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Title: The Lilac Sunbonnet

Author: S.R. Crockett

Release Date: January, 2004  [EBook #4918]
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[This file was first posted on March 27, 2002]

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THE LILAC SUNBONNET

A LOVE STORY

BY S. R. CROCKETT

AUTHOR OF THE STICKIT MINISTER, THE RAIDERS, ETC.





CONTENTS.

PROLOGUE.--BY THE WAYSIDE
       I.--THE BLANKET-WASHING
      II.--THE MOTHER OF KING LEMUEL
     III.--A TREASURE-TROVE
      IV.--A CAVALIER PURITAN
       V.--A LESSON IN BOTANY
      VI.--CURLED EYELASHES
     VII.--CONCERNING TAKING EXERCISE
    VIII.--THE MINISTER'S MAN ARMS FOR CONQUEST
      IX.--THE ADVENT OF THE CUIF
       X.--THE LOVE-SONG OF THE MAVIS
      XI.--ANDREW KISSOCK GOES TO SCHOOL
     XII.--MIDSUMMER DAWN
    XIII.--A STRING OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET
     XIV.--CAPTAIN AGNEW GREATORIX
      XV.--ON THE EDGE OF THE ORCHARD
     XVI.--THE CUIF BEFORE THE SESSION
    XVII.--WHEN THE KYE COMES HAME
   XVIII.--A DAUGHTER OF THE PlCTS
     XIX.--AT THE BARN END
      XX.-"DARK-BROWED EGYPT"
     XXI.--THE RETURN OF EBIE FARRISH
    XXII.--A SCARLET POPPY
   XXIII.--CONCERNING JOHN BAIRDIESON
    XXIV.--LEGITIMATE SPORT
     XXV.--BARRIERS BREAKING
    XXVI.--SUCH SWEET PERIL
   XXVII.--THE OPINIONS OF SAUNDERS MOWDIEWORT UPON BESOM-SHANKS
  XXVIII.--THAT GIPSY JESS
    XXIX.--THE DARK OF THE MOON AT THE GRANNOCH BRIDGE
     XXX.--THE HILL GATE
    XXXI.--THE STUDY OF THE MANSE OF DULLARG
   XXXII.--OUTCAST AND ALIEN FROM THE COMMONWEALTH
  XXXIII.--JOCK GORDON TAKES A HAND
   XXXIV.--THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH
    XXXV.--SUCH SWEET SORROW
   XXXVI.--OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
  XXXVII.--UNDER THE RED HEATHER
 XXXVIII.--BEFORE THE REFORMER'S CHAIR
   XXXIX.--JEMIMA, KEZIA, AND LITTLE KEREN-HAPPUCH
      XL.--A TRIANGULAR CONVERSATION
     XLI.--THE MEETING OF THE SYNOD
    XLII.--PURGING AND RESTORATION
   XLIII.--THREADS DRAWN TOGETHER
    XLIV.--WINSOME'S LAST TRYST
     XLV.--THE LAST OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET





PROLOGUE.

BY THE WAYSIDE


As Ralph Peden came along the dusty Cairn Edward road from the
coach which had set him down there on its way to the Ferry town,
he paused to rest in the evening light at the head of the Long
Wood of Larbrax. Here, under boughs that arched the way, he took
from his shoulders his knapsack, filled with Hebrew and Greek
books, and rested his head on the larger bag of roughly tanned
Westland leather, in which were all his other belongings. They
were not numerous. He might, indeed, have left both his bags for
the Dullarg carrier on Saturday, but to lack his beloved books for
four days was not to be thought of for a moment by Ralph Peden. He
would rather have carried them up the eight long miles to the
manse of the Dullarg one by one.

As he sat by the tipsy milestone, which had swayed sidelong and
lay half buried amid the grass and dock leaves, a tall, dark girl
came by--half turning to look at the young man as he rested. It
was Jess Kissock, from the Herd's House at Craig Ronald, on her
way home from buying trimmings for a new hat. This happened just
twice a year, and was a solemn occasion.

"Is this the way to the manse of Dullarg?" asked the young man,
standing up with his hat in his hand, the brim just beneath his
chin. He was a handsome young man when he stood up straight.

Jess looked at him attentively. They did not speak in that way in
her country, nor did they take their hats in their hands when they
had occasion to speak to young women.

"I am myself going past the Dullarg," she said, and paused with a
hiatus like an invitation.

Ralph Peden was a simple young man, but he rose and shouldered his
knapsack without a word. The slim, dark-haired girl with the
bright, quick eyes like a bird, put out her hand to take a share
of the burden of Ralph's bag.

"Thank you, but I am quite able to manage it myself," he said, "I
could not think of letting you put your hand to it."

"I am not a fine lady," said the girl, with a little impatient
movement of her brows, as if she had stamped her foot. "I am
nothing but a cottar's lassie."

"But then, how comes it that you speak as you do?" asked Ralph.

"I have been long in England--as a lady's maid," she answered with
a strange, disquieting look at him. She had taken one side of the
bag of books in spite of his protest, and now walked by Ralph's
side through the evening coolness.

"This is the first time you have been hereaway?" his companion
asked.

Ralph nodded a quick affirmative and smiled.

"Then," said Jess Kissock, the rich blood mantling her dark
cheeks, "I am the first from the Dullarg you have spoken to!"

"The very first!" said Ralph.

"Then I am glad," said Jess Kissock. But in the young man's heart
there was no answering gladness, though in very sooth she was an
exceeding handsome maid.





CHAPTER I.

THE BLANKET-WASHING.


Ralph Peden lay well content under a thorn bush above the Grannoch
water. It was the second day of his sojourning in Galloway--the
first of his breathing the heather scent on which the bees grew
tipsy, and of listening to the grasshoppers CHIRRING in the long
bent by the loch side. Yesterday his father's friend, Allan Welsh,
minister of the Marrow kirk in the parish of Dullarg, had held
high discourse with him as to his soul's health, and made many
inquiries as to how it sped in the great city with the precarious
handful of pious folk, who gathered to listen to the precious and
savoury truths of the pure Marrow teaching. Ralph Peden was
charged with many messages from his father, the metropolitan
Marrow minister, to Allan Welsh--dear to his soul as the only
minister who had upheld the essentials on that great day, when
among the assembled Presbyters so many had gone backward and
walked no more with him.

"Be faithful with the young man, my son," Allan Welsh read in the
quaintly sealed and delicately written letter which his brother
minister in Edinburgh had sent to him, and which Ralph had duly
delivered in the square, grim manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and
old-fashioned reverence which sat strangely on one of his years.
"Be faithful with the young man," continued the letter; "he is
well grounded on the fundamentals; his head is filled with godly
lear, and he has sound views on the Headship; but he has always
been a little cold and distant even to me, his father according to
the flesh. With his companions he is apt to be distant and
reserved. I am to blame for the solitude of our life here in
James's Court, but to you I do not need to tell the reason of
that. The Lord give you his guidance in leading the young man in
the right way."

So far Gilbert Peden's letter had run staidly and in character
like the spoken words of the writer. But here it broke off. The
writing, hitherto fine as a hair, thickened; and from this point
became crowded and difficult, as though the floods of feeling had
broken some dam. "O man Allan, for my sake, if at all you have
loved me, or owe me anything, dig deep and see if the lad has a
heart. He shews it not to me."

So that is why Ralph Peden lies couched in the sparce bells of the
ling, just where the dry, twisted timothy grasses are beginning to
overcrown the purple bells of the heather. Tall and clean-limbed,
with a student's pallor of clear-cut face, a slightly ascetic
stoop, dark brown curls clustering over a white forehead, and eyes
which looked steadfast and true, the young man was sufficient of a
hero. He wore a broad straw hat, which he had a pleasant habit of
pushing back, so that his clustering locks fell over his brow
after a fashion which all women thought becoming. But Ralph Peden
heeded not what women thought, said, or did, for he was trysted to
the kirk of the Marrow, the sole repertory of orthodox truth in
Scotland, which is as good as saying in the wide world--perhaps
even in the universe.

Ralph Peden had dwelt all his life with his father in an old house
in James's Court, Edinburgh, overlooking the great bounding circle
of the northern horizon and the eastern sea. He had been trained
by his father to think more of a professor's opinion on his Hebrew
exercise than of a woman's opinion on any subject whatever. He had
been told that women were an indispensable part of the economy of
creation; but, though he accepted word by word the Westminster
Confession, and as an inexorable addition the confessions and
protests of the remnant of the true kirk in Scotland (known as the
Marrow kirk), he could not but consider woman a poor makeshift,
even as providing for the continuity of the race. Surely she had
not been created when God looked upon all that he had made and
found it very good. The thought preserved Ralph's orthodoxy.

Ralph Peden had come out into the morning air, with his note-book
and a volume which he had been studying all the way from
Edinburgh. As he lay at length among the grass he conned it over
and over. He referred to passages here and there. He set out very
calmly with that kind of determination with which a day's work in
the open air with a book is often begun. Not for a moment did he
break the monotony of his study. The marshalled columns of strange
letters were mowed down before him.

A great humble-bee, barred with tawny orange, worked his way up
from his hole in the bank, buzzing shrilly in an impatient,
stifled manner at finding his dwelling blocked as to its exit by a
mountainous bulk. Ralph Peden rose in a hurry. The beast seemed to
be inside his coat. He had instinctively hated bees and everything
that buzzed ever since as a child he had made experiments with the
paper nest of a tree-building wasp. The humble-bee buzzed a little
more, discontentedly, thought of going back, crept out at last
from beneath the Hebrew Lexicon, and appeared to comb his hair
with his feeler. Then he slowly mounted along the broad blade of a
meadow fox-tail grass, which bent under him as if to afford him an
elastic send-off upon his flight. With a spring he lumbered up,
taking his way over the single field which separated his house
from the edge of the Grannoch water--where on the other side,
above the glistening sickle-sweep of sand which looked so
inviting, yet untouched under the pines by the morning sun, the
hyacinths lay like a blue wreath of peat smoke in the hollows of
the wood.

But there was a whiff of real peat smoke somewhere in the air, and
Ralph Peden, before he returned to his book, was aware of the
murmur of voices. He moved away from the humble-bee's dwelling and
established himself on a quieter slope under a bush of broom. A
whin-chat said "check, check" above him, and flirted a brilliant
tail; but Ralph Peden was not afraid of whin-chats. Here he
settled himself to study, knitting his brows and drumming on the
ground with the toe of one foot to concentrate his attention. The
whin-chat could hear him murmuring to himself at intervals,
"Surely that is the sense--it must be taken this way." Sometimes,
on the contrary, he shook his head at Luther's Commentary, which
lay on the short, warm turf before him, as if in reproof. Ralph
was of opinion that Luther, but for his great protective
reputation, and the fact that he had been dead some time, might
have been served with a libel for heresy--at least if he had
ministered to the Marrow kirk.

Then after a little he pulled his hat over his eyes to think, and
lay back till he could just see one little bit of Loch Grannoch
gleaming through the trees, and the farm of Nether Crae set on the
hillside high above it. He counted the sheep on the green field
over the loch, numbering the lambs twice because they frisked
irresponsibly about, being full of frivolity and having no
opinions upon Luther to sober them.

Gradually a haze spun itself over the landscape, and Ralph Peden's
head slowly fell back till it rested somewhat sharply upon a
spikelet of prickly whin. His whole body sat up instantly, with an
exclamation which was quite in Luther's manner. He had not been
sleeping. He rejected the thought; yet he acknowledged that it was
nevertheless passing strange that, just where the old single-
arched bridge takes a long stride over the Grannoch lane, there
was now a great black pot a-swing above a blinking pale fire of
peats and fir-branches, and a couple of great tubs set close
together on stones which he had not seen before. There was, too, a
ripple of girls' laughter, which sent a strange stirring of
excitement along the nerves of the young man. He gathered his
books to move away; but on second thoughts, looking through the
long, swaying tendrils of the broom under which he sat, he
resolved to remain. After all, the girls might be as harmless as
his helper of yesterday.

"Yet it is most annoying," he said; "I had been quieter in James's
Court."

Still he smiled a little to himself, for the broom did not grow in
James's Court, nor the blackbirds flute their mellow whistle
there.

Loch Grannoch stretched away three miles to the south, basking in
alternate blue and white, as cloud and sky mirrored themselves
upon it. The first broad rush of the ling [Footnote: Common heath
(Erica tetralix).] was climbing the slopes of the Crae Hill above
--a pale lavender near the loch-side, deepening to crimson on the
dryer slopes where the heath-bells grew shorter and thicker
together. The wimpling lane slid as silently away from the
sleeping loch as though it were eloping and feared to awake an
angry parent. The whole range of hill and wood and water was
drenched in sunshine. Silence clothed it like a garment--save only
for the dark of the shadow under the bridge, from whence had come
that ring of girlish laughter which had jarred upon the nerves of
Ralph Peden.

Suddenly there emerged from the indigo shade where the blue
spruces overarched the bridge a girl carrying two shining pails of
water. Her arms were bare, her sleeves being rolled high above her
elbow; and her figure, tall and shapely, swayed gracefully to the
movement of the pails. Ralph did not know before that there is an
art in carrying water. He was ignorant of many things, but even
with his views on woman's place in the economy of the universe, he
could not but be satisfied with the fitness and the beauty of the
girl who came up the path, swinging her pails with the
compensatory sway of lissom body, and that strong outward flex of
the elbow which kept the brimming cans swinging in safety by her
side.

Ralph Peden never took his eyes off her as she came, the theories
of James's Court notwithstanding. Nor indeed need we for a little.
For this is Winifred, better known as Winsome Charteris, a very
important young person indeed, to whose beauty and wit the poets
of three parishes did vain reverence; and, what she might well
value more, whose butter was the best (and commanded the highest
price) of any that went into Dumfries market on Wednesdays.

Fair hair, crisping and tendrilling over her brow, swept back in
loose and flossy circlets till caught close behind her head by a
tiny ribbon of blue--then again escaping it went scattering and
wavering over her shoulders wonderingly, like nothing on earth but
Winsome Charteris's hair. It was small wonder that the local poets
grew grey before their time in trying to find a rhyme for
"sunshine," a substantive which, for the first time, they had
applied to a girl's hair. For the rest, a face rather oval than
long, a nose which the schoolmaster declared was "statuesque"
(used in a good sense, he explained to the village folk, who could
never be brought to see the difference between a statue and an
idol--the second commandment being of literal interpretation along
the Loch Grannoch side), and eyes which, emulating the parish
poet, we can only describe as like two blue waves when they rise
just far enough to catch a sparkle of light on their crests. The
subject of her mouth, though tempting, we refuse to touch. Its
description has already wrecked three promising reputations.

