The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story
was playing this night with the sharpest of edged tools, till her
messengers should return and her combinations should close, Jess
was perfectly able and willing to give herself up to the game of
conversational give-and-take with Ebie Farrish. She was a girl of
few genteel accomplishments, but with her gipsy charm and her
frankly pagan nature she was fitted to go far.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE DAKK OF THE MOON AT THE GKANNOCH BRIDGE.
Over the manse of Dullarg, still and grey, with only the two men
in it; over the low-walled rectangular farm steading of Craig
Ronald, fell alike the midsummer night. Ten o'clock on an early
July evening is in Galloway but a modified twilight. But as the
sun went down behind the pines he sent an angry gleam athwart the
green braes. The level cloud-band into which he plunged drew
itself upward to the zenith, and, like the eyelid of a gigantic
eye, shut down as though God in his heaven were going to sleep,
and the world was to be left alone.
It was the dark of the moon, and even if there had been full moon
its light would have been as completely shut out by the cloud
canopy as was the mild diffusion of the blue-grey twilight. So it
happened that, as Ralph Peden took his way to his first love-
tryst, it was all that he could do to keep the path, so dark had
it become. But there was no rain--hardly yet even the hint or
promise of rain.
Yet under the cloud there was a great solitariness--the murmur of
a land where no man had come since the making of the world. Down
in the sedges by the lake a blackcap sang sweetly, waesomely, the
nightingale of Scotland. Far on the moors a curlew cried out that
its soul was lost. Nameless things whinnied in the mist-filled
hollows. On the low grounds there lay a white mist knee-deep, and
Ralph Peden waded in it as in a shallow sea. So in due time he
came near to the place of his tryst.
Never had he stood so before. He stilled the beating of his heart
with his hand, so loud and riotous it was in that silent place. He
could hear, loud as an insurrection, the quick, unequal double-
knocking in his bosom.
A grasshopper, roosting on a blade of grass beneath, his feet,
tumbled off and gave vent to his feelings in a belated "chirr."
Overhead somewhere a raven croaked dismally and cynically at
intervals. Ralph's ears heard these things as he waited, with
every sense on the alert, at the place of his love-tryst.
He thrilled with the subtle hope of strange possibilities. A mill-
race of pictures of things sweet and precious ran through his
mind. He saw a white-spread table, with Winsome seated opposite to
himself, tall, fair, and womanly, the bright heads of children
between them. And the dark closed in. Again he saw Winsome with
her head on his arm, standing looking out on the sunrise from the
hilltop, whence they had watched it not so long ago. The thought
brought him to his pocket-book. He took it out, and in the
darkness touched his lips to the string of the lilac sunbonnet. It
surely must be past ten now, he thought. Would she not come? He
had, indeed, little right to ask her, and none at all to expect
her. Yet he had her word of promise--one precious line. What would
he say to her when she came? He would leave that to be settled
when his arms were about her. But perhaps she would be colder than
before. They would sit, he thought, on the parapet of the bridge.
There were no fir-branches to part them with intrusive spikes. So
much at least should be his.
But then, again, she might not come at all! What more likely than
that she had been detained by her grandmother? How could he expect
it? Indeed, he told himself he did not expect it. He had come out
here because it was a fine night, and the night air cooled his
brain for his studies. His heart, hammering on his life's anvil,
contradicted him. He could not have repeated the Hebrew alphabet.
His head, bent a little forward in the agony of listening, whirled
madly round; the ambient darkness surrounding all.
There! He heard a footstep. There was a light coming down the
avenue under the elders. At last! No, it was only the glow-worms
under the leaves, shining along the grass by the wayside. The
footstep was but a restless sheep on the hillside. Then some one
coughed, with the suppressed sound of one who covers his mouth
with his hand. Ralph was startled, but almost laughed to think
that it was still only the lamb on the other side of the wall
moving restlessly about in act to feed. Time and again the blood
rushed to his temples, for he was sure that he heard her coming to
him. But it was only the echo of the blood surging blindly through
his own veins, or some of the night creatures fulfilling their
love-trysts, and seeking their destinies under the cloud of night.
Suddenly his whole soul rose in revolt against him. Certainly now
he heard a light and swift footstep. There was a darker shape
coming towards him against the dim, faint grey glimmer of the
loch. It was his love, and she had come out to him at his bidding.
He had dreamed of an angel, and lo! now he should touch her in the
hollow night, and find that she was a warm, breathing woman.
Wrapped from head to foot in a soft close shawl, she came to him.
He could see her now, but only as something darker against the
canopy of the night. So, in the blissful dark, which makes lovers
brave, he opened his arms to receive her. For the first time in
his life he drew them to him again not empty.
The thrill electric of the contact, the yielding quiescence of the
girl whom he held to his breast, stilled his heart's tumultuous
beating. She raised her head, and their lips drew together into a
long kiss. What was this thing? It was a kiss in which he tasted a
strange alien flavour even through the passion of it. A sense of
wrong and disappointment flowed round Ralph's heart. So on the
bridge in the darkness, where many lovers had stood ever since the
first Pict trysted his dark-browed bride by the unbridged water,
the pair stood very still. They only breathed each other's breath.
