Thenceforward Eric Marshall was a constant visitor at the Gordon
homestead. He soon became a favourite with Thomas and Janet, especially
the latter. He liked them both, discovering under all their outward
peculiarities sterling worth and fitness of character. Thomas Gordon was
surprisingly well read and could floor Eric any time in argument, once
he became sufficiently warmed up to attain fluency of words. Eric hardly
recognized him the first time he saw him thus animated. His bent form
straightened, his sunken eyes flashed, his face flushed, his voice
rang like a trumpet, and he poured out a flood of eloquence which swept
Eric’s smart, up-to-date arguments away like straws in the rush of a
mountain torrent. Eric enjoyed his own defeat enormously, but Thomas
Gordon was ashamed of being thus drawn out of himself, and for a week
afterwards confined his remarks to “Yes” and “No,” or, at the outside,
to a brief statement that a change in the weather was brewing.
Janet never talked on matters of church and state; such she plainly
considered to be far beyond a woman’s province. But she listened with
lurking interest in her eyes while Thomas and Eric pelted on each other
with facts and statistics and opinions, and on the rare occasions when
Eric scored a point she permitted herself a sly little smile at her
brother’s expense.
Of Neil, Eric saw but little. The Italian boy avoided him, or if they
chanced to meet passed him by with sullen, downcast eyes. Eric did not
trouble himself greatly about Neil; but Thomas Gordon, understanding the
motive which had led Neil to betray his discovery of the orchard trysts,
bluntly told Kilmeny that she must not make such an equal of Neil as she
had done.
“You have been too kind to the lad, lassie, and he’s got presumptuous.
He must be taught his place. I mistrust we have all made more of him
than we should.”
But most of the idyllic hours of Eric’s wooing were spent in the old
orchard; the garden end of it was now a wilderness of roses--roses red
as the heart of a sunset, roses pink as the early flush of dawn, roses
white as the snows on mountain peaks, roses full blown, and roses in
buds that were sweeter than anything on earth except Kilmeny’s face.
Their petals fell in silken heaps along the old paths or clung to the
lush grasses among which Eric lay and dreamed, while Kilmeny played to
him on her violin.
Eric promised himself that when she was his wife her wonderful gift
for music should be cultivated to the utmost. Her powers of expression
seemed to deepen and develop every day, growing as her soul grew, taking
on new colour and richness from her ripening heart.
To Eric, the days were all pages in an inspired idyl. He had never
dreamed that love could be so mighty or the world so beautiful. He
wondered if the universe were big enough to hold his joy or eternity
long enough to live it out. His whole existence was, for the time
being, bounded by that orchard where he wooed his sweetheart. All other
ambitions and plans and hopes were set aside in the pursuit of this one
aim, the attainment of which would enhance all others a thousand-fold,
the loss of which would rob all others of their reason for existence.
His own world seemed very far away and the things of that world
forgotten.
His father, on hearing that he had taken the Lindsay school for a year,
had written him a testy, amazed letter, asking him if he were demented.
“Or is there a girl in the case?” he wrote. “There must be, to tie you
down to a place like Lindsay for a year. Take care, master Eric; you’ve
been too sensible all your life. A man is bound to make a fool of
himself at least once, and when you didn’t get through with that in your
teens it may be attacking you now.”
David also wrote, expostulating more gravely; but he did not express the
suspicions Eric knew he must entertain.
“Good old David! He is quaking with fear that I am up to something he
can’t approve of, but he won’t say a word by way of attempting to force
my confidence.”
It could not long remain a secret in Lindsay that “the Master” was going
to the Gordon place on courting thoughts intent. Mrs. Williamson kept
her own and Eric’s counsel; the Gordons said nothing; but the secret
leaked out and great was the surprise and gossip and wonder. One or
two incautious people ventured to express their opinion of the Master’s
wisdom to the Master himself; but they never repeated the experiment.
Curiosity was rife. A hundred stories were circulated about Kilmeny, all
greatly exaggerated in the circulation. Wise heads were shaken and the
majority opined that it was a great pity. The Master was a likely young
fellow; he could have his pick of almost anybody, you might think; it
was too bad that he should go and take up with that queer, dumb niece of
the Gordons who had been brought up in such a heathenish way. But then
you never could guess what way a man’s fancy would jump when he set out
to pick him a wife. They guessed Neil Gordon didn’t like it much. He
seemed to have got dreadful moody and sulky of late and wouldn’t sing in
the choir any more. Thus the buzz of comment and gossip ran.
To those two in the old orchard it mattered not a whit. Kilmeny knew
nothing of gossip. To her, Lindsay was as much of an unknown world as
the city of Eric’s home. Her thoughts strayed far and wide in the realm
of her fancy, but they never wandered out to the little realities that
hedged her strange life around. In that life she had blossomed out, a
fair, unique thing. There were times when Eric almost regretted that one
day he must take her out of her white solitude to a world that, in the
last analysis, was only Lindsay on a larger scale, with just the same
pettiness of thought and feeling and opinion at the bottom of it. He
wished he might keep her to himself for ever, in that old, spruce-hidden
orchard where the roses fell.
