THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH.
Jock made his way without a moment's hesitation to the little hen-
house which stood at one end of the farm steading of Craig Ronald.
Up this he walked with his semi-prehensile bare feet as easily as
though he were walking along the highway. Up to the rigging of the
house he went, then along it--setting one foot on one side and the
other on the other, turning in his great toes upon the coping for
support. Thus he came to the gable end at which Meg slept. Jock
leaned over the angle of the roof and with his hand tapped on the
window.
"Wha's there? "said Meg from her bed, no more surprised than if
the knock had been upon the outer door at midday.
"It's me, daft Jock Gordon," said Jock candidly.
"Gae wa' wi' ye, Jock! Can ye no let decent fowk sleep in their
beds for yae nicht?"
"Ye maun get up, Meg," said Jock.
"An' what for should I get up?" queried Meg indignantly. "I had
ancuch o' gettin' up yestreen to last me a gye while."
"There's a young man here wantin' to coort your mistress!" said
Jock delicately.
"Haivers!" said Meg, "hae ye killed another puir man?"
"Na, na, he's honest--this yin. It's the young man frae the manse.
The auld carle o' a minister has turned him oot o' hoose an' hame,
and he's gaun awa' to Enbra'. He says he maun see the young
mistress afore he gangs--but maybe ye ken better, Meg."
"Gae wa' frae the wunda, Jock, and I'll get up," said Meg, with a
brevity which betokened the importance of the news.
In a little while Meg was in Winsome's room. The greyish light of
early morning was just peeping in past the little curtain. On the
chair lay the lilac-sprigged muslin dress of her grandmother's,
which Winsome had meant to put on next morning to the kirk. Her
face lay sideways on the pillow, and Meg could see that she was
softly crying even in her sleep. Meg stood over her a moment.
Something hard lay beneath Winsome's cheek, pressing into its soft
rounding. Meg tenderly slipped it out. It was an ordinary
memorandum-book written with curious signs. On the pillow by her
lay the lilac sunbonnet.
Meg put her arms gently round Winsome, saying:
"It's me, my lamb. It's me, your Meg!"
And Meg's cheek was pressed against that of Winsome, moist with
sleep. The sleeper stirred with a dovelike moaning, and opened her
eyes, dark with sleep and wet with the tears of dreams, upon Meg.
"Waken, my bonnie; Meg has something that she maun tell ye."
So Winsome looked round with the wild fear with which she now
started from all her sleeps; but the strong arms of her loyal Meg
were about her, and she only smiled with a vague wistfulness, and
said:
"It's you, Meg, my dear!"
So into her ear Meg whispered her tale. As she went on, Winsome
clasped her round the neck, and thrust her face into the neck of
Meg's drugget gown. This is the same girl who had set the
ploughmen their work and appointed to each worker about the farm
her task. It seems necessary to say so.
"Noo," said Meg, when she had finished, "ye ken whether ye want to
see him or no!"
"Meg," whispered Winsome, "can I let him go away to Edinburgh and
maybe never see me again, without a word?"
"Ye ken that best yersel'," said Meg with high impartiality, but
with her comforting arms very close about her darling.
"I think," said Winsome, the tears very near the lids of her eyes,
"that I had better not see him. I--I do not wish to see him--Meg,"
she said earnestly; "go and tell him not to see me any more, and
not to think of a girl like me--"
Meg went to Winsome's little cupboard wardrobe in the wall and
took down the old lilac-sprayed summer gown which she had worn
when she first saw Ralph Peden.
"Ye had better rise, my lassie, an' tak' that message yersel'!"
said Meg dryly.
So obediently Winsome rose. Meg helped her to dress, holding
silently her glimmering white garments for her as she had done
when first as a fairy child she came to Craig Ronald. Some of them
were a little roughly held, for Meg could not see quite so clearly
as usual. Also when she spoke her speech sounded more abruptly and
harshly than was its wont.
At last the girl's attire was complete, and Winsome stood ready
for her morning walk fresh as the dew on the white lilies. Meg
tied the strings of the old sunbonnet beneath her sweet chin, and
stepped back to look at the effect; then, with sudden impulsive
movement, she went tumultuously forward and kissed her mistress on
the cheek.
