MISS FORTUNE'S TRYST BY WATER OF EARN, AND HOW I MARRED THE SAME
UNWITTINGLY
For the most part of a year I toiled and moiled like any crofter's son
on my father's poor estate, and dreary was the weird I had to dree, for
my being there at all was an advertisement to the countryside of what a
fool was young Paul Greig. “The Spoiled Horn” was what they called me in
the neighbourhood (I learned it in the taunt of a drunken packman), for
I had failed at being the spoon I was once designed for, and there was
not a ne'er-do-weel peasant nor a bankrupt portioner came craving some
benefit to my father's door but made up for his deference to the laird
by his free manner with the laird's son. The extra tenderness of my
mother (if that were possible) only served to swell my rebel heart, for
I knew she was but seeking to put me in a better conceit of myself, and
I found a place whereof I had before been fond exceedingly assume a new
complexion. The rain seemed to fall constantly that year, and the earth
in spring was sodden and sour. Hazel Den House appeared sunk in the
rotten leafage of the winter long after the lambs came home and the
snipe went drumming on the marsh, and the rookery in the holm plantation
was busy with scolding parents tutoring their young. A solemn house at
its best--it is so yet, sometimes I think, when my wife is on a jaunt
at her sister's and Walter's bairns are bedded--it was solemn beyond all
description that spring, and little the better for the coming of summer
weather. For then the trees about it, that gave it over long billows of
untimbered countryside an aspect of dark importance, by the same token
robbed it (as I thought then) of its few amenities. How it got the name
of Hazel Den I cannot tell, for autumn never browned a nut there. It was
wych elm and ash that screened Hazel Den House; the elms monstrous and
grotesque with knotty growths: when they were in their full leaf behind
the house they hid the valley of the Clyde and the Highland hills, that
at bleaker seasons gave us a sense of companionship with the wide world
beyond our infield of stunted crops. The ash towered to the number of
two score and three towards the south, shutting us off from the view
there, and working muckle harm to our kitchen-garden. Many a time my
father was for cutting them down, but mother forbade it, though her
syboes suffered from the shade and her roses grew leggy and unblooming.
“That,” said she, “is the want of constant love: flowers are like
bairns; ye must be aye thinking of them kindly to make them thrive.” And
indeed there might be something in the notion, for her apple-ringie
and Dutch Admiral, jonquils, gillyflowers, and peony-roses throve
marvellously, better then they did anywhere in the shire of Renfrew
while she lived and tended them and have never been quite the same since
she died, even with a paid gardener to look after them.
A winter loud with storm, a spring with rain-rot in the fallen leaf, a
summer whose foliage but made our home more solitary than ever, a short
autumn of stifling heats--that was the year the Spoiled Horn tasted the
bitterness of life, the bitterness that comes from the want of an
aim (that is better than the best inheritance in kind) and from a
consciousness that the world mistrusts your ability. And to cap all,
there was no word about my returning to the prelections of Professor
Reid, for a reason which I could only guess at then, but learned later
was simply the want of money.
My father comported himself to me as if I were doomed to fall into a
decline, as we say, demanding my avoidance of night airs, preaching the
Horatian virtues of a calm life in the fields, checking with a reddened
face and a half-frightened accent every turn of the conversation that
gave any alluring colour to travel or adventure. Notably he was dumb,
and so was my mother, upon the history of his family. He had had four
brothers: three of them I knew were dead and their tombs not in Mearns
kirkyard; one of them, Andrew, the youngest, still lived: I feared it
might be in a bedlam, by the avoidance they made of all reference to
him. I was fated, then, for Bedlam or a galloping consumption--so I
apprehended dolefully from the mystery of my folk; and the notion sent
me often rambling solitary over the autumn moors, cultivating a not
unpleasing melancholy and often stringing stanzas of a solemn complexion
that I cannot recall nowadays but with a laugh at my folly.
A favourite walk of mine in these moods was along the Water of Earn,
where the river chattered and sang over rocks and shallows or plunged
thundering in its linn as it did ere I was born and shall do when I and
my story are forgotten. A pleasant place, and yet I nearly always had it
to myself alone.
I should have had it always to myself but for one person--Isobel Fortune
from the Kirkillstane. She seemed as little pleased to meet me there
as I was to meet her, though we had been brought up in the same school
together; and when I would come suddenly round a bend of the road and
she appeared a hundred yards off, I noticed that she half stopped and
seemed, as it were, to swither whether she should not turn and avoid me.