But withal Winsome Charteris set her pails as frankly and plumply
on the ground, as though she were plain as a pike-staff, and bent
a moment over to look into the gypsy-pot swung on its birchen
triangle. Then she made an impatient movement of her hand, as if
to push the biting fir-wood smoke aside. This angered Ralph, who
considered it ridiculous and ill-ordered that a gesture which
showed only a hasty temper and ill-regulated mind should be
undeniably pretty and pleasant to look upon, just because it was
made by a girl's hand. He was angry with himself, yet he hoped she
would do it again. Instead, she took up one pail of water after
the other, swung them upward with a single dexterous movement, and
poured the water into the pot, from which the steam was rising.
Ralph Peden could see the sunlight sparkle in the water as it
arched itself solidly out of the pails. He was not near enough to
see the lilac sprig on her light summer gown; but the lilac
sunbonnet which she wore, principally it seemed in order that it
might hang by the strings upon her shoulders, was to Ralph a
singularly attractive piece of colour in the landscape. This he
did not resent, because it is always safe to admire colour.

Ralph would have been glad to have been able to slip off quietly
to the manse. He told himself so over and over again, till he
believed it. This process is easy. But he saw very well that he
could not rise from the lee of the whin bush without being in full
view of this eminently practical and absurdly attractive young
woman. So he turned to his Hebrew Lexicon with a sigh, and a grim
contraction of determined brows which recalled his father. A
country girl was nothing to the hunter after curious roots and the
amateur of finely shaded significances in Piel and Pual.

"I WILL not be distracted!" Ralph said doggedly, though a Scot,
correct for once in his grammar; and he pursued a recalcitrant
particle through the dictionary like a sleuthhound.

A clear shrill whistle rang through the slumberous summer air.

"Bless me," said Ralph, startled, "this is most discomposing!"

He raised himself cautiously on his elbow, and beheld the girl of
the water-pails standing in the full sunshine with her lilac
sunbonnet in her hand. She wared it high above her head, then she
paused a moment to look right in his direction under her hand held
level with her brows. Suddenly she dropped the sunbonnet, put a
couple of fingers into her mouth in a manner which, if Ralph had
only known it, was much admired of all the young men in the
parish, and whistled clear and loud, so that the stone-chat
fluttered up indignant and scurried to a shelter deeper among the
gorse. A most revolutionary young person this. He regretted that
the humble-bee had moved him nearer the bridge.

Ralph was deeply shocked that a girl should whistle, and still
more that she should use two fingers to do it, for all the world
like a shepherd on the hill. He bethought him that not one of his
cousins, Professor Habakkuk Thriepneuk's daughters (who studied
Chaldaeic with their father), would ever have dreamed of doing
that. He imagined their horror at the thought, and a picture,
compound of Jemima, Kezia, and Kerenhappuch, rose before him.

Down the hill, out from beneath the dark green solid foliaged
elder bushes, there came a rush of dogs.

"Save us," said Ralph, who saw himself discovered, "the deil's in
the lassie; she'll have the dogs on me!"--an expression he had
learned from John Bairdison, his father's "man," [Footnote: Church
officer and minister's servant.] who in an unhallowed youth had
followed the sea.

Then he would have reproved himself for the unlicensed exclamation
as savouring of the "minced oath," had he not been taken up with
watching the dogs. There were two of them. One was a large, rough
deerhound, clean cut about the muzzle, shaggy everywhere else,
which ran first, taking the hedges in his stride. The other was a
small, short-haired collie, which, with his ears laid back and an
air of grim determination not to be left behind, followed grimly
after. The collie went under the hedges, diving instinctively for
the holes which the hares had made as they went down to the water
for their evening drink. Both dogs crossed to windward of him,
racing for their mistress. When they reached the green level where
the great tubs stood they leaped upon her with short sharp barks
of gladness. She fended them off again with gracefully impatient
hand; then bending low, she pointed to the loch-side a quarter of
a mile below, where a herd of half a dozen black Galloway cows,
necked with the red and white of the smaller Ayrshires, could be
seen pushing its way through the lush heavy grass of the water
meadow.

"Away by there! Fetch them, Roger!" she cried. "Haud at them--the
kye's in the meadow!"

The dogs darted away level. The cows continued their slow advance,
browsing as they went, but in a little while their dark fronts
were turned towards the dogs as after a momentary indecision they
recognized an enemy. With a startled rush the herd drove through
the meadow and poured across the unfenced road up to the hill
pasture which they had left, whose scanty grasses had doubtless
turned slow bovine thoughts to the coolness of the meadow grass,
and the pleasure of standing ruminant knee-deep in the river, with
wavy tail nicking the flies in the shade.

For a little while Ralph Peden breathed freely again, but his
satisfaction was short-lived. One girl was discomposing enough,
but here were two. Moreover the new-comer, having arranged some
blankets in a tub to her satisfaction, calmly tucked up her skirts
in a professional manner and got bare-foot into the tub beside
them. Then it dawned upon Ralph, who was not very instructed on
matters of household economy, that he had chanced upon a Galloway
blanket-washing; and that, like the gentleman who spied upon
Musidora's toilet, of whom he had read in Mr. James Thomson's
Seasons, he might possibly see more than he had come out to see.

Yet it was impossible to rise composedly and take his way
manseward. Ralph wished now that he had gone at the first alarm.
It had become so much more difficult now, as indeed it always does
in such cases. Moreover, he was certain that these two vagabonds
of curs would return. And they would be sure to find him out. Dogs
were unnecessary and inconvenient beasts, always sniffing and
nosing about. He decided to wait. The new-comer of the kilts was
after all no Naiad or Hebe. Her outlines did not resemble to any
marked degree the plates in his excellent classical dictionary.
She was not short in stature, but so strong and of a complexion so
ruddily beaming above the reaming white which filled the blanket
tub, that her mirthful face shone like the sun through an evening
mist.

But Ralph did not notice that, in so far as she could, she had
relieved the taller maiden of the heavier share of the work; and
that her laugh was hung on a hair trigger, to go off at every jest
and fancy of Winsome Charteris. All this is to introduce Miss Meg
Kissock, chief and favoured maidservant at the Dullarg farm, and
devoted worshipper of Winsome, the young mistress thereof. Meg
indeed, would have thanked no one for an introduction, being at
all times well able (and willing) to introduce herself.

It had been a shock to Ralph Peden when Meg Kissock walked up from
the lane-side barefoot, and when she cleared the decks for the
blanket tramping. But he had seen something like it before on the
banks of the water of Leith, then running clear and limpid over
its pebbles, save for a flour-mill or two on the lower reaches.
But it was altogether another thing when, plain as print, he saw
his first goddess of the shining water-pails sit calmly down on
the great granite boulder in the shadow of the bridge, and take
one small foot in her hand with the evident intention of removing
her foot-gear and occupying the second tub.

The hot blood surged in responsive shame to Ralph Peden's cheeks
and temples. He started up. Meg Kissock was tramping the blankets
rhythmically, holding her green kirtle well up with both hands,
and singing with all her might. The goddess of the shining pails
was also happily unconscious, with her face to the running water.
Ralph bent low and hastened through a gap in the fence towards the
shade of the elder bushes on the slope. He did not run--he has
never acknowledged that; but he certainly came almost
indistinguishably near it. As soon, however, as he was really out
of sight, he actually did take to his heels and run in the
direction of the manse, disconcerted and demoralized.

The dogs completed his discomfiture, for they caught sight of his
flying figure and gave chase--contenting themselves, however, with
pausing on the hillside where Ralph had been lying, with indignant
barkings and militant tails high crested in air.

Winsome Charteris went up to the broom bushes which fringed the
slope to find out what was the matter with Tyke and Roger. When
she got there, a slim black figure was just vanishing round the
white bend of the Far Away Turn. Winsome whistled low this time,
and without putting even one finger into her mouth.





CHAPTER II.

THE MOTHER OF KING LEMUEL.


It was not till Ralph Peden had returned to the study of the manse
of the Marrow kirk of Dullarg, and the colour induced by exercise
had had time to die out of his naturally pale cheeks, that he
remembered that he had left his Hebrew Bible and Lexicon, as well
as a half-written exegesis on an important subject, underneath the
fatal whin bush above the bridge over the Grannoch water. He would
have been glad to rise and seek it immediately--a task which,
indeed, no longer presented itself in such terrible colours to
him. He found himself even anxious to go. It would be a serious
thing were he to lose his father's Lexicon and Mr. Welsh's Hebrew
Bible. Moreover, he could not bear the thought of leaving the
sheets of his exposition of the last chapter of Proverbs to be the
sport of the gamesome Galloway winds--or, worse thought, the
laughing-stock of gamesome young women who whistled with two
fingers in their mouths.

Yet the picture of the maid of the loch which rose before him
struck him as no unpleasant one. He remembered for one thing how
the sun shone through the tangle of her hair. But he had quite
forgotten, on the other hand, at what part of his exegesis he had
left off. It was, however, a manifest impossibility for him to
slip out again. Besides, he was in mortal terror lest Mr. Welsh
should ask for his Hebrew Bible, or offer to revise his chapter of
the day with him. All the afternoon he was uneasy, finding no
excuse to take himself away to the loch-side in order to find his
Bible and Lexicon.

"I understand you have been studying, with a view to license, the
last chapter of the Proverbs of Solomon?" said Gilbert Welsh,
interrogatively, bending his shaggy brows and pouting his underlip
at the student.

The Marrow minister was a small man, with a body so dried and
twisted ("shauchelt" was the local word) that all the nerve stuff
of a strong nature had run up to his brain, so that when he walked
he seemed always on the point of falling forward, overbalanced by
the weight of his cliff-like brow.

"Ralph, will you ground the argument of the mother of King Lemuel
in this chapter? But perhaps you would like to refer to the
original Hebrew?" said the minister.

"Oh, no," interrupted Ralph, aghast at the latter suggestion, "I
do not need the text--thank you, sir."

But, in spite of his disclaimer, he devoutly desired to be where
the original text and his written comment upon it were at that
moment--which, indeed, was a consummation even more devoutly to be
wished than he had any suspicion of. The Marrow minister leaned
his head on his hand and looked waitingly at the young man.

Ralph recalled himself with an effort. He had to repeat to himself
that he was in the manse study, and almost to pinch his knee to
convince himself of the reality of his experiences. But this was
not necessary a second time, for, as he sat hastily down on one of
Allen Welsh's hard-wood chairs, a prickle from the gorse bush
which he had brought back with him from Loch Grannoch side was
argument sharp enough to convince Bishop Berkeley.

"Compose yourself to answer my question," said the minister, with
some slight severity. Ralph wondered silently if even a minister
of the Marrow kirk in good standing, could compose himself on one
whin prickle for certain, and the probability of several others
developing themselves at various angles hereafter.

Ralph "grounded" himself as best as he could, explaining the views
of the mother of King Lemuel as to the woman of virtue and
faithfulness. He seemed to himself to have a fluency and a fervour
in exposition to which he had been a stranger. He began to have
new views about the necessity for the creation of Eve. Woman might
possibly, after all, be less purely gratuitous than he had
supposed.

"The woman who is above rubies," said he, "is one who rises early
to care for the house, who oversees the handmaids as they cleanse
the household stuffs--in a" (he just saved himself from saying "in
a black pot")--"in a fitting vessel by the rivers of water."

"Well put and correctly mandated," said Mr. Welsh, very much
pleased. There was unction about this young man. Though a bachelor
by profession, he loved to hear the praises of good women; for he
had once known one.

"She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and--"

Here Ralph paused, biting his tongue to keep from describing the
picture which rose before him.

"And what," said the minister, tentatively, leaning forward to
look into the open face of the young man, "what is the distinction
or badge of true beauty and favour of countenance, as so well
expressed by the mother of King Lemuel?"

"A LILAC SUNBONNET!" said Ralph Peden, student in divinity.





CHAPTER III.

A TREASURE-TROVE.


Winsome CHARTERIS was a self-possessed maid, but undeniably her
heart beat faster when she found on the brae face, beneath the
bush of broom, two books the like of which she had never seen
before, as well as an open notebook with writing upon it in the
neatest and delicatest of hands. First, as became a prudent woman
of experience, she went up to the top of the hill to assure
herself that the owner of this strange treasure was not about to
return. Then she carefully let down her high-kilted print dress
till only her white feet "like little mice" stole in and out. It
did not strike her that this sacrifice to the conventions was just
a trifle belated.

As she returned she said "Shoo!" at every tangled bush, and
flapped her apron as if to scare whatever curious wild fowl might
have left behind it in its nest under the broom such curious nest-
eggs as two great books full of strange, bewitched-looking
printing, and a note-book of curious and interesting writings.
Then, with a half sigh of disappointment, Winsome Charteris sat
herself down to look into this matter. Meg Kissock from the bridge
end showed signs of coming up to see what she was about; but
Winsome imperiously checked the movement.

"Bide where you are, Meg; I'll be down with you presently."

She turned over the great Hebrew Bible reverently. "A. Welsh" was
written on the fly-leaf. She had a strange idea that she had seen
it before. It seemed somehow thrillingly familiar.

"That's the minister's Hebrew Bible book, no doubt," she said.
"For that's the same kind of printing as between the double verses
of the hundred-and-nineteenth Psalm in my grandfather's big
Bible," she continued, sapiently shaking her head till the crispy
ringlets tumbled about her eyes, and she had impatiently to toss
them aside.

She laid the Bible down and peeped into the other strange-looking
book. There were single words here of the same kind as in the
other, but the most part was in ordinary type, though in a
language of which she could make nothing. The note-book was a
resource. It was at least readable, and Winsome Charteris began
expectantly to turn it over. But something stirred reprovingly in
her heart. It seemed as if she were listening to a conversation
not meant for her. So she kept her finger on the leaf, but did not
turn it.

"No," she said, "I will not read it. It is not meant for me."
Then, after a pause, "At least I will only read this page which is
open, and then look at the beginning to see whose it is; for, you
know, I may need to send it back to him." The back she had seen
vanish round the Far Away Turn demanded the masculine pronoun.

