SUCH SWEET PERIL.
Winsome looked away down the glen, and strove to harden her face
into a superhuman indignation.
"That he should dare--the idea!"
But it so happened that the idea so touched that rare gift of
humour, and the picture of herself looking at Ralph Peden solemnly
with one eye at a time, in order at once to spare his
susceptibilities and give the other a rest, was too much for her.
She laughed a peal of rippling merriment that sent all the
blackbirds indignant out of their copses at the infringement of
their prerogative.
Ralph's humour was slower and a little grimmer than Winsome's,
whose sunny nature had blossomed out amid the merry life of the
woods and streams. But there was a sternness in both of them as
well, that was of the heather and the moss hags. And that would in
due time come out. It is now their day of love and bounding life.
And there are few people in this world who would not be glad to
sit just so at the opening of the flower of love. Indeed, it was
hardly necessary to tell one another.
Laughter, say the French (who think that their l'amour is love,
and so will never know anything), kills love. But not the kind of
laughter that rang in the open dell which peeped like the end of a
great green-lined prospect glass upon the glimmering levels of
Loch Grannoch; nor yet the kind of love which in alternate
currents pulsed to and fro between the two young people who sat so
demurely on either side of the great, many-spiked fir-branch.
"Is not this nice?" said Winsome, shrugging her shoulders
contentedly and swinging her feet.
Their laughter made them better friends than before. The
responsive gladness in each other's eyes seemed part of the
midsummer stillness of the afternoon. Above, a red squirrel
dropped the husks of larch tassels upon them, and peered down upon
them with his bright eyes. He was thinking himself of household
duties, and had his own sweetheart safe at home, nestling in the
bowl of a great beech deep in the bowering wood by the loch.
"I liked to hear you speak of your father to-day," said Winsome,
still swinging her feet girlishly. "It must be a great delight to
have a father to go to. I never remember father or mother."
Her eyes were looking straight before her now, and a depth of
tender wistfulness in them went to Ralph's heart. He was beginning
to hate the branch.
"My father," he said, "is often stern to others, but he has never
been stern to me--always helpful, full of tenderness and kindness.
Perhaps that is because I lost my mother almost before I can
remember."
Winsome's wet eyes, with the lashes curving long over the under
side of the dark-blue iris, were turned full on him now with the
tenderness of a kindred pity.
"Do you know I think that your father was once kind to my mother.
Grandmother began once to tell me, and then all at once would tell
me no more--I think because grandfather was there."
"I did not know that my father ever knew your mother," answered
Ralph.
"Of course, he would never tell you if he did," said the woman of
experience, sagely; "but grandmother has a portrait in an oval
miniature of your father as a young man, and my mother's name is
on the back of it."
"Her maiden name?" queried Ralph.
Winsome Charteris nodded. Then she said wistfully: "I wish I knew
all about it. I think it is very hard that grandmother will not
tell me!"
Then, after a silence which a far-off cuckoo filled in with that
voice of his which grows slower and fainter as the midsummer heats
come on, Winsome said abruptly, "Is your father ever hard and--
unkind?"
Ralph started to his feet as if hastily to defend his father.
There was something in Winsome's eyes that made him sit down
again--something shining and tender and kind.
"My father," he said, "is very silent and reserved, as I fear I
too have been till I came down here" (he meant to say, "Till I met
you, dear," but he could not manage it), "but he is never hard or
unkind, except perhaps on matters connected with the Marrow kirk
and its order and discipline. Then he becomes like a stone, and
has no pity for himself or any. I remember him once forbidding me
to come into the study, and compelling me to keep my own garret-
room for a month, for saying that I did not see much difference
between the Marrow kirk and the other kirks. But I am sure he
could never be unkind or hurtful to any one in the world. But why
do you ask, Mistress Winsome?"
"Because--because--" she paused, looking down now, the underwells
of her sweet eyes brimming to the overflow--"because something
grandfather said once, when he was very ill, made me wonder if
your father had ever been unkind to my mother."
Two great tears overflowed from under the dark lashes and ran down
Winsome's cheek. Ralph was on the right side of the branch now,
and, strangely enough, Winsome did not seem to notice it. He had a
lace-edged handkerchief in his hand which had been his mother's,
and all that was loving and chivalrous in his soul was stirred at
the sight of a woman's tears. He had never seen them before, and
there is nothing so thrilling in the world to a young man. Gently,
with a light, firm hand, he touched Winsome's cheek, instinctively
murmuring tenderness which no one had ever used to him since that
day long ago, when his mother had hung, with the love of a woman
who knows that she must give up all, over the cot of a boy whose
future she could not foresee.
