Books: The Lilac Sunbonnet

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But when the church was empty and all gone home, in the little
vestry two men sat together, and the door was shut. Between them
they held a miniature, the picture of a girl with a flush of rose
on her cheek and a laughing light in her eyes. There was silence,
but for a quick catch in the stronger man's breathing, which
sounded like a sob. Gilbert Peden, who had only lost and never
won, and Allan Welsh, who had both won and lost, were forever at
one. There was silence between them, as they looked with eyes of
deathless love at the picture which spoke to them of long ago.

Walter Skirving's message, which Winsome had brought to the manse
of Dullarg, had united the hearts estranged for twenty years.
Winsome had builded better than she knew.

CHAPTER XLIII.

THREADS DRAWN TOGETHER.

Winsome took her grandmother out one afternoon into the rich
mellow August light, when the lower corn-fields were glimmering
with misty green shot underneath with faintest blonde, and the
sandy knowes were fast yellowing. The blithe old lady was getting
back some of her strength, and it seemed possible that once again
she might be able to go round the house without even the
assistance of an arm.

"And what is this I hear," said Mistress Skirving, "that the daft
young laird frae the Castle has rin' aff wi' that cottar's lassie,
Jess Kissock, an' marriet her at Gretna Green. It's juist no
possible."

"But, grandma, it is quite true, for Jock Gordon brought the news.
He saw them postin' back from Gretna wi' four horses!"

"An' what says his mither, the Lady Elizabeth?"

"They say that she's delighted," said Winsome.

"That's a lee, at ony rate!" said the mistress of Craig Ronald,
without a moment's hesitation. She knew the Lady Elizabeth,

"They say," said Winsome, "that Jess can make them do all that she
wants at the Castle."

"Gin she gars them pit doon new carpets, she'll do wonders," said
her grandmother, acidly. She came of a good family, and did not
like mesalliances, though she had been said to have made one
herself.

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."

And his manner of assisting Winsome to gather her flowers for her
wedding bouquet was, when you come to think of it, admirably
adapted for keeping the shoulders back.

"Meg waked me this morning," said Winsome suddenly.

"She did, did she?" remarked Ralph ineffectively, with a quick
envy of Meg. Then it occurred to him that he had no need to envy
Meg. And Winsome blushed for no reason at all.

Then she became suddenly practical, as the protective instinct
teaches women to be on these occasions.

"You have not seen your study," she said.

"No," said Ralph, "but I have heard enough about it. It has
occupied sixteen pages in the last three letters."

Ralph considered the study a good thing, but he had his views upon
the composition of love-letters.

"You are an ungrateful boy," said Winsome sternly, "and I shall
see that you get no more letters--not any more!"

"I shall never want any, little woman," cried Ralph joyously, "for
I shall have you!"

It was a blessing that at this moment they were passing under the
dense shade of the great oaks at the foot of the orchard. Winsome
had thought for five minutes that it would happen about there. It
happened.

A quarter of an hour later they came out into the cool ocean of
leaf shadow which lay blue upon the grass and daisies. Winsome now
carried the sunbonnet over her arm, and in the morning sunshine
her uncovered head was so bright that Ralph could not gaze at it
long. Besides, he wanted to look at the eyes that looked at him,
and one cannot do everything at once.

"This is your study," she said, standing back to let him look in.
It was a long, low room with an outside stair above the
farthermost barn, and Winsome had fitted it up wondrously for
Ralph. It opened off the orchard, and the late blossoms scattered
into it when the winds blew from the south.

They stood together on the topmost step. There was a desk and one
chair, and a low window-seat in each of the deep windows.

"You will never be disturbed here," said Winsome.

"But I want to be disturbed," said Ralph, who was young and did
not know any better.

"Now go in," said Winsome, giving him a little push in the way
that, without any offence, a proximate wife may. "Go in and study
a little this morning, and see how you like it."

Ralph considered this as fair provocation, and turned, with bonds
and imprisonment in his mind. But Winsome had vanished.