It would not have surprised me had she done so, for, to tell the truth,
I was no very cheery object to contemplate upon a pleasant highway, with
the bawbee frown of a poetic gloom upon my countenance and the most curt
of salutations as I passed. What she did there all her lone so often
mildly puzzled me, till I concluded she was on a tryst with some young
gentleman of the neighbourhood; but as I never saw sign of him, I did
not think myself so much the marplot as to feel bound to take another
road for my rambling. I was all the surer 'twas a lover she was out to
meet, because she reddened guiltily each time that we encountered (a
fine and sudden charm to a countenance very striking and beautiful, as I
could not but observe even then when weightier affairs engaged me); but
it seemed I was all in error, for long after she maintained she was,
like myself, indulging a sentimental humour that she found go very well
in tune with the noise of Earn Water.
As it was her habit to be busily reading when we thus met, I had little
doubt as to the ownership of a book that one afternoon I found on
the road not long after passing her. It was--of all things in the
world!--Hervey's “Meditations.”
“It's an odd graveyard taste for a lass of that stamp,” thought I,
hastening back after her to restore the book, and when I came up to her
she was--not red this time, but wan to the very lips, and otherwise in
such confusion that she seemed to tremble upon her legs, “I think this
is yours, Isobel,” says I: we were too well acquaint from childhood for
any address more formal.
“Oh, thank you, Paul,” said she hastily. “How stupid of me to lose it!”
She took it from me; her eye fell (for the first time, I felt sure) upon
the title of the volume, and she bit her lip in a vexation. I was all
the more convinced that her book was but a blind in her rambles, and
that there was a lover somewhere; and I think I must have relaxed my
silly black frown a little, and my proud melancholy permitted a faint
smile of amusement. The flag came to her face then.
“Thank you,” said she very dryly, and she left me in the middle of the
road, like a stirk. If it had been no more than that, I should have
thought it a girl's tantrum; but the wonder was to come, for before
I had taken three steps on my resumed way I heard her run after me. I
stopped, and she stopped, and the notion struck me like a rhyme of song
that there was something inexpressibly pleasant in her panting breath
and her heaving bosom, where a pebble brooch of shining red gleamed like
an eye between her breasts.
“I'm not going to tell you a lie about it, Master Paul,” she said,
almost like to cry; “I let the book fall on purpose.”
“Oh, I could have guessed as much as that, Isobel,” said I, wondering
who in all the world the fellow was. Her sun-bonnet had fallen from her
head in her running, and hung at her back on its pink ribbons, and a
curl or two of her hair played truant upon her cheek and temple. It
seemed to me the young gentleman she was willing to let a book drop for
as a signal of her whereabouts was lucky enough.
“Oh! you could have guessed!” she repeated, with a tone in which were
dumbfounderment and annoyance; “then I might have saved myself the
trouble.” And off she went again, leaving me more the stirk than ever
and greatly struck at her remorse of conscience over a little sophistry
very pardonable in a lass caught gallivanting. When she was gone and her
frock was fluttering pink at the turn of the road, I was seized for the
first time with a notion that a girl like that some way set off, as we
say, or suited with, a fine landscape.
Not five minutes later I met young David Borland of the Driepps, and
there--I told myself--the lover was revealed! He let on he was taking
a short cut for Polnoon, so I said neither buff nor sty as to Mistress
Isobel.
The cool superiority of the gentleman, who had, to tell the truth, as
little in his head as I had in the heel of my shoe, somewhat galled me,
for it cried “Spoiled Horn!” as loud as if the taunt were bawled, so my
talk with him was short. There was but one topic in it to interest me.
“Has the man with the scarred brow come yet?” he asked curiously.
I did not understand.
“Then he's not your length yet,” said he, with the manifest gratification
of one who has the hanselling of great news. “Oh! I came on him this
morning outside a tavern in the Gorbals, bargaining loudly about a
saddle horse for Hazel Den. I'll warrant Hazel Den will get a start when
it sees him.”
I did not care to show young Borland much curiosity in his story, and so
it was just in the few words he gave it to me that I brought it home to
our supper-table.
My father and mother looked at each other as if I had told them a
tragedy. The supper ended abruptly. The evening worship passed unusually
fast, my father reading the Book as one in a dream, and we went to our
beds nigh an hour before the customary time.