For a thrilling moment Winsome's golden coronet of curls touched
his breast, and, as he told himself after long years, rested
willingly there while his heart beat at least ten times.
Unfortunately, it did not take long to beat ten times.
One moment more, and without any doubt Ralph would have taken
Winsome in his arms. But the girl, with that inevitable instinct
which tells a woman when her waist or her lips are in danger--
matters upon which no woman is ever taken by surprise, whatever
she may pretend--drew quietly back. The time was not yet.
"Indeed, you must not, you must not think of me. You must go away.
You know that there are only pain and danger before us if you come
to see me any more."
"Indeed, I do not know anything of the kind. I am sure that my
father could never be unkind to any creature, and I am certain
that he was not to your mother. But what has he to do with us,
Winsome?"
Her name sounded so perilously sweet to her, said thus in Ralph's
low voice, that once again her eyes met his in that full, steady
gaze which tells heart secrets and brings either life-long joys or
unending regrets. Nor--as we look--can we tell which?
"I cannot speak to you now, Ralph," she said, "but I know that you
ought not to come to see me any more. There must be something
strange and wicked about me. I feel that there is a cloud over me,
Ralph, and I do not want you to come under it."
At the first mention of his name from the lips of his beloved,
Ralph drew very close to her, with that instinctive drawing which
he was now experiencing. It was that irresistible first love of a
man who has never wasted himself even on the harmless flirtations
which are said to be the embassies of love.
But Winsome moved away from him, walking down towards the mouth of
the linn, through the thickly wooded glen, and underneath the
overarching trees, with their enlacing lattice-work of curving
boughs.
"It is better not," she said, almost pleadingly, for her strength
was failing her. She almost begged him to be merciful.
"But you believe that I love you, Winsome?" he persisted.
Low in her heart of hearts Winsome believed it. Her ear drank in
every word. She was silent only because she was thirsty to hear
more. But Ralph feared that he had fatally offended her.
"Are you angry with me, Winsome?" he said, bending from his
masculine height to look under the lilac sunbonnet.
Winsome shook her head. "Not angry, Ralph, only sorry to the
heart."
She stopped and turned round to him. She held out a hand, when
Ralph took it in both of his. There was in the touch a
determination to keep the barriers slight but sure between them.
He felt it and understood.
"Listen, Ralph," she said, looking at him with shining eyes, in
which another man would have read the love, "I want you to
understand. There is a fate about those who love me. My mother
died long ago; my father I never knew; my grandfather and
grandmother are--what you know, because of me; Mr. Welsh, at the
Manse, who used to love me and pet me when I was a little girl,
now does not speak to me. There is a dark cloud all about me!"
said Winsome sadly, yet bravely and determinedly.
Yet she looked as bright and sunshiny as her own name, as if God
had just finished creating her that minute, and had left the
Sabbath silence of thanksgiving in her eyes. Ralph Peden may be
forgiven if he did not attend much to what she said. As long as
Winsome was in the world, he would love her just the same,
whatever she said.
"What the cloud is I cannot tell," she went on; "but my
grandfather once said that it would break on whoever loved me--
and--and I do not want that one to be you."
Ralph, who had kept her hand a willing prisoner, close and warm in
his, would have come nearer to her.
He said: "Winsome, dear" (the insidious wretch! he thought that,
because she was crying, she would not notice the addition, but she
did)--"Winsome, dear, if there be a cloud, it is better that it
should break over two than over one."
"But not over you," she said, with a soft accent, which should
have been enough, for any one, but foolish Ralph was already fixed
on his own next words:
"If you have few to love you, let me be the one who will love you
all the time and altogether. I am not afraid; there will be two of
us against the world, dear."
Winsome faltered. She had not been wooed after this manner before.
It was perilously sweet. Little ticking pulses beat in her head. A
great yearning came to her to let herself drift up on a sea of
love. That love of giving up all, which is the precious privilege,
the saving dowry or utter undoing of women, surged in upon her
heart.
She drew away her hand, not quickly, but slowly and firmly, and as
if she meant it. "I have come to a decision--I have made a vow,"
she said. She paused, and looked at Ralph a little defiantly,
hoping that he would take the law into his own hands, and forbid
the decision and disallow the vow.