But from beneath came a clear voice out of the unseen:

"If you don't like it, you can come round and tell me. It will not
be too late till the afternoon. Any time before three!"

A mere man is at a terrible disadvantage in word play of this
kind. On this occasion Ralph could think of nothing better than--

"Winsome Charteris, I shall pay you back for this!"

Then he heard what might either have been a bell ringing for the
fairies' breakfast, or a ripple of the merriest earthly laughter
very far away.

Then he sat down to study.

It took him quite an hour to arrive at a conclusion; but when
reached it was a momentous one. It was, that it is a mistake to be
married in summer, for three o'clock in the afternoon is such a
long time in coming.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE LAST OF THE LILAC SUNBONNET.

Craig Ronald lies bright in a dreaming day in mid-September. The
reapers are once more in the fields. Far away there is a crying of
voices. The corn-fields by the bridge are white with a bloomy and
mellow whiteness. Some part of the oats is already down. Close
into the standing crop there is a series of rhythmic flashes, the
scythes swinging like a long wave that curls over here and there.
Behind the line of flashing steel the harvesters swarm like ants
running hither and thither crosswise, apparently in aimless
fashion.

Up through the orchard comes a girl, tall and graceful, but with a
touch of something nobler and stiller that does not come to
girlhood. It is the seal of the diviner Eden grace which only
comes with the after Eden pain.

Winsome Peden carries more than ever of the old grace and beauty;
and the eyes of her husband, who has been finishing the proofs of
his next volume and at intervals looking over the busy fields to
the levels of Loch Grannoch, tell her so as she comes.

But suddenly from opposite sides of the orchard this girl with the
gracious something in her eyes is borne down by simultaneous
assault. Shrieking with delight, a boy and a girl, dressed in
complete defensive armour of daisies, and wielding desperate arms
of lath manufactured by Andra Kissock, their slave, rush fiercely
upon her. They pull down their quarry after a brisk chase, who
sinks helplessly upon the grass under a merciless fire of
caresses.

It is a critical moment. A brutal and licentious soldiery are not
responsible at such moments. They may carry sack and rapine to
unheard of extremities.

"You young barbarians, be careful of your only mother--unless you
have a stock of them!" calls a voice from the top of the stairs
which lead to the study.

"Father's come out--hurrah! Come on, Allan!" shouts Field-Marshal
Winifred the younger who is leader and commander, to her army
whose tottery and chubby youth does not suggest the desperation of
a forlorn hope. So the study is carried at the point of the lath,
and the banner of the victors--a cross of a sort unknown to
heraldry, marked on a white ground with a blue pencil--is planted
on the sacred desk itself.

Winsome the matron comes more slowly up the stairs.

"Can common, uninspired people come in?" she says, pausing at the
top.

She looks about with a motherly eye, and pulls down the blind of
the window into which the sun has been streaming all the morning.
It is one of the advantages of such a wife that her husband,
especially the rare literary variety, may be treated as no more
than the eldest but most helpless of the babes. It is also true
that Ralph had pulled up the blind in order that he might the
better be able to see his wife moving among the reapers. For
Winsome was more than ever a woman of affairs.

She stood in the doorway, looking in spite of the autumn sun and
the walk up from the corn-field, deliriously cool. She fanned
herself with a broad rhubarb-leaf--an impromptu fan plucked by the
way. She sat down on the ledge of the upper step of Ralph's study,
as she often did when she worked or rested. Ralph was again
within, reclining on a window-seat, while the pack of reckless
banditti swarmed over him.

"Have the rhymes been behaving themselves this morning?" Winsome
said, looking across at Ralph as only a wife of some years'
standing can look at her husband--with love deepened into
understanding, and tempered with a spice of amusement and a wide
and generous tolerance--the look of a loving woman to whom her
husband and her husband's ways are better than a stage play. Such
a look is a certificate of happy home and an ideal life, far more
than all heroics. The love of the after-years depends chiefly on
the capacity of a wife to be amused by her husband's
peculiarities--and not to let him see it.

"There are three blanks," said Ralph, a little wistfully. "I have
written a good deal, but I dare not read it over, lest it should
be nothing worth."

This was a well-marked stage in Ralph's composition, and it was
well that his wife had come.

"I fear you have been dreaming, instead of working," she said,
looking at him with a kind of pitying admiration. Ralph, too, had
grown handsomer, so his wife thought, since she had him to look
after. How, indeed, could it be otherwise?

She rose and went towards him.

"Sun down, now, children, and play on the grass," she said. "Sun,
chicks--off with you--shoo!" and she flirted her apron after them
as she did when she scattered the chickens from the dairy door.
The pinafored people fled shrieking across the grass, tumbling
over each other in riotous heaps.

Then Winsome went over and kissed her husband. He was looking so
handsome that he deserved it. And she did not do it too often. She
was glad that she had made him wear a beard. She put one of her
hands behind his head and the other beneath his chin, tilting his
profile with the air of a connoisseur. This can only be done in
one position.

"Well, does it suit your ladyship?" said Ralph.

She gave him a little box on the ear.

"I knew," he said, "that you wanted to come and sit on my knee!"

"I never did," replied Winsome with animation, making a statement
almost certainly inaccurate upon the face of it.

"That's why you sent away the children," he went on, pinching her
ear.

"Of all things in this world," said Winsome indignantly, "commend
me to a man for conceit!"

"And to winsome wives for wily ways!" said her husband instantly.
To do him justice, he did not often do this sort of thing.

"Keep the alliteration for the poems," retorted Winsome. "Truth
will do for me."

After a little while she said, without apparent connection:

"It is very hot."

"What are they doing in the hay-field?" asked Ralph.

"Jock Forrest was leading and they were cutting down the croft
very steadily. I think it looks like sixty bushels to the acre,"
she continued practically; "so you shall have a carpet for the
study this year, if all goes well."

"That will be famous!" cried Ralph, like a schoolboy, waving his
hand. It paused among Winsome's hair.

"I wish you would not tumble it all down," she said; "I am too old
for that kind of thing now!"

The number of times good women perjure themselves is almost
unbelievable.

But the recording angel has, it is said, a deaf side, otherwise he
would need an ink-eraser. Ralph knew very well what she really
meant, and continued to throw the fine-spun glossy waves over her
head, as a miser may toss his gold for the pleasure of the cool,
crisp touch.

"Then," continued Winsome, without moving (for, though so unhappy
and uncomfortable, she sat still--some women are born with a
genius for martyrdom), "then I had a long talk with Meg."

"And the babe?" queried Ralph, letting her hair run through his
fingers.

"And the babe," said Winsome; "she had laid it to sleep under a
stock, and when we went to see, it looked so sweet under the
narrow arch of the corn! Then it looked up with big wondering
eyes. I believe he thought the inside of the stook was as high as
a temple."

"It is not I that am the poet!" said Ralph, transferring his
attention for a moment from her hair.

"Meg says Jock Forrest is perfectly good to her, and that she
would not change her man for all Greatorix Castle."

"Does Jock make a good grieve?" asked Ralph.

"The very best; he is a great comfort to me," replied his wife. "I
get far more time to work at the children's things--and also to
look after my Ursa Major!"

"What of Jess?" asked Ralph; "did Meg say?"

"Jess has taken the Lady Elizabeth to call on My Lord at Bowhill!
What do you think of that? And she leads Agnew Greatorix about
like a lamb, or rather like a sheep. He gets just one glass of
sherry at dinner," said Winsome, who loved a spice of gossip--as
who does not?

"There is a letter from my father this morning," said Ralph, half
turning to pick it off his desk; "he is well, but he is in
distress, he says, because he got his pocket picked of his
handkerchief while standing gazing in at a shop window wherein
books were displayed for sale, but John Bairdieson has sewed
another in at the time of writing. They had a repeating tune the
other day, and the two new licentiates are godly lads, and turning
out a credit to the kirk of the Marrow."

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