THE LAST OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET.
Craig Ronald lies bright in a dreaming day in mid-September. The
reapers are once more in the fields. Far away there is a crying of
voices. The corn-fields by the bridge are white with a bloomy and
mellow whiteness. Some part of the oats is already down. Close
into the standing crop there is a series of rhythmic flashes, the
scythes swinging like a long wave that curls over here and there.
Behind the line of flashing steel the harvesters swarm like ants
running hither and thither crosswise, apparently in aimless
fashion.
Up through the orchard comes a girl, tall and graceful, but with a
touch of something nobler and stiller that does not come to
girlhood. It is the seal of the diviner Eden grace which only
comes with the after Eden pain.
Winsome Peden carries more than ever of the old grace and beauty;
and the eyes of her husband, who has been finishing the proofs of
his next volume and at intervals looking over the busy fields to
the levels of Loch Grannoch, tell her so as she comes.
But suddenly from opposite sides of the orchard this girl with the
gracious something in her eyes is borne down by simultaneous
assault. Shrieking with delight, a boy and a girl, dressed in
complete defensive armour of daisies, and wielding desperate arms
of lath manufactured by Andra Kissock, their slave, rush fiercely
upon her. They pull down their quarry after a brisk chase, who
sinks helplessly upon the grass under a merciless fire of
caresses.
It is a critical moment. A brutal and licentious soldiery are not
responsible at such moments. They may carry sack and rapine to
unheard of extremities.
"You young barbarians, be careful of your only mother--unless you
have a stock of them!" calls a voice from the top of the stairs
which lead to the study.
"Father's come out--hurrah! Come on, Allan!" shouts Field-Marshal
Winifred the younger who is leader and commander, to her army
whose tottery and chubby youth does not suggest the desperation of
a forlorn hope. So the study is carried at the point of the lath,
and the banner of the victors--a cross of a sort unknown to
heraldry, marked on a white ground with a blue pencil--is planted
on the sacred desk itself.
Winsome the matron comes more slowly up the stairs.
"Can common, uninspired people come in?" she says, pausing at the
top.
She looks about with a motherly eye, and pulls down the blind of
the window into which the sun has been streaming all the morning.
It is one of the advantages of such a wife that her husband,
especially the rare literary variety, may be treated as no more
than the eldest but most helpless of the babes. It is also true
that Ralph had pulled up the blind in order that he might the
better be able to see his wife moving among the reapers. For
Winsome was more than ever a woman of affairs.
She stood in the doorway, looking in spite of the autumn sun and
the walk up from the corn-field, deliriously cool. She fanned
herself with a broad rhubarb-leaf--an impromptu fan plucked by the
way. She sat down on the ledge of the upper step of Ralph's study,
as she often did when she worked or rested. Ralph was again
within, reclining on a window-seat, while the pack of reckless
banditti swarmed over him.
"Have the rhymes been behaving themselves this morning?" Winsome
said, looking across at Ralph as only a wife of some years'
standing can look at her husband--with love deepened into
understanding, and tempered with a spice of amusement and a wide
and generous tolerance--the look of a loving woman to whom her
husband and her husband's ways are better than a stage play. Such
a look is a certificate of happy home and an ideal life, far more
than all heroics. The love of the after-years depends chiefly on
the capacity of a wife to be amused by her husband's
peculiarities--and not to let him see it.
"There are three blanks," said Ralph, a little wistfully. "I have
written a good deal, but I dare not read it over, lest it should
be nothing worth."
This was a well-marked stage in Ralph's composition, and it was
well that his wife had come.
"I fear you have been dreaming, instead of working," she said,
looking at him with a kind of pitying admiration. Ralph, too, had
grown handsomer, so his wife thought, since she had him to look
after. How, indeed, could it be otherwise?
She rose and went towards him.
"Sun down, now, children, and play on the grass," she said. "Sun,
chicks--off with you--shoo!" and she flirted her apron after them
as she did when she scattered the chickens from the dairy door.
The pinafored people fled shrieking across the grass, tumbling
over each other in riotous heaps.
Then Winsome went over and kissed her husband. He was looking so
handsome that he deserved it. And she did not do it too often. She
was glad that she had made him wear a beard. She put one of her
hands behind his head and the other beneath his chin, tilting his
profile with the air of a connoisseur. This can only be done in
one position.
"Well, does it suit your ladyship?" said Ralph.
She gave him a little box on the ear.
"I knew," he said, "that you wanted to come and sit on my knee!"
"I never did," replied Winsome with animation, making a statement
almost certainly inaccurate upon the face of it.
"That's why you sent away the children," he went on, pinching her
ear.
