The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story
"I think, dear," said Ralph, "you must after this make your
letters so full of your love, that there can be no mistake whom
they are intended for."
"I mean to," said Winsome frankly.
There was also some fine scenery at this point.
But there was no hesitation in Ralph Peden's tone when he settled
down steadily to tell her of his hopes.
Winsome sat with her eyes downcast and her head a little to one
side, like a bright-eyed bird listening.
"That is all true and delightful," she said, "but we must not be
selfish or forget."
"We must remember one another!" said Ralph, with the absorption of
newly assured love.
"We are in no danger of forgetting one another," said that wise
woman in counsel; "we must not forget others. There is your
father--you have not forgotten him."
With a pang Ralph remembered that there was yet something that he
could not tell Winsome. He had not even been frank with her
concerning the reason of his leaving the manse and going to
Edinburgh. She only understood that it was connected with his love
for her, which was not approved of by the minister of the Marrow
kirk.
"My father will be as much pleased with you as I," said Ralph,
with enthusiasm.
"No doubt," said Winsome, laughing; "fathers always are with their
sons' sweethearts. But you have not forgotten something else?"
"What may that be?" said Ralph doubtfully.
"That I cannot leave my grandfather and grandmother at Craig
Ronald as they are. They have cared for me and given me a home
when I had not a friend. Would you love me as you do, if I could
leave them even to go out into the world with you?"
"No," said Ralph very reluctantly, but like a man.
"Then," said Winsome bravely, "go to Edinburgh. Fight your own
battle, and mine," she added.
"Winsome," said Ralph, earnestly, for this serious and practical
side of her character was an additional and unexpected revelation
of perfection, "if you make as good a wife as you make a
sweetheart, you will make one man happy."
"I mean to make a man happy," said Winsome, confidently.
The scenery again asserted its claim to attention. Observation
enlarges the mind, and is therefore pleasant.
After a pause, Winsome said irrelevantly.
"And you really do not think me so foolish?"
"Foolish! I think you are the wisest and--"
"No, no." Winsome would not let him proceed. "You do not really
think so. You know that I am wayward and changeable, and not at
all what I ought to be. Granny always tells me so. It was very
different when she was young, she says. Do you know," continued
Winsome thoughtfully, "I used to be so frightened, when I knew
that you could read in all these wise books of which I did not
know a letter? But I must confess--I do not know what you will
say, you may even be angry--I have a note-book of yours which I
kept."
But if Winsome wanted a new sensation she was disappointed, for
Ralph was by no means angry.
"So that's where it went?" said Ralph, smiling gladly.
"Yes," said Winsome, blushing not so much with guilt as with the
consciousness of the locality of the note-book at that moment,
which she was not yet prepared to tell him. But she consoled
herself with the thought that she would tell him one day.
Strangely however, Ralph did not seem to care much about the book,
so Winsome changed the subject to one of greater interest.
"And what else did you think about me that first day?--tell me,"
said Winsome, shamelessly.
It was Ralph's opportunity.
"Why, you know very well, Winsome dear, that ever since the day I
first saw you I have thought that there never was any one like
you--"
"Yes?" said Winsome, with a rising inflection in her voice.
"I ever thought you the best and the kindest--"
"Yes?" said Winsome, a little breathlessly.
"The most helpful and the wisest--"
"Yes?" said Winsome.
"And the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life!"
"Then I do not care for anything else!" cried Winsome, clapping
her hands. She had been resolving to learn Hebrew five minutes
before.
"Nor do I, really," said Ralph, speaking out the inmost soul that
is in every young man.
As Ralph Peden sat looking at Winsome the thought came sometimes
to him--but not often--"This is Allan Welsh's daughter, the
daughter of the woman whom my father once loved, who lies so still
under the green sod of Crossthwaite beneath the lea of Skiddaw."
He looked at her eyes, deep blue like the depths of the
Mediterranean Sea, and, like it, shot through with interior light.
"What are you thinking of?" asked Winsome, who had also meanwhile
been looking at him.
"Of your eyes, dear!" said Ralph, telling half the truth--a good
deal for a lover.
Winsome paused for further information, looking into the depths of
his soul. Ralph felt as though his heart and judgment were being
assaulted by storming parties. He looked into these wells of blue
and saw the love quivering in them as the broken light quivers,
deflected on its way through clear water to a sea bottom of golden
sand.
"You want to hear me tell you something wiser," said Ralph, who
did not know everything; "you are bored with my foolish talk."
And he would have spoken of the hopes of his future.
"No, no; tell me--tell me what you see in my eyes," said Winsome,
a little impatiently.
"Well then, first," said truthful Ralph, who certainly did not
flinch from the task, "I see the fairest thing God made for man to
see. All the beauty of the world, losing its way, stumbled, and
was drowned in the eyes of my love. They have robbed the sunshine,
and stolen the morning dew. The sparkle of the light on the water,
the gladness of a child when it laughs because it lives, the
sunshine which makes the butterflies dance and the world so
beautiful--all these I see in your eyes."
"This story is plainly impossible. This practical girl was not one
to find pleasure in listening to flattery. Let us read no more in
this book." This is what some wise people will say at this point.