She lifted the book and read:

"Alas!" (so ran the writing, fluent and clear, small as printer's
type, Ralph Peden's beautiful Hellenic script), "alas, that the
good qualities of the housewives of Solomon's days are out of date
and forgotten in these degenerate times! Women, especially the
younger of them, are become gadabouts, chatterers in the public
ways, idle, adorners of their vain selves, pamperers of their
frail tabernacles--"

Winsome threw down the book and almost trod upon it as upon a
snake.

"'Tis some city fop," she said, stamping her foot, "who is tired
of the idle town dames. I wonder if he has ever seen the sun rise
or done a day's work in his life? If only I had the wretch! But I
will read no more!"

In token of the sincerity of the last assertion, she picked up the
note-book again. There was little more to read. It was at this
point that the humble-bee had startled the writer.

But underneath there were woids faintly scrawled in pencil: "Must
concentrate attention"--"The proper study of mankind is"--this
last written twice, as if the writer were practising copy-lines
absently. Then at the very bottom was written, so faintly that
hardly any eyes but Winsome's could have read the words:

"Of all colours I do love the lilac. I wonder all maids do not
wear gear of that hue!"

"Oh!" said Winsome Charteris quickly.

Then she gathered up the books very gently, and taking a kerchief
from her neck, she folded the two great books within it, fastening
them with a cunning knot. She was carrying them slowly up towards
the farm town of Craig Ronald in her bare arms when Ralph Peden
sat answering his catechism in the study at the manse. She entered
the dreaming courtyard, and walked sedately across its silent sun-
flooded spaces without a sound. She passed the door of the cool
parlour where her grandfather and grandmother sat, the latter with
her hands folded and her great tortoiseshell spectacles on her
nose, taking her afternoon nap. A volume of Waverley lay beside
her. Into her own white little room Winsome went, and laid the
bundle of books in the bottom of the wall-press, which was lined
with sheets of the Cairn Edward Miscellany. She looked at it some
time before she shut the door.

"His name is Ralph," she said. "I wonder how old he is--I shall
know tomorrow, because he will come back; but--I would like to
know tonight."

She sighed a little--so light a breath that it was only the dream
of a sigh. Then she looked at the lilac sunbonnet, as if it ought
to have known.

"At any rate he has very good taste," she said.

But the lilac sunbonnet said never a word.





CHAPTER IV.

A CAVALIER PURITAN.


The farm town of Craig Ronald drowsed in the quiet of noon. In the
open court the sunshine triumphed, and only the purple-grey marsh
mallows along the side of the house under the windows gave any
sign of life. In them the bees had begun to hum at earliest dawn,
an hour and a half before the sun looked over the crest of Ben
Gairn. They were humming busily still. In all the chambers of the
house there was the same reposeful stillness. Through them Winsome
Charteris moved with free, light step. She glanced in to see that
her grandfather and grandmother were wanting for nothing in their
cool and wide sitting-room, where the brown mahogany-cased eight-
day clock kept up an unequal ticking, like a man walking upon two
wooden legs of which one is shorter than the other.

It said something for Winsome Charteris and her high-hearted
courage, that what she was accustomed to see in that sitting-room
had no effect upon her spirits. It was a pleasant room enough,
with two windows looking to the south--little round-budded, pale-
petalled monthly roses nodding and peeping within the opened
window-frames. Sweet it was with a great peace, every chair
covered with old sprigged chintz, flowers of the wood and heather
from the hill set in china vases about it. The room where the old
folk dwelt at Craig Ronald was fresh within as is the dew on
sweetbrier. Fresh, too, was the apparel of her grandmother, the
flush of youth yet on her delicate cheek, though the Psalmist's
limit had long been passed for her.

As Winsome looked within,

"Are ye not sleeping, grandmother?" she said.

The old lady looked up with a resentful air.

"Sleepin'! The lassie's gane gyte! [out of her senses]. What for
wad I be sleepin' in the afternune? An' me wi' the care o' yer
gran'faither--sic a handling, him nae better nor a bairn, an' you
a bit feckless hempie wi' yer hair fleeing like the tail o' a twa-
year-auld cowt! [colt]. Sleepin' indeed! Na, sleepin's nane for
me!"

The young girl came up and put her arms about her grandmother.

"That's rale unceevil o' ye, noo, Granny Whitemutch!" she said,
speaking in the coaxing tones to which the Scots' language lends
itself so easily, "an' it's just because I hae been sae lang at
the blanket-washin', seein' till that hizzy Meg. An' ken ye what I
saw!-ane o' the black dragoons in full retreat, grannie; but he
left his camp equipage ahint him, as the sergeant said when--Ye
ken the story, grannie. Ye maun hae been terrible bonny in thae
days!"

"'Deed I'm nane sae unbonny yet, for a' yer helicat
flichtmafleathers, sprigget goons, an' laylac bonnets," said the
old lady, shaking her head till the white silk top-knots trembled.
"No, nor I'm nane sae auld nayther. The gudeman in the corner
there, he's auld and dune gin'ye like, but no me--no me! Gin he
warna spared to me, I could even get a man yet," continued the
lively old lady, "an' whaur wad ye be then, my lass, I wad like to
ken?"

"Perhaps I could get one too, grannie," she said. And she shook
her head with an air of triumph. Winsome kissed her grandmother
gently on the brow.

"Nane o' yer Englishy tricks an' trokin's," said she, settling the
white muslin band which she wore across her brow wrinkleless and
straight, where it had been disarrayed by the onslaught of her
impulsive granddaughter.

"Aye," she went on, stretching out a hand which would have done
credit to a great dame, so white and slender was it in spite of
the hollows which ran into a triangle at the wrist, and the pale-
blue veins which the slight wrinkles have thrown into relief.

"An' I mind the time when three o' his Majesty's officers--nane
o' yer militia wi' horses that rin awa' wi' them ilka time they
gang oot till exerceese, but rale sodgers wi' sabre-tashies to
their heels and spurs like pitawtie dreels. Aye, sirs, but that
was before I married an elder in the Kirk o' the Marrow. I wasna
twenty-three when I had dune wi' the gawds an' vanities o' this
wicked world."

"I saw a minister lad the day--a stranger," said Winsome, very
quietly.

"Sirce me," returned her grandmother briskly; "kenned I e'er the
like o' ye, Winifred Chayrteris, for licht-heedit-ness an' lack o'
a' common sense! Saw a minister an' ne'er thocht, belike, o'
sayin' cheep ony mair nor if he had been a wutterick [weasel]. An'
what like was he, na? Was he young, or auld--or no sae verra auld,
like mysel'? Did he look like an Establisher by the consequence o'
the body, or--"

"But, grannie dear, how is it possible that I should ken, when all
that I saw of him was but his coat-tails? It was him that was
running away."

"My certes," said grannie, "but the times are changed since my
day! When I was as young as ye are the day it wasna sodger or
minister ayther that wad hae run frae the sicht o' me. But a
minister, and a fine, young-looking man, I think ye said,"
continued Mistress Walter Skirving anxiously.

"Indeed, grandmother, I said nothing--" began Winsome.

"Haud yer tongue, Deil's i' the lassie, he'll be comin' here.
Maybes he's comin' up the loan this verra meenit. Get me my best
kep [cap], the French yin o' Flanders lawn trimmed wi' Valenceenes
lace that Captain Wildfeather, of his Majesty's--But na, I'll no
think o' thae times, I canna bear to think o' them wi' ony
complaisance ava. But bring me my kep--haste ye fast, lassie!"

Obediently Winsome went to her grandmother's bedroom and drew from
under the bed the "mutch" box lined with pale green paper,
patterned with faded pink roses. She did not smile when she drew
it out. She was accustomed to her grandmother's ways. She too
often felt the cavalier looking out from under her Puritan
teaching; for the wild strain of the Gordon blood held true to its
kind, and Winsome's grandmother had been a Gordon at Lochenkit,
whose father had ridden with Kenmure in the great rebellion.

When she brought the white goffered mutch with its plaits and
puckers, granny tried it on in various ways, Winsome meanwhile
holding a small mirror before her.

"As I was sayin', I renounced thinkin' aboot the vanities o' youth
langsyne. Aye, it'll be forty years sin'--for ye maun mind that I
was marriet whan but a lassie. Aye me, it's forty-five years since
Ailie Gordon, as I was then, wed wi' Walter Skirving o' Craig
Ronald (noo o' his ain chammer neuk, puir man, for he'll never
leave it mair)," added she with a brisk kind of acknowledgment
towards the chair of the semi-paralytic in the corner.

There silent and unregarding Walter Skirving sat--a man still
splendid in frame and build, erect in his chair, a shawl over his
knees even in this day of fervent heat, looking out dumbly on the
drowsing, humming world of broad, shadowless noonshine, and often
also on the equable silences of the night.

"No that I regret it the day, when he is but the name o' the man
he yince was. For fifty years since there was nae lad like Walter
Skirving cam into Dumfries High Street frae Stewartry or frae
Shire. No a fit in buckled shune sae licht as his, his weel-shapit
leg covered wi' the bonny 'rig-an'-fur' stockin' that I knitted
mysel' frae the cast on o' the ower-fauld [over-fold] to the bonny
white forefit that sets aff the blue sae weel. Walter Skirving
could button his knee-breeks withoot bendin' his back--that nane
could do but the king's son himsel'; an' sic a dancer as he was
afore guid an' godly Maister Cauldsowans took hand o' him at the
tent, wi' preachin' a sermon on booin' the knee to Baal. Aye, aye,
its a' awa'--an' its mony the year I thocht on it, let alane
thocht on wantin' back thae days o' vanity an' the pride o' sinfu'
youth!"

"Tell me about the officer men, granny," said Winsome.

"'Deed wull I no. It wad be mair tellin' ye gin ye were learnin'
yer Caritches" [Westminster Catechism].

"But, grandmammy dear, I thought that you said that the officer
men ran away from you--"

"Hear till her! Rin frae me? Certes, ye're no blate. They cam'
frae far an' near to get a word wi' me. Na, there was nae rinnin'
frae a bonny lass in thae days. Weel, there was three o' them; an'
they cam' ower the hill to see the lasses, graund in their reed
breeks slashed wi' yellow. An' what for no, they war his Majesty's
troopers; an' though nae doot they had been on the wrang side o'
the dyke, they were braw chiels for a' that!"

"An' they cam' to see you, granny?" asked Winsome, who approved of
the subject.

"What else--but they got an unco begunk [cheat]. Ye see, my
faither had bocht an awfu' thrawn young bull at the Dumfries fair,
an' he had been gaun gilravagin' aboot; an' whaur should the
contrary beast betak' himsel' to but into the Roman camp on Craig
Ronald bank, where the big ditch used to be? There we heard him
routin' for three days till the cotmen fand him i' the hinderend,
an' poo'ed him oot wi' cart-rapes. But when he got oot--certes,
but he was a wild beast! He got at Jock Hinderlands afore he could
climb up a tree; an', fegs, he gaed up a tree withoot clim'in',
I'se warrant, an' there he hung, hanket by the waistband o' his
breeks, baa-haain' for his minnie to come and lift him doon, an'
him as muckle a clampersome [awkward] hobbledehoy as ever ye saw!

"Then what did Carlaverock Jock do but set his heid to a yett
[gate] and ding it in flinders; fair fire-wood he made o't; an'
sae, rampagin' into the meadow across whilk," continued the old
lady, with a rising delight in her eye, "the three cavalry men
were comin' to see me, wi' the spurs on them jangling clear. Reed
breeks did na suit Jock's taste at the best o' times, and he had
no been brocht up to countenance yellow facin's. So the three braw
King George's sodgers that had dune sic graund things at Waterloo
took the quickest road through the meadow. Captain St. Clair, he
trippit on his sword, an' was understood to cry oot that he had
never eaten beef in his life. Ensign Withershins threw his shako
ower his shoother and jumpit intil the water, whaur he expressed
his opinion o' Carlaverock Jock stan'in' up to his neck in Luckie
Mowatt's pool--the words I dinna juist call to mind at this
present time, which, indeed, is maybe as weel; but it was
Lieutenant Lichtbody, o' his Majesty's Heavy Dragoons, that cam'
aff at the waurst. He made for the stane dyke, the sven-fite march
dyke that rins up the hill, ye ken. Weel, he made as if he wad
mak' ower it, but Boreland'a big Heelant bull had heard the
routin' o' his friend Carlaverock Jock, an' was there wi' his
horns spread like a man keppin' yowes [catching sheep]. Aye, my
certes!" here the old lady paused, overcome by the humour of her
recollections, laughing in her glee a delightfully catching and
mellow laugh, in which Winsome joined.

"Sae there was my braw beau, Lieutenant Lichtbody, sittin' on his
hunkers on the dyke tap girnin' at Carlaverock Jock an' the
Boreland Hielantman on baith sides o' him, an' tryin' tae hit them
ower the nose wi' the scabbard o' his sword, for the whinger
itsel' had drappit oot in what ye micht ca' the forced retreat. It
was bonny, bonny to see; an' whan the three cam' up the loanin'
the neist day, 'Sirs,' I said, 'I'm thinkin' ye had better be
gaun. I saw Carlaverock Jock the noo, fair tearin' up the
greensward. It wudna be bonny gin his Majesty's officers had twice
to mak' sae rapid a march to the rear--an' you, Lieutenant
Lichtbody, canna hae a'thegither gotten the better o' yer lang
sederunt on the tap o' the hill dyke. It's a bonny view that ye
had. It was a peety that ye had forgotten yer perspective
glasses.'

"And wad ye believe it, lassie, the threesome turned on the braid
o'their fit an' marched doon the road withoot as muckle as Fair-
guid-e'en or Fair-guid-day!"

"And what said ye, grannie dear?" said Winsome, who sat on a low
seat looking up at her granny.

"O lassie, I juist set my braid hat ower my lug wi' the bonny
white cockade intil't an' gied them 'The Wee, Wee German Lairdie'
as they gaed doon the road, an' syne on the back o't:

    "'Awa, Whigs, awa'!
    Ye're but a pack----'"

But the great plaid-swathed figure of Winsome's grandfather turned
at the words of the long-forgotten song as though waking from a
deep sleep. A slumberous fire gleamed momentarily in his eye.

"Woman," he said, "hold your peace; let not these words be heard
in the house of Walter Skirving!"

