Books: The Lilac Sunbonnet

S >> S.R. Crockett >> The Lilac Sunbonnet

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It was far more of a wonder how Ailie Gordon came to take Walter
Skirving. It may be that she felt in her heart the accent of a
true man in the unbending, nonjuring elder of the Marrow kirk. Two
great heart-breaks had crossed their lives: the shadow of the life
story of Winsome's mother, that earlier Winsome whose name had not
been heard for twenty years in the house of Craig Ronald; and the
more recent death of Adam, the strong, silent, chivalrous-natured
son who had sixteen years ago been killed, falling from his horse
as he rode home alone one winter's night from Dumfries.

It was a natural thing to be in love with Winsome Charteris. It
seemed natural to Winsome herself. Ever since she was a little
lass running to school in Keswick, with a touse of lint-white
locks blowing out in the gusts that came swirling off Skiddaw,
Winsome had always been conscious of a train of admirers. The boys
liked to carry her books, and were not so ashamed to walk home
with her, as even at six years of age young Cumbrians are wont to
be in the company of maids. Since she came to Galloway, and opened
out with each succeeding year, like the bud of a moss rose growing
in a moist place, Winsome had thought no more of masculine
admiration than of the dull cattle that "goved" [stared stupidly]
upon her as she picked her deft way among the stalls in the byre.
In all Craig Ronald there was nothing between the hill and the
best room that did not bear the mark of Winsome's method and
administrative capacity. In perfect dependence upon Winsome, her
granny had gradually abandoned all the management of the house to
her, so that at twenty that young woman was a veritable Napoleon
of finance and capacity. Only old Richard Clelland of the
Boreland, grave and wise pillar of the kirk by law established,
still transacted her market business and banked her siller--being,
as he often said, proud to act as "doer" for so fair a principal.
So it happened that all the reins of government about this tiny
lairdship of one farm were in the strong and capable hands of a
girl of twenty.

And Meg Kissock was her true admirer and faithful slave--Winsome's
heavy hand, too, upon occasion; for all the men on the farm stood
in awe of Meg's prowess, and very especially of Meg's tongue. So
also the work fell mostly upon these two, and in less measure upon
a sister of Meg's, Jess Kissock, lately returned from England, a
young lady whom we have already met.

During the night and morning Winsome had studied with some
attention the Hebrew Bible, in which the name Allan Welsh
appeared, as well as the Latin Luther Commentary, and the Hebrew
Lexicon, on the first page of which the name of Ralph Peden was
written in the same neat print hand as in the note-book.

This was the second day of the blanket-washing, and Winsome,
having in her mind a presentiment that the proprietor of these
learned quartos would appear to claim his own, carried them down
to the bridge, where Meg and her sister were already deep in the
mysteries of frothing tubs and boiling pots. Winsome from the
broomy ridge could hear the shrill "giff-gaff" [give and take] of
their colloquy. She sat down under Ralph's very broom bush, and
absently turned over the leaves of the note-book, catching
sentences here and there.

"I wonder how old he is?" she said, meditatively; "his coat-tails
looked old, but the legs went too lively for an old man; besides,
he likes maids to be dressed in lilac--" She paused still more
thoughtfully. "Well, we shall see." She bent over and pulled the
milky-stalked, white-seeded head of a dandelion. Taking it between
the finger and thumb of her left hand she looked critically at it
as though it were a glass of wine. "He is tall, and he is fair,
and his age is--"

Here she pouted her pretty lips and blew.

"One--ha, ha!--he was an active infant when he ran from the
blanket-tramping--two, three, four--"

Some tiny feather-headed spikelets disengaged themselves
unwillingly from the round and venerable downpolled dandelion.
They floated lazily up between the tassels of the broom upon the
light breeze.

"Five, six, seven, eight--faith, he was a clean-heeled laddie yon.
Ye couldna see his legs or coat-tails for stour as he gaed roon'
the Far Away Turn."

Winsome was revelling in her broad Scots. She had learned it from
her grandmother.

"Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen--I'll no
can set the dogs on him then--sixteen, seventeen, eighteen--dear
me, this is becoming interesting."

The plumules were blowing off freely now, like snow from the eaves
on a windy day in winter.

"Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one--I must reverence my elders. If I
don't blow stronger he'll turn out to be fifty--twenty-three,
twenty-f--"

A shadow fell across the daintily-held dandelion and lay a blue
patch on the grass. Only one pale grey star stood erect on the
stem, the vacant green sheathing of the calyx turning suddenly
down.

"TWENTY-FOUR!--" said Ralph Peden quietly, standing with his hat
in his hand and an eager flush on his cheek. The last plumule
floated away.

Winsome Charteris had risen instinctively, and stood looking with
crimson cheeks and quicker-coming breath at this young man who
came upon her in the nick of time.

