The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story
But there was no misdoubting the fact that Jess had done her sick
nursing well, and had possessed herself in honourable and lawful
wedlock of the Honourable Agnew Greatorix--and that too,
apparently with the consent of the Lady Elizabeth.
"What took them to Gretna, then?" said Winsome's grandmother.
"Well, grandmammy, you see, the Castle folk are Catholic, and
would not have a minister; an' Jess, though a queer Christian, as
well as maybe to show her power and be romantic, would have no
priest or minister either, but must go to Gretna. So they're back
again, and Jock Gordon says that she'll comb his hair. He has to
be in by seven o'clock now," said Winsome, smiling.
"Wha's ben wi' yer grandfaither?" after a pause, Mistress Skirving
asked irrelevantly.
"Only Mr. Welsh from the manse," said Winsome. "I suppose he came
to see grandfather about the packet I took to the manse a month
ago. Grandmother, why does Mr. Welsh come so seldom to Craig
Ronald?" she asked.
But her grandmother was shaking in a strange way.
"I have not heard any noise," she said. "You had better go in and
see."
Winsome stole to the door and looked within. She saw the minister
with his head on the swathed knees of her grandfather. The old man
had laid his hand upon the grey hair of the kneeling minister.
Awed and solemnised, Winsome drew back.
She told her grandmother what she had seen, and the old lady said
nothing for the space of a quarter of an hour. At the end of that
time she said:
"Help me ben."
And Winsome, taking her arm, guided her into the hushed room where
her husband sat, still holding his hand on the head of Allan
Welsh.
Something in the pose of the kneeling man struck her--a certain
helpless inclination forward.
Winsome ran, and, taking Allan Welsh by the shoulders, lifted him
up in her strong young arms.
He was dead. He had passed in the act of forgiveness.
Walter Skirving, who had sat rapt and silent through it all as
though hardly of this world, now said clearly and sharply:
"'For if ye forgive men their trespasses, so also shall your
heavenly Father forgive you.'"
Walter Skirving did not long survive the man, in hatred of whom he
had lived, and in unity with whom he had died. It seemed as though
he had only been held to the earth by the necessity that the sun
of his life should not go down upon his wrath. This done, like a
boat whose moorings are loosed, very gladly he went out that same
night upon the ebb tide. The two funerals were held upon the same
day. Minister and elder were buried side by side one glorious
August day, which was a marvel to many. So the Dullarg kirk was
vacant, and there was only Manse Bell to take care of the
property. Jonas Shillinglaw came from Cairn Edward and
communicated the contents of both Walter Skirving's will and of
that of Allan Welsh to those whom it concerned. Jonas had made
several journeys of late both to the manse as well as to the
steading of Craig Ronald. Walter Skirving left Craig Ronald and
all of which he died possessed to Winsome Charteris, subject to
the approval of her grandmother as to whom she might marry. There
was a recent codicil. "I desire to record my great satisfaction
that Winifred Charteris or Welsh is likely to marry the son of my
old friend Gilbert Peden, minister of the Marrow kirk in
Edinburgh; and hearing that the young man contemplates the career
of letters, I desire that, if it be possible, in the event of
their marriage, they come to abide at Craig Ronald, at least till
a better way be opened for them. I commend my wife, ever loving
and true, to them both; and in the good hope of a glorious
resurrection I commit myself to Him who made me."
Allan Welsh left all his goods and his property to Ralph Peden,
"being as mine own son, because he taught me to know true love,
and fearlessness and faith unfeigned. Also because one dear to him
brought me my hope of forgiveness."
There was indeed need of Ralph at Craig Ronald. Mistress Skirving
cried out incessantly for him. Meg begged Winsome to let her look
every day at the little miniature Ralph had sent her from
Edinburgh. The Cuif held forth upon the great event every night
when he came over to hold the tails of Meg's cows. Jock Forrest
still went out, saying nothing, whenever the Cuif came in, which
the Cuif took to be a good sign. Only Ebie Fairrish, struck to the
heart by the inconstancy of Jess, removed at the November term
back again to the "laigh end" of the parish, and there plunged
madly into flirtations with several of his old sweethearts. He is
reported to have found in numbers the anodyne for the
unfaithfulness of one. As for what Winsome thought and longed for,
it is better that we should not begin to tell, not having another
volume to spare.
Only she went to the hill-top by the side of Loch Ken and looked
northward every eventide; and her heart yearned within her.
CHAPTER XLIV.
WINSOME'S LAST TRYST.
It was the morn before a wedding, and there had been a constant
stir all night all about the farmsteading, for a brand-new world
was in the making. Such a marrying had not been for years. The
farmers' sons for miles around were coming on their heavy plough-
horses, with here and there one of better breed. Long ago in the
earliest morning some one had rung the bell of the little kirk of
the Dullarg. It came upon the still air a fairy tinkle, and many a
cottar and many a shepherd turned over with a comfortable feeling:
"This is the Sabbath morn; I need not rise so soon to-day." But
all their wives remembered, and turned them out with wifely elbow.
