The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story
high or lasted very long, had ebbed long ago. The indigo grey of
the sky was receding, and tinging towards the east with an
imperceptibly graded lavender which merged behind the long shaggy
outline of the piny ridge into a wash of pale lemon yellow.
The world paused, finger on lip, saying "Hush!" to Winsome as she
stepped over the threshold from the serenely breathing morning
air, from the illimitable sky which ran farther and farther back
as the angels drew the blinds from the windows of heaven.
"Hush!" said the cows over the hedge, blowing fragrant breaths of
approval from their wide, comma-shaped nostrils upon the lush
grass and upon the short heads of white clover, as they stood face
to the brae, all with their heads upward, eating their way like an
army on the march.
"Hush! hush!" said the sheep who were straggling over the shorter
grass of the High Park, feeding fitfully in their short, uneasy
way--crop, crop, crop--and then a pause, to move forward their own
length and begin all over again.
But the sheep and the kine, the dewy grass and the brightening
sky, might every one have spared their pains, for it was in no
wise in the heart of Winsome Charteris to make a noise amid the
silences of dawn. Meg Kissock, who still lay snug by Jess in a
plump-cheeked country sleep, made noise enough to stir the country
side when, rising, she set briskly about to get the house on its
morning legs. But Winsome was one of the few people in this world
--few but happy--to whom a sunrise is more precious than a sun set
--rarer and more calming, instinct with message and sign from a
covenant-keeping God. Also, Winsome betook her self early to bed,
and so awoke attuned to the sun's rising.
What drew her forth so early this June day was no thought or hope
or plan except the desire to read the heart of Nature, and perhaps
that she might not be left too long alone with the parable of her
own heart. A girl's heart is full of thought which it dares not
express to herself--of fluttering and trembling possibilities,
chrysalis-like, set aside to await the warmth of an unrevealed
summer. In Winsome's soul the first flushing glory of the May of
youth was waking the prisoned life. But there were throbs and
thrillings too piercingly sweet to last undeveloped in her soul.
The bursting bud of her healthful beauty, quickened by the shy
radiance of her soul, shook the centres of her life, even as a
laburnum-tree mysteriously quivers when the golden rain is in act
to break from the close-clustered dependent budlets.
Thus it was that, at the stile which helps the paths be tween the
Dullarg and Craig Ronald to overleap the high hill dyke, Ralph met
Winsome. As they looked into one another's eyes, they saw Nature
suddenly dissolve into confused meaninglessness. There was no
clear message for either of them there, save the message that the
old world of their hopes and fears had wholly passed away. Yet no
new world had come when over the hill dyke their hands met. They
said no word. There is no form of greeting for such. Eve did not
greet Adam in polite phrase when he awoke to find her in the dawn
of one Eden day, a helpmeet meet for him. Neither did Eve reply
that "it was a fine morn ing." It is always a fine morning in
Eden. They were silent, and so were these two. Their hands lay
within one another a single instant. Then, with a sense of
something wanting, Ralph sprang lightly over the dyke as an Edin
burgh High-School boy ought who had often played hares and hounds
in the Hunter's Bog, and been duly thrashed therefor by Dr. Adam
[Footnote: The Aery famous master of the High School of
Edinburgh.] on the following morning.
When Ralph stood beside her upon the sunny side of the stile he
instinctively resumed Winsome's hand. For this he had no reason,
certainly no excuse. Still, it may be urged in excuse that it was
as much as an hour or an hour and a half before Winsome remembered
that he needed any. Our most correct and ordered thoughts have a
way of coming to us belated, as the passenger who strolls in
confidently ten minutes after the platform is clear. But, like
him, they are at least ready for the next train.
As Winsome and Ralph turned towards the east, the sun set his face
over the great Scotch firs on the ridge, whose tops stood out like
poised irregular blots on the fire centred ocean of light.
It was the new day, and if the new world had not come with it, of
a surety it was well on the way.
CHAPTER XIII.
A STRING OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET.
For a long time they were silent, though it was not long before
Winsome drew away her hand, which, however, continued to burn
consciously for an hour afterwards. Silence settled around them.
The constraint of speech fell first upon Ralph, being town-bred
and accustomed to the convenances at Professor Thriepneuk's.
"You rise early," he said, glancing shyly down at Winsome, who
seemed to have forgotten his presence. He did not wish her to
forget. He had no objection to her dreaming, if only she would
dream about him.
Winsome turned the bewildering calmness of her eyes upon him. A
gentleman, they say, is calm-eyed. So is a cow. But in the eye of
a good woman there is a peace which comes from many generations of
mothers--who, every one Christs in their way, have suffered their
heavier share of the Eden curse.
Ralph would have given all that he possessed--which, by the way,
was not a great deal--to be able to assure himself that there was
any hesitancy or bashfulness in the glance which met his own. But
Winsome's eyes were as clearly and frankly blue as if God had made
them new that morning. At least Ralph looked upon their Sabbath
peace and gave thanks, finding them very good.