He was startled and a little indignant. So they stood facing one
another while one might count a score--silent and drinking each
the other in, with that flashing transference of electric sympathy
possible only to the young and the innocent.

It was the young man who spoke first. Winsome was a little
indignant that he should dare to come upon her while so engaged.
Not, of course, that she cared for a moment what he thought of
her, but he ought to have known better than to have stolen upon
her while she was behaving in such a ridiculous, childish way. It
showed what he was capable of.

"My name is Ralph Peden," he said humbly. "I came from Edinburgh
the day before yesterday. I am staying with Mr. Welsh at the
manse."

Winsome Charteris glanced down at the books and blushed still more
deeply. The Hebrew Bible and Lexicon lay harmlessly enough on the
grass, and the Luther was swinging in a frivolous and
untheological way on the strong, bent twigs of broom. But where
was the note-book? Like a surge of Solway tide the remembrance
came over her that, when she had plucked the dandelion for her
soothsaying, she had thrust it carelessly into the bosom of her
lilac-sprigged gown. Indeed, a corner of it peeped out at this
moment. Had he seen it?--monstrous thought! She knew young men and
the interpretations that they put upon nothings! This, in spite of
his solemn looks and mantling bashfulness, was a young man.

"Then I suppose these are yours," said Winsome, turning sideways
towards the indicated articles so as to conceal the note-book. The
young man removed his eyes momentarily from her face and looked in
the direction of the books. He seemed to have entirely forgotten
what it was that had brought him to Loch Grannoch bridge so early
this June morning. Winsome took advantage of his glance to feel
that her sunbonnet sat straight, and as her hand was on its way to
her clustering curls she took this opportunity of thrusting
Ralph's note-book into more complete concealment. Then her hands
went up to her head only to discover that her sunbonnet had
slipped backward, and was now hanging down her back by the
strings.

Ralph Peden looked up at her, apparently entirely satisfied. What
was a note-book to him now? He saw the sunbonnet resting upon the
wavy distraction of the pale gold hair. He had a luxurious eye for
colour. That lilac and gold went well together, was his thought.

Trammelled by the fallen head-gear, Winsome threw her head back,
shaking out her tresses in a way that Ralph Peden never forgot.
Then she caught at the strings of the errant bonnet.

"Oh, let it alone!" he suddenly exclaimed.

"Sir?" said Winsome Charteris--interrogatively, not imperatively.
Ralph Peden, who had taken a step forward in the instancy of his
appeal, came to himself again in a moment.

"I beg your pardon," he said very humbly, "I had no right--"

He paused, uncertain what to say.

Winsome Charteris looked up quickly, saw the simplicity of the
young man, in one full eye-blink read his heart, then dropped her
eyes again and said:

"But I thought you liked lilac sunbonnets!"

Ralph Peden had now his turn to blush. Hardly in the secret of his
own heart had he said this thing. Only to Mr. Welsh had his
forgetful tongue uttered the word that was in his mind, and which
had covered since yesterday morn all the precepts of that most
superfluous wise woman, the mother of King Lemuel.

"Are you a witch?" asked Ralph, blundering as an honest and
bashful man may in times of distress into the boldest speech.

"You want to go up and see my grandmother, do you not?" said
Winsome, gravely, for such conversation was not to be continued on
any conditions.

"Yes," said the young man, perjuring himself with a readiness and
facility most unbecoming in a student desiring letters of
probation from the Protesting and Covenant-keeping Kirk of the
Marrow.

Ralph Peden lightly picked up the books, which, as Winsome knew,
were some considerable weight to carry.

"Do you find them quite safe?" she asked.

"There was a heavy dew last night," he answered, "but in spite of
it they seem quite dry.

"We often notice the same thing on Loch Grannoch side," said
Winsome.

"I thought--that is, I was under the impression--that I had left a
small book with some manuscript notes!" said the young man,
tentatively.

"It may have dropped among the broom," replied the simple maid.

Whereupon the two set to seeking, both bareheaded, brown cropped
head and golden wilderness of tresses not far from one another,
while the "book of manuscript notes" rose and fell to the
quickened heart-beating of that wicked and deceitful girl, Winsome
Charteris.

CHAPTER VI.

CURLED EYELASHES.

Now Meg Kissock could stand a great deal, and she would put up
with a great deal to pleasure her mistress; but half an hour of
loneliness down by the washing was overly much for her, and the
struggle between loyalty and curiosity ended, after the manner of
her sex, in the victory of the latter.