One day he indulged himself in the fulfillment of the whim he had formed
when Kilmeny had told him she thought herself ugly. He went to Janet and
asked her permission to bring a mirror to the house that he might
have the privilege of being the first to reveal Kilmeny to herself
exteriorly. Janet was somewhat dubious at first.
“There hasn’t been such a thing in the house for sixteen years, Master.
There never was but three--one in the spare room, and a little one in
the kitchen, and Margaret’s own. She broke them all the day it first
struck her that Kilmeny was going to be bonny. I might have got one
after she died maybe. But I didn’t think of it; and there’s no need of
lasses to be always prinking at their looking glasses.”
But Eric pleaded and argued skilfully, and finally Janet said,
“Well, well, have your own way. You’d have it anyway I think, lad. You
are one of those men who always get their own way. But that is different
from the men who TAKE their own way--and that’s a mercy,” she added
under her breath.
Eric went to town the next Saturday and picked out a mirror that pleased
him. He had it shipped to Radnor and Thomas Gordon brought it home, not
knowing what it was, for Janet had thought it just as well he should not
know.
“It’s a present the Master is making Kilmeny,” she told him.
She sent Kilmeny off to the orchard after tea, and Eric slipped around
to the house by way of the main road and lane. He and Janet together
unpacked the mirror and hung it on the parlour wall.
“I never saw such a big one, Master,” said Janet rather doubtfully,
as if, after all, she distrusted its gleaming, pearly depth and richly
ornamented frame. “I hope it won’t make her vain. She is very bonny, but
it may not do her any good to know it.”
“It won’t harm her,” said Eric confidently. “When a belief in her
ugliness hasn’t spoiled a girl a belief in her beauty won’t.”
But Janet did not understand epigrams. She carefully removed a little
dust from the polished surface, and frowned meditatively at the by no
means beautiful reflection she saw therein.
“I cannot think what made Kilmeny suppose she was ugly, Master.”
“Her mother told her she was,” said Eric, rather bitterly.
“Ah!” Janet shot a quick glance at the picture of her sister. “Was that
it? Margaret was a strange woman, Master. I suppose she thought her own
beauty had been a snare to her. She WAS bonny. That picture doesn’t do
her justice. I never liked it. It was taken before she was--before she
met Ronald Fraser. We none of us thought it very like her at the time.
But, Master, three years later it was like her--oh, it was like her
then! That very look came in her face.”
“Kilmeny doesn’t resemble her mother,” remarked Eric, glancing at the
picture with the same feeling of mingled fascination and distaste with
which he always regarded it. “Does she look like her father?”
“No, not a great deal, though some of her ways are very like his. She
looks like her grandmother--Margaret’s mother, Master. Her name was
Kilmeny too, and she was a handsome, sweet woman. I was very fond of my
stepmother, Master. When she died she gave her baby to me, and asked me
to be a mother to it. Ah well, I tried; but I couldn’t fence the sorrow
out of Margaret’s life, and it sometimes comes to my mind that maybe
I’ll not be able to fence it out of Kilmeny’s either.”
“That will be my task,” said Eric.
“You’ll do your best, I do not doubt. But maybe it will be through you
that sorrow will come to her after all.”
“Not through any fault of mine, Aunt Janet.”
“No, no, I’m not saying it will be your fault. But my heart misgives me
at times. Oh, I dare say I am only a foolish old woman, Master. Go your
ways and bring your lass here to look at your plaything when you like.
I’ll not make or meddle with it.”
Janet betook herself to the kitchen and Eric went to look for Kilmeny.
She was not in the orchard and it was not until he had searched for some
time that he found her. She was standing under a beech tree in a field
beyond the orchard, leaning on the longer fence, with her hands clasped
against her cheek. In them she held a white Mary-lily from the orchard.
She did not run to meet him while he was crossing the pasture, as she
would once have done. She waited motionless until he was close to her.
Eric began, half laughingly, half tenderly, to quote some lines from her
namesake ballad:
“‘Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been?
Long hae we sought baith holt and den,--
By linn, by ford, and greenwood tree!
Yet you are halesome and fair to see.
Where got you that joup o’ the lily sheen?
That bonny snood o’ the birk sae green,
And those roses, the fairest that ever was seen?
Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been?’
“Only it’s a lily and not a rose you are carrying. I might go on and
quote the next couplet too--
“‘Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
But there was nae smile on Kilmeny’s face.’
“Why are you looking so sober?”
Kilmeny did not have her slate with her and could not answer; but Eric
guessed from something in her eyes that she was bitterly contrasting the
beauty of the ballad’s heroine with her own supposed ugliness.
“Come down to the house, Kilmeny. I have something there to show
you--something lovelier than you have ever seen before,” he said, with
boyish pleasure shining in his eyes. “I want you to go and put on that
muslin dress you wore last Sunday evening, and pin up your hair the same
way you did then. Run along--don’t wait for me. But you are not to go
into the parlour until I come. I want to pick some of those Mary-lilies
up in the orchard.”
