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THE LILAC SUNBONNET
A LOVE STORY
BY S. R. CROCKETT
AUTHOR OF THE STICKIT MINISTER, THE RAIDERS, ETC.
CONTENTS.
PROLOGUE.--BY THE WAYSIDE
I.--THE BLANKET-WASHING
II.--THE MOTHER OF KING LEMUEL
III.--A TREASURE-TROVE
IV.--A CAVALIER PURITAN
V.--A LESSON IN BOTANY
VI.--CURLED EYELASHES
VII.--CONCERNING TAKING EXERCISE
VIII.--THE MINISTER'S MAN ARMS FOR CONQUEST
IX.--THE ADVENT OF THE CUIF
X.--THE LOVE-SONG OF THE MAVIS
XI.--ANDREW KISSOCK GOES TO SCHOOL
XII.--MIDSUMMER DAWN
XIII.--A STRING OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET
XIV.--CAPTAIN AGNEW GREATORIX
XV.--ON THE EDGE OF THE ORCHARD
XVI.--THE CUIF BEFORE THE SESSION
XVII.--WHEN THE KYE COMES HAME
XVIII.--A DAUGHTER OF THE PlCTS
XIX.--AT THE BARN END
XX.-"DARK-BROWED EGYPT"
XXI.--THE RETURN OF EBIE FARRISH
XXII.--A SCARLET POPPY
XXIII.--CONCERNING JOHN BAIRDIESON
XXIV.--LEGITIMATE SPORT
XXV.--BARRIERS BREAKING
XXVI.--SUCH SWEET PERIL
XXVII.--THE OPINIONS OF SAUNDERS MOWDIEWORT UPON BESOM-SHANKS
XXVIII.--THAT GIPSY JESS
XXIX.--THE DARK OF THE MOON AT THE GRANNOCH BRIDGE
XXX.--THE HILL GATE
XXXI.--THE STUDY OF THE MANSE OF DULLARG
XXXII.--OUTCAST AND ALIEN FROM THE COMMONWEALTH
XXXIII.--JOCK GORDON TAKES A HAND
XXXIV.--THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH
XXXV.--SUCH SWEET SORROW
XXXVI.--OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
XXXVII.--UNDER THE RED HEATHER
XXXVIII.--BEFORE THE REFORMER'S CHAIR
XXXIX.--JEMIMA, KEZIA, AND LITTLE KEREN-HAPPUCH
XL.--A TRIANGULAR CONVERSATION
XLI.--THE MEETING OF THE SYNOD
XLII.--PURGING AND RESTORATION
XLIII.--THREADS DRAWN TOGETHER
XLIV.--WINSOME'S LAST TRYST
XLV.--THE LAST OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET
PROLOGUE.
BY THE WAYSIDE
As Ralph Peden came along the dusty Cairn Edward road from the
coach which had set him down there on its way to the Ferry town,
he paused to rest in the evening light at the head of the Long
Wood of Larbrax. Here, under boughs that arched the way, he took
from his shoulders his knapsack, filled with Hebrew and Greek
books, and rested his head on the larger bag of roughly tanned
Westland leather, in which were all his other belongings. They
were not numerous. He might, indeed, have left both his bags for
the Dullarg carrier on Saturday, but to lack his beloved books for
four days was not to be thought of for a moment by Ralph Peden. He
would rather have carried them up the eight long miles to the
manse of the Dullarg one by one.
As he sat by the tipsy milestone, which had swayed sidelong and
lay half buried amid the grass and dock leaves, a tall, dark girl
came by--half turning to look at the young man as he rested. It
was Jess Kissock, from the Herd's House at Craig Ronald, on her
way home from buying trimmings for a new hat. This happened just
twice a year, and was a solemn occasion.
"Is this the way to the manse of Dullarg?" asked the young man,
standing up with his hat in his hand, the brim just beneath his
chin. He was a handsome young man when he stood up straight.
Jess looked at him attentively. They did not speak in that way in
her country, nor did they take their hats in their hands when they
had occasion to speak to young women.
"I am myself going past the Dullarg," she said, and paused with a
hiatus like an invitation.
Ralph Peden was a simple young man, but he rose and shouldered his
knapsack without a word. The slim, dark-haired girl with the
bright, quick eyes like a bird, put out her hand to take a share
of the burden of Ralph's bag.
"Thank you, but I am quite able to manage it myself," he said, "I
could not think of letting you put your hand to it."
"I am not a fine lady," said the girl, with a little impatient
movement of her brows, as if she had stamped her foot. "I am
nothing but a cottar's lassie."