Having thus delivered himself, the fire faded out of his eyes dead
as black ashes; he turned to the window, and lost himself again in
meditation, looking with steady eyes across the ocean of sunshine
which flooded the valley beneath.

His wife gave him no answer. She seemed scarce to have heard the
interruption. But Winsome went across and pulled the heavy plaid
gently off her grandfather's shoulder. Then she stood quietly by
him with one hand upon his head and with the other she gently
stroked his brow. A milder light grew in his dull eye, and he put
up his hand uncertainly as if to take hers.

"But what for should I be takin' delicht in speakin' o' thae auld
unsanctified regardless days," said her grandmother, "that 'tis
mony a year since I hae ta'en ony pleesure in thinkin' on? Gae
wa', ye hempie that ye are!" she cried, turning with a sudden and
uncalled-for sparkle of temper on her granddaughter; "There's nae
time an' little inclination in this hoose for yer flichty
conversation. I wonder muckle that yer thouchts are sae set on the
vanities o' young men. And such are all that delight in them." She
went on somewhat irrelevantly, "Did not godly Maister Cauldsowans
redd up [settle] the doom o' such--'all desirable young men riding
upon horses--'"

"An' I'll gae redd up the dairy, an' kirn the butter, grannie!"
said Winsome Charteris, breaking in on the flow of her
grandmother's reproaches.





CHAPTER V.

A LESSON IN BOTANY.


No lassie in all the hill country went forth more heart-whole
into the June morning than Winsome Charteris. She was not, indeed,
wholly a girl of the south uplands. Her grandmother was never done
reminding her of her "Englishy" ways, which, according to that
authority, she had contracted during those early years she had
spent in Cumberland. From thence she had been brought to the farm
town of Craig Ronald, soon after the death of her only uncle, Adam
Skirving--whose death, coming after the loss of her own mother,
had taken such an effect upon her grandfather that for years he
had seldom spoken, and now took little interest in the ongoings of
the farm.

Walter Skirving was one of a class far commoner in Galloway sixty
years ago than now. He was a "bonnet laird" of the best type, and
his farm, which included all kinds of soil--arable and pasture,
meadow and moor, hill pasture and wood--was of the value of about
L300 a year, a sum sufficient in those days to make him a man of
substance and consideration in the country.

He had been all his life, except for a single year in his youth
when he broke bounds, a Marrow man of the strictest type; and it
had been the wonder and puzzle of his life (to others, not to
himself) how he came to make up to Ailie Gordon, the daughter of
the old moss-trooping Lochenkit Gordons, that had ridden with the
laird of Redgauntlet in the killing time, and more recently had
been out with Maxwell of Nithsdale, and Gordon of Kenmure, to
strike a blow for the "King-over-the-Water." And to this very day,
though touched with a stroke which prevented her from moving far
out of her chair, Ailie Skirving showed the good blood and high-
hearted lightsomeness that had won the young laird of Craig Ronald
upon the Loch Grannoch side nearly fifty years before.

It was far more of a wonder how Ailie Gordon came to take Walter
Skirving. It may be that she felt in her heart the accent of a
true man in the unbending, nonjuring elder of the Marrow kirk. Two
great heart-breaks had crossed their lives: the shadow of the life
story of Winsome's mother, that earlier Winsome whose name had not
been heard for twenty years in the house of Craig Ronald; and the
more recent death of Adam, the strong, silent, chivalrous-natured
son who had sixteen years ago been killed, falling from his horse
as he rode home alone one winter's night from Dumfries.

It was a natural thing to be in love with Winsome Charteris. It
seemed natural to Winsome herself. Ever since she was a little
lass running to school in Keswick, with a touse of lint-white
locks blowing out in the gusts that came swirling off Skiddaw,
Winsome had always been conscious of a train of admirers. The boys
liked to carry her books, and were not so ashamed to walk home
with her, as even at six years of age young Cumbrians are wont to
be in the company of maids. Since she came to Galloway, and opened
out with each succeeding year, like the bud of a moss rose growing
in a moist place, Winsome had thought no more of masculine
admiration than of the dull cattle that "goved" [stared stupidly]
upon her as she picked her deft way among the stalls in the byre.
In all Craig Ronald there was nothing between the hill and the
best room that did not bear the mark of Winsome's method and
administrative capacity. In perfect dependence upon Winsome, her
granny had gradually abandoned all the management of the house to
her, so that at twenty that young woman was a veritable Napoleon
of finance and capacity. Only old Richard Clelland of the
Boreland, grave and wise pillar of the kirk by law established,
still transacted her market business and banked her siller--being,
as he often said, proud to act as "doer" for so fair a principal.
So it happened that all the reins of government about this tiny
lairdship of one farm were in the strong and capable hands of a
girl of twenty.

And Meg Kissock was her true admirer and faithful slave--Winsome's
heavy hand, too, upon occasion; for all the men on the farm stood
in awe of Meg's prowess, and very especially of Meg's tongue. So
also the work fell mostly upon these two, and in less measure upon
a sister of Meg's, Jess Kissock, lately returned from England, a
young lady whom we have already met.

During the night and morning Winsome had studied with some
attention the Hebrew Bible, in which the name Allan Welsh
appeared, as well as the Latin Luther Commentary, and the Hebrew
Lexicon, on the first page of which the name of Ralph Peden was
written in the same neat print hand as in the note-book.

This was the second day of the blanket-washing, and Winsome,
having in her mind a presentiment that the proprietor of these
learned quartos would appear to claim his own, carried them down
to the bridge, where Meg and her sister were already deep in the
mysteries of frothing tubs and boiling pots. Winsome from the
broomy ridge could hear the shrill "giff-gaff" [give and take] of
their colloquy. She sat down under Ralph's very broom bush, and
absently turned over the leaves of the note-book, catching
sentences here and there.

"I wonder how old he is?" she said, meditatively; "his coat-tails
looked old, but the legs went too lively for an old man; besides,
he likes maids to be dressed in lilac--" She paused still more
thoughtfully. "Well, we shall see." She bent over and pulled the
milky-stalked, white-seeded head of a dandelion. Taking it between
the finger and thumb of her left hand she looked critically at it
as though it were a glass of wine. "He is tall, and he is fair,
and his age is--"

Here she pouted her pretty lips and blew.

"One--ha, ha!--he was an active infant when he ran from the
blanket-tramping--two, three, four--"

Some tiny feather-headed spikelets disengaged themselves
unwillingly from the round and venerable downpolled dandelion.
They floated lazily up between the tassels of the broom upon the
light breeze.

"Five, six, seven, eight--faith, he was a clean-heeled laddie yon.
Ye couldna see his legs or coat-tails for stour as he gaed roon'
the Far Away Turn."

Winsome was revelling in her broad Scots. She had learned it from
her grandmother.

"Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen--I'll no
can set the dogs on him then--sixteen, seventeen, eighteen--dear
me, this is becoming interesting."

The plumules were blowing off freely now, like snow from the eaves
on a windy day in winter.

"Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one--I must reverence my elders. If I
don't blow stronger he'll turn out to be fifty--twenty-three,
twenty-f--"

A shadow fell across the daintily-held dandelion and lay a blue
patch on the grass. Only one pale grey star stood erect on the
stem, the vacant green sheathing of the calyx turning suddenly
down.

"TWENTY-FOUR!--" said Ralph Peden quietly, standing with his hat
in his hand and an eager flush on his cheek. The last plumule
floated away.

Winsome Charteris had risen instinctively, and stood looking with
crimson cheeks and quicker-coming breath at this young man who
came upon her in the nick of time.

He was startled and a little indignant. So they stood facing one
another while one might count a score--silent and drinking each
the other in, with that flashing transference of electric sympathy
possible only to the young and the innocent.

It was the young man who spoke first. Winsome was a little
indignant that he should dare to come upon her while so engaged.
Not, of course, that she cared for a moment what he thought of
her, but he ought to have known better than to have stolen upon
her while she was behaving in such a ridiculous, childish way. It
showed what he was capable of.

"My name is Ralph Peden," he said humbly. "I came from Edinburgh
the day before yesterday. I am staying with Mr. Welsh at the
manse."

Winsome Charteris glanced down at the books and blushed still more
deeply. The Hebrew Bible and Lexicon lay harmlessly enough on the
grass, and the Luther was swinging in a frivolous and
untheological way on the strong, bent twigs of broom. But where
was the note-book? Like a surge of Solway tide the remembrance
came over her that, when she had plucked the dandelion for her
soothsaying, she had thrust it carelessly into the bosom of her
lilac-sprigged gown. Indeed, a corner of it peeped out at this
moment. Had he seen it?--monstrous thought! She knew young men and
the interpretations that they put upon nothings! This, in spite of
his solemn looks and mantling bashfulness, was a young man.

"Then I suppose these are yours," said Winsome, turning sideways
towards the indicated articles so as to conceal the note-book. The
young man removed his eyes momentarily from her face and looked in
the direction of the books. He seemed to have entirely forgotten
what it was that had brought him to Loch Grannoch bridge so early
this June morning. Winsome took advantage of his glance to feel
that her sunbonnet sat straight, and as her hand was on its way to
her clustering curls she took this opportunity of thrusting
Ralph's note-book into more complete concealment. Then her hands
went up to her head only to discover that her sunbonnet had
slipped backward, and was now hanging down her back by the
strings.

Ralph Peden looked up at her, apparently entirely satisfied. What
was a note-book to him now? He saw the sunbonnet resting upon the
wavy distraction of the pale gold hair. He had a luxurious eye for
colour. That lilac and gold went well together, was his thought.

Trammelled by the fallen head-gear, Winsome threw her head back,
shaking out her tresses in a way that Ralph Peden never forgot.
Then she caught at the strings of the errant bonnet.

"Oh, let it alone!" he suddenly exclaimed.

"Sir?" said Winsome Charteris--interrogatively, not imperatively.
Ralph Peden, who had taken a step forward in the instancy of his
appeal, came to himself again in a moment.

"I beg your pardon," he said very humbly, "I had no right--"

He paused, uncertain what to say.

Winsome Charteris looked up quickly, saw the simplicity of the
young man, in one full eye-blink read his heart, then dropped her
eyes again and said:

"But I thought you liked lilac sunbonnets!"

Ralph Peden had now his turn to blush. Hardly in the secret of his
own heart had he said this thing. Only to Mr. Welsh had his
forgetful tongue uttered the word that was in his mind, and which
had covered since yesterday morn all the precepts of that most
superfluous wise woman, the mother of King Lemuel.

"Are you a witch?" asked Ralph, blundering as an honest and
bashful man may in times of distress into the boldest speech.

"You want to go up and see my grandmother, do you not?" said
Winsome, gravely, for such conversation was not to be continued on
any conditions.

"Yes," said the young man, perjuring himself with a readiness and
facility most unbecoming in a student desiring letters of
probation from the Protesting and Covenant-keeping Kirk of the
Marrow.

Ralph Peden lightly picked up the books, which, as Winsome knew,
were some considerable weight to carry.

"Do you find them quite safe?" she asked.

"There was a heavy dew last night," he answered, "but in spite of
it they seem quite dry.

"We often notice the same thing on Loch Grannoch side," said
Winsome.

"I thought--that is, I was under the impression--that I had left a
small book with some manuscript notes!" said the young man,
tentatively.

"It may have dropped among the broom," replied the simple maid.

Whereupon the two set to seeking, both bareheaded, brown cropped
head and golden wilderness of tresses not far from one another,
while the "book of manuscript notes" rose and fell to the
quickened heart-beating of that wicked and deceitful girl, Winsome
Charteris.





CHAPTER VI.

CURLED EYELASHES.


Now Meg Kissock could stand a great deal, and she would put up
with a great deal to pleasure her mistress; but half an hour of
loneliness down by the washing was overly much for her, and the
struggle between loyalty and curiosity ended, after the manner of
her sex, in the victory of the latter.

As Ralph and Winsome continued to seek, they came time and again
close together and the propinquity of flushed cheek and mazy
ringlet stirred something in the lad's heart which had never been
touched by the Mistresses Thriepneuk, who lived where the new
houses of the Plainstones look over the level meadows of the
Borough Muir. His father had often said within himself, as he
walked the Edinburgh streets to visit some sick kirk member, as he
had written to his friend Adam Welsh, "Has the lad a heart?" Had
he seen him on that broomy knowe over the Grannoch water, he had
not doubted, though he might well have been fearful enough of that
heart's too sudden awakening.

Never before had the youth come within that delicate AURA of charm
which radiates from the bursting bud of the finest womanhood.
Ralph Peden had kept his affections ascetically virgin. His
nature's finest juices had gone to feed the brain, yet all the
time his heart had waited expectant of the revealing of a mystery.
Winsome Charteris had come so suddenly into his life that the
universe seemed newborn in a day. He sprang at once from the
thought of woman as only an unexplained part of the creation, to
the conception of her (meaning thereby Winsome Charteris) as an
angel who had not lost her first estate.

It was a strange thing for Ralph Peden, as indeed it is to every
true man, to come for the first time within the scope of the
unconscious charms of a good girl. There is, indeed, no better
solvent of a cold nature, no better antidote to a narrow
education, no better bulwark of defence against frittering away
the strength and solemnity of first love, than a sudden, strong
plunge into its deep waters.

Like timid bathers, who run a little way into the tide and then
run out again with ankles wet, fearful of the first chill, many
men accustom themselves to love by degrees. So they never taste
the sweetness and strength of it as did Ralph Peden in these days,
when, never having looked upon a maid with the level summer
lightning of mutual interest flashing in his eyes, he plunged into
love's fathomless mysteries as one may dive upon a still day from
some craggy platform among the westernmost isles into Atlantic
depths.

Winsome's light summer dress touched his hand and thrilled the lad
to his remotest nerve centres. He stood light-headed, taking in as
only they twain looked over the loch with far-away eyes, that
subtle fragrance, delicate and free, which like a garment clothed
the maid of the Grannoch lochside.

"The water's on the boil," cried Meg Kissock, setting her ruddy
shock of hair and blooming, amplified, buxom form above the knoll,
wringing at the same time the suds from her hands, "an' I canna
lift it aff mysel'."

Her mistress looked at her with a sudden suspicion. Since when had
Meg grown so feeble?

"We had better go down," she said simply, turning to Ralph, who
would have cheerfully assented had she suggested that they
should together walk into the loch among the lily beds. It was the
"we" that overcame him. His father had used the pronoun in quite a
different sense. "WE will take the twenty-ninth chapter of second
Chronicles this morning, Ralph--what do WE understand by this
peculiar use of VAV CONVERSIVE?"

