The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story
"That is likely enough, sir, but I would like to know why in that
case I am called in question." "Because I have been, more than
twenty years ago, where you are to-day, Ralph Peden, I--even I--
have seen eyes blue as those of Winsome Charteris kindle with
pleasure at my approach. Yes, I have known it. And I have also
seen the lids lie white and still upon these eyes, and I am here
to warn you from the primrose way; and also, if need be, to forbid
you to walk therein."
His voice took a sterner tone with the last words.
Ralph bowed his head on the table and listened; but there was no
feeling save resentment and resistance in his heart.
The minister went on in a level, unemotional tone, like one
telling a tale of long ago, of which the issues and even the
interests are dead and gone.
"I do not look now like a man on whom the eye of woman could ever
rest with the abandonment of love. Yet I, Allan Welsh, have seen
'the love that casteth out fear.'"
After a pause the high, expressionless voice took up the tale.
"Many years ago there were two students, poor in money but rich in
their mutual love. They were closer in affection than twin
brothers. The elder was betrothed to be married to a beautiful
girl in the country; so he took down his friend with him to the
village where the maid dwelt to stand by his side and look upon
the joy of the bridegroom. He saw the trysted (betrothed) of his
friend. He and she looked into one another's eyes and were drawn
together as by a power beyond them. The elder was summoned
suddenly back to the city, and for a week he, all unthinking, left
the friends of his love together glad that they should know one
another better. They walked together. They spoke of many things,
ever returning back to speak of themselves. One day they held a
book together till they heard their hearts beat audibly, and in
the book read no more that day.
"Upon the friend's return he found only an empty house and
distracted parents. Bride and brother had fled. Word came that
they had been joined by old Joseph Paisley, the Gretna Green
'welder,' without blessing of minister or kirk. Then they hid
themselves in a little Cumbrian village, where for six years the
unfaithful friend wrought for his wife--for so he deemed her--till
in the late bitterness of bringing forth she died, that was the
fairest of women and the unhappiest."
The minister ceased. Outside the rain had come on in broad single
drops, laying the dust on the road. Ralph could hear it pattering
on the broad leaves of the plane-tree outside the window. He did
not like to hear it. It sounded like a woman's tears.
But he could not understand how all this bore on his case. He was
silenced and awed, but it was with the sight of a soul of a man of
years and approved sanctity in deep apparent waters of sorrow.
The minister lifted his head and listened. In the ancient woodwork
of the manse, somewhere in the crumbling wainscoting, the little
boring creature called a death-watch ticked like the ticking of an
old verge watch. Mr. Welsh broke off with a sudden causeless auger
very appalling in one so sage and sober in demeanour.
"There's that beast again!" he said; "often have I thought it was
ticking in my head. I have heard it ever since the night she died--"
"I wonder at a man like you," said Ralph, "with your wisdom and
Christian standing, caring for a worm--"
"You're a very young man, and when you are older maybe you'll
wonder at a deal fewer things," answered the minister with a kind
of excited truculence very foreign to his habit, "for I myself am
a worm and no man," he added dreamily. "And often I tried to kill
the beast. Ye see thae marks--" he broke off again--"I bored for
it till the boards are a honeycomb, but the thing aye ticks on."
"But, Mr. Welsh," said Ralph eagerly, with some sympathy in his
voice, "why should you trouble yourself about this story now--or
I, for the matter of that? I can understand that Winsome Charteris
has somehow to do with it, and that the knowledge has come to you
in the course of your duty; but even if, at any future time,
Winsome Charteris were aught to me or I to her--the which I have
at present only too little hope of--her forbears, be they
whomsoever they might, were no more to me than Julius Caesar. I
have seen her and looked into her eyes. What needs she of
ancestors that is kin to the angels?"
Something like pity came into the minister's stern eyes as he
listened to the lad. Once he had spoken just such wild, heart-
eager words.
"I will answer you in a sentence," he said. "I that speak with you
am the cause. I am he that has preached law and the gospel--for
twenty years covering my sin with the Pharisee's strictness of
observance. I am he that was false friend but never false lover--
that married without kirk or blessing. I am the man that clasped a
dead woman's hand whom I never owned as wife, and watched afar off
the babe that I never dared to call mine own. I am the father of
Winifred Oharteris, coward before man, castaway before God. Of my
sin two know besides my Maker--the father that begot you, whose
false friend I was in the days that were, and Walter Skirving, the
father of the first Winifred whose eyes this hand closed under the
Peacock tree at Crossthwaite."
The broad drops fell on the window-panes in splashes, and the
thunder rain drummed on the roof.
The minister rose and went out, leaving Ralph Peden sitting in the
dark with the universe in ruins about him. The universe is fragile
at twenty-one.
And overhead the great drops fell from the brooding thunder-
clouds, and in the wainscoting of Allan Welsh's study the death-
watch ticked.
CHAPTER XXXII.
OUTCAST AND ALIEN FROM THE COMMONWEALTH.
