WINSOME'S LAST TRYST.
It was the morn before a wedding, and there had been a constant
stir all night all about the farmsteading, for a brand-new world
was in the making. Such a marrying had not been for years. The
farmers' sons for miles around were coming on their heavy plough-
horses, with here and there one of better breed. Long ago in the
earliest morning some one had rung the bell of the little kirk of
the Dullarg. It came upon the still air a fairy tinkle, and many a
cottar and many a shepherd turned over with a comfortable feeling:
"This is the Sabbath morn; I need not rise so soon to-day." But
all their wives remembered, and turned them out with wifely elbow.
It was Winsome Charteris's wedding day. The flower of all the
countryside was to wed the young Edinburgh lad who had turned out
so great a poet. It was the opinion of the district that her
"intended" had unsettled the thrones of all the great writers of
the past by his volume of poems, which no one in the parish had
read; but the fame of whose success had been wafted down upon the
eastern breezes which bore the snell bite of the metropolis upon
their front.
"Tra-la-la-la!" chanted the cocks of Craig Ronald.
"Tra-la-la-la-la!" airily sang the solitary bird which lived up
among the pine woods, where, in the cot of Mistress Kissock, Ralph
Peden occupied the little bedroom which Meg had got ready for him
with such care and honour.
"Tra-la-la-laa!" was echoed in the airiest diminuendo from the
far-away leader of the harem at the Nether Orae. His challenge
crossed the wide gulf of air above Loch Grannoch, from which in
the earliest morning the mists were rising.
Ralph Peden heard all three birds. He had a delightfully
comfortable bedroom, and the flowers on the little white-covered
table have come from the front square of Mistress Kissock's
garden. There was a passion-flower on his table, which somehow
reminded him of a girl who had put poppies in hair of the raven's
wing hue. It had not grown in the garden of the cot.
Yet Ralph was out in the earliest dawn, listening to the sighing
of the trees and taking in the odour of the perfume from the pines
on the slope.
Ralph did not write any poem this morning, though the Muses were
abroad in the stillness of the dawn. His eyes were on a little
window once more overclambered by the June roses. His poem was
down there, and it was coming to him.
How eagerly he looked, his eyes like telescopes! Then his heart
thrilled. In the cool flood of slanting morning sunshine which had
just overflowed the eastern gable of the house, some one swiftly
crossed the court-yard of the farm. In a moment the sun, winking
on a pair of tin pails, told him that Meg Kissock was going to the
well. From the barn end some one stepped out by her side and
walked to the well. Then, as they returned, it was not the woman
who was carrying the winking pails. At the barn end they drew
together in the shadow for a long minute, and then again Ralph saw
Meg's back as she walked sedately to the kitchen door, the cans
flashing rhythmically as she swung them. So high was he above them
that he could even notice the mellow dimple of diffused light from
the water in the bright pail centring and scattering the morning
sunlight as it swayed.
Presently the one half of the blue kitchen door became black. It
had been opened. Ralph's heart gave a great bound. Then the black
became white and glorified, for framed within it appeared a
slender shape like a shaft of light. Ralph's eyes did not leave
the figure as it stepped out and came down by the garden edge.
Along the top of the closely-cut hawthorn a dot of light moved. It
was but a speck, like the paler centre of the heather bells. Ralph
ran swiftly down the great dyke in a manner more natural to a
young man than dignified in a poet. In a minute he came to the
edge of the glen in which Andra Kissock had guddled the trouts.
That flash of layender must pass this way. It passed and stayed.
So in the cool translucence of morning light the lovers met in
this quiet glade, the great heather moors above them once more
royally purple, the burnie beneath singing a gentle song, the
birds vying with each other in complicated trills of pretended
artlessness.
It was purely by chance that Winsome Charteris passed this way.
And a kind Providence, supplemented on Ralph's side by some
activity and observation, brought him also to the glen of the
elders that June morning. Yet there are those who say that there
is nothing in coincidence.
When Winsome, moving thoughtfully onward, gently waving a slip of
willow in her hand, came in sight of Ralph, she stood and waited.
Ralph went towards her, and so on their marriage morn these two
lovers met.
It was like that morning on which by the lochside they parted, yet
it was not like it.