As Ralph and Winsome continued to seek, they came time and again
close together and the propinquity of flushed cheek and mazy
ringlet stirred something in the lad's heart which had never been
touched by the Mistresses Thriepneuk, who lived where the new
houses of the Plainstones look over the level meadows of the
Borough Muir. His father had often said within himself, as he
walked the Edinburgh streets to visit some sick kirk member, as he
had written to his friend Adam Welsh, "Has the lad a heart?" Had
he seen him on that broomy knowe over the Grannoch water, he had
not doubted, though he might well have been fearful enough of that
heart's too sudden awakening.

Never before had the youth come within that delicate AURA of charm
which radiates from the bursting bud of the finest womanhood.
Ralph Peden had kept his affections ascetically virgin. His
nature's finest juices had gone to feed the brain, yet all the
time his heart had waited expectant of the revealing of a mystery.
Winsome Charteris had come so suddenly into his life that the
universe seemed newborn in a day. He sprang at once from the
thought of woman as only an unexplained part of the creation, to
the conception of her (meaning thereby Winsome Charteris) as an
angel who had not lost her first estate.

It was a strange thing for Ralph Peden, as indeed it is to every
true man, to come for the first time within the scope of the
unconscious charms of a good girl. There is, indeed, no better
solvent of a cold nature, no better antidote to a narrow
education, no better bulwark of defence against frittering away
the strength and solemnity of first love, than a sudden, strong
plunge into its deep waters.

Like timid bathers, who run a little way into the tide and then
run out again with ankles wet, fearful of the first chill, many
men accustom themselves to love by degrees. So they never taste
the sweetness and strength of it as did Ralph Peden in these days,
when, never having looked upon a maid with the level summer
lightning of mutual interest flashing in his eyes, he plunged into
love's fathomless mysteries as one may dive upon a still day from
some craggy platform among the westernmost isles into Atlantic
depths.

Winsome's light summer dress touched his hand and thrilled the lad
to his remotest nerve centres. He stood light-headed, taking in as
only they twain looked over the loch with far-away eyes, that
subtle fragrance, delicate and free, which like a garment clothed
the maid of the Grannoch lochside.

"The water's on the boil," cried Meg Kissock, setting her ruddy
shock of hair and blooming, amplified, buxom form above the knoll,
wringing at the same time the suds from her hands, "an' I canna
lift it aff mysel'."

Her mistress looked at her with a sudden suspicion. Since when had
Meg grown so feeble?

"We had better go down," she said simply, turning to Ralph, who
would have cheerfully assented had she suggested that they
should together walk into the loch among the lily beds. It was the
"we" that overcame him. His father had used the pronoun in quite a
different sense. "WE will take the twenty-ninth chapter of second
Chronicles this morning, Ralph--what do WE understand by this
peculiar use of VAV CONVERSIVE?"

But it was quite another thing when Winsome Charteris said simply,
as though he had been her brother:

"We had better go down!"

So they went down, taking the little stile at which Winsome had
meditated over the remarks of Ralph Peden concerning the creation
of Eve upon their way. Meg Kissock led the van, and took the dyke
vigorously without troubling the steps, her kirtle fitting her for
such exercises. Winsome came next, and Ralph stood aside to let
her pass. She sprang up the low steps light as a feather, rested
her fingertips for an appreciable fraction of a second on the hand
which he instinctively held out, and was over before he realized
that anything had happened. Yet it seemed that in that contact,
light as a rose-leaf blown by the winds of late July against his
cheek, his past life had been shorn clean away from all the future
as with a sharp sword.

Ralph Peden had dutifully kissed his cousins Jemima, Kezia, and
Kerenhappuch; but, on the whole, he had felt more pleasure when he
had partaken of the excellent bannocks prepared for him by the
fair hands of Kerenhappuch herself. But this was wholly a new
thing. His breath came suddenly short. He breathed rapidly as
though to give his lungs more air. The atmosphere seemed to have
grown rarer and colder. Indeed, it was a different world, and the
blanket-washing itself was transferred to some deliciously homely
outlying annex of paradise.

Yet it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should
be helping this girl, and he went forward with the greatest
assurance to lift the black pot off the fire for her. The keen,
acrid swirls of wood-smoke blew into his eyes, and the rank steam
of yellow home-made soap, manufactured with bracken ash for lye,
rose to his nostrils. Now, Ralph Peden was well made and strong.
Spare in body but accurately compacted, if he had ever struggled
with anything more formidable than the folio hide-hound Calvins
and Turretins on his father's lower shelf in James's Court, he had
been no mean antagonist.