But it was quite another thing when Winsome Charteris said simply,
as though he had been her brother:

"We had better go down!"

So they went down, taking the little stile at which Winsome had
meditated over the remarks of Ralph Peden concerning the creation
of Eve upon their way. Meg Kissock led the van, and took the dyke
vigorously without troubling the steps, her kirtle fitting her for
such exercises. Winsome came next, and Ralph stood aside to let
her pass. She sprang up the low steps light as a feather, rested
her fingertips for an appreciable fraction of a second on the hand
which he instinctively held out, and was over before he realized
that anything had happened. Yet it seemed that in that contact,
light as a rose-leaf blown by the winds of late July against his
cheek, his past life had been shorn clean away from all the future
as with a sharp sword.

Ralph Peden had dutifully kissed his cousins Jemima, Kezia, and
Kerenhappuch; but, on the whole, he had felt more pleasure when he
had partaken of the excellent bannocks prepared for him by the
fair hands of Kerenhappuch herself. But this was wholly a new
thing. His breath came suddenly short. He breathed rapidly as
though to give his lungs more air. The atmosphere seemed to have
grown rarer and colder. Indeed, it was a different world, and the
blanket-washing itself was transferred to some deliciously homely
outlying annex of paradise.

Yet it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should
be helping this girl, and he went forward with the greatest
assurance to lift the black pot off the fire for her. The keen,
acrid swirls of wood-smoke blew into his eyes, and the rank steam
of yellow home-made soap, manufactured with bracken ash for lye,
rose to his nostrils. Now, Ralph Peden was well made and strong.
Spare in body but accurately compacted, if he had ever struggled
with anything more formidable than the folio hide-hound Calvins
and Turretins on his father's lower shelf in James's Court, he had
been no mean antagonist.

But, though he managed with a great effort to lift the black pot
off its gypsy tripod, he would have let the boiling contents swing
dangerously against his legs had not Winsome caught sharply at his
other hand and leaned over, so balancing the weight of the boiling
water. So they walked down the path to where the tubs stood under
the shade of the great ash-trees, with their sky-tossing, dry-
rustling leaves. There Ralph set his burden down. Meg Kissock had
been watching him keenly. She saw that he had severely burned his
hand, and also that he said nothing whatever about it. He was a
man. This gained for the young man Meg's hearty approval almost as
much as his bashfulness and native good looks. What Meg Kissock
did not know was that Ralph was altogether unconscious of the
wound in his hand. It was a deeper wound which was at that time
monopolising his thoughts. But this little incident was more than
a thousand certificates in the eyes of Meg Kissock, and Meg's
friendship was decidedly worth cultivating. Even for its own sake
she did not give it lightly.

Before Winsome Charteris could release her hand, Ralph turned and
said:

"Do you know you have not yet told me your name?"

Winsome did know it very well, but she only said, "My name is
Winsome Charteris, and this is Meg Kissock."

"Winsome Charteris, Winsome Charteris," said Ralph's heart over
and over again, and he had not even the grace to say "Thank you";
but Meg stepped up to shake him by the hand.

"I'm braw an' prood to ken ye, sir," said Meg. "That muckle sumph
[stupid], Saunders Mowdiewort, telled me a' aboot ye comin' an'
the terrible store o' lear [learning] ye hae. He's the minister's
man, ye ken, an' howks the graves ower by at the parish kirk-yard,
for the auld betheral there winna gang ablow three fit deep, and
them that haes ill-tongued wives to haud doon disna want ony
mistake--"

"Meg," said her mistress, "do not forget yourself."

"Deil a fear," said Meg; "it was auld Sim o' Glower-ower-'em, the
wizened auld hurcheon [hedgehog], that set a big thruch stane ower
his first wife; and when he buried his second in the neist grave,
he just turned the broad flat stone. 'Guid be thankit!' he says,
'I had the forethocth to order a stane heavy eneuch to hand them
baith doon!'"

"Get to the washing, Meg," said Winsome.

"Fegs!" returned Meg, "ye waur in nae great hurry yersel' doon aff
the broomy knowe! What's a' the steer sae sudden like?"

Winsome disdained an answer, but stood to her own tub, where some
of the lighter articles--pillow-slips, and fair sheets of
"seventeen-hundred" linen were waiting her daintier hand.

As Winsome and Meg washed, Ralph Peden carried water, learning the
wondrous science of carrying two cans over a wooden hoop; and in
the frankest tutelage Winsome put her hand over his to teach him,
and the relation of master and pupil asserted its ancient danger.

It had not happened to Winsome Charteris to meet any one to whom
she was attracted with such frank liking. She had never known what
it was to have a brother, and she thought that this clear-eyed
young man might be a brother to her. It is a fallacy common among
girls that young men desire them as sisters. Ralph himself was
under no such illusion, or at least would not have been, had he
had the firmness of mind to sit down half a mile from his emotions
and coolly look them over. But in the meanwhile he was only
conscious of a great and rising delight in his heart.

As Winsome Charteris bent above the wash-tub he was at liberty to
observe how the blood mantled on the clear oval of her cheek. He
had time to note--of course entirely as a philosopher--the pale
purple shadow under the eyes, over which the dark, curling lashes
came down like the fringe of the curtain of night.

"Why--I wonder why?" he said, and stopped aghast at his utterance
aloud of his inmost thought.

"What do you wonder?" said Winsome, glancing up with a frank dewy
freshness in her eyes.

"I wonder why--I wonder that you are able to do all this work," he
said, with an attempt to turn the corner of his blunder.

Winsome shook her head.

"Now you are trying to be like other people," she said; "I do not
think you will succeed. That was not what you were going to say.
If you are to be my friend, you must speak all the truth to me and
speak it always." A thing which, indeed, no man does to a woman.
And, besides, nobody had spoken of Ralph Peden being a friend to
her. The meaning was that their hearts had been talking while
their tongues had spoken of other things; and though there was no
thought of love in the breast of Winsome Charteris, already in the
intercourse of a single morning she had given this young Edinburgh
student of divinity a place which no other had ever attained to.
Had she had a brother, she thought, what would he not have been to
her? She felt specially fitted to have a brother. It did not occur
to her to ask whether she would have carried her brother's college
note-book, even by accident, where it could be stirred by the
beating of her heart.

"Well," Ralph said at last, "I will tell you what I was wondering.
You have asked me, and you shall know: I only wondered why your
eyelashes were so much darker than your hair."

Winsome Charteris was not in the least disturbed.

"Ministers should occupy their minds with something else," she
said, demurely. "What would Mr. Welsh say? I am sure he has never
troubled his head about such things. It is not fitting," Winsome
said severely.

"But I want to know," said this persistent young man, wondering at
himself.

"Well," said Winsome, glancing up with mischief in her eye, "I
suppose because I am a very lazy sort of person, and dark window-
blinds keep out the light."

"But why are they curled up at the end?" asked unblushingly the
author of the remarks upon Eve formerly quoted.

"It is time that you went up and saw my grandmother!" said
Winsome, with great composure.

"Juist what I was on the point o' remarkin' mysel'!" said Meg
Kissock.





CHAPTER VII. 

CONCERNING TAKING EXERCISE.


Winsome and Ralph walked silently and composedly side by side up
the loaning under the elder-trees, over the brook at the watering-
place to which in her hoydenish girlhood Winsome had often ridden
the horses when the ploughmen loosed Bell and Jess from the
plough. In these days she rode without a side-saddle. Sometimes
she did it yet when the spring gloamings were gathering fast, but
no one knew this except Jock Forrest, the ploughman, who never
told any more than he could help.

Silence deep as that of yesterday wrapped about the farmhouse of
Craig Ronald. The hens were all down under the lee of the great
orchard hedge, chuckling low to themselves, and nestling with
their feathers spread balloon-wise, while they flirted the hot
summer dust over them. Down where the grass was in shadow a mower
was sharpening his blade. The clear metallic sound of the "strake"
or sharpening strop, covered with pure white Loch Skerrow sand set
in grease, which scythemen universally use in Galloway, cut
through the slumberous hum of the noonday air like the blade
itself through the grass. The bees in the purple flowers beneath
the window boomed a mellow bass, and the grasshoppers made love by
millions in the couch grass, chirring in a thousand fleeting
raptures.

"Wait here while I go in," commanded Winsome, indicating a chair
in the cool, blue-flagged kitchen, which Meg Kissock had marked
out in white, with whorls and crosses of immemorial antiquity--the
same that her Pictish forefathers had cut deep in the hard
Silurian rocks of the southern uplands.

It was a little while before, in the dusk of the doorway Winsome
appeared, looking paler and fairer and more infinitely removed
from him than before. Instinctively he wished himself out with her
again on the broomy knowe. He seemed somehow nearer to her there.
Yet he followed obediently enough.

Within the shadowed "ben"-room of Craig Ronald all the morning
this oddly assorted pair of old people had been sitting--as indeed
every morning they sat, one busily reading and often looking up to
talk; while the other, the master of the house himself, sat
silent, a majestic and altogether pathetic figure, looking
solemnly out with wide-open, dreamy eyes, waking to the actual
world of speech and purposeful life only at rare intervals.

But Walter Skirving was keenly awake when Ralph Peden entered. It
was in fact he, and not his partner, who spoke first--for Walter
Skirving's wife had among other things learned when to be silent--
which was, when she must.

"You honour my hoose," he said; "though it grieves me indeed that
I canna rise to receive yin o' your family an' name! But what I
have is at your service, for it was your noble faither that led
the faithful into the wilderness on the day o' the Great
Apostasy!"

The young man shook him by the hand. He had no bashfulness here.
He was on his own ground. This was the very accent of the society
in which he moved in Edinburgh.

"I thank you," he said, quietly and courteously, stepping back at
once into the student of divinity; "I have often heard my father
speak of you. You were the elder from the south who stood by him
on that day. He has ever retained a great respect for you."

"It WAS a great day," Walter Skirving muttered, letting his arm
rest on the little square deal table which stood beside him with
his great Bible open upon it--"a great day--aye, Maister Peden's
laddie i' my hoose! He's welcome, he's mair nor welcome."

So saying, he turned his eyes once more on the blue mist that
filled the wide Grannoch Valley, and the bees hummed again in the
honey-scented marshmallows so that all heard them.

"This is my grandmother," said Winsome, who stood quite quiet
behind her chair, swinging the sunbonnet in her hand. From her
flower-set corner the old lady held out her band. With a touch of
his father's old-fashioned courtesy he stooped and kissed it.
Winsome instinctively put her hand quickly behind her as though he
had kissed that. Once such practices have a beginning, who knows
where they may end? She had not expected it of him, though,
curiously, she thought no worse of him for his gallantry.

But the lady of Craig Ronald was obviously greatly pleased.

"The lad has guid bluid in him. That's the minnie [mother] o' him,
nae doot. She was a Gilchrist o' Linwood on Nithsdale. What she
saw in your faither to tak' him I dinna ken ony mair than I ken
hoo it cam' to pass that I am the mistress o' Walter Skirving's
hoose the day.--Come oot ahint my chair, lassie; dinna be lauchin'
ahint folks's backs. D'ye think I'm no mistress o' my ain hoose
yet, for a' that ye are sic a grand hoosekeeper wi' your way o't."

The accusation was wholly gratuitous. Winsome had been grave with
a great gravity. But she came obediently out, and seated herself
on a low stool by her grandmother's side. There she sat, holding
her hand, and leaning her elbow on her knee. Ralph thought he had
never seen anything so lovely in his life--an observation entirely
correct. The old lady was clad in a dress of some dark stiff
material, softer than brocade, which, like herself, was more
beautiful in its age than even in youth. Folds of snowy lawn
covered her breast and fell softly about her neck, fastened there
by a plain black pin. Her face was like a portrait by Henry
Raeburn, so beautifully venerable and sweet. The twinkle in her
brown eyes alone told of the forceful and restless spirit which
was imprisoned within. She had been reading a new volume of the
Great Unknown which the Lady Elizabeth had sent her over from the
Big House of Greatorix. She had laid it down on the entry of the
young man. Now she turned sharp upon him.

"Let me look at ye, Maister Ralph Peden. Whaur gat ye the 'Ralph'?
That's nae westland Whig name. Aye, aye, I mind--what's comin' o'
my memory? Yer grandfaither was auld Ralph Gilchrist; but ye dinna
tak' after the Gilchrists--na, na, there was no ane o' them weel
faured--muckle moo'd [large-mouthed] Gilchrists they ca'ed them.
It'll be your faither that you favour."

And she turned him about for inspection with her hand.

"Grandmother--" began Winsome, anxious lest she should say
something to offend the guest of the house. But the lady did not
heed her gentle monition.

"Was't you that ran awa' frae a bonny lass yestreen?" she queried,
sudden as a flash of summer lightning.

It was now the turn of both the younger folk to blush. Winsome
reddened with vexation at the thought that he should think that
she had seen him run and gone about telling of it. Ralph grew
redder and redder, and remained speechless. He did not think of
anything at all.

"I am fond of exercise," he said falteringly.

The gay old lady rippled into a delicious silver stream of
laughter, a little thin, but charmingly provocative. Winsome did
not join, but she looked up imploringly at her grandmother,
leaning her head back till her tresses swept the ground.

When Mistress Skirving recovered herself,

"Exerceese, quo' he, heard ye ever the like o' that? In their
young days lads o' speerit took their exerceese in comin' to see a
bonny lass--juist as I was sayin' to Winifred yestreen nae faurer
gane. Hoot awa', twa young folk! The simmer days are no lang. Waes
me, but I had my share o' them! Tak' them while they shine,
bankside an' burnside an' the bonny heather. Aince they bloomed
for Ailie Gordon. Once she gaed hand in hand alang the braes,
where noo she'll gang nae mair. Awa' wi' ye, ye're young an'
honest. Twa auld cankered carles are no fit company for twa young
folks like you. Awa' wi' ye; dinna be strange wi' his mither's
bairn, say I--an' the guid man hae's spoken for the daddy o' him."

Thus was Ralph Peden made free of the Big Hoose of Craig Ronald.





CHAPTER VIII.

THE MINISTER'S MAN ARMS EOR CONQUEST.