A sparkle of laughter, at first silent and far away, sprang into
them, like a breeze coming down Loch Grannoch when it lies asleep
in the sun, sending shining sparkles winking shoreward, and
causing the wavering golden lights on the shallow sand of the bays
to scatter tremulously. So in the depths of Winsome's eyes
glimmered the coming smile. Winsome could be divinely serious, but
behind there lay the possibility and certainty of very frank
earthly laughter. If, as Ralph thought, not for the first time in
this rough island story, this girl were an angel, surely she was
one to whom her Maker had given that rarest gift given to woman--
a well-balanced sense of humour.
So when Ralph said, hardly knowing what he said, "You rise early,"
it was with that far-away intention of a smile that Winsome
replied:
"And you, sir, have surely not lagged in bed, or else you have
come here in a great hurry."
"I rose," returned Ralph, "certainly betimes--in fact, a great
while before day; it is the time when one can best know one's
self."
The sententiousness, natural to his years and education, to some
extent rebuked Winsome, who said more soberly:
"Perhaps you have again lost your books of study?"
"I do not always study in books," answered Ralph.
Winsome continued to look at him as though waiting his
explanation.
"I mean," said Ralph, quickly, his pale cheek touched with red,
"that though I am town-bred I love the things that wander among
the flowers and in the wood. There are the birds, too, and the
little green plants that have no flow ers, and they all have a
message, if I could only hear it and understand it."
The sparkle in Winsome's eyes quieted into calm.
"I too--" she began, and paused as if startled at what she was
about to say. She went on: "I never heard any one say things like
these. I did not know that any one else had thoughts like these
except myself."
"And have you thought these things?" said Ralph, with a quick joy
in his heart.
"Yes," replied Winsome, looking down on the ground and playing
with the loose string of the lilac sunbonnet. "I used often to
wonder how it was that I could not look on the loch on Sabbath
morning without feeling like crying. It was often better to look
upon it than to go to Maister Welsh's kirk. But I ought not to say
these things to you," she said, with a quick thought of his
profession.
Ralph smiled. There were few things that Winsome Charteris might
not say to him. He too had his experiences to collate.
"Have you ever stood on a hill-top as though you were suspended in
the air, and when you seem to feel the earth whirling away from
beneath you, rushing swiftly eastward towards the sunrise?"
"I have heard it," said Winsome unexpectedly.
"Heard it?" queried Ralph, with doubt in his voice.
"Yes," said Winsome calmly, "I have often heard the earth wheeling
round on still nights out on the top of the Craigs, where there
was no sound, and all the house was asleep. It is as if some Great
One were saying 'Hush!' to the angels--I think God himself!"
These were not the opinions of the kirk of the Marrow; neither
were they expressed in the Acts Declaratory or the protests or
claims of right made by the faithful contending remnant. But Ralph
would not at that moment have hesitated to add them to the
Westminster Confession.
It is a wonderful thing to be young. It is marvellously delightful
to be young and a poet as well, who has just fallen--nay, rather,
plunged fathoms--deep in love. Ralph Peden was both. He stood
watching Winsome Charteris, who looked past him into a distance
moistly washed with tender ultramarine ash, like her own eyes too
full of colour to be gray and too pearly clear to be blue.
An equal blowing wind drew up the loch which lay be neath flooded
with morning light, the sun basking on its broad expanse, and
glittering in a myriad sparkles on the, narrows beneath them
beside which the blanket-washing had been. A frolicsome breeze
blew down the hill towards them in little flicks and eddies. One
of these drew a flossy tendril of Winsome's golden hair, which
this morning had red lights in it like the garnet gloss on ripe
wheat or Indian corn, and tossed it over her brow. Ralph's hand
tingled with the desire to touch it and put it back under her
bonnet, and his heart leaped at the thought. But though he did not
stir, nor had any part of his being moved save the hidden thought
of his heart, he seemed to fall in his own estimation as one who
had attempted a sacrilege.
"Have you ever noticed," continued Winsome, all unconscious, going
on with that fruitful comparison of feelings which has woven so
many gossamer threads into three-fold cords, "how everything in
the fields and the woods is tamer in the morning? They seem to
have forgotten that man is their natural enemy while they slept."
"Perhaps," said Ralph theologically, "when they awake they forget
that they are not still in that old garden that Adam kept."
Winsome was looking at him now, for he had looked away in his
turn, lost in a poet's thought. It struck her for the first time
that other people might think him handsome. When a girl forgets to
think whether she herself is of this opinion, and begins to think
what others will think on a subject like this (which really does
not concern her at all), the proceedings in the case are not
finished.
They walked on together down by the sunny edge of the great
plantation. The sun was now rising well into the sky, climbing
directly upward as if on this midsummer day he were leading a
forlorn hope to scale the zenith of heaven. He shone on the russet
tassels of the larches, and the deep sienna boles of the Scotch
firs. The clouds, which rolled fleecy and white in piles and
crenulated bastions of cumulus, lighted the eyes of the man and
maid as they went onward upon the crisping piny carpet of fallen
fir-needles.
"I have never seen Nature so lovely," said Ralph, "as when the
bright morning breaks after a night of shower. Everything seems to
have been new bathed in freshness."