old comfortable

manse-kitchen glittering with pewter, tin and brass, the very roof

groaning with the weight of mutton hams, pigs’ cheeks, dried fish,

bags of onions, bunches of herbs, contrasted it with this region of

desolation, but did not shrink from the contrast.

Jean and Bob chatted together one on each side of the flickering

fire--the blinking of which was more kindly than the pale February

sunbeams, which shone steadily on the dispiriting house-place.

But Bob was not down-hearted: he was wonderfully hopeful, as, by the

Providence which makes the back fit for the burden, it was his nature

to be. He was ready to praise to the skies the cleverness and kindness

of his young doctor--Bob having affectionately appropriated his medical

man, with a certain proud admiration and tenderness for his gifts and

his youth, much as Jean had appropriated her young mistresses, dwelling

with fond delight on their graces. Bob proclaimed with unstinted

gratitude the generosity of his master, who was paying in full a

term’s wages which the servant had not earned, and only putting an

orra (extra man) man into Bob’s place, till it could be ascertained

whether he should recover from the effects of his accident, as Bob was

well assured he would in time, if it were the Lord’s will--he used the

expression without the slightest affectation. Eppie was a good sister

to him, while all his neighbours were richt kind. He could better thole

the pain of his arm now, that he had the comfort of trusting it was not

to be sawn off. Bob said the words without shrinking and with manly

fortitude. He had been in worse straits and seen far greater ‘trouble,’

and he had much to be thankful for. There was no more pretence in the

acknowledgment of thankfulness than in the reference to his Maker’s

will. Bob was one of those wayfaring men who, though a fool, was

prevented, in part by his very simplicity, from erring in his judgment

of the way he had to go through life and death.

Then he quietly dropped his own affairs and turned with kindly

interest to discuss Jean’s concerns, and also to hear the news of old

acquaintances which could only reach him and Jean orally, and could

never come to them through any humble substitute for ‘Fashionable

News’ in West-end newspapers. Bob could and did read stray newspapers,

but they rarely brought him intelligence of the doings of friends old

or new, and news were especially acceptable to Bob in these weeks of

enforced idleness and pain, from which, though he bore the infliction

bravely, he was fain to have his mind diverted for an hour. He took the

friendliest interest in the changes going on in Jean’s ‘family,’ which

happened at that moment to be looking up in the world, while now and

then that very interest betrayed him into precarious allusions. ‘So

Miss Mary is to be buckled with young Logan o’ Logan! I mind her weel

as a bairn. She was the little leddy wi’ the lint white locks I ha’e

carried on my shouther many a time--you mind, Jean? when there was a

lock o’ us among the minister’s hay. And Miss Catrine’s to go back to

the manse--how bools rin round! and she wants you to go back wi’ her.

You’ll do’t, Jean,’ said Bob with cordial confidence. ‘You’ll like the

auld place far better than Logan House after young Logan has come to

his kingdom. The manse o’ Dalroy was a bonnie pairt and a happy hame

even for a servant lass in the auld days. I’ve no doubt it will be as

nearly as possible the same, under Miss Catrine who comes o’ a gude

stock and the young minister who I am told has the making o’ a powerful

preacher in him, while he is a kind man to the puir. I’m as pleased as

you can think, Jean, to hear o’ your down-sitten in the end--for you’ll

never leave them, they’ll never let you go. Woman, you’ll be an honour

to their house among their young maids; you’ll be like Rebeecy’s nurse

whom all Israel murned for, that the auld Doctor aince preached about,

and you could turn up chapter and verse, and read what was said o’ her

in the “Word.”’

‘Thanks to you, Bob,’ said Jean in a low tone, conscious of his

self-forgetfulness.

But all through the conversation Bob was alert for any sign of the

return of his bairns. He was extremely desirous that they should come

home in time for Jean to see them before she left. ‘I wouldna like to

keep you ower long, Jean, when you have siccan a tramp between toons,

and it was mair than kind of you to come. But if you could just aince

cast een on the bairns, if you could see Jockie and tell me what you

think o’ him, I would like it aboon a’ things. If I were at their

heels,’ cried Bob, waxing hot in his great longing to bring about the

introduction, ‘I would try if a gude paik wouldna put smeddum in them.

But you ken bairns will be bairns,’ he turned the next moment and

craved indulgence for his culprits. ‘They will find things to play wi’,

were it but a wheen burrs to stick on ane anither’s backs, and keep

them ahint on the road.’

At last the members of Bob’s family arrived simultaneously, the lasses

with their bleached hair and round rosy faces, and the puny little

lad. Lizzie was lugging along her brother in her motherly young arms,

Peggy had her bag with her books hung round her neck. There was no

particular sign of that seeking to get their heads out of the yoke

which Eppie had foreboded, though they might not have been guiltless of

the light-heartedness of sticking burrs on each other’s backs for the

last quarter of an hour. But the two, and even the small child, having

a spindly arm hanging loosely across the breast of his sister’s blue

pinafore, with his eyes looking large and hollow like his father’s, in

his wasted mite of a face, stared open-mouthed at Jean. In vain their

father strove to do the honours with the best effect. ‘Gie me the

bairn, Lizzie. This is Lizzie and thon’s Peggy, Jean; and here’s an

auld friend of mine, lasses.’