With that prescience which is a sixth sense to women, Winsome had
slipped on the old sprigged gown which had done duty at the
blanket-washing so long ago, and her hair, unbound in the sun,
shone golden as it flowed from beneath the lilac sunbonnet. As for
Ralph, it does not matter how he was dressed. In love, dress does
not matter a brass button after the first corner is turned--at
least not to the woman.
"Sweet," said Ralph, "you are awake?"
Winsome looked up with eyes so glorious and triumphant that a
blind man could scarce have doubted the fact.
"And you love me?" he continued, reading her eyes. With her old
ripple of laughter she lightened the strain of the occasion.
"You are a silly boy," she said; "but you'll learn. I have come
out to gather flowers," she added, ingenuously. "I shall expect
you to help. No--no--and nothing else."
Had Ralph been in a fit condition to observe Nature this morning,
it might have occurred to him that when girls come out to gather
flowers for somewhat extensive decoration, they bring with them at
least a basket and generally also their fourth best pair of
scissors. Winsome had neither. But he was not in a mood for
careful inductions.
The morning lights sprayed upon them as they went hither and
thither gathering flowers--dew-drenched hyacinths, elastic wire-
strung bluebells the colour of the sky when the dry east wind
blows, the first great red bushes of the ling. Now it is a known
fact that, in order properly to gather flowers, the collectors
must divide and so quarter the ground.
"But this was not a scientific expedition," said Ralph, when the
folly of their mode of proceeding was pointed out to him.
It was manifestly impossible that they could gather flowers
walking with the palm of Ralph's left hand laid on the inside of
Winsome's left arm. The thing cannot be done. At least so Ralph
admitted afterwards.
"No," said Ralph, "but you made me promise to keep my shoulders
back, and I am trying to to do it now."
And his manner of assisting Winsome to gather her flowers for her
wedding bouquet was, when you come to think of it, admirably
adapted for keeping the shoulders back.
"Meg waked me this morning," said Winsome suddenly.
"She did, did she?" remarked Ralph ineffectively, with a quick
envy of Meg. Then it occurred to him that he had no need to envy
Meg. And Winsome blushed for no reason at all.
Then she became suddenly practical, as the protective instinct
teaches women to be on these occasions.
"You have not seen your study," she said.
"No," said Ralph, "but I have heard enough about it. It has
occupied sixteen pages in the last three letters."
Ralph considered the study a good thing, but he had his views upon
the composition of love-letters.
"You are an ungrateful boy," said Winsome sternly, "and I shall
see that you get no more letters--not any more!"
"I shall never want any, little woman," cried Ralph joyously, "for
I shall have you!"
It was a blessing that at this moment they were passing under the
dense shade of the great oaks at the foot of the orchard. Winsome
had thought for five minutes that it would happen about there. It
happened.
A quarter of an hour later they came out into the cool ocean of
leaf shadow which lay blue upon the grass and daisies. Winsome now
carried the sunbonnet over her arm, and in the morning sunshine
her uncovered head was so bright that Ralph could not gaze at it
long. Besides, he wanted to look at the eyes that looked at him,
and one cannot do everything at once.
"This is your study," she said, standing back to let him look in.
It was a long, low room with an outside stair above the
farthermost barn, and Winsome had fitted it up wondrously for
Ralph. It opened off the orchard, and the late blossoms scattered
into it when the winds blew from the south.
They stood together on the topmost step. There was a desk and one
chair, and a low window-seat in each of the deep windows.
"You will never be disturbed here," said Winsome.
"But I want to be disturbed," said Ralph, who was young and did
not know any better.
"Now go in," said Winsome, giving him a little push in the way
that, without any offence, a proximate wife may. "Go in and study
a little this morning, and see how you like it."
Ralph considered this as fair provocation, and turned, with bonds
and imprisonment in his mind. But Winsome had vanished.
But from beneath came a clear voice out of the unseen:
"If you don't like it, you can come round and tell me. It will not
be too late till the afternoon. Any time before three!"
A mere man is at a terrible disadvantage in word play of this
kind. On this occasion Ralph could think of nothing better than--
"Winsome Charteris, I shall pay you back for this!"
Then he heard what might either have been a bell ringing for the
fairies' breakfast, or a ripple of the merriest earthly laughter
very far away.
Then he sat down to study.
It took him quite an hour to arrive at a conclusion; but when
reached it was a momentous one. It was, that it is a mistake to be
married in summer, for three o'clock in the afternoon is such a
long time in coming.