"Of all things in this world," said Winsome indignantly, "commend
me to a man for conceit!"
"And to winsome wives for wily ways!" said her husband instantly.
To do him justice, he did not often do this sort of thing.
"Keep the alliteration for the poems," retorted Winsome. "Truth
will do for me."
After a little while she said, without apparent connection:
"It is very hot."
"What are they doing in the hay-field?" asked Ralph.
"Jock Forrest was leading and they were cutting down the croft
very steadily. I think it looks like sixty bushels to the acre,"
she continued practically; "so you shall have a carpet for the
study this year, if all goes well."
"That will be famous!" cried Ralph, like a schoolboy, waving his
hand. It paused among Winsome's hair.
"I wish you would not tumble it all down," she said; "I am too old
for that kind of thing now!"
The number of times good women perjure themselves is almost
unbelievable.
But the recording angel has, it is said, a deaf side, otherwise he
would need an ink-eraser. Ralph knew very well what she really
meant, and continued to throw the fine-spun glossy waves over her
head, as a miser may toss his gold for the pleasure of the cool,
crisp touch.
"Then," continued Winsome, without moving (for, though so unhappy
and uncomfortable, she sat still--some women are born with a
genius for martyrdom), "then I had a long talk with Meg."
"And the babe?" queried Ralph, letting her hair run through his
fingers.
"And the babe," said Winsome; "she had laid it to sleep under a
stock, and when we went to see, it looked so sweet under the
narrow arch of the corn! Then it looked up with big wondering
eyes. I believe he thought the inside of the stook was as high as
a temple."
"It is not I that am the poet!" said Ralph, transferring his
attention for a moment from her hair.
"Meg says Jock Forrest is perfectly good to her, and that she
would not change her man for all Greatorix Castle."
"Does Jock make a good grieve?" asked Ralph.
"The very best; he is a great comfort to me," replied his wife. "I
get far more time to work at the children's things--and also to
look after my Ursa Major!"
"What of Jess?" asked Ralph; "did Meg say?"
"Jess has taken the Lady Elizabeth to call on My Lord at Bowhill!
What do you think of that? And she leads Agnew Greatorix about
like a lamb, or rather like a sheep. He gets just one glass of
sherry at dinner," said Winsome, who loved a spice of gossip--as
who does not?
"There is a letter from my father this morning," said Ralph, half
turning to pick it off his desk; "he is well, but he is in
distress, he says, because he got his pocket picked of his
handkerchief while standing gazing in at a shop window wherein
books were displayed for sale, but John Bairdieson has sewed
another in at the time of writing. They had a repeating tune the
other day, and the two new licentiates are godly lads, and turning
out a credit to the kirk of the Marrow."
"And that is more than ever you would have done, Ralph," said his
wife candidly.
"Kezia is to be married in October, and there is a young man
coming to see little Keren-happuch, but Jemima thinks that the
minds of both of her younger sisters are too much set on the
frivolous things of this earth. The professor has received a new
kind of snuff from Holland which Kezia says is indistinguishable
in its effects from pepper--one of his old students brought it to
him--and that's all the news," said Ralph, closing up the letter
and laying it on the table.
"Has Saunders Moudiewort cast his easy affections on any one this
year yet?" Ralph asked, returning to the consideration of
Winsome's hair.
Saunders was harvesting at present at Craig Ronald. The mistress
of the farm laughed.
"I think not," she said; "Saunders says that his mother is the
most' siccar' housekeeper that he kens of, and that after a while
ye get to mind her tongue nae mair nor the mill fanners."
"That's just the way with me when you scold me," said Ralph.
"Very well, then, I must go to the summer seat and put you out of
danger," replied Winsome. "Since you are so imposed upon, I shall
see if the grannymother has done with her second volume. She never
gets dangerous, except when she is kept waiting for the third."
But before they had time to move, the rollicking storm-cloud of
younglings again came tumultuously up the stairs--Winifred far in
front, Allan toddling doggedly in the rear.
"See what granny has put on my head!" cried Mistress Winifred the
youngest, whose normal manner of entering a room suggested a
revolution.
"Oo" said Allan, pointing with his chubby finger, "yook, yook!
mother's sitting on favver's knee-rock-a-by, favver, rock-a-by!"
But Ralph had no eyes for anything but the old sunbonnet in which,
the piquant flower face of Mistress Five-year-old Winifred was
all but lost. He stooped and kissed it, and the face under it. It
was frayed and faded, and it had lost both strings.
Then he looked up and kissed the wife who was still his
sweetheart, for the love the lilac sunbonnet had brought to them
so many years ago was still fresh with the dew of their youth.
THE END.