But Ralph was not yet enterprising enough, and took her words a
little too seriously. He only stood looking at her and waiting, as
if her decision were to settle the fate of kingdoms.
Then Winsome emitted the declaration which has been so often made,
at which even the more academic divinities are said to smile, "I
am resolved never to marry!"
An older man would have laughed. He might probably have heard
something like this before. But Ralph had no such experience, and
he bowed his head as to an invincible fate--for which stupidity
Winsome's grandmother would have boxed his ears.
"But I may still love you, Winsome?" he said, very quietly and
gently.
"Oh, no, you must not--you must not love me! Indeed, you must not
think of me any more. You must go away."
"Go away I can and will, if you say so, Winsome; but even you do
not believe that I can forget you when I like."
"And you will go away?" said Winsome, looking at him with eyes
that would have chained a Stoic philosopher to the spot.
"Yes," said Ralph, perjuring his intentions.
"And you will not try to see me any more--you promise?" she added,
a little spiteful at the readiness with which he gave his word.
So Ralph made a promise. He succeeded in keeping it just twenty-
four hours--which was, on the whole, very creditable, considering.
What else he might have promised we cannot tell--certainly
anything else asked of him so long as Winsome continued to look at
him.
Those who have never made just such promises, or listened to them
being made--occupations equally blissful and equally vain--had
better pass this chapter by. It is not for the uninitiated. But it
is true, nevertheless.
So in silence they walked down to the opening of the glen. As they
turned into the broad expanse of glorious sunshine the shadows
were beginning to slant towards them. Loch Grannoch was darkening
into pearl grey, under the lee of the hill. Down by the high-
backed bridge, which sprang at a bound over the narrows of the
lane, there was a black patch on the greensward, and the tripod of
the gipsy pot could faintly be distinguished.
Ralph, who had resumed Winsome's hand as a right, pointed it out.
It is strange how quickly pleasant little fashions of that kind
tend to perpetuate themselves!
As Winsome's grandmother would have said, "It's no easy turnin' a
coo when she gets the gate o' the corn."
Winsome looked at the green patch and the dark spot upon it. "Tell
me," she said, looking up at him, "why you ran away that day?"
Ralph Peden was nothing if not frank. "Because," he said, "I
thought you were going to take off your stockings!"
Through the melancholy forebodings which Winsome had so recently
exhibited there rose the contagious blossom of mirth, that never
could be long away even from such a fate-harassed creature as
Winsome Charteris considered herself to be. "Poor fellow," she
said, "you must indeed have been terribly frightened!"
"I was," said Ralph Peden, with conviction. "But I do not think I
should feel quite the same about it now!"
They walked silently to the foot of the Craig Ronald loaning,
where by mutual consent they paused.
Winsome's hand was still in Ralph's. She had forgotten to take it
away. She was, however, still resolved to do her duty.
"Now you are sure you are not going to think of me any more?" she
asked.
"Quite sure," said Ralph, promptly.
Winsome looked a little disappointed at the readiness of the
answer. "And you won't try to see me any more?" she asked,
plaintively.
"Certainly not," replied Ralph, who had some new ideas.
Winsome looked still more disappointed. This was not what she had
expected.
"Yes," said Ralph, "because I shall not need to think of you
again, for I shall never stop thinking of you; and I shall not try
to see you again, because I know I shall. I shall go away, but I
shall come back again; and I shall never give you up, though every
friend forbid and every cloud in the heavens break!"
The gladness broke into his love's face in spite of all her
gallant determination.
"But remember," said Winsome, "I am never going to marry. On that
point I am quite determined."
"You can forbid me marrying you, Winsome dear," said Ralph, "but
you cannot help me loving you."
Indeed on this occasion and on this point of controversy Winsome
did not betray any burning desire to contradict him. She gave him
her hand--still with the withholding power in it, however, which
told Ralph that his hour was not yet come.
He bowed and kissed it--once, twice, thrice. And to him who had
never kissed woman before in the way of love, it was more than
many caresses to one more accustomed.
Then she took her way, carrying her hand by her side tingling with
consciousness. It seemed as if Ebie Farrish, who was at the
watering-stone as she passed, could read what was written upon it
as plain as an advertisement. She put it, therefore, into the
lilac sunbonnet and so passed by.
Ralph watched her as she glided, a tall and graceful young figure,
under the archway of the trees, till he could no longer see her
light dress glimmering through the glades of the scattered oaks.