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
octosyllabics 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 find 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 kirkyard. 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. "Daftlike!" 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 naething 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 kirkyard, 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 manoeuvre 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 antennae 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 shurely 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 shurely 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 stirk,"
"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 undissuadably 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 heed, 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 leear?" 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 good-night 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, Dandle
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 way. 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 countryside.
"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," said she. "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 hame-coming, 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, woman-like, 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 ran 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 Elliotts of auld!"
All the time she sang she looked steadfastly before her, her knees
straight, her hands upon her knee, 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 withinsides
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 slily.
She looked down; she was one blush. "I maun have forgotten to change
them," said she; and went in to 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.