"I wush it was me!" she said, pushing Winsome from the room.
The day was breaking red in the east when Winsome stepped out upon
the little wooden stoop, damp with the night mist, which seemed
somehow strange to her feet. She stepped down, giving a little
familiar pat to the bosom of her dress, as though to advertise to
any one who might be observing that it was her constant habit thus
to walk abroad in the dawn.
Meg watched her as she went. Then she turned into the house to
stop the kitchen clock and out to lock the stable door.
Through the trees Winsome saw Ralph long before he saw her. She
was a woman; he was only a naturalist and a man. She drew the
sunbonnet a little farther over her eyes. He started at last,
turned, and came eagerly towards her.
Jock Gordon, who had remained about the farm, went quickly to the
gate at the end of the house as if to shut it.
"Come back oot o' that," said Meg sharply.
Jock turned quite as briskly.
"I was gaun to stand wi' my back til't, sae that they micht ken
there was naebody luikin'. D'ye think Jock Gordon haes nae
mainners?" he said indignantly.
"Staun wi' yer back to a creel o' peats, Jock; it'll fit ye
better!" ooserved Meg, giving him the wicker basket with the broad
leather strap which was used at Craig Ronald for bringing the
peats in from the stack.
Winsome had not meant to look at Ralph as she came up to him. It
seemed a bold and impossible thing for her ever again to come to
him. The fear of a former time was still strong upon her.
But as soon as she saw him, her eyes somehow could not leave his
face. He dropped his hat on the grass beneath, as he came forward
to meet her under the great branches of the oak-trees by the
little pond. She had meant to tell him that he must not touch her
--she was not to be touched; yet she went straight into his open
arms like a homing dove. Her great eyes, still dewy with the warm
light of love in them, never left his till, holding his love safe
in his arms, he drew her to him and upon her sweet lips took his
first kiss of love.
"At last!" he said, after a silence.
The sun was rising over the hills of heather. League after league
of the imperial colour rolled westward as the level rays of the
sun touched it.
"Now do you understand, my beloved?" said Ralph. Perhaps it was
the red light of the sun, or only some roseate tinge from the
miles of Galloway heather that stretched to the north, but it is
certain that there was a glow of more than earthly beauty on
Winsome's face as she stood up, still within his arms, and said:
"I do not understand at all, but I love you."
Then, because there is nothing more true and trustful than the
heart of a good woman, or more surely an inheritance from the
maid-mother of the sinless garden than her way of showing that she
gives her all, Winsome laid her either hand on her lover's
shoulders and drew his face down to hers--laying her lips to his
of her own free will and accord, without shame in giving, or
coquetry of refusal, in that full kiss of first surrender which a
woman may give once, but never twice, in her life.
This also is part of the proper heritage of man and woman, and
whoso has missed it may attain wealth or ambition, may exhaust the
earth--yet shall die without fully or truly living.
A moment they stood in silence, swaying a little like twin flowers
in the wind of the morning. Then taking hands like children, they
slowly walked away with their faces towards the sunrise. There was
the light of a new life in their eyes. It is good sometimes to
live altogether in the present. "Sufficient unto the day is the
good thereof," is a proverb in all respects equal to the
scriptural original.
For a little while they thus walked silently forward, and on the
crest of the ridge above the nestling farm Ralph paused to take
his last look of Craig Ronald. Winsome turned with him in complete
comprehension, though as yet he had told her no word of his
projects. Nor did she think of any possible parting, or of
anything save of the eyes into which she did not cease to look,
and the lover whose hand it was enough to hold. All true and pure
love is an extension of God--the gladness in the eyes of lovers,
the tears also, bridals and espousals, the wife's still happiness,
the delight of new-made homes, the tinkle of children's laughter.
It needs no learned exegete to explain to a true lover what John
meant when he said, "For God is love." These things are not gifts
of God, they are parts of him.
It was at this moment that Meg Kissock, having seen them stand a
moment still against the sky, and then go down from their hilltop
towards the north, unlocked the stable door, at which Ebie
Fairrish had been vainly hammering from within for a quarter of an
hour. Then she went indoors and pulled close the curtains of
Winsome's little room. She came out, locked the bedroom door, and
put the key in her pocket. Her mistress had a headache. Meg was a
treasure indeed, as a thoughtful person about a household often
is.