Saunders Mowdiewort, minister's man and grave-digger, was going a
sweethearting. He took off slowly the leathern "breeks" of his
craft, sloughing them as an adder casts his skin. They collapsed
upon the floor with a hideous suggestion of distorted human limbs,
as Saunders went about his further preparations. Saunders was a
great, soft-bodied, fair man, of the chuby flaxen type so rare in
Scotland--the type which looks at home nowhere but along the south
coast of England. Saunders was about thirty-five. He was a widower
in search of a wife, and made no secret of his devotion to
Margaret Kissock, the "lass" of the farm town of Craig Ronald.

Saunders was slow of speech when in company, and bashful to a
degree. He was accustomed to make up his mind what he would say
before venturing within the range of the sharp tongue of his well-
beloved--an excellent plan, but one which requires for success
both self-possession and a good memory. But for lack of these
Saunders had made an excellent courtier.

Saunders made his toilet in the little stable of the manse above
which he slept. As he scrubbed himself he kept up a constant
sibilant hissing, as though he were an equine of doubtful
steadiness with whom the hostler behooved to be careful. First he
carefully removed the dirt down to a kind of Plimsoll load-line
midway his neck; then he frothed the soap-suds into his red
rectangular ears, which stood out like speaking trumpets; there he
let it remain. Soap is for putting on the face, grease on the
hair. It is folly then to wash either off. Besides being wasteful.
His flaxen hair stood out in wet strands and clammy tags and
tails. All the while Saunders kept muttering to himself:

"An' says I to her: 'Meg Kissock, ye're a bonny woman,' says I.
'My certie, but ye hae e'en like spunkies [will-o'-the-wisps] or
maybes," said Saunders in a meditative tone. "I had better say
'like whurlies in a sky-licht.' It micht be considered mair lovin'
like!"

"Then she'll up an' say: 'Saunders, ye mak' me fair ashamed to
listen to ye. Be mensefu' [polite], can ye no?'"

This pleased Saunders so much that he slapped his thigh so that
the pony started and clattered to the other side of his stall.

"Then I'll up an' tak' her roun' the waist, an' I'll look at her
like this--" (here Saunders practised the effect of his
fascinations in the glass, a panorama which was to some extent
marred by the necessary opening of his mouth to enable the razor
he was using to excavate the bristles out of the professional
creases in his lower jaw. Saunders pulled down his mouth to
express extra grief when a five-foot grave had been ordered. His
seven-foot manifestations of respect for the deceased were a sight
to see. He held the opinion that anybody that had no more 'conceit
o' themsel'' [were so much left to themselves] than to be buried
in a three-foot grave, did not deserve to be mourned at all. This
crease, then, was one of Saunders's assets, and had therefore to
be carefully attended to. Even love must not interfere with it.)

"Sae after that, I shall tak' her roun' the waist, juist like
this--" said he, insinuating his left arm circumferentially. It
was an ill-judged movement, for, instead of circling Meg Kissock's
waist, he extended his arm round the off hindleg of Birsie, the
minister's pony, who had become a trifle short tempered in his old
age. Now it was upon that very leg and at that very place that,
earlier in the day, a large buzzing horse-fly had temporarily
settled. Birsie was in no condition, therefore, for argument upon
the subject. So with the greatest readiness he struck straight out
behind and took Saunders what he himself called a "dinnle on the
elbuck." Nor was this all, for the razor suddenly levered upwards
by Birsie's hoof added another and entirely unprofessional wrinkle
to his face.

Saunders uprose in wrath, for the soap was stinging furiously in
the cut, and expostulated with Birsie with a handful of reins
which he lifted off the lid of the corn-chest.

"Ye ill-natured, thrawn, upsettin' blastie, ye donnart auld
deevil!" he cried.

"Alexander Mowdiewort, gin ye desire to use minced oaths and braid
oaths indiscriminately, ye shall not use them in my stable. Though
ye be but a mere Erastian and uncertain in yer kirk membership, ye
are at least an occasional hearer, whilk is better than naething,
at the kirk o' the Marrow; and what is more to the point, ye are
my own hired servant, and I desire that ye cease from makin' use
o' any such expressions upon my premises."

"Weel, minister," said Saunders, penitently, "I ken brawly I'm i'
the wrang; but ye ken yersel', gin ye had gotten a dinnle i' the
elbuck that garred ye loup like a troot i' Luckie Mowatt's pool,
or gin ye had cuttit yersel' wi' yer ain razor, wad 'Effectual
Callin',' think ye, hae been the first word i' yer mooth? Noo,
minister, fair Hornie!"

"At any rate," said the minister, "what I would have said or done
is no excuse for you, as ye well know. But how did it happen?"

"Weel, sir, ye see the way o't was this: I was thinkin' to mysel',
'There's twa or three ways o' takin' the buiks intil the pulpit--
There's the way consequential--that's Gilbert Prettiman o' the
Kirkland's way. Did ever ye notice the body? He hauds the Bibles
afore him as if he war Moses an' Aaron gaun afore Pharaoh, wi' the
coat-taillies o' him fleein' oot ahint, an' his chin pointin' to
the soon'in'-board o' the pulpit."

"Speak respectfully of the patriarchs," said Mr. Welsh
sententiously. Saunders looked at him with some wonder expressed
in his eyes.

"Far be it frae me," he said, "to speak lichtly o' ony ane o' them
(though, to tell the truth, some o' them war gye boys). I hae been
ower lang connectit wi' them, for I hae carriet the buiks for
fifteen year, ever since my faither racket himsel' howkin' the
grave o' yer predecessor, honest man, an' I hae leeved a' my days
juist ower the wa' frae the kirk."

"But then they say, Saunders," said the minister, smilingly, "'the
nearer the kirk the farther frae grace.'"

"'Deed, minister," said Saunders, "Grace Kissock is a nice bit
lassie, but an' Jess will be no that ill in a year or twa, but o'
a' the Kissocks commend me till Meg. She wad mak' a graund wife.
What think ye, minister?"

Mr. Welsh relaxed his habitual severe sadness of expression and
laughed a little. He was accustomed to the sudden jumps which his
man's conversation was wont to take.

"Nay," he said, "but that is a question for you, Saunders. It is
not I that think of marrying her."

"The Lord be thankit for that! for gin the minister gaed speerin',
what chance wad there be for the betheral?"

"Have you spoken to Meg herself yet?" asked Mr. Welsh.

"Na," said Saunders; "I haena that, though I hae made up my mind
to hae it oot wi' her this verra nicht--if sae it micht be that ye
warna needin' me, that is--" he added, doubtfully, "but I hae guid
reason to hope that Meg--"

"What reason have you, Saunders? Has Margaret expressed a
preference for you in any way?"

"Preference!" said Saunders; "'deed she has that, minister; a
maist marked preference. It was only the last Tuesday afore
Whussanday [Whitsunday] that she gied me a clour [knock] i' the
lug that fair dang me stupid. Caa that ye nocht?"

"Well, Saunders," said the minister, going out, "certainly I wish
you good speed in your wooing; but see that you fall no more out
with Birsie, lest you be more bruised than you are now; and for
the rest, learn wisely to restrain your unruly member."

"Thank ye, minister," said Saunders; "I'll do my best endeavours
to obleege ye. Meg's clours are to be borne wi' a' complaisancy,
but Birsie's dunts are, so to speak, gratuitous!"





CHAPTER IX.

THE ADVENT OF THE CUIF.


"Here's the Cuif!" said Meg Kissock, who with her company gown on,
and her face glowing from a brisk wash, sat knitting a stocking in
the rich gloaming light at the gable end of the house of Craig
Ronald. Winsome usually read a book, sitting by the window which
looked up the long green croft to the fir-woods and down to the
quiet levels of Loch Grannoch, on which the evening mist was
gathering a pale translucent blue. It was a common thing for Meg
and Jessie Kissock to bring their knitting and darning there, and
on their milking-stools sit below the window. If Winsome were in a
mood for talk she did not read much, but listened instead to the
brisk chatter of the maids. Sometimes the ploughmen, Jock Forrest
and Ebie Farrish, came to "ca' the crack," and it was Winsome's
delight on these occasions to listen to the flashing claymore of
Meg Kissock's rustic wit. Before she settled down, Meg had taken
in the three tall candles "ben the hoose," where the old people
sat--Walter Skirving, as ever, silent and far away, his wife deep
in some lively book lent her by the Lady Elizabeth out of the
library of Greatorix Castle.

A bank of wild thyme lay just beneath Winsome's window, and over
it the cows were feeding, blowing softly through their nostrils
among the grass and clover till the air was fragrant with their
balmy breath.

"Guid e'en to ye, 'Cuif,'" cried Meg Kissock as soon as Saunders
Mowdiewort came within earshot. He came stolidly forward tramping
through the bog with his boots newly greased with what remained of
the smooth candle "dowp" with which he had sleeked his flaxen
locks. He wore a broad blue Kilmarnock bonnet, checked red and
white in a "dam-brod" [draught-board] pattern round the edge, and
a blue-buttoned coat with broad pearl buttons. It may be well to
explain that there is a latent meaning, apparent only to Galloway
folk of the ancient time, in the word "cuif." It conveys at once
the ideas of inefficiency and folly, of simplicity and the
ignorance of it. The cuif is a feckless person of the male sex,
who is a recognized butt for a whole neighbourhood to sharpen its
wits upon.

The particular cuif so addressed by Meg came slowly over the
knoll.

"Guid e'en to ye," he said, with his best visiting manners.

"Can ye no see me as weel, Saunders?" said Jess, archly, for all
was grist that came to her mill.

Saunders rose like a trout to the fly.

"Ow aye, Jess, lass, I saw ye brawly, but it disna do to come
seekin' twa lasses at ae time."'

"Dinna ye be thinkin' to put awa' Meg, an' then come coortin' me!"
said Jess, sharply.

Saunders was hurt for the moment at this pointed allusion both to
his profession and also to his condition as a "seekin'" widower.

"Wha seeks you, Jess, 'ill be sair ill-aff!" he replied very
briskly for a cuif.

The sound of Meg's voice in round altercation with Jock Gordon,
the privileged "natural" or innocent fool of the parish,
interrupted this interchange of amenities, which was indeed as
friendly and as much looked for between lads and lasses as the
ordinary greeting of "Weel, hoo's a' wi' ye the nicht?" which
began every conversation between responsible folks.

"Jock Gordon, ye lazy ne'er-do-weel, ye hinna carried in a single
peat, an' it comin' on for parritch-time. D'ye think my maister
can let the like o' you sorn on him, week in, week oot, like a
mawk on a sheep's hurdie? Gae wa' oot o' that, lyin' sumphin'
[sulking] an' sleepin' i' the middle o' the forenicht, an' carry
the water for the boiler an' bring in the peats frae the stack."

Then there arose a strange elricht quavering voice--the voice of
those to whom has not been granted their due share of wits. Jock
Gordon was famed all over the country for his shrewd replies to
those who set their wits in contest with his. Jock is remembered
on all Deeside, and even to Nithsdale. He was a man well on in
years at this time, certainly not less than forty-five. But on his
face there was no wrinkle set, not a fleck of gray upon his
bonnetless fox-red shock of hair, weather-rusted and usually stuck
full of feathers and short pieces of hay. Jock Gordon was
permitted to wander as a privileged visitor through the length and
breadth of the south hill country. He paid long visits to Craig
Ronald, where he had a great admiration and reverence for the
young mistress, and a hearty detestation for Meg Kissock, who, as
he at all times asserted, "was the warst maister to serve atween
the Cairnsmuirs."

"Richt weel I'll do yer biddin', Meg Kissock," he answered in his
shrill falsetto, "but no for your sake or the sake o' ony
belangin' to you. But there's yae bonny doo [dove], wi' her hair
like gowd, an' a fit that she micht set on Jock Gordon's neck, an'
it wad please him weel. An' said she, 'Do the wark Meg Kissock
bids ye,' so Jock Gordon, Lord o' Kelton Hill an' Earl o'
Clairbrand, will perform a' yer wull. Otherwise it's no in any
dochter o' Hurkle-backit [bent-backed] Kissock to gar Jock Gordon
move haund or fit."

So saying, Jock clattered away with his water-pails, muttering to
himself.

Meg Kissock came out again to sit down on her milking-stool under
the westward window, within which was Winsome Charteris, reading
her book unseen by the last glow of the red west.

Jess and Saunders Mowdiewort had fallen silent. Jess had said her
say, and did not intend to exert herself to entertain her sister's
admirer. Jess was said to look not unkindly on Ebie Farrish, the
younger ploughman who had recently come to Craig Ronald from one
of the farms at the "laigh" end of the parish. Ebie had also, it
was said, with better authority, a hanging eye to Jess, who had
the greater reason to be kind to him, that he was the first since
her return from England who had escaped the more BRAVURA
attractions of her sister.

"Can ye no find a seat guid eneuch to sit doon on, cuif?" inquired
Meg with quite as polite an intention as though she had said, "Be
so kind as to take a seat." The cuif, who had been uneasily
balancing himself first on one foot and then on the other, and
apologetically passing his hand over the sleek side of his head
which was not covered by the bonnet, replied gratefully:

"'Deed I wull that, Meg, since ye are sae pressin'."

He went to the end of the milk-house, selected a small tub used
for washing the dishes of red earthenware and other domestic small
deer, turned it upside down, and seated himself as near to Meg as
he dared. Then he tried to think what it was he had intended to
say to her, but the words somehow would not now come at call.
Before long he hitched his seat a little nearer, as though his
present position was not quite comfortable.

But Meg checked him sharply.

"Keep yer distance, cuif," she said; "ye smell o' the muils"
[churchyard earth].

"Na, na, Meg, ye ken brawly I haena been howkin' [digging] since
Setterday fortnicht, when I burriet Tarn Rogerson's wife's guid-
brither's auntie, that leeved grainin' an' deein' a' her life wi'
the rheumatics an' wame disease, an' died at the last o' eatin'
swine's cheek an' guid Cheddar cheese thegither at Sandy
Mulquharchar's pig-killin'."

"Noo, cuif," said Meg, with an accent of warning in her voice,
"gin ye dinna let alane deevin' [deafening] us wi' yer kirkyaird
clavers, ye'll no sit lang on my byne" [tub].

From the end of the peat-stack, out of the dark hole made by the
excavation of last winter's stock of fuel, came the voice of Jock
Gordon, singing:

    "The deil he sat on the high lumtap,
    HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!
    Gang yer ways and drink yer drap,
    Ye'll need it a' whan ye come to stap
    IN MY HOLE SAE BLACK AN' REEKY, O!
    HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!