Something familiar struck on Ralph's senses. He seemed to be
standing silent in the parlour at Craig Ronald--not here, with his
arms round his love--and somehow between them there rose
unmistakable the perfume of the flower which for an hour he had
carried in his coat on the day that he and she went a-fishing.
"Beloved," he said tenderly, looking down, "you are very good to
me to come!"
For all reply a face was held close pressed to his. The mists of
night had made her cheek damp. He passed his hand across the
ripples of her hair. Half hidden by the shawl he could feel the
crisping of the curls under his fingers.
It was harder in texture than he had fancied Winsome's hair would
be. He half smiled that he had time at such a moment to think such
a thing. It was strange, however. He had thought a woman's hair
was like floss silk--at least Winsome's, for he had theorized
about none other.
"Winsome, dear!" he said, again bending his head to look down, "I
have to go far away, and I wanted to tell you. You are not angry
with me, sweetest, for asking you to come? I could not go without
bidding you good-bye, and in the daytime I might not have seen you
alone. You know that I love you with all my life and all my heart.
And you love me--at least a little. Tell me, beloved!"
Still there was no answer. Ralph waited with some certitude and
ease from pain, for indeed the clasping arms told him all he
wished to know.
There was a brightness low down in the west. Strangely and slowly
the gloomy eyelid of cloud which had fallen athwart the evening
lifted for a moment its sullen fringe; a misty twilight of lurid
light flowed softly over the land. The shawl fell back like a hood
from off the girl's shoulders. She looked up throbbing and
palpitating. Ralph Peden was clasping Jess Kissock in his arms.
She had kept her word. He had kissed her of his own free will, and
that within a day. Her heart rejoiced over Winsome. "So much, at
least, she cannot take from me."
Ralph Peden's heart stopped beating for a tremendous interval of
seconds. Then the dammed-back blood-surge drave thundering in his
ears. He swayed, and would have fallen but for the parapet of the
bridge and the clinging arms about his neck. All his nature and
love in full career stopped dead. The shock almost unhinged his
soul and reason. It was still so dark that, though he could see
the outline of her head and the paleness of her face, nothing held
him but the intense and vivid fascination of her eyes. Ralph would
have broken away, indignant and amazed, but her arms and eyes held
him close prisoner, the dismayed turmoil in his own heart aiding.
"Yes, Ralph Peden," Jess Kissock said, cleaving to him, "and you
hate me because it is I and not another. You think me a wicked
girl to come to you in her place. But you called her because you
loved her, and I have come because I loved you as much. Have I not
as much right? Do not dream that I came for aught but that. Have I
not as good a right to love as you?"
She prisoned his face fiercely between her hands, and held him off
from her as if to see into his soul by the light of the lingering
lake of ruddy light low in the west.
"In your Bible where is there anything that hinders a woman from
loving? Yet I know you will despise me for loving you, and hate me
for coming in her place."
"I do not hate you!" said Ralph, striving to go without rudely
unclasping the girl's hands. Her arms fell instantly again about
his neck, locking themselves behind.
"No, you shall not go till you have heard all, and then you can
cast me into the loch as a worthless thing that you are better rid
of."
Through his disappointment and his anger, Ralph was touched. He
would have spoken, but the girl went on:
"No, you do not hate me--I am not worth it. You despise me, and do
you think that is any better? I am only a cottar's child. I have
been but a waiting-maid. But I have read how maids have loved the
kings and the kings loved them. Yes, I own it. I am proud of it. I
have schemed and lain awake at nights for this. Why should I not
love you? Others have loved me without asking my leave. Why should
I ask yours? And love came to me without your leave or my own that
day on the road when you let me carry your books."
She let her arms drop from his neck and buried her face in her
hands, sobbing now with very genuine tears. Ralph could not yet
move away, even though no longer held by the stringent coercion of
this girl's arms. He was too grieved, too suddenly and bitterly
disappointed to have any fixed thought or resolve. But the good
man does not live who can listen unmoved to the despairing catch
of the sobbing in a woman's throat. Then on his hands, which he
had clasped before him, he felt the steady rain of her tears; his
heart went out in a great pity for this wayward girl who was
baring her soul to him.
The whole note and accent of her grief was of unmistakable
feeling. Jess Kissock had begun in play, but her inflammable
nature kindled easily into real passion. For at least that night,
by the bridge of the Grannoch water, she believed that her heart
was broken.
Ralph put his hand towards her with some unformed idea of
sympathy. He murmured vague words of comfort, as he might have
done to a wailing child that had hurt itself; but he had no idea
how to still the tempestuous grief of a passion-pale woman.
Suddenly Jess Kissock slipped down and clasped him about the
knees. Her hair had broken from its snood and streamed a cloud of
intense blackness across her shoulders. He could see her only
weirdly and vaguely, as one may see another by the red light of a
wood ember in the darkness. She seemed like a beautiful, pure