As Winsome and Ralph went down the farther slope of the hill,
towards the road that stretched away northward across the moors,
they fell to talking together very practically. They had much to
say. Before they had gone a mile the first strangeness had worn
off, and the stage of their intimacy may be inferred from the fact
that they were only at the edge of the great wood of Grannoch
bank, when Winsome reached the remark which undoubtedly Mother Eve
made to her husband after they had been some time acquainted:
"Do you know, I never thought I should talk to any one as I am
talking to you?"
Ralph allowed that it was an entirely wonderful thing--indeed, a
belated miracle. Strangely enough, he had experienced exactly the
same thought. "Was it possible?" smiled Winsome gladly, from under
the lilac sunbonnet.
Such wondrous and unexampled correspondence of impression proved
that they were made for one another, did it not? At this point
they paused. Exercise in the early morning is fatiguing. Only the
unique character of these refreshing experiences induces us to put
them on record.
Then Winsome and Ralph proceeded to other and not less
extraordinary discoveries. Sitting on a wind-overturned tree-
trunk, looking out from the edge of the fringing woods of the
Grannoch bank towards the swells of Cairnsmuir's green bosom, they
entered upon their position with great practicality. Nature, with
an unusual want of foresight, had neglected to provide a back to
this sylvan seat, so Ralph attended to the matter himself. This
shows that self-help is a virtue to be encouraged.
Ralph had some disinclination to speak of the terrors of the night
which had forever rolled away. Still, he felt that the matter must
be cleared up; so that it was with doubt in his mind that he
showed Winsome the written line which had taken him to the bridge
instead of to the hill gate.
"That's Jess Kissock's writing!" Winsome said at once. Ralph had
the same thought. So in a few moments they traced the whole plot
to its origin. It was a fit product of the impish brain of Jess
Kissock. Jess had sent the false note of appointment to Ralph by
Andra, knowing that he would be so exalted with the contents that
he would never doubt its accuracy. Then she had despatched Jock
Gordon with "Winsome's real letter to Greatorix Castle; in answer
to the supposed summons, which was genuine enough, though not
meant for him, Agnew Greatorix had come to the hill gate, and Jess
had met Ralph by the bridge to play her own cards as best she
could for herself.
"How wicked!" said Winsome, "after all."
"How foolish!" said Ralph, "to think for a moment that any one
could separate you and me."
But Winsome bethought herself how foolishly jealous she had been
when she found Jess putting a flower into Ralph's coat, and Jess's
plot did not look quite so impossible as before.
"I think, dear," said Ralph, "you must after this make your
letters so full of your love, that there can be no mistake whom
they are intended for."
"I mean to," said Winsome frankly.
There was also some fine scenery at this point.
But there was no hesitation in Ralph Peden's tone when he settled
down steadily to tell her of his hopes.
Winsome sat with her eyes downcast and her head a little to one
side, like a bright-eyed bird listening.
"That is all true and delightful," she said, "but we must not be
selfish or forget."
"We must remember one another!" said Ralph, with the absorption of
newly assured love.
"We are in no danger of forgetting one another," said that wise
woman in counsel; "we must not forget others. There is your
father--you have not forgotten him."
With a pang Ralph remembered that there was yet something that he
could not tell Winsome. He had not even been frank with her
concerning the reason of his leaving the manse and going to
Edinburgh. She only understood that it was connected with his love
for her, which was not approved of by the minister of the Marrow
kirk.
"My father will be as much pleased with you as I," said Ralph,
with enthusiasm.
"No doubt," said Winsome, laughing; "fathers always are with their
sons' sweethearts. But you have not forgotten something else?"
"What may that be?" said Ralph doubtfully.
"That I cannot leave my grandfather and grandmother at Craig
Ronald as they are. They have cared for me and given me a home
when I had not a friend. Would you love me as you do, if I could
leave them even to go out into the world with you?"
"No," said Ralph very reluctantly, but like a man.
"Then," said Winsome bravely, "go to Edinburgh. Fight your own
battle, and mine," she added.