"But then, how comes it that you speak as you do?" asked Ralph.
"I have been long in England--as a lady's maid," she answered with
a strange, disquieting look at him. She had taken one side of the
bag of books in spite of his protest, and now walked by Ralph's
side through the evening coolness.
"This is the first time you have been hereaway?" his companion
asked.
Ralph nodded a quick affirmative and smiled.
"Then," said Jess Kissock, the rich blood mantling her dark
cheeks, "I am the first from the Dullarg you have spoken to!"
"The very first!" said Ralph.
"Then I am glad," said Jess Kissock. But in the young man's heart
there was no answering gladness, though in very sooth she was an
exceeding handsome maid.
CHAPTER I.
THE BLANKET-WASHING.
Ralph Peden lay well content under a thorn bush above the Grannoch
water. It was the second day of his sojourning in Galloway--the
first of his breathing the heather scent on which the bees grew
tipsy, and of listening to the grasshoppers CHIRRING in the long
bent by the loch side. Yesterday his father's friend, Allan Welsh,
minister of the Marrow kirk in the parish of Dullarg, had held
high discourse with him as to his soul's health, and made many
inquiries as to how it sped in the great city with the precarious
handful of pious folk, who gathered to listen to the precious and
savoury truths of the pure Marrow teaching. Ralph Peden was
charged with many messages from his father, the metropolitan
Marrow minister, to Allan Welsh--dear to his soul as the only
minister who had upheld the essentials on that great day, when
among the assembled Presbyters so many had gone backward and
walked no more with him.
"Be faithful with the young man, my son," Allan Welsh read in the
quaintly sealed and delicately written letter which his brother
minister in Edinburgh had sent to him, and which Ralph had duly
delivered in the square, grim manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and
old-fashioned reverence which sat strangely on one of his years.
"Be faithful with the young man," continued the letter; "he is
well grounded on the fundamentals; his head is filled with godly
lear, and he has sound views on the Headship; but he has always
been a little cold and distant even to me, his father according to
the flesh. With his companions he is apt to be distant and
reserved. I am to blame for the solitude of our life here in
James's Court, but to you I do not need to tell the reason of
that. The Lord give you his guidance in leading the young man in
the right way."
So far Gilbert Peden's letter had run staidly and in character
like the spoken words of the writer. But here it broke off. The
writing, hitherto fine as a hair, thickened; and from this point
became crowded and difficult, as though the floods of feeling had
broken some dam. "O man Allan, for my sake, if at all you have
loved me, or owe me anything, dig deep and see if the lad has a
heart. He shews it not to me."
So that is why Ralph Peden lies couched in the sparce bells of the
ling, just where the dry, twisted timothy grasses are beginning to
overcrown the purple bells of the heather. Tall and clean-limbed,
with a student's pallor of clear-cut face, a slightly ascetic
stoop, dark brown curls clustering over a white forehead, and eyes
which looked steadfast and true, the young man was sufficient of a
hero. He wore a broad straw hat, which he had a pleasant habit of
pushing back, so that his clustering locks fell over his brow
after a fashion which all women thought becoming. But Ralph Peden
heeded not what women thought, said, or did, for he was trysted to
the kirk of the Marrow, the sole repertory of orthodox truth in
Scotland, which is as good as saying in the wide world--perhaps
even in the universe.
Ralph Peden had dwelt all his life with his father in an old house
in James's Court, Edinburgh, overlooking the great bounding circle
of the northern horizon and the eastern sea. He had been trained
by his father to think more of a professor's opinion on his Hebrew
exercise than of a woman's opinion on any subject whatever. He had
been told that women were an indispensable part of the economy of
creation; but, though he accepted word by word the Westminster
Confession, and as an inexorable addition the confessions and
protests of the remnant of the true kirk in Scotland (known as the
Marrow kirk), he could not but consider woman a poor makeshift,
even as providing for the continuity of the race. Surely she had
not been created when God looked upon all that he had made and
found it very good. The thought preserved Ralph's orthodoxy.
Ralph Peden had come out into the morning air, with his note-book
and a volume which he had been studying all the way from
Edinburgh. As he lay at length among the grass he conned it over
and over. He referred to passages here and there. He set out very
calmly with that kind of determination with which a day's work in
the open air with a book is often begun. Not for a moment did he
break the monotony of his study. The marshalled columns of strange
letters were mowed down before him.
