The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story
"I told you I should come," said Ralph, beginning the personal
tale which always waits at the door, whatever lovers may say when
they first meet. Winsome was meditating a conversation about the
scenery of the dell. She needed also some botanical information
which should aid her in the selection of plants for a herbarium.
But on this occasion Ralph was too quick for her. "I told you I
should come," said Ralph boldly, "and so you see I am here," he
concluded, rather lamely.
"To see my grandmother," said Winsome, with a touch of archness in
her tone or in her look--Ralph could not tell which, though he
eyed her closely. He wished for the first time that the dark-brown
eyelashes which fringed her lids were not so long. He fancied
that, if he could only have seen the look in the eyes hidden
underneath, he might have risked changing to the other side of the
unkindly frontier of fir-bough which marked him off from the land
of promise on the farther side.
But he could not see, and in a moment the chances were past.
"Not only to see your grandmother, who has been very kind to me,
but also to see you, who have not been at all kind to me,"
answered Ralph.
"And pray, Master Ralph Peden, how have I not been kind to you?"
said Winsome with dignity, giving him the full benefit of a pair
of apparently reproachful eyes across the fir-branch.
Now Ralph had strange impulses, and, like Winsome, certainly did
not talk by rule.
"I do wish," he said complainingly, with his head a little to one
side, "that you would only look at me with one eye at a time. Two
like that are too much for a man."
This is that same Ralph Peden whose opinions on woman were written
in a lost note-book which at this present moment is--we shall not
say where.
CHAPTER XXVI.
SUCH SWEET PERIL.
Winsome looked away down the glen, and strove to harden her face
into a superhuman indignation.
"That he should dare--the idea!"
But it so happened that the idea so touched that rare gift of
humour, and the picture of herself looking at Ralph Peden solemnly
with one eye at a time, in order at once to spare his
susceptibilities and give the other a rest, was too much for her.
She laughed a peal of rippling merriment that sent all the
blackbirds indignant out of their copses at the infringement of
their prerogative.
Ralph's humour was slower and a little grimmer than Winsome's,
whose sunny nature had blossomed out amid the merry life of the
woods and streams. But there was a sternness in both of them as
well, that was of the heather and the moss hags. And that would in
due time come out. It is now their day of love and bounding life.
And there are few people in this world who would not be glad to
sit just so at the opening of the flower of love. Indeed, it was
hardly necessary to tell one another.
Laughter, say the French (who think that their l'amour is love,
and so will never know anything), kills love. But not the kind of
laughter that rang in the open dell which peeped like the end of a
great green-lined prospect glass upon the glimmering levels of
Loch Grannoch; nor yet the kind of love which in alternate
currents pulsed to and fro between the two young people who sat so
demurely on either side of the great, many-spiked fir-branch.
"Is not this nice?" said Winsome, shrugging her shoulders
contentedly and swinging her feet.
Their laughter made them better friends than before. The
responsive gladness in each other's eyes seemed part of the
midsummer stillness of the afternoon. Above, a red squirrel
dropped the husks of larch tassels upon them, and peered down upon
them with his bright eyes. He was thinking himself of household
duties, and had his own sweetheart safe at home, nestling in the
bowl of a great beech deep in the bowering wood by the loch.
"I liked to hear you speak of your father to-day," said Winsome,
still swinging her feet girlishly. "It must be a great delight to
have a father to go to. I never remember father or mother."
Her eyes were looking straight before her now, and a depth of
tender wistfulness in them went to Ralph's heart. He was beginning
to hate the branch.
"My father," he said, "is often stern to others, but he has never
been stern to me--always helpful, full of tenderness and kindness.
Perhaps that is because I lost my mother almost before I can
remember."
Winsome's wet eyes, with the lashes curving long over the under
side of the dark-blue iris, were turned full on him now with the
tenderness of a kindred pity.
"Do you know I think that your father was once kind to my mother.
Grandmother began once to tell me, and then all at once would tell
me no more--I think because grandfather was there."
"I did not know that my father ever knew your mother," answered
Ralph.
"Of course, he would never tell you if he did," said the woman of
experience, sagely; "but grandmother has a portrait in an oval
miniature of your father as a young man, and my mother's name is
on the back of it."
"Her maiden name?" queried Ralph.
Winsome Charteris nodded. Then she said wistfully: "I wish I knew
all about it. I think it is very hard that grandmother will not
tell me!"
Then, after a silence which a far-off cuckoo filled in with that
voice of his which grows slower and fainter as the midsummer heats
come on, Winsome said abruptly, "Is your father ever hard and--
unkind?"
Ralph started to his feet as if hastily to defend his father.
There was something in Winsome's eyes that made him sit down
again--something shining and tender and kind.