So, to their loss will they close the book. They have not achieved
all knowledge. The wisest woman would rather hear of her eyes than
of her mind. There are those who say the reverse, but then perhaps
no one has ever had cause to tell them concerning what lies hid in
their eyes.
Many had wished to tell Winsome these things, but to no one
hitherto had been given the discoverer's soul, the poet's voice,
the wizard's hand to bring the answering love out of the deep sea
of divine possibilities in which the tides ran high and never a
lighthouse told of danger.
"Tell me more," said Winsome, being a woman, as well as fair and
young. These last are not necessary; to desire to be told about
one's eyes, it is enough to be a woman.
Ralph looked down. In such cases it is necessary to refresh the
imagination constantly with the facts. As in the latter days wise
youths read messages from the quivering needle of the talking
machine, so Ralph read his message flash by flash as it pulsated
upward from a pure woman's soul.
"Once you would not tell me why your eyelashes were curled up at
the ends," said this eager Columbus of a new continent, drawing
the new world nearer his heart in order that his discoveries might
be truer, surer, in detail more trustworthy. "I know now without
telling. Would you like to know, Winsome?"
Winsome drew a happy breath, nestling a little closer--so little
that no one but Ralph would have known. But the little shook him
to the depths of his soul. This it is to be young and for the
first time mastering the geography of an unknown and untraversed
continent. The unversed might have thought that light breath a
sigh, but no lover could have made the mistake. It is only in
books, wordy and unreal, that lovers misunderstand each other in
that way.
"I know," said Ralph, needing no word of permission to proceed,
"it is with touching your cheek when you sleep."
"Then I must sleep a very long time!" said Winsome merrily, making
light of his words.
"Underneath in the dark of either eye," continued Ralph, who, be
it not forgotten, was a poet, "I see two young things like
cherubs."
"I know," said Winsome; "I see myself in your eyes--you see
yourself in mine."
She paused to note the effect of this tremendous discovery.
"Then," replied Ralph, "if it be indeed my own self I see in your
eyes, it is myself as God made me at first without sin. I do not
feel at all like a cherub now, but I must have been once, if I
ever was like what I see in your eyes."
"Now go on; tell me what else you see," said Winsome.
"Your lips--" began Ralph, and paused.
"No, six is quite enough," said Winsome, after a little while,
mysteriously. She had only two, and Ralph only two; yet she said
with little grammar and no sense at all, "Six is enough."
But a voice from quite other lips came over the rising background
of scrub and tangled thicket.
"Gang on coortin'," it said; "I'm no lookin', an' I canna see
onything onyway."
It was Jock Gordon. He continued:
"Jock Scott's gane hame till his breakfast. He'll no bother ye
this mornin', sae coort awa'."
CHAPTEE XXXV.
SUCH SWEET SORROW.
WINSOME and Ralph laughed, but Winsome sat up and put straight her
sunbonnet. Sunbonnets are troublesome things. They will not stick
on one's head. Manse Bell contradicts this. She says that her
sunbonnet never comes off, or gets pushed back. As for other
people's, lasses are not what they were in her young days.
"I must go home," said Winsome; "they will miss me."
"You know that it is 'good-bye,' then," said Ralph.
"What!" said Winsome, "shall I not see you to-morrow?" the bright
light of gladness dying out of her eye. And the smile drained down
out of her cheek like the last sand out of the sand-glass.
"No," said Ralph quietly, keeping his eyes full on hers, "I cannot
go back to the manse after what was said. It is not likely that I
shall ever be there again."
"Then when shall I see you?" said Winsome piteously. It is the cry
of all loving womanhood, whose love goes out to the battle or into
the city, to the business of war, or pleasure, or even of money-
getting. "Then when shall I see you. again?" said Winsome, saying
a new thing. There is nothing new under the sun, yet to lovers
like Winsome and Ralph all things are new.
There was a catch in her throat. A salter dew gathered about her
eyes, and the pupils expanded till the black seemed to shut out
the blue.
Very tenderly Ralph looked down, and said, "Winsome, my dear, very
soon I shall come again with more to ask and more to tell."
"But you are not going straight away to Edinburgh now? You must
get a drive to Dumfries and take the Edinburgh coach."
"I cannot do that," said Ralph; "I must walk all the way; it is
nothing."
Winsome looked at Ralph, the motherly instinct that is in all true
love surging up even above the lover's instinct. It made her clasp
and unclasp her hands in distress, to think of him going away
alone over the waste moors, from the place where they had been so
happy.
"And he will leave me behind!" she said, with a sudden fear of the
loneliness which would surely come when the bright universe was
emptied of Ralph.
"Had it only been to-morrow, I could have borne it better," she
said. "Oh, it is too soon! How could he let us be so happy when he
was going away from me?"
Winsome knew even better than Ralph that he must go, but the most
accurate knowledge of necessity does not prevent the resentful
feeling in a woman's heart when one she loves goes before his
time.
But the latent motherhood in this girl rose up. If he were truly
hers, he was hers to take care of. Therefore she asked the
question which every mother asks, and no sweetheart who is nothing
but a sweetheart has ever yet asked: