A TRIANGULAR CONVERSATION.
It was the day of the fast before the Communion in the Dullarg.
The services of the day were over, and Allan Welsh, the minister
of the Marrow kirk, was resting in his study from his labours.
Manse Bell came up and knocked, inclining her ear as she did so to
catch the minister's low-toned reply.
"Mistress Winifred Charteris frae the Craig Ronald to see ye,
sir."
Allan Welsh commanded his emotion without difficulty--what of it
he felt--as indeed he had done for many years.
He rose, however, with his hand on the table as though for
support, as Winsome came in. He received her in silence, bending
over her hand with a certain grave reverence.
Winsome sat down. She was a little paler but even lovelier in the
minister's eyes than when he had seen her before. The faint violet
shadows under her lower lids were deeper, and gave a new depth to
her sapphire eyes whose irises were so large that the changeful
purple lights in them came and went like summer lightnings.
It was Winsome who first spoke, looking at him with a strange pity
and a stirring of her soul that she could not account for. She had
come unwillingly on her errand, disliking him as the cause of her
lover's absence--one of the last things a woman learns to forgive.
But, as she looked on Allan Welsh, so bowed and broken, his eyes
fallen in, looking wistfully out of the pain of his life, her
heart went out to him, even as she thought that of a truth he was
Ralph Peden's enemy.
"My grandfather," she said, and her voice was low, equable, and
serious, "sent me with a packet to you that he instructed me only
to give into your own hands."
Winsome went over to the minister and gave him a sealed parcel.
Allan Welsh took it in his hand and seemed to weigh it.
"I thank you," he said, commanding his voice with some difficulty.
"And I ask you to thank Walter Skirving for his remembrance of me.
It is many years since we were driven apart, but I have not
forgotten the kindness of the long ago!"
He opened the parcel. It was sealed with Walter Skirving's great
seal ring which he wore on his watch-chain, lying on the table
before him as he kept his never-ending vigil. There was a
miniature and a parcel of letters within.
It was the face of a fair girl, with the same dark-blue eyes of
the girl now before him, and the same golden hair--the face of an
earlier but not a fairer Winifred. Allan Welsh set his teeth, and
caught at the table to stay his dizzying head. The letters were
his own. It was Walter Skirving's stern message to him. From the
very tomb his own better self rose in judgment against him. He saw
what he might have been--the sorrow he had wrought, and the path
of ultimate atonement.
He had tried to part two young lovers who had chosen the straight
and honest way. It was true that his duty to the kirk which had
been his life, and which he himself was under condemnation
according to his own standard, had seemed to him to conflict with
the path he had marked out for Ralph.
But his own letters, breaking from their brittle confining band,
poured in a cataract of folded paper and close-knit writing which
looked like his own self of long ago, upon the table before him.
He was condemned out of his own mouth.
Winsome sat with her face turned to the window, from which she
could see the heathery back of a hill which heaved its bulk
between the manse and the lowlands at the mouth of the Dee. There
was a dreamy look in her eyes, land her heart was far away in that
Edinburgh town from which she had that day received a message to
shake her soul with love and pity.
The minister of the Dullarg looked up.
"Do you love him?" he asked, abruptly and harshly.
Winsome looked indignant and surprised. Her love, laid away in the
depths of her heart, was sacred, and not thus to be at the mercy
of every rude questioner. But as her eye rested on Allan Welsh,
the unmistakable accent of sincerity took hold on her--that accent
which may ask all things and not be blamed.
"I do love him," she said--"with all my heart."
That answer does not vary while God is in his heaven.
The eye of Allan Welsh fell on the miniature. The woman he had
loved so long ago took part in the conversation.
"That is what you said twenty years ago!" the unseen Winsome said
from the table.
"And he loves you?" he asked, without looking up.
"If I did not believe it, I could not live!"
Allan Welsh glanced with a keen and sudden scrutiny at Winsome
Charteris; but the clearness of her eye and the gladness and faith
at the bottom of it satisfied him as to his thought.
This Ralph Peden was a better man than he. A sad yearning face
looked up at him from the table, and a voice thrilled in his ears
across the years--
"So did not you!"
"You know," said Allan Welsh, again untrue to himself, "that it is
not for Ralph Peden's good that he should love you." The formal
part of him was dictating the words.
"I know you think so, and I am here to ask you why," said Winsome
fearlessly.
"And if I persuade you, will you forbid him?" said Allan Welsh,
convinced of his own futility.
Winsome's heart caught the accent of insincerity. It had gone far
beyond forbidding love or allowing it with Ralph Peden and
herself.
"I shall try!" she said, with her own sweet serenity. But across
the years a voice was pleading their case. As the black and faded
ink of the letters flashed his own sentences across the minister's
eye, the soul God had put within him rose in revolt against his
own petty and useless preaching.
"So did not you" persisted the voice in his ear. "Me you
counselled to risk all, and you took me out into the darkness,
lighting my way with love. Did ever I complain--father lost,
mother lost, home lost, God well nigh lost--all for you; yet did I
even regret when you saw me die?"
"Think of the Marrow kirk," said the minister. "Her hard service
does not permit a probationer, before whom lies the task of
doctrine and reproof, to have father or mother, wife or
sweetheart."
"And what did you," said the voice, "in that past day, care for
the Marrow kirk, when the light shone upon me, and you thought the
world, and the Marrow kirk with it, well lost for love's sake and
mine?"
Allan Welsh bowed his head yet lower.
Winsome Charteris went over to him. His tears were falling fast on
the dulled and yellowing paper.
Winsome put her hands on his shoulder.
"Is that my mother's picture?" she said, hardly knowing what she
said.
Allan Welsh put his hand greedily about it, he could not let it
go.
"Will you kiss me for your mother's sake?" he said.
And then, for the first time since her babyhood, Winsome
Charteris, whose name was Welsh, kissed her father.
There were tears on her mother's miniature, but through them the
face of the dead Winifred seemed to smile well pleased.
"For my mother's sake!" said Winsome again, and kissed him of her
own accord on the brow.
Thus Walter Skirving's message was delivered.