A great humble-bee, barred with tawny orange, worked his way up
from his hole in the bank, buzzing shrilly in an impatient,
stifled manner at finding his dwelling blocked as to its exit by a
mountainous bulk. Ralph Peden rose in a hurry. The beast seemed to
be inside his coat. He had instinctively hated bees and everything
that buzzed ever since as a child he had made experiments with the
paper nest of a tree-building wasp. The humble-bee buzzed a little
more, discontentedly, thought of going back, crept out at last
from beneath the Hebrew Lexicon, and appeared to comb his hair
with his feeler. Then he slowly mounted along the broad blade of a
meadow fox-tail grass, which bent under him as if to afford him an
elastic send-off upon his flight. With a spring he lumbered up,
taking his way over the single field which separated his house
from the edge of the Grannoch water--where on the other side,
above the glistening sickle-sweep of sand which looked so
inviting, yet untouched under the pines by the morning sun, the
hyacinths lay like a blue wreath of peat smoke in the hollows of
the wood.
But there was a whiff of real peat smoke somewhere in the air, and
Ralph Peden, before he returned to his book, was aware of the
murmur of voices. He moved away from the humble-bee's dwelling and
established himself on a quieter slope under a bush of broom. A
whin-chat said "check, check" above him, and flirted a brilliant
tail; but Ralph Peden was not afraid of whin-chats. Here he
settled himself to study, knitting his brows and drumming on the
ground with the toe of one foot to concentrate his attention. The
whin-chat could hear him murmuring to himself at intervals,
"Surely that is the sense--it must be taken this way." Sometimes,
on the contrary, he shook his head at Luther's Commentary, which
lay on the short, warm turf before him, as if in reproof. Ralph
was of opinion that Luther, but for his great protective
reputation, and the fact that he had been dead some time, might
have been served with a libel for heresy--at least if he had
ministered to the Marrow kirk.
Then after a little he pulled his hat over his eyes to think, and
lay back till he could just see one little bit of Loch Grannoch
gleaming through the trees, and the farm of Nether Crae set on the
hillside high above it. He counted the sheep on the green field
over the loch, numbering the lambs twice because they frisked
irresponsibly about, being full of frivolity and having no
opinions upon Luther to sober them.
Gradually a haze spun itself over the landscape, and Ralph Peden's
head slowly fell back till it rested somewhat sharply upon a
spikelet of prickly whin. His whole body sat up instantly, with an
exclamation which was quite in Luther's manner. He had not been
sleeping. He rejected the thought; yet he acknowledged that it was
nevertheless passing strange that, just where the old single-
arched bridge takes a long stride over the Grannoch lane, there
was now a great black pot a-swing above a blinking pale fire of
peats and fir-branches, and a couple of great tubs set close
together on stones which he had not seen before. There was, too, a
ripple of girls' laughter, which sent a strange stirring of
excitement along the nerves of the young man. He gathered his
books to move away; but on second thoughts, looking through the
long, swaying tendrils of the broom under which he sat, he
resolved to remain. After all, the girls might be as harmless as
his helper of yesterday.
"Yet it is most annoying," he said; "I had been quieter in James's
Court."
Still he smiled a little to himself, for the broom did not grow in
James's Court, nor the blackbirds flute their mellow whistle
there.
Loch Grannoch stretched away three miles to the south, basking in
alternate blue and white, as cloud and sky mirrored themselves
upon it. The first broad rush of the ling [Footnote: Common heath
(Erica tetralix).] was climbing the slopes of the Crae Hill above
--a pale lavender near the loch-side, deepening to crimson on the
dryer slopes where the heath-bells grew shorter and thicker
together. The wimpling lane slid as silently away from the
sleeping loch as though it were eloping and feared to awake an
angry parent. The whole range of hill and wood and water was
drenched in sunshine. Silence clothed it like a garment--save only
for the dark of the shadow under the bridge, from whence had come
that ring of girlish laughter which had jarred upon the nerves of
Ralph Peden.
Suddenly there emerged from the indigo shade where the blue
spruces overarched the bridge a girl carrying two shining pails of
water. Her arms were bare, her sleeves being rolled high above her
elbow; and her figure, tall and shapely, swayed gracefully to the
movement of the pails. Ralph did not know before that there is an
art in carrying water. He was ignorant of many things, but even
with his views on woman's place in the economy of the universe, he
could not but be satisfied with the fitness and the beauty of the
girl who came up the path, swinging her pails with the
compensatory sway of lissom body, and that strong outward flex of
the elbow which kept the brimming cans swinging in safety by her
side.
Ralph Peden never took his eyes off her as she came, the theories
of James's Court notwithstanding. Nor indeed need we for a little.