"Winsome," said Ralph, earnestly, for this serious and practical
side of her character was an additional and unexpected revelation
of perfection, "if you make as good a wife as you make a
sweetheart, you will make one man happy."
"I mean to make a man happy," said Winsome, confidently.
The scenery again asserted its claim to attention. Observation
enlarges the mind, and is therefore pleasant.
After a pause, Winsome said irrelevantly.
"And you really do not think me so foolish?"
"Foolish! I think you are the wisest and--"
"No, no." Winsome would not let him proceed. "You do not really
think so. You know that I am wayward and changeable, and not at
all what I ought to be. Granny always tells me so. It was very
different when she was young, she says. Do you know," continued
Winsome thoughtfully, "I used to be so frightened, when I knew
that you could read in all these wise books of which I did not
know a letter? But I must confess--I do not know what you will
say, you may even be angry--I have a note-book of yours which I
kept."
But if Winsome wanted a new sensation she was disappointed, for
Ralph was by no means angry.
"So that's where it went?" said Ralph, smiling gladly.
"Yes," said Winsome, blushing not so much with guilt as with the
consciousness of the locality of the note-book at that moment,
which she was not yet prepared to tell him. But she consoled
herself with the thought that she would tell him one day.
Strangely however, Ralph did not seem to care much about the book,
so Winsome changed the subject to one of greater interest.
"And what else did you think about me that first day?--tell me,"
said Winsome, shamelessly.
It was Ralph's opportunity.
"Why, you know very well, Winsome dear, that ever since the day I
first saw you I have thought that there never was any one like
you--"
"Yes?" said Winsome, with a rising inflection in her voice.
"I ever thought you the best and the kindest--"
"Yes?" said Winsome, a little breathlessly.
"The most helpful and the wisest--"
"Yes?" said Winsome.
"And the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life!"
"Then I do not care for anything else!" cried Winsome, clapping
her hands. She had been resolving to learn Hebrew five minutes
before.
"Nor do I, really," said Ralph, speaking out the inmost soul that
is in every young man.
As Ralph Peden sat looking at Winsome the thought came sometimes
to him--but not often--"This is Allan Welsh's daughter, the
daughter of the woman whom my father once loved, who lies so still
under the green sod of Crossthwaite beneath the lea of Skiddaw."
He looked at her eyes, deep blue like the depths of the
Mediterranean Sea, and, like it, shot through with interior light.
"What are you thinking of?" asked Winsome, who had also meanwhile
been looking at him.
"Of your eyes, dear!" said Ralph, telling half the truth--a good
deal for a lover.
Winsome paused for further information, looking into the depths of
his soul. Ralph felt as though his heart and judgment were being
assaulted by storming parties. He looked into these wells of blue
and saw the love quivering in them as the broken light quivers,
deflected on its way through clear water to a sea bottom of golden
sand.
"You want to hear me tell you something wiser," said Ralph, who
did not know everything; "you are bored with my foolish talk."
And he would have spoken of the hopes of his future.
"No, no; tell me--tell me what you see in my eyes," said Winsome,
a little impatiently.
"Well then, first," said truthful Ralph, who certainly did not
flinch from the task, "I see the fairest thing God made for man to
see. All the beauty of the world, losing its way, stumbled, and
was drowned in the eyes of my love. They have robbed the sunshine,
and stolen the morning dew. The sparkle of the light on the water,
the gladness of a child when it laughs because it lives, the
sunshine which makes the butterflies dance and the world so
beautiful--all these I see in your eyes."
"This story is plainly impossible. This practical girl was not one
to find pleasure in listening to flattery. Let us read no more in
this book." This is what some wise people will say at this point.
So, to their loss will they close the book. They have not achieved
all knowledge. The wisest woman would rather hear of her eyes than
of her mind. There are those who say the reverse, but then perhaps
no one has ever had cause to tell them concerning what lies hid in
their eyes.
Many had wished to tell Winsome these things, but to no one
hitherto had been given the discoverer's soul, the poet's voice,
the wizard's hand to bring the answering love out of the deep sea
of divine possibilities in which the tides ran high and never a
lighthouse told of danger.
"Tell me more," said Winsome, being a woman, as well as fair and
young. These last are not necessary; to desire to be told about
one's eyes, it is enough to be a woman.
Ralph looked down. In such cases it is necessary to refresh the
imagination constantly with the facts. As in the latter days wise
youths read messages from the quivering needle of the talking
machine, so Ralph read his message flash by flash as it pulsated
upward from a pure woman's soul.
"Once you would not tell me why your eyelashes were curled up at
the ends," said this eager Columbus of a new continent, drawing
the new world nearer his heart in order that his discoveries might
be truer, surer, in detail more trustworthy. "I know now without
telling. Would you like to know, Winsome?"
Winsome drew a happy breath, nestling a little closer--so little
that no one but Ralph would have known. But the little shook him
to the depths of his soul. This it is to be young and for the
first time mastering the geography of an unknown and untraversed
continent. The unversed might have thought that light breath a
sigh, but no lover could have made the mistake. It is only in
books, wordy and unreal, that lovers misunderstand each other in
that way.
"I know," said Ralph, needing no word of permission to proceed,
"it is with touching your cheek when you sleep."
"Then I must sleep a very long time!" said Winsome merrily, making
light of his words.
"Underneath in the dark of either eye," continued Ralph, who, be
it not forgotten, was a poet, "I see two young things like
cherubs."
"I know," said Winsome; "I see myself in your eyes--you see
yourself in mine."
She paused to note the effect of this tremendous discovery.
"Then," replied Ralph, "if it be indeed my own self I see in your
eyes, it is myself as God made me at first without sin. I do not
feel at all like a cherub now, but I must have been once, if I
ever was like what I see in your eyes."
"Now go on; tell me what else you see," said Winsome.
"Your lips--" began Ralph, and paused.
"No, six is quite enough," said Winsome, after a little while,
mysteriously. She had only two, and Ralph only two; yet she said
with little grammar and no sense at all, "Six is enough."
But a voice from quite other lips came over the rising background
of scrub and tangled thicket.
"Gang on coortin'," it said; "I'm no lookin', an' I canna see
onything onyway."
It was Jock Gordon. He continued:
"Jock Scott's gane hame till his breakfast. He'll no bother ye
this mornin', sae coort awa'."
CHAPTEE XXXV.
SUCH SWEET SORROW.
WINSOME and Ralph laughed, but Winsome sat up and put straight her
sunbonnet. Sunbonnets are troublesome things. They will not stick
on one's head. Manse Bell contradicts this. She says that her
sunbonnet never comes off, or gets pushed back. As for other
people's, lasses are not what they were in her young days.
"I must go home," said Winsome; "they will miss me."
"You know that it is 'good-bye,' then," said Ralph.
"What!" said Winsome, "shall I not see you to-morrow?" the bright
light of gladness dying out of her eye. And the smile drained down
out of her cheek like the last sand out of the sand-glass.
"No," said Ralph quietly, keeping his eyes full on hers, "I cannot
go back to the manse after what was said. It is not likely that I
shall ever be there again."
"Then when shall I see you?" said Winsome piteously. It is the cry
of all loving womanhood, whose love goes out to the battle or into
the city, to the business of war, or pleasure, or even of money-
getting. "Then when shall I see you. again?" said Winsome, saying
a new thing. There is nothing new under the sun, yet to lovers
like Winsome and Ralph all things are new.
There was a catch in her throat. A salter dew gathered about her
eyes, and the pupils expanded till the black seemed to shut out
the blue.
Very tenderly Ralph looked down, and said, "Winsome, my dear, very
soon I shall come again with more to ask and more to tell."
"But you are not going straight away to Edinburgh now? You must
get a drive to Dumfries and take the Edinburgh coach."
"I cannot do that," said Ralph; "I must walk all the way; it is
nothing."
Winsome looked at Ralph, the motherly instinct that is in all true
love surging up even above the lover's instinct. It made her clasp
and unclasp her hands in distress, to think of him going away
alone over the waste moors, from the place where they had been so
happy.
"And he will leave me behind!" she said, with a sudden fear of the
loneliness which would surely come when the bright universe was
emptied of Ralph.
"Had it only been to-morrow, I could have borne it better," she
said. "Oh, it is too soon! How could he let us be so happy when he
was going away from me?"
Winsome knew even better than Ralph that he must go, but the most
accurate knowledge of necessity does not prevent the resentful
feeling in a woman's heart when one she loves goes before his
time.
But the latent motherhood in this girl rose up. If he were truly
hers, he was hers to take care of. Therefore she asked the
question which every mother asks, and no sweetheart who is nothing
but a sweetheart has ever yet asked:
"Have you enough money?"
Ralph blushed and looked most unhappy, for the first time since
the sun rose.
"I have none at all," he said; "my father only gave me the money
for my journey to the Dullarg, and Mr. Welsh was to provide me
what was necessary--" He stopped here, it seemed such a hard and
shameful thing to say. "I have never had anything to do with
money," he said, hanging down his head.
Now Winsome, who was exceedingly practical in this matter, went
forward to him quickly and put an arm upon his shoulder.
"My poor boy!" she said, with the tenderest and sweetest
expression on her face. And again Ralph Peden perceived that there
are things more precious than much money.
"Now bend your head and let me whisper." It was already bent, but
it was in his ear that Winsome wished to speak.
"No, no, indeed I cannot, Winsome, my love; I could not, indeed,
and in truth I do not need it."
Winsome dropped her arms and stepped back tragically. She put one
hand over the other upon her breast, and turned half way from him.
"Then you do not love me," she said, purely as a coercive measure.
"I do, I do--you know that I do; but I could not take it," said
Ralph, piteously.
"Well, good-bye, then," said Winsome, without holding out her
hand, and turning away.
"You do not mean it; Winsome, you cannot be cruel, after all. Come
back and sit down. We shall talk about it, and you will see--"
Winsome paused and looked at him, standing so piteously. She says
now that she really meant to go away, but she smiles when she says
it, as if she did not quite believe the statement herself. But
something--perhaps the look in his eyes, and the thought that,
like herself, he had never known a mother--made her turn. Going
back, she took his hand and laid it against her cheek.
"Ralph," she said, "listen to me; if _I_ needed help and had none
I should not be proud; I would not quarrel with you when you
offered to help me. No, I would even ask you for it! BUT THEN I
LOVE YOU." It was hardly fair. Winsome acknowledges as much
herself; but then a woman has no weapons but her wit and her
beauty--which is, seeing the use she can make of these two, on the
whole rather fortunate than otherwise.
Ralph looked eager and a little frightened.
"Would you do that really?" he asked eagerly.
"Of course I should!" replied Winsome, a little indignantly.
Ralph took her in his arms, and in such a masterful way, that
first she was frightened and then she was glad. It is good to feel
weak in the arms of a strong man who loves you. God made it so
when he made all things well.
"My lassie!" said Ralph for all comment.
Then fell a silence so prolonged that a shy squirrel in the boughs
overhead resumed his researches upon the tassels and young shoots
of the pine-tops, throwing down the debris in a contemptuous
manner upon Winsome and Ralph, who stood below, listening to the
beating of each other's hearts.
Finally Winsome, without moving, produced apparently from regions
unknown a long green silk purse with three silver rings round the
middle.
As she put it into Ralph's hand, something doubtful started again
into his eyes, but Winsome looked so fierce in a moment, and so
decidedly laid a finger on his lips, that perforce he was silent.
As soon as he had taken it, Winsome clapped her hands (as well as
was at the time possible for her--it seemed, indeed, altogether
impossible to an outsider, yet it was done), and said:
"You are not sorry, dear--you are glad?" with interrogatively
arched eyebrows.
"Yes," said Ralph, "I am very glad." As indeed he might well be.
"You see," said the wise young woman, "it is this way: all that is
my very own. _I_ am your very own, so what is in the purse is your
very own."
Logic is great--greatest when the logician is distractingly
pretty; then, at least, it is sure to prevail--unless, indeed, the
opponent be blind, or another woman. This is why they do not
examine ladies orally in logic at the great colleges.
We have often tried to recover Ralph's reply, but the text is
corrupt at this place, the context entirely lost. Experts suspect
a palimpsest.
Perhaps we linger overly long on the records; but there is so much
called love in the world, which is no love, that there may be some
use in dwelling upon the histories of a love which was fresh and
tender, sweet and true. It is at once instruction for the young,
and for the older folk a cast back into the days that were. If to
any it is a mockery or a scorning, so much the worse--for of them
who sit in the scorner's chair the doom is written.
Winsome and Ralph walked on into the eye of the day, hand in hand,
as was their wont. They crossed the dreary moor, which yet is not
dreary when you came to look at it on such a morning as this.
The careless traveller glancing at it as he passed might call it
dreary; but in the hollows, miniature lakes glistened, into which
the tiny spurs of granite ran out flush with the water like
miniature piers. The wind of the morning waking, rippled on the
lakelets, and blew the bracken softly northward. The heather was
dark rose purple, the "ling" dominating the miles of moor; for the
lavender-grey flush of the true heather had not yet broken over
the great spaces of the south uplands.
So their feet dragged slower as they drew near to that spot where
they knew they must part. There was no thought of going back.
There was even little of pain.
Perfect love had done its work. All frayed and secondhand loves
may be made ashamed by the fearlessness of these two walking to
their farewell trysting-place, lonely amid the world of heather.
Only daft Jock Gordon above them, like a jealous scout, scoured
the heights--sometimes on all-fours, sometimes bending double,
with his long arms swinging like windmills, scaring even the sheep
and the deer lest they should come too near. Overhead there was
nothing nearer them than the blue lift, and even that had
withdrawn itself infinitely far away, as though the angels
themselves did not wish to spy on a later Eden. It was that
midsummer glory of love-time, when grey Galloway covers up its
flecked granite and becomes a true Purple Land.
If there be a fairer spot within the four seas than this fringe of
birch-fringed promontory which juts into westernmost Loch Ken, I
do not know it. Almost an island, it is set about with the tiniest
beaches of white sand. From the rocks that look boldly up the loch
the heather and the saxifrage reflect themselves in the still
water. To reach it Winsome led Ralph among the scented gall-bushes
and bog myrtle, where in the marshy meadows the lonely grass of
Parnassus was growing. Pure white petals, veined green, with
spikelets of green set in the angles within, five-lobed broidery
of daintiest gold stitching, it shone with so clear a presage of
hope that Ralph stooped to pick it that he might give it to
Winsome.
She stopped him.
"Do not pull it," she said; "leave it for me to come and look at--
when--when you are gone. It will soon wither if it is taken away;
but give me some of the bog myrtle instead," she added, seeing
that Ralph looked a little disappointed.
Ralph gathered some of the narrow, brittle, fragrant leaves.
Winsome carefully kept half for herself, and as carefully inserted
a spray in each pocket of his coat.
"There, that will keep you in mind of Galloway!" she said. And
indeed the bog myrtle is the characteristic smell of the great
world of hill and moss we call by that name. In far lands the mere
thought of it has brought tears to the eyes unaccustomed, so close
do the scents and sights of the old Free Province--the lordship of
the Picts--wind themselves about the hearts of its sons.
"We transplant badly, we plants of the hills. You must come back
to me," said Winsome, after a pause of wondering silence.
Loch Ken lay like a dream in the clear dispersed light of the
morning, the sun shimmering upon it as through translucent ground
glass. Teal and moor-hen squattered away from the shore as Winsome
and Ralph climbed the brae, and stood looking northward over the
superb levels of the loch. On the horizon Cairnsmuir showed golden
tints through his steadfast blue.
Whaups swirled and wailed about the rugged side of Bennan above
their heads. Across the loch there was a solitary farm so
beautifully set that Ralph silently pointed it out to Winsome, who
smiled and shook her head.
"The Shirmers has just been let on a nineteen years' lease," she
said, "eighteen to run."
So practical was the answer, that Ralph laughed, and the strain of
his sadness was broken. He did not mean to wait eighteen years for
her, fathers or no fathers.
Then beyond, the whole land leaped skyward in great heathery
sweeps, save only here and there, where about some hill farm the
little emerald crofts and blue-green springing oatlands clustered
closest. The loch spread far to the north, sleeping in the
sunshine. Burnished like a mirror it was, with no breath upon it.
In the south the Dee water came down from the hills peaty and
brown. The roaring of its rapids could faintly be heard. To the
east, across the loch, an island slept in the fairway, wooded to
the water's edge.
It were a good place to look one's last on the earth, this wooded
promontory, which might indeed have been that mountain, though a
little one, from which was once seen all the kingdoms of the earth
and the glory of them. For there are no finer glories on the earth
than red heather and blue loch, except only love and youth.
So here love and youth had come to part, between the heather that
glowed on the Bennan Hill and the sapphire pavement of Loch Ken.
For a long time Winsome and Ralph were silent--the empty interior
sadness, mixed of great fear and great hunger, beginning to grip
them as they stood. Lives only just twined and unified were again
to twain. Love lately knit was to be torn asunder. Eyes were to
look no more into the answering eloquence of other eyes.
"I must go," said Ralph, looking down into his betrothed's face.
"Stay only a little," said Winsome. "It is the last time."
So he stayed.
Strange, nervous constrictions played at "cat's cradle" about
their hearts. Vague noises boomed and drummed in their ears,
making their own words sound strange and empty, like voices heard
in a dream.
"Winsome!" said Ralph.
"Ralph!" said Winsome.
"You will never for a moment forget me?" said Winsome Charteris.
"You will never for a moment forget me?" said Ralph Peden.
The mutual answer taken and given, after a long silence of soul
and body in not-to-be-forgotten communion, they drew apart.
Ralph went a little way down the birch-fringed hill, but turned to
look a last look. Winsome was standing where he had left her.
Something in her attitude told of the tears steadily falling upon
her summer dress. It was enough and too much.
Ralph ran back quickly.
"I cannot go away, Winsome. I cannot bear to leave you like this!"
Winsome looked at him and fought a good fight, like the brave girl
she was. Then she smiled through her tears with the sudden
radiance of the sun upon a showery May morning when the white
hawthorn is coming out.
At this a sob, dangerously deep, rending and sudden, forced itself
from Ralph's throat. Her smile was infinitely more heart-breaking
than her tears. Ralph uttered a kind of low inarticulate roar at
the sight--being his impotent protest against his love's pain. Yet
such moments are the ineffaceable treasures of life, had he but
known it. Many a man's deeds follow his vows simply because his
lips have tasted the salt water of love's ocean upon the face of
the beloved.
"Be brave, Winsome," said Ralph; "it shall not be for long."
Yet she was braver than he, had he but known it; for it is the
heritage of the woman to be the stronger in the crises which
inevitably wait upon love and love's achievement.
Winsome bent to kiss, with a touch like a benediction, not his
lips now but his brow, as he stood beneath her on the hill slope.
"Go," she said; "go quickly, while I have the strength. I will be
brave. Be thou brave also. God be with thee!"
So Ralph turned and fled while he could. He dared not trust
himself to look till he was past the hill and some way across the
moor. Then he turned and looked back over the acres of heather
which he had put between himself and his love.
Winsome still stood on the hill-top, the sun shining on her face.
In her hand was the lilac sunbonnet, making a splash of faint pure
colour against the blonde whiteness of her dress. Ralph could just
catch the golden shimmer of her hair. He knew but he could not see
how it crisped and tendrilled about her brow, and how the light
wind blew it into little cirrus wisps of sun-flossed gold. The
thought that for long he should see it no more was even harder
than parting. It is the hard things on this earth that are the
easiest to do. The great renunciation is easy, but it is
infinitely harder to give up the sweet, responsive delight of the
eye, the thought, the caress. This also is human. God made it.
The lilac sunbonnet waved a little heartless wave which dropped in
the middle as if a string were broken. But the shining hair blew
out, as a waft of wind from the Bennan fretted a moving patch
across the loch.
Ralph flung out his hand in one of the savage gestures men use
when they turn bewildered and march away, leaving the best of
their lives behind them.
So shutting his eyes Ralph plunged headlong into the green glades
of the Kenside and looked no more. Winsome walked slowly and
sedately back, not looking on the world any more, but only twining
and pulling roughly the strings of her sunbonnet till one came
off. Winsome threw it on the grass. What did it matter now? She
would wear it no longer. There was none to cherish the lilac
sunbonnet any more.