It was Winsome Charteris's wedding day. The flower of all the
countryside was to wed the young Edinburgh lad who had turned out
so great a poet. It was the opinion of the district that her
"intended" had unsettled the thrones of all the great writers of
the past by his volume of poems, which no one in the parish had
read; but the fame of whose success had been wafted down upon the
eastern breezes which bore the snell bite of the metropolis upon
their front.
"Tra-la-la-la!" chanted the cocks of Craig Ronald.
"Tra-la-la-la-la!" airily sang the solitary bird which lived up
among the pine woods, where, in the cot of Mistress Kissock, Ralph
Peden occupied the little bedroom which Meg had got ready for him
with such care and honour.
"Tra-la-la-laa!" was echoed in the airiest diminuendo from the
far-away leader of the harem at the Nether Orae. His challenge
crossed the wide gulf of air above Loch Grannoch, from which in
the earliest morning the mists were rising.
Ralph Peden heard all three birds. He had a delightfully
comfortable bedroom, and the flowers on the little white-covered
table have come from the front square of Mistress Kissock's
garden. There was a passion-flower on his table, which somehow
reminded him of a girl who had put poppies in hair of the raven's
wing hue. It had not grown in the garden of the cot.
Yet Ralph was out in the earliest dawn, listening to the sighing
of the trees and taking in the odour of the perfume from the pines
on the slope.
Ralph did not write any poem this morning, though the Muses were
abroad in the stillness of the dawn. His eyes were on a little
window once more overclambered by the June roses. His poem was
down there, and it was coming to him.
How eagerly he looked, his eyes like telescopes! Then his heart
thrilled. In the cool flood of slanting morning sunshine which had
just overflowed the eastern gable of the house, some one swiftly
crossed the court-yard of the farm. In a moment the sun, winking
on a pair of tin pails, told him that Meg Kissock was going to the
well. From the barn end some one stepped out by her side and
walked to the well. Then, as they returned, it was not the woman
who was carrying the winking pails. At the barn end they drew
together in the shadow for a long minute, and then again Ralph saw
Meg's back as she walked sedately to the kitchen door, the cans
flashing rhythmically as she swung them. So high was he above them
that he could even notice the mellow dimple of diffused light from
the water in the bright pail centring and scattering the morning
sunlight as it swayed.
Presently the one half of the blue kitchen door became black. It
had been opened. Ralph's heart gave a great bound. Then the black
became white and glorified, for framed within it appeared a
slender shape like a shaft of light. Ralph's eyes did not leave
the figure as it stepped out and came down by the garden edge.
Along the top of the closely-cut hawthorn a dot of light moved. It
was but a speck, like the paler centre of the heather bells. Ralph
ran swiftly down the great dyke in a manner more natural to a
young man than dignified in a poet. In a minute he came to the
edge of the glen in which Andra Kissock had guddled the trouts.
That flash of layender must pass this way. It passed and stayed.
So in the cool translucence of morning light the lovers met in
this quiet glade, the great heather moors above them once more
royally purple, the burnie beneath singing a gentle song, the
birds vying with each other in complicated trills of pretended
artlessness.
It was purely by chance that Winsome Charteris passed this way.
And a kind Providence, supplemented on Ralph's side by some
activity and observation, brought him also to the glen of the
elders that June morning. Yet there are those who say that there
is nothing in coincidence.
When Winsome, moving thoughtfully onward, gently waving a slip of
willow in her hand, came in sight of Ralph, she stood and waited.
Ralph went towards her, and so on their marriage morn these two
lovers met.
It was like that morning on which by the lochside they parted, yet
it was not like it.
With that prescience which is a sixth sense to women, Winsome had
slipped on the old sprigged gown which had done duty at the
blanket-washing so long ago, and her hair, unbound in the sun,
shone golden as it flowed from beneath the lilac sunbonnet. As for
Ralph, it does not matter how he was dressed. In love, dress does
not matter a brass button after the first corner is turned--at
least not to the woman.
"Sweet," said Ralph, "you are awake?"
Winsome looked up with eyes so glorious and triumphant that a
blind man could scarce have doubted the fact.
"And you love me?" he continued, reading her eyes. With her old
ripple of laughter she lightened the strain of the occasion.
"You are a silly boy," she said; "but you'll learn. I have come
out to gather flowers," she added, ingenuously. "I shall expect
you to help. No--no--and nothing else."
Had Ralph been in a fit condition to observe Nature this morning,
it might have occurred to him that when girls come out to gather
flowers for somewhat extensive decoration, they bring with them at
least a basket and generally also their fourth best pair of
scissors. Winsome had neither. But he was not in a mood for
careful inductions.
The morning lights sprayed upon them as they went hither and
thither gathering flowers--dew-drenched hyacinths, elastic wire-
strung bluebells the colour of the sky when the dry east wind
blows, the first great red bushes of the ling. Now it is a known
fact that, in order properly to gather flowers, the collectors
must divide and so quarter the ground.
"But this was not a scientific expedition," said Ralph, when the
folly of their mode of proceeding was pointed out to him.
It was manifestly impossible that they could gather flowers
walking with the palm of Ralph's left hand laid on the inside of
Winsome's left arm. The thing cannot be done. At least so Ralph
admitted afterwards.
"No," said Ralph, "but you made me promise to keep my shoulders
back, and I am trying to to do it now."