For this is Winifred, better known as Winsome Charteris, a very
important young person indeed, to whose beauty and wit the poets
of three parishes did vain reverence; and, what she might well
value more, whose butter was the best (and commanded the highest
price) of any that went into Dumfries market on Wednesdays.
Fair hair, crisping and tendrilling over her brow, swept back in
loose and flossy circlets till caught close behind her head by a
tiny ribbon of blue--then again escaping it went scattering and
wavering over her shoulders wonderingly, like nothing on earth but
Winsome Charteris's hair. It was small wonder that the local poets
grew grey before their time in trying to find a rhyme for
"sunshine," a substantive which, for the first time, they had
applied to a girl's hair. For the rest, a face rather oval than
long, a nose which the schoolmaster declared was "statuesque"
(used in a good sense, he explained to the village folk, who could
never be brought to see the difference between a statue and an
idol--the second commandment being of literal interpretation along
the Loch Grannoch side), and eyes which, emulating the parish
poet, we can only describe as like two blue waves when they rise
just far enough to catch a sparkle of light on their crests. The
subject of her mouth, though tempting, we refuse to touch. Its
description has already wrecked three promising reputations.
But withal Winsome Charteris set her pails as frankly and plumply
on the ground, as though she were plain as a pike-staff, and bent
a moment over to look into the gypsy-pot swung on its birchen
triangle. Then she made an impatient movement of her hand, as if
to push the biting fir-wood smoke aside. This angered Ralph, who
considered it ridiculous and ill-ordered that a gesture which
showed only a hasty temper and ill-regulated mind should be
undeniably pretty and pleasant to look upon, just because it was
made by a girl's hand. He was angry with himself, yet he hoped she
would do it again. Instead, she took up one pail of water after
the other, swung them upward with a single dexterous movement, and
poured the water into the pot, from which the steam was rising.
Ralph Peden could see the sunlight sparkle in the water as it
arched itself solidly out of the pails. He was not near enough to
see the lilac sprig on her light summer gown; but the lilac
sunbonnet which she wore, principally it seemed in order that it
might hang by the strings upon her shoulders, was to Ralph a
singularly attractive piece of colour in the landscape. This he
did not resent, because it is always safe to admire colour.
Ralph would have been glad to have been able to slip off quietly
to the manse. He told himself so over and over again, till he
believed it. This process is easy. But he saw very well that he
could not rise from the lee of the whin bush without being in full
view of this eminently practical and absurdly attractive young
woman. So he turned to his Hebrew Lexicon with a sigh, and a grim
contraction of determined brows which recalled his father. A
country girl was nothing to the hunter after curious roots and the
amateur of finely shaded significances in Piel and Pual.
"I WILL not be distracted!" Ralph said doggedly, though a Scot,
correct for once in his grammar; and he pursued a recalcitrant
particle through the dictionary like a sleuthhound.
A clear shrill whistle rang through the slumberous summer air.
"Bless me," said Ralph, startled, "this is most discomposing!"
He raised himself cautiously on his elbow, and beheld the girl of
the water-pails standing in the full sunshine with her lilac
sunbonnet in her hand. She wared it high above her head, then she
paused a moment to look right in his direction under her hand held
level with her brows. Suddenly she dropped the sunbonnet, put a
couple of fingers into her mouth in a manner which, if Ralph had
only known it, was much admired of all the young men in the
parish, and whistled clear and loud, so that the stone-chat
fluttered up indignant and scurried to a shelter deeper among the
gorse. A most revolutionary young person this. He regretted that
the humble-bee had moved him nearer the bridge.
Ralph was deeply shocked that a girl should whistle, and still
more that she should use two fingers to do it, for all the world
like a shepherd on the hill. He bethought him that not one of his
cousins, Professor Habakkuk Thriepneuk's daughters (who studied
Chaldaeic with their father), would ever have dreamed of doing
that. He imagined their horror at the thought, and a picture,
compound of Jemima, Kezia, and Kerenhappuch, rose before him.
Down the hill, out from beneath the dark green solid foliaged
elder bushes, there came a rush of dogs.
"Save us," said Ralph, who saw himself discovered, "the deil's in
the lassie; she'll have the dogs on me!"--an expression he had
learned from John Bairdison, his father's "man," [Footnote: Church
officer and minister's servant.] who in an unhallowed youth had
followed the sea.