When Eric returned to the house with an armful of the long stemmed,
white Madonna lilies that bloomed in the orchard Kilmeny was just coming
down the steep, narrow staircase with its striped carpeting of homespun
drugget. Her marvelous loveliness was brought out into brilliant relief
by the dark wood work and shadows of the dim old hall.
She wore a trailing, clinging dress of some creamy tinted fabric that
had been her mother’s. It had not been altered in any respect, for
fashion held no sway at the Gordon homestead, and Kilmeny thought
that the dress left nothing to be desired. Its quaint style suited
her admirably; the neck was slightly cut away to show the round white
throat, and the sleeves were long, full “bishops,” out of which her
beautiful, slender hands slipped like flowers from their sheaths. She
had crossed her long braids at the back and pinned them about her head
like a coronet; a late white rose was fastened low down on the left
side.
“‘A man had given all other bliss
And all his worldly wealth for this--
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips,’”
quoted Eric in a whisper as he watched her descend. Aloud he said,
“Take these lilies on your arm, letting their bloom fall against your
shoulder--so. Now, give me your hand and shut your eyes. Don’t open them
until I say you may.”
He led her into the parlour and up to the mirror.
“Look,” he cried, gaily.
Kilmeny opened her eyes and looked straight into the mirror where, like
a lovely picture in a golden frame, she saw herself reflected. For a
moment she was bewildered. Then she realized what it meant. The lilies
fell from her arm to the floor and she turned pale. With a little low,
involuntary cry she put her hands over her face.
Eric pulled them boyishly away.
“Kilmeny, do you think you are ugly now? This is a truer mirror than
Aunt Janet’s silver sugar bowl! Look--look--look! Did you ever imagine
anything fairer than yourself, dainty Kilmeny?”
She was blushing now, and stealing shy radiant glances at the mirror.
With a smile she took her slate and wrote naively,
“I think I am pleasant to look upon. I cannot tell you how glad I am.
It is so dreadful to believe one is ugly. You can get used to everything
else, but you never get used to that. It hurts just the same every time
you remember it. But why did mother tell me I was ugly? Could she really
have thought so? Perhaps I have become better looking since I grew up.”
“I think perhaps your mother had found that beauty is not always
a blessing, Kilmeny, and thought it wiser not to let you know you
possessed it. Come, let us go back to the orchard now. We mustn’t waste
this rare evening in the house. There is going to be a sunset that we
shall remember all our lives. The mirror will hang here. It is yours.
Don’t look into it too often, though, or Aunt Janet will disapprove. She
is afraid it will make you vain.”
Kilmeny gave one of her rare, musical laughs, which Eric never heard
without a recurrence of the old wonder that she could laugh so when she
could not speak. She blew an airy little kiss at her mirrored face and
turned from it, smiling happily.
On their way to the orchard they met Neil. He went by them with an
averted face, but Kilmeny shivered and involuntarily drew nearer to
Eric.
“I don’t understand Neil at all now,” she wrote nervously. “He is not
nice, as he used to be, and sometimes he will not answer when I speak
to him. And he looks so strangely at me, too. Besides, he is surly and
impertinent to Uncle and Aunt.”
“Don’t mind Neil,” said Eric lightly. “He is probably sulky because of
some things I said to him when I found he had spied on us.”
That night before she went up stairs Kilmeny stole into the parlour for
another glimpse of herself in that wonderful mirror by the light of a
dim little candle she carried. She was still lingering there dreamily
when Aunt Janet’s grim face appeared in the shadows of the doorway.
“Are you thinking about your own good looks, lassie? Ay, but
remember that handsome is as handsome does,” she said, with grudging
admiration--for the girl with her flushed cheeks and shining eyes was
something that even dour Janet Gordon could not look upon unmoved.
Kilmeny smiled softly.
“I’ll try to remember,” she wrote, “but oh, Aunt Janet, I am so glad I
am not ugly. It is not wrong to be glad of that, is it?”
The older woman’s face softened.
“No, I don’t suppose it is, lassie,” she conceded. “A comely face is
something to be thankful for--as none know better than those who have
never possessed it. I remember well when I was a girl--but that is
neither here nor there. The Master thinks you are wonderful bonny,
Kilmeny,” she added, looking keenly at the girl.
Kilmeny started and a scarlet blush scorched her face. That, and the
expression that flashed into her eyes, told Janet Gordon all she wished
to know. With a stifled sigh she bade her niece good night and went
away.
Kilmeny ran fleetly up the stairs to her dim little room, that looked
out into the spruces, and flung herself on her bed, burying her burning
face in the pillow. Her aunt’s words had revealed to her the hidden
secret of her heart. She knew that she loved Eric Marshall--and the
knowledge brought with it a strange anguish. For was she not dumb? All
night she lay staring wide-eyed through the darkness till the dawn.