"My father," he said, "is very silent and reserved, as I fear I
too have been till I came down here" (he meant to say, "Till I met
you, dear," but he could not manage it), "but he is never hard or
unkind, except perhaps on matters connected with the Marrow kirk
and its order and discipline. Then he becomes like a stone, and
has no pity for himself or any. I remember him once forbidding me
to come into the study, and compelling me to keep my own garret-
room for a month, for saying that I did not see much difference
between the Marrow kirk and the other kirks. But I am sure he
could never be unkind or hurtful to any one in the world. But why
do you ask, Mistress Winsome?"
"Because--because--" she paused, looking down now, the underwells
of her sweet eyes brimming to the overflow--"because something
grandfather said once, when he was very ill, made me wonder if
your father had ever been unkind to my mother."
Two great tears overflowed from under the dark lashes and ran down
Winsome's cheek. Ralph was on the right side of the branch now,
and, strangely enough, Winsome did not seem to notice it. He had a
lace-edged handkerchief in his hand which had been his mother's,
and all that was loving and chivalrous in his soul was stirred at
the sight of a woman's tears. He had never seen them before, and
there is nothing so thrilling in the world to a young man. Gently,
with a light, firm hand, he touched Winsome's cheek, instinctively
murmuring tenderness which no one had ever used to him since that
day long ago, when his mother had hung, with the love of a woman
who knows that she must give up all, over the cot of a boy whose
future she could not foresee.
For a thrilling moment Winsome's golden coronet of curls touched
his breast, and, as he told himself after long years, rested
willingly there while his heart beat at least ten times.
Unfortunately, it did not take long to beat ten times.
One moment more, and without any doubt Ralph would have taken
Winsome in his arms. But the girl, with that inevitable instinct
which tells a woman when her waist or her lips are in danger--
matters upon which no woman is ever taken by surprise, whatever
she may pretend--drew quietly back. The time was not yet.
"Indeed, you must not, you must not think of me. You must go away.
You know that there are only pain and danger before us if you come
to see me any more."
"Indeed, I do not know anything of the kind. I am sure that my
father could never be unkind to any creature, and I am certain
that he was not to your mother. But what has he to do with us,
Winsome?"
Her name sounded so perilously sweet to her, said thus in Ralph's
low voice, that once again her eyes met his in that full, steady
gaze which tells heart secrets and brings either life-long joys or
unending regrets. Nor--as we look--can we tell which?
"I cannot speak to you now, Ralph," she said, "but I know that you
ought not to come to see me any more. There must be something
strange and wicked about me. I feel that there is a cloud over me,
Ralph, and I do not want you to come under it."
At the first mention of his name from the lips of his beloved,
Ralph drew very close to her, with that instinctive drawing which
he was now experiencing. It was that irresistible first love of a
man who has never wasted himself even on the harmless flirtations
which are said to be the embassies of love.
But Winsome moved away from him, walking down towards the mouth of
the linn, through the thickly wooded glen, and underneath the
overarching trees, with their enlacing lattice-work of curving
boughs.
"It is better not," she said, almost pleadingly, for her strength
was failing her. She almost begged him to be merciful.
"But you believe that I love you, Winsome?" he persisted.
Low in her heart of hearts Winsome believed it. Her ear drank in
every word. She was silent only because she was thirsty to hear
more. But Ralph feared that he had fatally offended her.
"Are you angry with me, Winsome?" he said, bending from his
masculine height to look under the lilac sunbonnet.
Winsome shook her head. "Not angry, Ralph, only sorry to the
heart."
She stopped and turned round to him. She held out a hand, when
Ralph took it in both of his. There was in the touch a
determination to keep the barriers slight but sure between them.
He felt it and understood.
"Listen, Ralph," she said, looking at him with shining eyes, in
which another man would have read the love, "I want you to
understand. There is a fate about those who love me. My mother
died long ago; my father I never knew; my grandfather and
grandmother are--what you know, because of me; Mr. Welsh, at the
Manse, who used to love me and pet me when I was a little girl,
now does not speak to me. There is a dark cloud all about me!"
said Winsome sadly, yet bravely and determinedly.
Yet she looked as bright and sunshiny as her own name, as if God
had just finished creating her that minute, and had left the
Sabbath silence of thanksgiving in her eyes. Ralph Peden may be
forgiven if he did not attend much to what she said. As long as
Winsome was in the world, he would love her just the same,
whatever she said.
"What the cloud is I cannot tell," she went on; "but my
grandfather once said that it would break on whoever loved me--
and--and I do not want that one to be you."
Ralph, who had kept her hand a willing prisoner, close and warm in
his, would have come nearer to her.
He said: "Winsome, dear" (the insidious wretch! he thought that,
because she was crying, she would not notice the addition, but she
did)--"Winsome, dear, if there be a cloud, it is better that it
should break over two than over one."
"But not over you," she said, with a soft accent, which should
have been enough, for any one, but foolish Ralph was already fixed
on his own next words:
"If you have few to love you, let me be the one who will love you
all the time and altogether. I am not afraid; there will be two of
us against the world, dear."
Winsome faltered. She had not been wooed after this manner before.
It was perilously sweet. Little ticking pulses beat in her head. A
great yearning came to her to let herself drift up on a sea of