THE DAKK OF THE MOON AT THE GKANNOCH BRIDGE.
Over the manse of Dullarg, still and grey, with only the two men
in it; over the low-walled rectangular farm steading of Craig
Ronald, fell alike the midsummer night. Ten o'clock on an early
July evening is in Galloway but a modified twilight. But as the
sun went down behind the pines he sent an angry gleam athwart the
green braes. The level cloud-band into which he plunged drew
itself upward to the zenith, and, like the eyelid of a gigantic
eye, shut down as though God in his heaven were going to sleep,
and the world was to be left alone.
It was the dark of the moon, and even if there had been full moon
its light would have been as completely shut out by the cloud
canopy as was the mild diffusion of the blue-grey twilight. So it
happened that, as Ralph Peden took his way to his first love-
tryst, it was all that he could do to keep the path, so dark had
it become. But there was no rain--hardly yet even the hint or
promise of rain.
Yet under the cloud there was a great solitariness--the murmur of
a land where no man had come since the making of the world. Down
in the sedges by the lake a blackcap sang sweetly, waesomely, the
nightingale of Scotland. Far on the moors a curlew cried out that
its soul was lost. Nameless things whinnied in the mist-filled
hollows. On the low grounds there lay a white mist knee-deep, and
Ralph Peden waded in it as in a shallow sea. So in due time he
came near to the place of his tryst.
Never had he stood so before. He stilled the beating of his heart
with his hand, so loud and riotous it was in that silent place. He
could hear, loud as an insurrection, the quick, unequal double-
knocking in his bosom.
A grasshopper, roosting on a blade of grass beneath, his feet,
tumbled off and gave vent to his feelings in a belated "chirr."
Overhead somewhere a raven croaked dismally and cynically at
intervals. Ralph's ears heard these things as he waited, with
every sense on the alert, at the place of his love-tryst.
He thrilled with the subtle hope of strange possibilities. A mill-
race of pictures of things sweet and precious ran through his
mind. He saw a white-spread table, with Winsome seated opposite to
himself, tall, fair, and womanly, the bright heads of children
between them. And the dark closed in. Again he saw Winsome with
her head on his arm, standing looking out on the sunrise from the
hilltop, whence they had watched it not so long ago. The thought
brought him to his pocket-book. He took it out, and in the
darkness touched his lips to the string of the lilac sunbonnet. It
surely must be past ten now, he thought. Would she not come? He
had, indeed, little right to ask her, and none at all to expect
her. Yet he had her word of promise--one precious line. What would
he say to her when she came? He would leave that to be settled
when his arms were about her. But perhaps she would be colder than
before. They would sit, he thought, on the parapet of the bridge.
There were no fir-branches to part them with intrusive spikes. So
much at least should be his.
But then, again, she might not come at all! What more likely than
that she had been detained by her grandmother? How could he expect
it? Indeed, he told himself he did not expect it. He had come out
here because it was a fine night, and the night air cooled his
brain for his studies. His heart, hammering on his life's anvil,
contradicted him. He could not have repeated the Hebrew alphabet.
His head, bent a little forward in the agony of listening, whirled
madly round; the ambient darkness surrounding all.
There! He heard a footstep. There was a light coming down the
avenue under the elders. At last! No, it was only the glow-worms
under the leaves, shining along the grass by the wayside. The
footstep was but a restless sheep on the hillside. Then some one
coughed, with the suppressed sound of one who covers his mouth
with his hand. Ralph was startled, but almost laughed to think
that it was still only the lamb on the other side of the wall
moving restlessly about in act to feed. Time and again the blood
rushed to his temples, for he was sure that he heard her coming to
him. But it was only the echo of the blood surging blindly through
his own veins, or some of the night creatures fulfilling their
love-trysts, and seeking their destinies under the cloud of night.
Suddenly his whole soul rose in revolt against him. Certainly now
he heard a light and swift footstep. There was a darker shape
coming towards him against the dim, faint grey glimmer of the
loch. It was his love, and she had come out to him at his bidding.
He had dreamed of an angel, and lo! now he should touch her in the
hollow night, and find that she was a warm, breathing woman.
Wrapped from head to foot in a soft close shawl, she came to him.
He could see her now, but only as something darker against the
canopy of the night. So, in the blissful dark, which makes lovers
brave, he opened his arms to receive her. For the first time in
his life he drew them to him again not empty.