"Moreover," said the minister--coming in an hour afterwards to
take up the interrupted discussion--"the kirk of the Marrow
overrides all considerations of affection or self-interest. If you
are to enter the Marrow kirk, you must live for the Marrow, and
fight for the Marrow, and, above all, you must wed for the Marrow--"
"As you did, no doubt," said Ralph, somewhat ungenerously.
Ralph had remained sitting in the study where the minister had
left him.
"No, for myself," said the minister, with a certain firmness and
high civility, which made the young man ashamed of himself, "I am
no true son of the Marrow. I have indeed served the Marrow kirk in
her true and only protesting section for twenty-five years; but I
am only kept in my position by the good grace of two men--of your
father and of Walter Skirving. And do not think that they keep
their mouths sealed by any love for me. Were there only my own
life and good name to consider, they would speak instantly, and I
should be deposed, without cavil or word spoken in my own defence.
Nay, by what I have already spoken, I have put myself in your
hands. All that you have to do is simply to rise in your place on
the Sabbath morn and tell the congregation what I have told you--
that the minister of the Marrow kirk in Dullarg is a man rebuking
sin when his own hearthstone is unclean--a man irregularly
espoused, who wrongfully christened his own unacknowledged child."
Allan Welsh laid his brow against the hard wood of the study table
as though to cool it.
"No," he continued, looking Ralph in the face, as the midnight
hummed around, and the bats softly fluttered like gigantic moths
outside, "your father is silent for the sake of the good name of
the Marrow kirk; but this thing shall never be said of his own
son, and the only hope of the Marrow kirk--the lad she has
colleged and watched and prayed for--not only the two
congregations of Edinburgh and the Dullarg contributing yearly out
of their smallest pittances, but the faithful single members and
adherents throughout broad Scotland--many of whom are coming to
Edinburgh at the time of our oncoming synod, in order to be
present at it, and at the communion when I shall assist your
father."
"But why can not I marry Winsome Charteris, even though she be
your daughter, as you say?" asked Ralph.
"O young man," said the minister, "ken ye so little about the kirk
o' the Marrow, and the respect for her that your father and myself
cherish for the office of her ministry, that ye think that we
could permit a probationer, on trials for the highest office
within her gift, to connect himself by tie, bond, or engagement
with the daughter of an unblest marriage? That wouald be winking
at a new sin, darker even, than the old." Then, with a burst of
passion--"I, even I, would sooner denounce it myself, though it
cost me my position! For twenty years I have known that before God
I was condemned. You have seen me praying--yes, often--all night,
but never did you or mortal man hear me praying for myself."
Ralph held out his hand in sympathy. Mr. Welsh did not seem to
notice it. He went on:
"I was praying for this poor simple folk--the elect of God--their
minister alone a castaway, set beyond the mercy of God by his own
act. Have I not prayed that they might never be put to shame by
the knowledge of the minister's sin being made a mockery in the
courts of Belial? And have I not been answered?"
Here we fear that Mr. Welsh referred to the ecclesiastical
surroundings of the Reverend Erasmus Teends.
"And I prayed for my poor lassie, and for you, when I saw you both
in the floods of deep waters. I have wept great and bitter tears
for you twain. But I am to receive my answer and reward, for this
night you shall give me your word that never more will you pass
word of love to Winsome, the daughter of Allan Charteris Welsh.
For the sake of the Marrow kirk and the unstained truth delivered
to the martyrs, and upheld by your father one great day, you will
do this thing."
"Mr. Welsh," said the young man calmly, "I cannot, even though I
be willing, do this thing. My heart and life, my honour and word,
are too deeply engaged for me to go back. At whatever cost to
myself, I must keep tryst and pledge with the girl who has trusted
me, and who for me has to-night suffered things whose depths of
pain and shame I know not yet."
"Then," said the minister sternly, "you and I must part. My duty
is done. If you refuse my appeal, you are no true son of the
Marrow kirk, and no candidate that I can recommend for her
ministry. Moreover, to keep you longer in my house and at my board
were tacitly to encourage you in your folly."
"It is quite true," replied Ralph, unshaken and undaunted, "that I
may be as unfit as you say for the office and ministry of the
Marrow kirk. It is, indeed, only as I have thought for a long
season. If that be so, then it were well that I should withdraw,
and leave the place for some one worthier."
"I wonder to hear ye, Ralph Peden, your father's son," said the
minister, "you that have been colleged by the shillings and
sixpences of the poor hill folk. How will ye do with these?"
"I will pay them back," said Ralph.
"Hear ye, man: can ye pay back the love that hained and saved to
send them to Edinburgh? Can ye pay back the prayers and
expectations that followed ye from class to class, rejoicing in
your success, praying that the salt of holiness might be put for
you into the fountains of earthly learning? Pay back, Ralph
Peden?--I wonder sair that ye are not shamed!"
Indeed, Ralph was in a sorrowful quandary. He knew that it was all
true, and he saw no way out of it without pain and grief to some.
But the thought of Winsome's cry came to him, heard in the
lonesome night. That appeal had severed him in a moment from all
his old life. He could not, though he were to lose heaven and
earth, leave her now to reproach and ignominy. She had claimed him
only in her utter need, and he would stand good, lover and friend