    "Hieland kilt an' Lawland hose,
    Parritch-fed an' reared on brose,
    Ye'll drink nae drap whan ye come tae stap
    IN MY HOLE SAE BLACK AN' REEKY, O!
    HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!"

Meg Kissock and her sweetheart stopped to listen. Saunders
Mowdiewort smiled an unprofessional smile when he heard the song
of the natural. "That's a step ayont the kirkyaird, Meg," he said.
"Gin ye hae sic objections to hear aboot honest men in their
honest graves, what say ye to that elricht craitur scraichin'
aboot the verra deil an' his hearth-stane?"

Certainly it sounded more than a trifle uncanny in the gloaming,
coming out of that dark place where even in the daytime the black
Galloway rats cheeped and scurried, to hear the high, quavering
voice of Jock Gordon singing his unearthly rhymes.

By-and-bye those at the house gable could see that the innocent
had climbed to the top of the peat-stack in some elvish freak, and
sat there cracking his thumbs and singing with all his might:

    "HECH HOW, BLACK AN' REEKY!
    IN MY HOLE SAE BLACK AN' REEKY, O!"

"Come doon oot o' that this meenit, Jock Gordon, ye gomeral!"
cried Meg, shaking her fist at the uncouth shape twisting and
singing against the sunset sky like one demented.

The song stopped, and Jock Gordon slowly turned his head in their
direction. All were looking towards him, except Ebie Farrish, the
new ploughman, who was wondering what Jess Kissock would do if he
put his arm around her waist.

"What said ye?" Jock asked from his perch on the top of the peat-
stack.

"Hae ye fetched in the peats an' the water, as I bade ye?" asked
Meg, with great asperity in her voice. "D'ye think that ye'll win
aff ony the easier in the hinnerend, by sittin' up there like yin
o' his ain bairns, takkin' the deil's name in vain?"

"Gin ye dinna tak' tent to [care of] yersel', Meg Kissock,"
retorted Jock, "wi' yer eternal yammer o' 'Peats, Jock Gordon, an'
'Water, Jock Gordon,' ye'll maybes find yersel' whaur Jock
Gordon'll no be there to serve ye; but the Ill Auld Boy'll keep ye
in routh o' peats, never ye fret, Meg Kissock, wi' that reed-heed
[red head] o' yours to set them a-lunt [on fire]. Faith an' ye may
cry 'Water! water!' till ye crack yer jaws, but nae Jock Gordon
there--na, na--nae Jock Gordon there. Jock kens better."

But at this moment there was a prolonged rumble, and the whole
party sitting by the gable end (the "gavel," as it was locally
expressed) rose to their feet from tub and hag-clog and milking-
stool. There had been a great land-slip. The whole side of the
peat-stack had tumbled bodily into the great "black peat-hole"
from which the winter's peats had come, and which was a favourite
lair of Jock's own, being ankle-deep in fragrant dry peat "coom"--
which is, strange to say, a perfectly clean and even a luxurious
bedding, far to be preferred as a couch to "flock" or its kindred
abominations.

All the party ran forward to see what had become of Jock, whose
song had come to so swift a close.

Out of the black mass of down-fallen peat there came a strange,
pleading voice.

"O guid deil, O kind deil, dinna yirk awa' puir Jock to that ill
bit--puir Jock, that never yet did ye ony hairm, but aye wished ye
weel! Lat me aff this time, braw deil, an' I'll sing nae mair ill
gangs aboot ye!"

"Save us!" exclaimed Meg Kissock, "the craitur's prayin' to the
Ill Body himsel'."

Ebbie Farrish began to clear away the peat, which was, indeed, no
difficult task. As he did so, the voice of Jock Gordon mounted
higher and higher:

"O mercy me, I hear them clawin' and skrauchelin'! Dinna let the
wee yins wi' the lang riven taes and the nebs like gleds [beaks
like kites] get haud o' me! I wad rayther hae yersel', Maister o'
Sawtan, for ye are a big mensefu' deil. Ouch! I'm dune for noo,
althegither; he haes gotten puir Jock! Sirce me, I smell the
reekit rags o' him!"

But it was only Ebie Farrish that had him by the roll of ancient
cloth which served as a collar for Jock's coat. When he was pulled
from under the peats and set upon his feet, he gazed around with a
bewildered look.

"O man, Ebie Farrish," he said solemnly, "If I didna think ye war
the deil himsel'--ye see what it is to be misled by ootward
appearances!"

There was a shout of laughter at the expense of Ebie, in which Meg
thought that she heard an answering ripple from within Winsome's
room.

"Surely, Jock, ye were never prayin' to the deil?" asked Meg from
the window, very seriously. "Ye ken far better than that."

"An' what for should I no pray to the deil? He's a desperate
onsonsy chiel yon. It's as weel to be in wi' him as oot wi' him
ony day. Wha' kens what's afore them, or wha they may be behaudin'
to afore the morrow's morn?" answered Jock stoutly.

"But d'ye ken," said John Scott, the theological herd, who had
quietly "daundered doon" as he said, from his cot-house up on the
hill, where his bare-legged bairns played on the heather and short
grass all day, to set his shoulder against the gable end for an
hour with the rest.

"D'ye ken what Maister Welsh was sayin' was the new doctrine amang
thae New Licht Moderates--'hireling shepherds,' he ca'd them? Noo
I'm no on mysel' wi' sae muckle speakin' aboot the deil. But the
minister was sayin' that the New Moderates threep [assert] that
there's nae deil at a'. He dee'd some time since!"

"Gae wa' wi' ye, John Scott! wha's gaun aboot doin' sae muckle ill
then, I wad like to ken?" said Meg Kissock.

"Dinna tell me," said Jock Gordon, "that the puir deil's deed, and
that we'll hae to pit up wi' Ebie Farrish. Na, na, Jock's maybe
daft, but he kens better than that!"

"They say," said John Scott, pulling meditatively at his cutty,
"that the pooer is vested noo in a kind o' comy-tee [committee]!"

"I dinna haud wi' comy-tees mysel'," replied Meg; "it's juist
haein' mony maisters, ilka yin mair cankersome and thrawn than
anither!"

"Weel, gin this news be true, there's a heep o' fowk in this
parish should be mentioned in his wull," said Jock Gordon,
significantly. "They're near kin till him--forby a heep o' bairns
that he has i' the laich-side o' the loch. They're that hard
there, they'll no gie a puir body a meal o' meat or the shelter o'
a barn."

"But," said Ebie Farrish, who had been thinking that, after all,
the new plan might have its conveniences, "gin there's nae deil to
tempt, there'll be nae deil to punish."

But the herd was a staunch Marrow man. He was not led away by any
human criticism, nor yet by the new theology.

"New Licht here, New Licht there," he said; "I canna' pairt wi' ma
deil. Na, na, that's ower muckle to expect o' a man o' my age!"

Having thus defined his theological position, without a word more
he threw his soft checked plaid of Galloway wool over his
shoulders, and fell into the herd's long swinging heather step,
mounting the steep brae up to his cot on the hillside as easily as
if he were walking along a level road.

There was a long silence; then a ringing sound, sudden and sharp,
and Ebie Farrish fell inexplicably from the axe-chipped hag-clog,
which he had rolled up to sit upon. Ebie had been wondering for
more than an hour what would happen if he put his arm round Jess
Kissock's waist. He knew now.

Then, after a little Saunders Mowdiewort, who was not unmindful of
his prearranged programme nor yet oblivious of the flight of time,
saw the stars come out, he knew that if he were to make any
progress, he must make haste; so he leaned over towards his
sweetheart and whispered, "Meg, my lass, ye're terrible bonny."

"D'ye think ye are the first man that has telled me that, cuif?"
said Meg, with point and emphasis.

Jock Forrest, the senior ploughman--a very quiet, sedate man with
a seldom stirred but pretty wit, laughed a short laugh, as though
he knew something about that. Again there was a silence, and as
the night wind began to draw southward in cool gulps of air off
the hills, Winsome Charteris's window was softly closed.

"Hae ye nocht better than that to tell us, cuif?" said Meg,
briskly, "nocht fresh-like?"

"Weel," said Saunders Mowdiewort, groping round for a subject of
general interest, his profession and his affection being alike
debarred, "there's that young Enbra' lad that's come till the
manse. He's a queer root, him."

"What's queer aboot him?" asked Meg, in a semi-belligerent manner.
A young man who had burned his fingers for her mistress's sake
must not be lightly spoken of.

"Oh, nocht to his discredit ava, only Manse Bell heard him arguin'
wi' the minister aboot the weemen-folk the day that he cam'. He
canna' bide them, she says."

"He has but puir taste," said Ebie Farrish; "a snod bit lass is
the bonniest work o' Natur'. Noo for mysel'--"

"D'ye want anither?" asked Jess, without apparent connection.

"He'll maybe mend o' that opeenion, as mony a wise man has dune
afore him," said Meg, sententiously. "Gae on, cuif; what else
aboot the young man?"

"Oh, he's a lad o' great lear. He can read ony language back or
forrit, up or doon, as easy as suppin' sowens. He can speak
byordinar' graund. They say he'll beat the daddy o' him for
preachin' when he's leecensed. He rade Birsie this mornin' too,
after the kickin' randie had cuist me aff his back like a draff
sack."

"Then what's queer aboot him?" said Jess.

Meg said nothing. She felt a draft of air suck into Winsome's
room, so that she knew that the subject was of such interest that
her mistress had again opened her window. Meg leaned back so far
that she could discern a glint of yellow hair in the darkness.

The cuif was about to light his pipe. Meg stopped him.

"Nane o' yer lichts here, cuif," she said; "it's time ye were
thinkin' aboot gaun ower the hill. But ye haena' telled us yet
what's queer aboot the lad."

"Weel, woman, he's aye write--writin', whiles on sheets o' paper,
and whiles on buiks."

"There's nocht queer aboot that," says Meg; "so does ilka
minister."

"But Manse Bell gied me ane o' his writings, that she had gotten
aboot his bedroom somewhere. She said that the wun' had blawn't
aff his table, but I misdoot her."

"Yer ower great wi' Manse Bell an' the like o' her, for a man that
comes to see me!" said Meg, who was a very particular young woman
indeed.

"It was cuttit intil lengths like the metre psalms, but it luikit
gye an' daft like, sae I didna' read it," said the cuif hastily.
"Here it's to ye, Meg. I was e'en gaun to licht my cutty wi't."
Something shone gray-white in Saunders's hand as he held it out to
Meg, It passed into Meg's palm, and then was seen no more.

The session at the house end was breaking up. Jess had vanished
silently. Ebie Farrish was not. Jock Forrest had folded his tent
and stolen away. Meg and Saunders were left alone. It was his
supreme opportunity.

He leaned over towards his sweetheart. His blue bonnet had fallen
to the ground, and there was a distinct odour of warm candle-
grease in the air.

"Meg," he said, "yer maist amazin' bonny, an' I'm that fond o' ye
that I am faain' awa' frae my meat! O Meg, woman, I think o' ye i'
the mornin' afore the Lord's Prayer, I sair misdoot! Guid forgie
me! I find mysel' whiles wonderin' gin I'll see ye the day afore I
can gang ower in my mind the graves that's to howk, or gin
Birsie's oats are dune. O Meg, Meg, I'm that fell fond o' ye that
I gruppit that thrawn speldron Birsie's hint leg juist i' the
fervour o' thinkin' o' ye."

"Hoo muckle hae ye i' the week?" said Meg, practically, to bring
the matter to a point.

"A pound a week," said Saunders Mowdiewort, promptly, who though a
cuif was a business man, "an' a cottage o' three rooms wi' a
graun' view baith back an' front!"

"Ow aye," said Meg, sardonically, "I ken yer graund view. It's o'
yer last wife's tombstane, wi' the inscriptions the length o' my
airm aboot Betty Mowdiewort an' a' her virtues, that Robert
Paterson cuttit till ye a year past in Aprile. Na, na, ye'll no
get me to leeve a' my life lookin' oot on that ilk' time I wash my
dishes. It wad mak' yin be wantin' to dee afore their time to get
sic-like. Gang an' speer [ask] Manse Bell. She's mair nor half
blind onyway, an' she's fair girnin' fain for a man, she micht
even tak' you."

With these cruel words Meg lifted her milking-stool and vanished
within. The cuif sat for a long time on his byne lost in thought.
Then he arose, struck his flint and steel together, and stood
looking at the tinder burning till it went out, without having
remembered to put it to the pipe which he held in his other hand.
After the last sparks ran every way and flickered, he threw the
glowing red embers on the ground, kicked the pail on which he had
been sitting as solemnly as if he had been performing a duty to
the end of the yard, and then stepped stolidly into the darkness.

The hag-clog was now left alone against the wall beneath Winsome's
window, within which there was now the light of a candle and a
waxing and waning shadow on the blind as some one went to and fro.
Then there was a sharp noise as of one clicking in the "steeple"
or brace of the front door (which opened in two halves), and then
the metallic grit of the key in the lock, for Craig Ronald was a
big house, and not a mere farm which might be left all night with
unbarred portals.

Winsome stepped lightly to her own door, which opened without
noise. She looked out and said, in a compromise between a coaxing
whisper and a voice of soft command:

"Meg, I want ye."

Meg Kissock came along the passage with the healthy glow of the
night air on her cheeks, and her candle in her hand. She seemed as
if she would pause at the door, but Winsome motioned her
imperiously within. So Meg came within, and Winsome shut to the
door. Then she simply held out her hand, at which Meg gazed as
silently.

"Meg!" said Winsome, warningly.

A queer, faint smile passed momentarily over the face of Winsome's
handmaid, as though she had been long trying to solve some problem
and had suddenly and unexpectedly found the answer. Slowly she
lifted up her dark-green druggit skirt, and out of a pocket of
enormous size, which was swung about her waist like a captured
leviathan heaving inanimate on a ship's cable, she extracted a
sheet of crumpled paper.

Winsome took it without a word. Her eye said "Good-night" to Meg
as plain as the minister's text.

Meg Kissock waited till she was at the door, and then, just as she
was making her silent exit, she said:

"Ye'll tak' as guid care o't as the ither yin ye fand. Ye can pit
them baith thegither."