The thrill electric of the contact, the yielding quiescence of the
girl whom he held to his breast, stilled his heart's tumultuous
beating. She raised her head, and their lips drew together into a
long kiss. What was this thing? It was a kiss in which he tasted a
strange alien flavour even through the passion of it. A sense of
wrong and disappointment flowed round Ralph's heart. So on the
bridge in the darkness, where many lovers had stood ever since the
first Pict trysted his dark-browed bride by the unbridged water,
the pair stood very still. They only breathed each other's breath.
Something familiar struck on Ralph's senses. He seemed to be
standing silent in the parlour at Craig Ronald--not here, with his
arms round his love--and somehow between them there rose
unmistakable the perfume of the flower which for an hour he had
carried in his coat on the day that he and she went a-fishing.
"Beloved," he said tenderly, looking down, "you are very good to
me to come!"
For all reply a face was held close pressed to his. The mists of
night had made her cheek damp. He passed his hand across the
ripples of her hair. Half hidden by the shawl he could feel the
crisping of the curls under his fingers.
It was harder in texture than he had fancied Winsome's hair would
be. He half smiled that he had time at such a moment to think such
a thing. It was strange, however. He had thought a woman's hair
was like floss silk--at least Winsome's, for he had theorized
about none other.
"Winsome, dear!" he said, again bending his head to look down, "I
have to go far away, and I wanted to tell you. You are not angry
with me, sweetest, for asking you to come? I could not go without
bidding you good-bye, and in the daytime I might not have seen you
alone. You know that I love you with all my life and all my heart.
And you love me--at least a little. Tell me, beloved!"
Still there was no answer. Ralph waited with some certitude and
ease from pain, for indeed the clasping arms told him all he
wished to know.
There was a brightness low down in the west. Strangely and slowly
the gloomy eyelid of cloud which had fallen athwart the evening
lifted for a moment its sullen fringe; a misty twilight of lurid
light flowed softly over the land. The shawl fell back like a hood
from off the girl's shoulders. She looked up throbbing and
palpitating. Ralph Peden was clasping Jess Kissock in his arms.
She had kept her word. He had kissed her of his own free will, and
that within a day. Her heart rejoiced over Winsome. "So much, at
least, she cannot take from me."
Ralph Peden's heart stopped beating for a tremendous interval of
seconds. Then the dammed-back blood-surge drave thundering in his
ears. He swayed, and would have fallen but for the parapet of the
bridge and the clinging arms about his neck. All his nature and
love in full career stopped dead. The shock almost unhinged his
soul and reason. It was still so dark that, though he could see
the outline of her head and the paleness of her face, nothing held
him but the intense and vivid fascination of her eyes. Ralph would
have broken away, indignant and amazed, but her arms and eyes held
him close prisoner, the dismayed turmoil in his own heart aiding.
"Yes, Ralph Peden," Jess Kissock said, cleaving to him, "and you
hate me because it is I and not another. You think me a wicked
girl to come to you in her place. But you called her because you
loved her, and I have come because I loved you as much. Have I not
as much right? Do not dream that I came for aught but that. Have I
not as good a right to love as you?"
She prisoned his face fiercely between her hands, and held him off
from her as if to see into his soul by the light of the lingering
lake of ruddy light low in the west.
"In your Bible where is there anything that hinders a woman from
loving? Yet I know you will despise me for loving you, and hate me
for coming in her place."
"I do not hate you!" said Ralph, striving to go without rudely
unclasping the girl's hands. Her arms fell instantly again about
his neck, locking themselves behind.
"No, you shall not go till you have heard all, and then you can
cast me into the loch as a worthless thing that you are better rid
of."
Through his disappointment and his anger, Ralph was touched. He
would have spoken, but the girl went on:
"No, you do not hate me--I am not worth it. You despise me, and do
you think that is any better? I am only a cottar's child. I have
been but a waiting-maid. But I have read how maids have loved the
kings and the kings loved them. Yes, I own it. I am proud of it. I
have schemed and lain awake at nights for this. Why should I not
love you? Others have loved me without asking my leave. Why should
I ask yours? And love came to me without your leave or my own that
day on the road when you let me carry your books."
She let her arms drop from his neck and buried her face in her
hands, sobbing now with very genuine tears. Ralph could not yet
move away, even though no longer held by the stringent coercion of
this girl's arms. He was too grieved, too suddenly and bitterly
disappointed to have any fixed thought or resolve. But the good
man does not live who can listen unmoved to the despairing catch
of the sobbing in a woman's throat. Then on his hands, which he
had clasped before him, he felt the steady rain of her tears; his
heart went out in a great pity for this wayward girl who was
baring her soul to him.
The whole note and accent of her grief was of unmistakable
feeling. Jess Kissock had begun in play, but her inflammable
nature kindled easily into real passion. For at least that night,
by the bridge of the Grannoch water, she believed that her heart
was broken.
Ralph put his hand towards her with some unformed idea of
sympathy. He murmured vague words of comfort, as he might have
done to a wailing child that had hurt itself; but he had no idea
how to still the tempestuous grief of a passion-pale woman.
Suddenly Jess Kissock slipped down and clasped him about the
knees. Her hair had broken from its snood and streamed a cloud of
intense blackness across her shoulders. He could see her only
weirdly and vaguely, as one may see another by the red light of a
wood ember in the darkness. She seemed like a beautiful, pure
angel, lost by some mischance, praying to him out of the hollow
pit of the night.
"I carried your burden for you once, the day I first saw you. Let
me carry your burden for you across the world. If you will not
love me, let me but serve you. I would slave so hard! See, I am
strong--"
She seized his hands, gripping thorn till his fingers clave
together with the pressure.
"See how I love you!" her hands seemed to say. Then she kissed his
hands, wetting them with the downfalling of her tears.
The darkness settled back thicker than before. He could not see
the kneeling woman whose touch he felt. He strove to think what he
should do, his emotions and his will surging in a troubled
maelstrom about his heart.
But just then, from out of the darkness high on the unseen hill
above them, there came a cry--a woman's cry of pain, anger, and
ultimate danger: "Ralph, Ralph, come to me--come!" it seemed to
say to him. Again and again it came, suddenly faltered and was
silenced as if smothered--as though a hand had been laid across a
mouth that cried and would not be silent.
Ralph sprang clear of Jess Kissock in a moment. He knew the voice.
He would have known it had it come to him across the wreck of
worlds. It was his love's voice. She was calling to him--Ralph
Peden--for help. Without a thought for the woman whose despairing
words he had just listened to, he turned and ran, plunging into
the thick darkness of the woods, hillward in the direction of the
cry. But he had not gone far when another cry was heard--not the
cry of a woman this time, but the shorter, shriller, piercing yell
of a man at the point of death--some deadly terror at his throat,
choking him. Mixed with this came also unearthly, wordless,
inhuman howlings, as of a wild beast triumphing. For a dozen
seconds these sounds dominated the night. Then upon the hill they
seemed to sink into a moaning, and a long, low cry, like the
whining of a beaten dog. Lights gleamed about the farm, and Ralph
could vaguely see, as he sprang out of the ravine, along which he
and Winsome had walked, dark forms flitting about with lanterns.
In another moment he was out on the moor, ranging about like a
wild, questing hound, seeking the cause of the sudden and hideous
outcry.
CHAPTEE XXX.
THE HILL GATE.
There was no merry group outside Winsome's little lattice window
this night, as she sat unclad to glimmering white in the quiet of
her room. In her heart there was that strange, quiet thrill of
expectancy--the resolve of a maiden's heart, when she knows
without willing that at last the flood-gates of her being must
surely be raised and the great flood take her to the sea. She did
not face the thought of what she would say. In such a case a man
plans what he will say, and once in three times he says it. But a
woman is wiser. She knows that in that hour it will be given her
what she shall speak.
"I shall go to him," said Winsome to herself; "I must, for he is
going away, and he has need of me. Can I let him go without a
word?"
Though Ralph had done no noble action in her sight or within her
ken, yet there was that about him which gave her the knowledge
that she would be infinitely safe with him even to the world's
end. Winsome wondered how she could so gladly go, when she would
not have so much as dreamed of stealing out at night to meet any
other, though she might have known him all her life. She did not
know, often as she had heard it read, that "perfect love casteth
out fear." Then she said to herself gently, as if she feared that
the peeping roses at the window might hear, "Perhaps it is because
I love him." Perhaps it was. Happy Winsome, to have found it out
so young!
The curtain of the dark drew down. Moist airs blew into the room,
warm with the scent of the flowers of a summer night. Honeysuckle
and rose blew in, and quieted the trembling nerves of the girl
going to meet her first love.
"He has sair need o' me!" she said, lapsing as she sometimes did
into her grandmother's speech. "He will stand before me," she
said, "and look so pale and beautiful. Then I will not let him
come nearer--for a while--unless it is very dark and I am afraid."
She glanced out. It promised to be very dark, and a tremour came
over her. Then she clad herself in haste, drawing from a box a
thin shawl of faded pale blue silk with a broad crimson edge,
which she drew close about her shoulders. The band of red lying
about her neck forced forward her golden tresses, throwing them
about her brow so that they stood out round her face in a
changeful aureole of fine-spun gold. She took a swift glance in
the mirror, holding her candle in her hand. Then she laughed a
nervous little laugh all to herself. How foolish of her! Of
course, it would be impossible for him to see her. But
nevertheless she put out her light, and went to the door smiling.
She had no sense of doing that which she ought not to do; for she
had been accustomed to her liberty in all matters whatsoever, ever
since she came to Craig Ronald, and in the summer weather nothing
was more common than for her to walk out upon the moor in the dewy
close of day. She shut the door quietly behind her, and set her
foot on the silent elastic turf, close cropped by many woolly
generations. The night shut down behind her closer than the door.
The western wind cooled her brain, and the singing in her heart
rose into a louder altar-song. A woman ever longs to be giving
herself. She rejoices in sacrifice. It is a pity that she so often
chooses an indifferently worthy altar. Yet it is questionable
whether her own pleasure in the sacrifice is any the less.
At the gate of the yard, which had been left open and hung
backward perilously upon its hinges, she paused.
"That is that careless girl, Jess!" she said, practical even at
such a moment.
And she was right--it was Jess who had so left it. Indeed, had she
been a moment sooner, she might have seen Jess flit by, taking the
downward road which led through the elder--trees to the waterside.
As it was, she only shut the gate carefully, so that no night-
wandering cattle might disturb the repose of her grandparents,
laid carefully asleep by Meg in their low-ceilinged bedroom.
The whole farm breathed from its walls and broad yard spaces the
peaceful rise and fall of an infant's repose. There was no sound
about the warm and friendly place save the sleepy chunner of a hen
on the bauks of the peat-house, just sufficiently awake to be
conscious of her own comfort.
The hill road was both stony and difficult, but Winsome's light
feet went along it easily and lightly. On not a single stone did
she stumble. She walked so gladsomely that she trod on the air.
There were no rocks in her path that night. Behind her the light
in the west winked once and went out. Palpable darkness settled
about her. The sigh of the waste moorlands, where in the haggs the
wild fowl were nestling and the adders slept, came down over the
well-pastured braes to her.
Winsome did not hasten. Why hasten, when at the end of the way
there certainly lies the sweet beginning of all things. Already
might she be happy in the possession of certainties? It never
occurred to her that Ralph would not be at the trysting-place.
That a messenger might fail did not once cross her mind. But
maidenly tremours, delicious in their uncertainty, coursed along
her limbs and through all her being. Could any one have seen,
there was a large and almost exultant happiness in the depths of
her eyes. Her lips were parted a little, like a child that waits
on tiptoe to see the curtain rise on some wondrous and long-
dreamed-of spectacle.
Soon against the darker sky the hill dyke stood up, looking in the
gloom massive as the Picts' Wall of long ago. It followed
irregularly the ridgy dips and hollows downward, till it ran into
the in tenser darkness of the pines. In a moment, ere yet she was
ready, there before her was the gate of her tryst. She paused,
affrighted for the first time. She listened, and there was no
sound. A trembling came over her and an uncertainty. She turned,
in act to flee.
But out of the dark of the great dyke stepped a figure cloaked
from head to heel, and while Winsome wavered, tingling now with
shame and fear, in an instant she was enclosed within two very
strong arms, that received her as in a snare a bird is taken.
Suddenly Winsome felt her breath shorten. She panted as if she
could not get air, like the bird as it nutters and palpitates.
"Oh, I ought not to have come!" &he said, "but I could not help
it!"
There was no word in answer, only a closer folding of the arms
that cinctured her. In the west the dusk was lightening and the
eyelid of the night drew slowly and grimly up.
When for the first time she looked shyly upward, Winsome found
herself in the arms of Agnew Greatorix. Wrapped in his great
military cloak, with a triumphant look in his handsome face, he
smiled down upon her.
Great Lord of Innocence! give now this lamb of thine thy help!
The leaping soul of pure disembodied terror stood in Winsome's
eyes. Fascinated like an antelope in the coils of a python she
gazed, her eyes dilating and contracting--the world whirling
about her, the soul of her bounding and panting to burst its bars.
"Winsome, my darling!" he said, "you have come to me. You are
mine"--bending his face to hers.
Not yet had the power to speak or to resist come back to her, so
instant and terrible was her surprise. But at the first touch of
his lips upon her cheek the very despair brought back to her
tenfold her own strength. She pushed against him with her hands,
straining him from her by the rigid tension of her arms, setting
her face far from his, but she was still unable to break the clasp
of his arms about her.
"Let me go! let me go!" she cried, in a hoarse and labouring
whisper.
"Gently, gently, fair and softly, my birdie," said Greatorix;
"surely you have not forgotten that you sent for me to meet you
here. Well, I am here, and I am not such a fool as to come for
nothing!"
The very impossibility of words steeled Winsome's heart,
"_I_ send for you!" cried Winsome; "I never had message or word
with you in my life to give you a right to touch me with your
little finger. Let me go, and this instant, Agnew Greatorix!"
"Winsome, sweetest girl, it pleases you to jest. Have not I your
own letter in my pocket telling me where to meet you? Did you not
write it? I am not angry. You can play out your play and pretend
you do not care for me as much as you like; but I will not let you
go. I have loved you too long, though till now you were cruel and
would give me no hope. So when I got your letter I knew it was
love, after all, that had been in your eyes as I rode away."
"Listen," said Winsome eagerly; "there is some terrible mistake; I
never wrote a line to you--"
"It matters not; it was to me that your letter came, brought by a
messenger to the castle an hour ago. So here I am, and here you
are, my beauty, and we shall just make the best of it, as lovers
should when the nights are short."
He closed his arms about her, forcing the strength out of her
wrists with slow, rude, masculine muscles. A numbness and a
deadness ran through her limbs as he compelled her nearer to him.
Her head spun round with the fear of fainting. With a great effort
she forced herself back a step from him, and just as she felt the
breath of his mouth upon hers her heart made way through her lips.
"Ralph! Ralph! Help me--help! Oh, come to me!" she cried in her
extremity of terror and the oncoming rigour of unconsciousness.
The next moment she dropped limp and senseless into the arms of
Agnew Greatorix. For a long moment he held her up, listening to
the echoes of that great cry, wondering whether it would wake up
the whole world, or if, indeed, there were none to answer in that
solitary place.
But only the wild bird wailed like a lost soul too bad for heaven,
too good for hell, wandering in the waste forever.
Agnew Greatorix laid Winsome down on the heather, lifeless and
still, her pure white face resting in a nest of golden curls, the
red band of her mother's Indian shawl behind all.
But as the insulter stooped to take his will of her lips, now pale
and defenceless, something that had been crouching beastlike in
the heather for an hour, tracking and tracing him like a
remorseless crawling horror, suddenly sprang with a voiceless rush
upon him as he bent over Winsome's prostrate body--gripped
straight at his throat and bore him backward bareheaded to the
ground.
So unexpected was the assault that, strong man as Greatorix was,
he had not the least chance of resistance. He reeled at the sudden
constriction of his throat by hands that hardly seemed human, so
wide was their clutch, so terrible the stringency of their grasp.
He struck wildly at his assailant, but, lying on his back with the
biting and strangling thing above him, his arms only met on one
another in vain blows. He felt the teeth of a great beast meet in
his throat, and in the sudden agony he sent abroad the mighty roar
of a man in the grips of death by violence. But his assailant was
silent, save for a fierce whinnying growl as of a wild beast
greedily lapping blood.
It was this terrible outcry ringing across the hills that brought
the farm steading suddenly awake, and sent the lads swarming about
the house with lanterns. But it was Ralph alone who, having heard
the first cry of his love and listened to nothing else, ran
onward, bending low with a terrible stitch in his side which
caught his breath and threw him to the ground almost upon the
white-wrapped body of his love. Hastily he knelt beside her and
laid his hand upon her heart. It was beating surely though
faintly.
But on the other side, against the gray glimmer of the march dyke,
he could see the twitchings of some great agony. At intervals
there was the ghastly, half-human growling and the sobbing catch
of some one striving for breath.
A light shone across the moor, fitfully wavering as the searcher
cast its rays from side to side. Ralph glanced behind him with the
instinct to carry his love away to a place of safety. But he saw
the face of Meg Kissock, with slow Jock Forrest behind her
carrying a lantern. Meg ran to the side of her mistress.
"Wha's dune this?" she demanded, turning fiercely to Ralph. "Gin
ye--"
"I know nothing about it. Bring the lantern here quickly," he
said, leaving Winsome in the hands of Meg. Jock Forrest brought
the lantern round, and there on the grass was Agnew Greatorix,
with daft Jock Gordon above him, his sinewy hands gripping his
neck and his teeth in his throat.
Ralph pulled Jock Gordon off and flung him upon the heather, where
Jock Forrest set his foot upon him, and turned the light of the
lantern upon the fierce face of a maniac, foam-flecked and blood-
streaked. Jock still growled and gnashed his teeth, and struggled
in sullen fury to get at his fallen foe. With his hat Ralph
brought water from a deep moss-hole and dashed it upon the face of
Winsome. In a little while, she began to sob in a heartbroken way.
Meg took her head upon her knees, and soothed her mistress,
murmuring tendernesses. Next he brought water to throw over the
face and neck of Greatorix, which Jock Gordon in his fury had made
to look like nothing human.
The rest might wait. It was Ralph's first care to get Winsome
home. Kneeling down beside her he soothed her with whispered
words, till the piteous sobbing in her throat stilled itself. The
ploughman was at this moment stolidly producing pieces of rope
from his pockets and tying up Jock Gordon's hands and feet; but
after his first attempts again to fly at Greatorix, and his gasps
of futile wrath when forced into the soft moss of the moor by Jock
Forrest's foot, he had not offered to move.
His paroxysm was only one of the great spasms of madness which
sometimes come over the innocently witless. He had heard close by
him the cries of Winsome Charteris, whom he had worshipped for
years almost in the place of the God whom he had not the
understanding to know. The wonder rather was that he did not kill
Greatorix outright. Had it happened a few steps nearer the great
stone dyke, there is little doubt but that Jock Gordon would have
beat out the assailant's brains with a ragged stone.
Winsome had not yet awakened enough to ask how all these things
came about. She could only cling to Meg, and listen to Ralph
whispering in her ear.
"I can go home now," she said earnestly.
So Ralph and Meg helped her up, Ralph wrapping her in her great
crimson-barred shawl.
Ralph would have kissed her, but Winsome, standing unsteadily
clasping Meg's arm, said tenderly:
"Not to-night. I am not able to bear it."
It was almost midnight when Ralph and the silent Jock Forrest got
Agnew Greatorix into the spring-cart to be conveyed to Greatorix
Castle.
He lay with his eyes closed, silent. Ralph took Jock Gordon to the
manse with him, determined to tell the whole to Mr. Welsh if
necessary; but if it were not necessary, to tell no one more than
he could help, in order to shelter Winsome from misapprehension.
It says something for Ralph that, in the turmoil of the night and
the unavailing questionings of the morning, he never for a moment
thought of doubting his love. It was enough for him that in the
depths of agony of body or spirit she had called out to him. All
the rest would be explained in due time, and he could wait.
Moreover, so selfish is love, that he had never once thought of
Jess Kissock from the moment that his love's cry had pealed across
the valley of the elder-trees and the plain of the water meadows.
When he brought Jock Gordon, hardly yet humanly articulate, into
the kitchen of the manse, the house was still asleep. Then Ralph
wakened Manse Bell, who slept above. He told her that Jock Gordon
had taken a fit upon the moor, that he had found him ill, and
brought him home. Next he went up to the minister's room, where he
found Mr. Welsh reading his Bible. He did not know that the
minister had watched him both come and go from his window, or that
he had remained all night in prayer for the lad, who, he
misdoubted, was in deep waters.
As soon as Jock Gordon had drunk the tea and partaken of the beef
ham which Manse Bell somewhat grumblingly set before him, he said:
"Noo, I'll awa'. The tykes'll be after me, nae doot, but it's no
in yin o' them to catch Jock Gordon gin yince he gets into the
Dungeon o' Buchan."
"But ye maun wait on the minister or Maister Peden. They'll hae
muckle to ask ye, nae doot!" said Bell, who yearned for news.
"Nae doot, nae doot!" said daft Jock Gordon, "an' I hae little to
answer. It's no for me to tie the rape roond my ain craig [neck].
Na, na, time aneu' to answer when I'm afore the sherra at
Kirkcudbright for this nicht's wark."
With these words Jock took his pilgrim staff and departed for
parts unknown. As he said, it was not bloodhounds that could catch
Jock Gordon on the Rhinns of Kells.
In the morning there was word come to the cot-house of the
Kissocks that Mistress Kissock was wanted up at the castle to
nurse a gentleman who had had an accident when shooting. Mistress
Kissock was unable to go herself, but her daughter Jess went
instead of her, having had some practice in nursing, among other
experiences which she had gained in England. It was reported that
she made an excellent nurse.
CHAPTEE XXXI.
THE STUDY OF THE MANSE OF DULLARG.
IT was growing slowly dusk again when Ralph Peden returned from
visiting Craig Ronald along the shore road to the Dullarg and its
manse. He walked briskly, as one who has good news. Sometimes he
whistled to himself--breaking off short with a quick smile at
some recollection. Once he stopped and laughed aloud. Then he
threw a stone at a rook which eyed him superciliously from the top
of a turf dyke. He made a bad shot, at which the black critic
wiped the bare butt of his bill upon the grass, uttered a hoarse
"A-ha!" of derision, and plunged down squatty among the dock-
leaves on the other side.
As Ralph turned up the manse loaning to the bare front door, he
was conscious of a vague uneasiness, the feeling of a man who
returns to a house of gloom from a world where all things have
been full of sunshine. It was not the same world since yesterday.
Even he, Ralph Peden, was not the same man. But he entered the
house with that innocent affectation of exceeding ease which is
the boy's tribute to his own inexperience. He went up the stairs
through the dark lobby and entered Allan Welsh's study. The
minister was sitting with his back to the window, his hands
clasped in front of him, and his great domed forehead and
emaciated features standing out against the orange and crimson
pool of glory where the sun had gone down.
Ralph ostentatiously clattered down his armful of books on the
table. The minister did not speak at first, and Ralph began his
explanation.
"I am sorry," he said, hesitating and blushing under the keen eyes
of his father's friend. "I had no idea I should have been
detained, but the truth is--"
"I ken what the truth is," said Allan Welsh, quietly. "Sit down,
Ralph Peden. I have somewhat to say to you."
A cold chill ran through the young man's veins, to which succeeded
a thrill of indignation. Was it possible that he was about to
reproach him, as a student in trials for the ministry of the
Marrow kirk, with having behaved in any way unbecoming of an
aspirant to that high office, or left undone anything expected of
him as his father's son?
The minister was long in speaking. Against the orange light of
evening which barred the window, his face could not be seen, but
Ralph had the feeling that his eyes, unseen themselves, were
reading into his very soul. He sat down and clenched his hands
under the table,
"I was at the Bridge of Grannoch this day," began the minister at
last. "I was on my way to visit a parishioner, but I do not
conceal from you that I also made it my business to observe your
walk and conversation."
"By what right do you so speak to me?" began Ralph, the hotter
blood of his mother rising within him.
"By the right given to me by your father to study your heart and
to find out whether indeed it is seeking to walk in the more
perfect way. By my love and regard for you, I hope I may also
say."
The minister paused, as if to gather strength for what he had yet
to say. He leaned his head upon his hand, and Balph did not see
that his frail figure was shaken with some emotion too strong for
his physical powers, only kept in check by the keen and
indomitable will within.
"Ralph, my lad," Allan Welsh continued, "do not think that I have
not foreseen this; and had jour father written to inform me of his
intention to send you to me, I should have urged him to cause you
to abide in your own city. What I feared in thought is in act come
to pass. I saw it in your eyes yestreen."
Kalph's eyes spoke an indignant query.
"Ralph Peden," said the minister, "since I came here, eighteen
years ago, not a mouse has crept out of Craig Ronald but I have
made it my business to know it. I am no spy, and yet I need not to
be told what happened yesterday or to-day."
"Then, sir, you know that I have no need to be ashamed."
"I have much to say to you, Ralph, which I desire to say by no
means in anger. But first let me say this: It is impossible that
you can ever be more to Winifred Charteris than you are to-day."
"That is likely enough, sir, but I would like to know why in that
case I am called in question." "Because I have been, more than
twenty years ago, where you are to-day, Ralph Peden, I--even I--
have seen eyes blue as those of Winsome Charteris kindle with
pleasure at my approach. Yes, I have known it. And I have also
seen the lids lie white and still upon these eyes, and I am here
to warn you from the primrose way; and also, if need be, to forbid
you to walk therein."