Then he would have reproved himself for the unlicensed exclamation
as savouring of the "minced oath," had he not been taken up with
watching the dogs. There were two of them. One was a large, rough
deerhound, clean cut about the muzzle, shaggy everywhere else,
which ran first, taking the hedges in his stride. The other was a
small, short-haired collie, which, with his ears laid back and an
air of grim determination not to be left behind, followed grimly
after. The collie went under the hedges, diving instinctively for
the holes which the hares had made as they went down to the water
for their evening drink. Both dogs crossed to windward of him,
racing for their mistress. When they reached the green level where
the great tubs stood they leaped upon her with short sharp barks
of gladness. She fended them off again with gracefully impatient
hand; then bending low, she pointed to the loch-side a quarter of
a mile below, where a herd of half a dozen black Galloway cows,
necked with the red and white of the smaller Ayrshires, could be
seen pushing its way through the lush heavy grass of the water
meadow.
"Away by there! Fetch them, Roger!" she cried. "Haud at them--the
kye's in the meadow!"
The dogs darted away level. The cows continued their slow advance,
browsing as they went, but in a little while their dark fronts
were turned towards the dogs as after a momentary indecision they
recognized an enemy. With a startled rush the herd drove through
the meadow and poured across the unfenced road up to the hill
pasture which they had left, whose scanty grasses had doubtless
turned slow bovine thoughts to the coolness of the meadow grass,
and the pleasure of standing ruminant knee-deep in the river, with
wavy tail nicking the flies in the shade.
For a little while Ralph Peden breathed freely again, but his
satisfaction was short-lived. One girl was discomposing enough,
but here were two. Moreover the new-comer, having arranged some
blankets in a tub to her satisfaction, calmly tucked up her skirts
in a professional manner and got bare-foot into the tub beside
them. Then it dawned upon Ralph, who was not very instructed on
matters of household economy, that he had chanced upon a Galloway
blanket-washing; and that, like the gentleman who spied upon
Musidora's toilet, of whom he had read in Mr. James Thomson's
Seasons, he might possibly see more than he had come out to see.
Yet it was impossible to rise composedly and take his way
manseward. Ralph wished now that he had gone at the first alarm.
It had become so much more difficult now, as indeed it always does
in such cases. Moreover, he was certain that these two vagabonds
of curs would return. And they would be sure to find him out. Dogs
were unnecessary and inconvenient beasts, always sniffing and
nosing about. He decided to wait. The new-comer of the kilts was
after all no Naiad or Hebe. Her outlines did not resemble to any
marked degree the plates in his excellent classical dictionary.
She was not short in stature, but so strong and of a complexion so
ruddily beaming above the reaming white which filled the blanket
tub, that her mirthful face shone like the sun through an evening
mist.
But Ralph did not notice that, in so far as she could, she had
relieved the taller maiden of the heavier share of the work; and
that her laugh was hung on a hair trigger, to go off at every jest
and fancy of Winsome Charteris. All this is to introduce Miss Meg
Kissock, chief and favoured maidservant at the Dullarg farm, and
devoted worshipper of Winsome, the young mistress thereof. Meg
indeed, would have thanked no one for an introduction, being at
all times well able (and willing) to introduce herself.
It had been a shock to Ralph Peden when Meg Kissock walked up from
the lane-side barefoot, and when she cleared the decks for the
blanket tramping. But he had seen something like it before on the
banks of the water of Leith, then running clear and limpid over
its pebbles, save for a flour-mill or two on the lower reaches.
But it was altogether another thing when, plain as print, he saw
his first goddess of the shining water-pails sit calmly down on
the great granite boulder in the shadow of the bridge, and take
one small foot in her hand with the evident intention of removing
her foot-gear and occupying the second tub.
The hot blood surged in responsive shame to Ralph Peden's cheeks
and temples. He started up. Meg Kissock was tramping the blankets
rhythmically, holding her green kirtle well up with both hands,
and singing with all her might. The goddess of the shining pails
was also happily unconscious, with her face to the running water.
Ralph bent low and hastened through a gap in the fence towards the
shade of the elder bushes on the slope. He did not run--he has
never acknowledged that; but he certainly came almost
indistinguishably near it. As soon, however, as he was really out
of sight, he actually did take to his heels and run in the
direction of the manse, disconcerted and demoralized.
The dogs completed his discomfiture, for they caught sight of his
flying figure and gave chase--contenting themselves, however, with
pausing on the hillside where Ralph had been lying, with indignant
barkings and militant tails high crested in air.
Winsome Charteris went up to the broom bushes which fringed the
slope to find out what was the matter with Tyke and Roger. When
she got there, a slim black figure was just vanishing round the
white bend of the Far Away Turn. Winsome whistled low this time,
and without putting even one finger into her mouth.