Winsome took a step towards her as if with some purpose of
indignant chastisement. But the red head and twinkling eyes of
mischief vanished, and Winsome stood with the paper in her hand.
Just as she had begun to smooth out the crinkles produced by the
hands of Manse Bell who could not read it, Saunders who would not,
and Meg Kissock who had not time to read it, the head of the last
named was once more projected into the room, looking round the
edge of the rose-papered door.

"Ye'll mak' a braw mistress o' the manse, Mistress--Ralph--
Peden!" she said, nodding her head after each proper name.





CHAPTER X.

THE LOVE-SONG OF THE MAVIS.


Winsome stamped her little foot in real anger now, and crumpling
the paper in her hand she threw it indignantly on the floor. She
was about to say something to Meg, but that erratic and privileged
domestic was in her own room by this time at the top of the house,
with the door barred.

But something like tears stood in Winsome's eyes. She was very
angry indeed. She would speak to Meg in the morning. She was
mistress of the house, and not to be treated as a child. Meg
should have her warning to leave at the term. It was ridiculous
the way that she had taken to speaking to her lately. It was clear
that she had been allowing her far too great liberties. It did not
occur to Winsome Charteris that Meg had been accustomed to tease
her in something like this manner about every man under forty who
had come to Craig Ronald on any pretext whatever--from young
Johnnie Dusticoat, the son of the wholesale meal-miller from
Dumfries, to Agnew Greatorix, eldest son of the Lady Elizabeth,
who came over from the castle with books for her grandmother
rather oftener than might be absolutely necessary, and who, though
a papist, had waited for Winsome three Sabbath days at the door of
the Marrow kirk, a building which he had never previously entered
during his life.

Winsome went indignant to bed. It was altogether too aggravating
that Meg should take on so, she said to herself.

"Of course I do not care a button," she said as she turned her hot
cheek upon the pillow and looked towards the pale gray-blue of the
window-panes, in which there was already the promise of the
morning; though yet it was hardly midnight of the short midsummer
of the north.

"It would be too ridiculous to suppose that I should care for
anybody whom I have only seen twice. Why, it was more than a year
before I really cared for dear old grannie! Meg might know better,
and it is very silly of her to say things like that. I shall send
back his book and paper to-morrow morning by Andrew Kissock when
he goes to school." Still even after this resolution she lay
sleepless.

"Now I will go to sleep," said Winsome, resolutely shutting her
eyes. "I will not think about him any more." Which was assuredly a
noble and fitting resolve. But Winsome had yet to discover in
restless nights and troubled morrows that sleep and thought are
two gifts of God which do not come or go at man's bidding. In her
silent chamber there seemed to be a kind of hushed yet palpable
life. It seemed to Winsome as if there were about her a thousand
little whispering voices. Unseen presences flitted everywhere. She
could hear them laughing such wicked, mocking laughs. They were
clustering round the crumpled piece of paper in the corner. Well,
it might lie there forever for her.

"I would not read it even if it were light. I shall send it back
to him to-morrow without reading it. Very likely it is a Greek
exercise, at any rate."

Yet, for all these brave sayings, neither sleep nor dawn had come,
when, clad in shadowy white and the more manifest golden glimmer
of her hair, she glided to the windowseat, and drawing a great
knitted shawl about her, she sat, a slender figure enveloped from
head to foot in sheeny white. The shawl imprisoned the pillow
tossed masses of her rippling hair, throwing them forward about
her face, which, in the half light, seemed to be encircled with an
aureole of pale Florentine gold.

In her hand Winsome held Ralph Peden's poem, and in spite of her
determination not to read it, she sat waiting till the dawn should
come. It might be something of great importance. It might only be
a Greek exercise. It was, at all events, necessary to find out, in
order that she might send it back.

It was a marvellous dawning, this one that Winsome waited for.
Dawn is the secret of the universe. It thrills us somehow with a
far-off prophecy of that eternal dawning when the God That Is
shall reveal himself--the dawning which shall brighten into the
more perfect day.

It was just the slack water--the water-shed of the night. So clear
it was this June night that the lingering gold behind the western
ridge of the Orchar Hill, where the sun went down, was neither
brighter nor yet darker than the faint tinge of lucent green, like
the colour of the inner curve of the sea-wave just as it bends to
break, which had begun to glow behind the fir woods to the east.

The birds were waking sleepily. Chaffinches began their clear,
short, natural bursts of song. "CHURR!" said the last barn owl as
he betook himself to bed. The first rook sailed slowly overhead
from Hensol wood. He was seeking the early worm. The green lake in
the east was spreading and taking a roseate tinge just where it
touched the pines on the rugged hillside.

Beneath Winsome's window a blackbird hopped down upon the grass
and took a tentative dab or two at the first slug he came across;
but it was really too early for breakfast for a good hour yet, so
he flew up again into a bush and preened his feathers, which had
been discomposed by the limited accommodation of the night. Now he
was on the topmost twig, and Winsome saw him against the crimson
pool which was fast deepening in the east.

Suddenly his mellow pipe fluted out over the grove. Winsome
listened as she had never listened before. Why had it become so
strangely sweet to listen to the simple sounds? Why did the rich
Tyrian dye of the dawn touch her cheek and flush the flowering
floss of her silken hair? A thrush from the single laurel at the
gate told her:

      "There--there--there--" he sang,
    "Can't you see, can't you see, can't you see it?
      Love is the secret, the secret!
    Could you but know it, did you but show it!
          Hear me! hear me! hear me!
      Down in the forest I loved her!
            Sweet, sweet, sweet!
            Would you but listen,
              I would love you!
      All is sweet and pure and good!
        Twilight and morning dew,
              I love it, I love it,
        Do you, do you, do you?"

This was the thrush's love-song. Now it was light enough for
Winsome to read hers by the red light of the midsummer's dawn.
This was Ralph's Greek exercise:

  "Sweet mouth, red lips, broad unwrinkled brow,
  Sworn troth, woven hands, holy marriage vow,
  Unto us make answer, what is wanting now?
     Love, love, love, the whiteness of the snow;
     Love, love, love, and the days of long ago.

  "Broad lands, bright sun, as it was of old;
  Red wine, loud mirth, gleaming of the gold;
  Something yet a-wanting--how shall it be told?
     Love, love, love, the whiteness of the snow;
     Love, love, love, and the days of long ago.

  "Large heart, true love, service void of sound,
  Life-trust, death-trust, here on Scottish ground,
  As in olden story, surely I have found--
     Love, love, love, the whiteness of the snow,
     Love, love, love, and the days of long ago."

The thrush had ceased singing while Winsome read. It was another
voice which she heard--the first authentic call of the springtime
for her. It coursed through her blood. It quickened her pulse. It
enlarged the pupil of her eye till the clear germander blue of the
iris grew moist and dark. It was a song for her heart, and hers
alone. She felt it, though no more than a leaf blown to her by
chance winds. It might have been written for any other, only she
knew that it was not. Ralph Peden had said nothing. The poem
certainly did not suggest a student of divinity in the Kirk of the
Marrow. There were a thousand objections--a thousand reasons--
every one valid, against such a thing. But love that laughs at
locksmiths is equally contemptuous of logic. It was hers, hers,
and hers alone. A breath from Love's wing as he passed came again
to Winsome. The blackbird was silent, but a thrush this time broke
in with his jubilant love-song, while Winsome, with her love-song
laid against a dewy cheek, paused to listen with a beating heart
and a new comprehension:

        "Hear! hear! hear!
          Dear! dear! dear!
    Far away, far away, far away,
      I saw him pass this way,
    Tirrieoo, tirrieoo! so tender and true,
      Chippiwee, chippiwee, oh, try him and see!
    Cheer up! cheer up! cheer up!
      He'll come and he'll kiss you,
      He'll kiss you and kiss you,
    And I'll see him do it, do it, do it!"

"Go away, you wicked bird!" said Winsome, when the master singer
in speckled grey came to this part of his song. So saying, she
threw, with such exact aim that it went in an entirely opposite
direction, a quaint, pink seashell at the bird, a shell which had
been given her by a lad who was going away again to sea three
years ago. She was glad now, when she thought of it, that she had
kissed him because he had no mother, for he never came back any
more.

"Keck, keck!" said the mavis indignantly, and went away.

Then Winsome lay down on her white bed well content, and pillowed
her cheek on a crumpled piece of paper.





CHAPTER XI

ANDREW KISSOCK GOES TO SCHOOL.


Love is, at least in maidens' hearts, of the nature of an
intermittent fever. The tide of Solway flows, but the more rapid
his flow the swifter his ebb. The higher it brings the wrack up
the beach, the deeper, six hours after, are laid bare the roots of
the seaweed upon the shingle. Now Winsome Charteris, however her
heart might conspire against her peace, was not at all the girl to
be won before she was asked. Also there was that delicious spirit
of contrariness that makes a woman even when won, by no means seem
won.

Besides, in the broad daylight of common day she was less attuned
and touched to earnest issues than in the red dawn. She had even
taken the poem and the exercise book out of the sacred enclosure,
where they had been hid so long. She did not really know that she
could make good any claim to either. Indeed, she was well aware
that to one of them at least she had no claim whatever. Therefore
she had placed both the note-book and the poem within the same
band as her precious housekeeping account-book, which she
reverenced next her Bible--which very practical proceeding pleased
her, and quite showed that she was above all foolish sentiment.
Then she went to churn for an hour and a half, pouring in a little
hot water critically from time to time in order to make the butter
come. This exercise may be recommended as an admirable corrective
to foolish flights of imagination. There is something concrete
about butter-making which counteracts an overplus of sentiment--
especially when the butter will not come. And hot water may be
overdone.

Now Winsome Charteris was a hard-hearted young woman--a fact that
may not as yet have appeared; at least so she told herself. She
had come to the conclusion that she had been foolish to think at
all of Ralph Peden, so she resolved to put him at once and
altogether out of her mind, which, as every one knows, is quite a
simple matter. Yet during the morning she went three times into
her little room to look at her housekeeping book, which by
accident lay within the same band as Ralph Peden's lost
manuscripts. First, she wanted to see how much she got for butter
at Cairn Edward the Monday before last; then to discover what the
price was on that very same day last year. It is an interesting
thing to follow the fluctuations of the produce market, especially
when you churn the butter yourself. The exact quotation of
documents is a valuable thing to learn. Nothing is so likely to
grow upon one as a habit of inaccuracy. This was what her
grandmother was always telling her, and it behooved Winsome to
improve. Each time as she strapped the documents together she
said, "And these go back to-day by Andra Kissock when he goes to
school." Then she took another look, in order to assure herself
that no forgeries had been introduced within the band while she
was churning the butter. They were still quite genuine.

Winsome went out to relieve Jess Kissock in the dairy, and as she
went she communed with herself: "It is right that I should send
them back. The verses may belong to somebody else--somebody in
Edinburgh--and, besides, I know them by heart."

A good memory is a fine thing.

The Kissocks lived in one of the Craig Ronald cot-houses. Their
father had in his time been one of the herds, and upon his death,
many years ago, Walter Skirving had allowed the widow and children
to remain in the house in which Andrew Kissock, senior, had died.
Mistress Kissock was a large-boned, soft-voiced woman, who had
supplied what dash of tenderness there was in her daughters. She
had reared them according to good traditions, but as she said,
when all her brood were talking at the same time, she alone
quietly silent:

"The Kissocks tak' efter their faither, they're great hands to
talk--a' bena [except] An'ra'."

Andrew was her youngest, a growing lump of a boy of twelve, who
was exceeding silent in the house. Every day Andra betook himself
to school, along the side of Loch Grannoch, by the path which
looked down on the cloud-flecked mirror of the loch. Some days he
got there, but very occasionally.

His mother had got him ready early this June morning. He had
brought in the kye for Jess. He had helped Jock Gordon to carry
water for Meg's kitchen mysteries. He had listened to a brisk
conversation proceeding from the "room" where his very capable
sister was engaged in getting the old people settled for the day.
All this was part of the ordinary routine. As soon as the whole
establishment knew that Walter Skirving was again at the window
over the marshmallows, and his wife at her latest book, a sigh of
satisfaction went up and the wheels of the day's work revolved. So
this morning it came time for Andra to go to school all too soon.
Andra did not want to stay at home from school, but it was against
the boy's principle to appear glad to go to school, so Andra made
it a point of honour to make a feint of wanting to stay every
morning.

"Can I no bide an' help ye wi' the butter-kirnin' the day, Jess?"
said Andra, rubbing himself briskly all over as he had seen the
ploughmen do with their horses. When he got to his bare red legs
he reared and kicked out violently, calling out at the same time:

"Wad ye then, ye tairger, tuts--stan' still there, ye kickin'
beast!" as though he were some fiery untamed from the desert.

Jess made a dart at him with a wet towel.

"Gang oot o' my back kitchen wi' yer nonsense!" she said. Andra
passaged like a strongly bitted charger to the back door, and
there ran away with himself, flourishing in the air a pair of very
dirty heels. Ebie Farrish was employed over a tin basin at the
stable door, making his breakfast toilet, which he always
undertook, not when he shook himself out of bed in the stable loft
at five o'clock, but before he went in to devour Jess with his
eyes and his porridge in the ordinary way. It was at this point
that Andra Kissock, that prancing Galloway barb, breaking away
from all restrictions, charged between Ebie's legs, and overset
him into his own horse-trough. The yellow soap was in Ebie's eyes,
and before he got it out the small boy was far enough away. The
most irritating thing was that from the back kitchen came peal on
peal of laughter.

"It's surely fashionable at the sea-bathin' to tak' a dook [swim]
in the stable-trough, nae less!"

Ebie gathered himself up savagely. His temperature was something
considerably above summer heat, yet he dared not give expression
to his feelings, for his experiences in former courtships had led
him to the conclusion that you cannot safely, having regard to
average family prejudice, abuse the brothers of your sweetheart.
After marriage the case is believed to be different.

Winsome Charteris stood at the green gate which led out of the
court-yard into the croft, as Andra was making his schoolward
exit. She had a parcel for him. This occasioned no surprise, nor
did the very particular directions as to delivery, and the dire
threatenings against forgetfulness or failure in the least dismay
Andra. He was entirely accustomed to them. From his earliest years
he had heard nothing else. He never had been reckoned as a "sure
hand," and it was only in default of a better messenger that
Winsome employed him. Then these directions were so explicit that
there did not appear to be any possibility of mistake. He had only
to go to the manse and l