In his deep anxiety that the children might make a favourable

impression on his old friend, Bob suddenly fell foul of the objects of

his devotion with a sharpness of fault-finding which not only took them

completely by surprise, but drove them into a frame of mind still more

stupid and provoking.

‘Ha’e you no a tongue in your head, Lizzie?’ Bob reproached his

eldest-born cuttingly. ‘And as for you, Peggy,’ he turned furiously

on the second girl, ‘lowse that bag from your neck this minute, and

put aff that bannet that you have a’ but torn the croon frae since

you left hame this morning. What garred you be sae royd--and noo you

are as blate, when I would have had you look wiselike and behave your

best no to disgrace yoursel’s and me.’ Bob ended with a groan of

disappointment--well-nigh despair.

Jean had to interfere with her womanly forbearance and consideration.

‘Let them alane, Bob. There’s naithing wrang. What would you ha’e o’

the bairns--fine bairns, who I am sure will do a’ they can to please

you?’

But Bob’s heart melted utterly to his youngest-born, his son and heir,

and he failed to attack him with scathing sarcasm. ‘Here’s Jockie,’

he said, smiling on the child that nestled in his left arm. ‘Tak him

frae me, Jean, he’ll no greet--he’s the best manners o’ us a’--he’s

sic a licht wecht, though he’s a hantle heavier than he was six months

syne, you’ll no feel it, even though you’re tired,’ said Bob, putting

his darling awkwardly with his one free hand into Jean’s arms. He

gave a sigh half of speechless satisfaction, half of unfathomable

sorrow--looking in her face at the same time, seeking to hear her utter

her tribute to the child’s attractions, and hanging breathlessly on

what was likely to be her outspoken verdict of whether it was to be

life or death for the lad.

Jean took the bairn reverently and gently. He did not greet; in his

weakness he appreciated fully Jean’s light firm grasp, while he

cuddled to her breast and looked up in her face with his child’s eyes.

‘Puir wee lamb,’ said Jean, sitting down again, for she had risen, as

if his feather’s weight had overpowered her strength; and she stroked

the wan cheeks till Jockie smiled with the ineffable sweetness of a

sick child’s smile.

‘He looks far frae strong,’ said truthful Jean slowly, while Bob

listened to her words as if they had been those of an oracle. ‘But I

dinna think he has just the look that little Jack at the manse had--I

ha’e a hope he’ll get ower his sickness. Do you mind, Bob, your mither

used to say you were a silly bairn yoursel’ till you were sax years

auld? and your Jockie has a look o’ you.’

‘Do you think sae, Jean?’ said Bob, almost shame-faced at the

extent of the compliment, while ready to bless her for the faintest

encouragement to trust that Jockie might live to become a toil-worn,

care-laden man like his father. But, no; Jockie, if he were spared,

would have brighter fortunes; no true father or mother has ever ceased

to dream that his or her child will be more successful in the best

sense--happier in every way, in the path trodden and cleared before him.

‘I canna keep you longer, Jean,’ said Bob reluctantly but with manly

tender forethought for her. ‘And I canna expeck that sic a favour will

be repeated. I canna even find words to express to you how much I’m

obleeged for this ca’. But if we should never meet again in this world,

you’ll mind, Jean, I said as my last words to you, that, like the

Maister you ha’e served all your life, you’ve returned gude for evil,

you have done what you could to cheer the heart of a sick and lanely

man.’

It was the single word of complaint he had allowed to fall from him,

and he only let it pass his lips to enhance the value of her good deeds.

The two had left the children in the room behind them, and were

standing in the doorway about to part.

‘Bob,’ said Jean hurriedly, ‘I’m ready and willing to come again and

stop, if you’re in the same mind that you were on the afternoon you

spoke with me, at the smiddy well. The Miss Frasers have no more need

o’ me. Eppie will gie in the lines and cite the minister to come here,

and I’ll walk across the moor as soon as a’ is ready--if you are in the

same mind, Bob.’

Jean spoke the words tremulously, but merely as a matter of course, in

her recantation of her refusal. It was the thought farthest from her

generous heart to choose this moment of all others in which to reproach

him with his former faithlessness.

But as a wrong once done is indelible, the reproach of which Jean

never dreamt, smote Bob’s conscience keenly, even while he protested

vehemently, ‘I’m in the same mind. Could I be in any other to my auld

true love Jean?’ And he cried again, ‘Oh, Jean! your tender mercies

are baith kind and cruel,’ while he bowed himself in such an agony

of shame as he had never yet felt for the past. He had even, for an

instant, a notion that it must be the bitterest part of his punishment

to have to put away from him, with his own hand, this ecstasy of hope

and happiness for the future--not of himself alone but of his children.

‘I canna let your mercies be, Jean, I daurna let them be,’ he muttered

hoarsely.

‘Then I winna ask your leave, Bob,’ said Jean in her triumph of love,

before the might of which Bob’s anguish and resistance went down.

‘It’s no me, it’s the bairns, who have won you, as I aye kenned they

would,’ said Bob, taking heart again at the thought of his treasure;

‘and they will thank you as I couldna do--no, though I were to live to

ninety-nine and never cease speaking your praises.’

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

LONDON: PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

AND PARLIAMENT STREET

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious punctuation errors and omissions have been silently corrected.

Page 41: “freely acknowleged” changed to “freely acknowledged”

Page 55: “scorched outmeal” changed to “scorched oatmeal”