His voice took a sterner tone with the last words.
Ralph bowed his head on the table and listened; but there was no
feeling save resentment and resistance in his heart.
The minister went on in a level, unemotional tone, like one
telling a tale of long ago, of which the issues and even the
interests are dead and gone.
"I do not look now like a man on whom the eye of woman could ever
rest with the abandonment of love. Yet I, Allan Welsh, have seen
'the love that casteth out fear.'"
After a pause the high, expressionless voice took up the tale.
"Many years ago there were two students, poor in money but rich in
their mutual love. They were closer in affection than twin
brothers. The elder was betrothed to be married to a beautiful
girl in the country; so he took down his friend with him to the
village where the maid dwelt to stand by his side and look upon
the joy of the bridegroom. He saw the trysted (betrothed) of his
friend. He and she looked into one another's eyes and were drawn
together as by a power beyond them. The elder was summoned
suddenly back to the city, and for a week he, all unthinking, left
the friends of his love together glad that they should know one
another better. They walked together. They spoke of many things,
ever returning back to speak of themselves. One day they held a
book together till they heard their hearts beat audibly, and in
the book read no more that day.
"Upon the friend's return he found only an empty house and
distracted parents. Bride and brother had fled. Word came that
they had been joined by old Joseph Paisley, the Gretna Green
'welder,' without blessing of minister or kirk. Then they hid
themselves in a little Cumbrian village, where for six years the
unfaithful friend wrought for his wife--for so he deemed her--till
in the late bitterness of bringing forth she died, that was the
fairest of women and the unhappiest."
The minister ceased. Outside the rain had come on in broad single
drops, laying the dust on the road. Ralph could hear it pattering
on the broad leaves of the plane-tree outside the window. He did
not like to hear it. It sounded like a woman's tears.
But he could not understand how all this bore on his case. He was
silenced and awed, but it was with the sight of a soul of a man of
years and approved sanctity in deep apparent waters of sorrow.
The minister lifted his head and listened. In the ancient woodwork
of the manse, somewhere in the crumbling wainscoting, the little
boring creature called a death-watch ticked like the ticking of an
old verge watch. Mr. Welsh broke off with a sudden causeless auger
very appalling in one so sage and sober in demeanour.
"There's that beast again!" he said; "often have I thought it was
ticking in my head. I have heard it ever since the night she died--"
"I wonder at a man like you," said Ralph, "with your wisdom and
Christian standing, caring for a worm--"
"You're a very young man, and when you are older maybe you'll
wonder at a deal fewer things," answered the minister with a kind
of excited truculence very foreign to his habit, "for I myself am
a worm and no man," he added dreamily. "And often I tried to kill
the beast. Ye see thae marks--" he broke off again--"I bored for
it till the boards are a honeycomb, but the thing aye ticks on."
"But, Mr. Welsh," said Ralph eagerly, with some sympathy in his
voice, "why should you trouble yourself about this story now--or
I, for the matter of that? I can understand that Winsome Charteris
has somehow to do with it, and that the knowledge has come to you
in the course of your duty; but even if, at any future time,
Winsome Charteris were aught to me or I to her--the which I have
at present only too little hope of--her forbears, be they
whomsoever they might, were no more to me than Julius Caesar. I
have seen her and looked into her eyes. What needs she of
ancestors that is kin to the angels?"
Something like pity came into the minister's stern eyes as he
listened to the lad. Once he had spoken just such wild, heart-
eager words.
"I will answer you in a sentence," he said. "I that speak with you
am the cause. I am he that has preached law and the gospel--for
twenty years covering my sin with the Pharisee's strictness of
observance. I am he that was false friend but never false lover--
that married without kirk or blessing. I am the man that clasped a
dead woman's hand whom I never owned as wife, and watched afar off
the babe that I never dared to call mine own. I am the father of
Winifred Oharteris, coward before man, castaway before God. Of my
sin two know besides my Maker--the father that begot you, whose
false friend I was in the days that were, and Walter Skirving, the
father of the first Winifred whose eyes this hand closed under the
Peacock tree at Crossthwaite."
The broad drops fell on the window-panes in splashes, and the
thunder rain drummed on the roof.
The minister rose and went out, leaving Ralph Peden sitting in the
dark with the universe in ruins about him. The universe is fragile
at twenty-one.
And overhead the great drops fell from the brooding thunder-
clouds, and in the wainscoting of Allan Welsh's study the death-
watch ticked.