But, though he managed with a great effort to lift the black pot
off its gypsy tripod, he would have let the boiling contents swing
dangerously against his legs had not Winsome caught sharply at his
other hand and leaned over, so balancing the weight of the boiling
water. So they walked down the path to where the tubs stood under
the shade of the great ash-trees, with their sky-tossing, dry-
rustling leaves. There Ralph set his burden down. Meg Kissock had
been watching him keenly. She saw that he had severely burned his
hand, and also that he said nothing whatever about it. He was a
man. This gained for the young man Meg's hearty approval almost as
much as his bashfulness and native good looks. What Meg Kissock
did not know was that Ralph was altogether unconscious of the
wound in his hand. It was a deeper wound which was at that time
monopolising his thoughts. But this little incident was more than
a thousand certificates in the eyes of Meg Kissock, and Meg's
friendship was decidedly worth cultivating. Even for its own sake
she did not give it lightly.

Before Winsome Charteris could release her hand, Ralph turned and
said:

"Do you know you have not yet told me your name?"

Winsome did know it very well, but she only said, "My name is
Winsome Charteris, and this is Meg Kissock."

"Winsome Charteris, Winsome Charteris," said Ralph's heart over
and over again, and he had not even the grace to say "Thank you";
but Meg stepped up to shake him by the hand.

"I'm braw an' prood to ken ye, sir," said Meg. "That muckle sumph
[stupid], Saunders Mowdiewort, telled me a' aboot ye comin' an'
the terrible store o' lear [learning] ye hae. He's the minister's
man, ye ken, an' howks the graves ower by at the parish kirk-yard,
for the auld betheral there winna gang ablow three fit deep, and
them that haes ill-tongued wives to haud doon disna want ony
mistake--"

"Meg," said her mistress, "do not forget yourself."

"Deil a fear," said Meg; "it was auld Sim o' Glower-ower-'em, the
wizened auld hurcheon [hedgehog], that set a big thruch stane ower
his first wife; and when he buried his second in the neist grave,
he just turned the broad flat stone. 'Guid be thankit!' he says,
'I had the forethocth to order a stane heavy eneuch to hand them
baith doon!'"

"Get to the washing, Meg," said Winsome.

"Fegs!" returned Meg, "ye waur in nae great hurry yersel' doon aff
the broomy knowe! What's a' the steer sae sudden like?"

Winsome disdained an answer, but stood to her own tub, where some
of the lighter articles--pillow-slips, and fair sheets of
"seventeen-hundred" linen were waiting her daintier hand.

As Winsome and Meg washed, Ralph Peden carried water, learning the
wondrous science of carrying two cans over a wooden hoop; and in
the frankest tutelage Winsome put her hand over his to teach him,
and the relation of master and pupil asserted its ancient danger.

It had not happened to Winsome Charteris to meet any one to whom
she was attracted with such frank liking. She had never known what
it was to have a brother, and she thought that this clear-eyed
young man might be a brother to her. It is a fallacy common among
girls that young men desire them as sisters. Ralph himself was
under no such illusion, or at least would not have been, had he
had the firmness of mind to sit down half a mile from his emotions
and coolly look them over. But in the meanwhile he was only
conscious of a great and rising delight in his heart.

As Winsome Charteris bent above the wash-tub he was at liberty to
observe how the blood mantled on the clear oval of her cheek. He
had time to note--of course entirely as a philosopher--the pale
purple shadow under the eyes, over which the dark, curling lashes
came down like the fringe of the curtain of night.

"Why--I wonder why?" he said, and stopped aghast at his utterance
aloud of his inmost thought.

"What do you wonder?" said Winsome, glancing up with a frank dewy
freshness in her eyes.

"I wonder why--I wonder that you are able to do all this work," he
said, with an attempt to turn the corner of his blunder.

Winsome shook her head.

"Now you are trying to be like other people," she said; "I do not
think you will succeed. That was not what you were going to say.
If you are to be my friend, you must speak all the truth to me and
speak it always." A thing which, indeed, no man does to a woman.
And, besides, nobody had spoken of Ralph Peden being a friend to
her. The meaning was that their hearts had been talking while
their tongues had spoken of other things; and though there was no
thought of love in the breast of Winsome Charteris, already in the
intercourse of a single morning she had given this young Edinburgh
student of divinity a place which no other had ever attained to.
Had she had a brother, she thought, what would he not have been to
her? She felt specially fitted to have a brother. It did not occur
to her to ask whether she would have carried her brother's college
note-book, even by accident, where it could be stirred by the
beating of her heart.

"Well," Ralph said at last, "I will tell you what I was wondering.
You have asked me, and you shall know: I only wondered why your
eyelashes were so much darker than your hair."

Winsome Charteris was not in the least disturbed.

"Ministers should occupy their minds with something else," she
said, demurely. "What would Mr. Welsh say? I am sure he has never
troubled his head about such things. It is not fitting," Winsome
said severely.

"But I want to know," said this persistent young man, wondering at
himself.

"Well," said Winsome, glancing up with mischief in her eye, "I
suppose because I am a very lazy sort of person, and dark window-
blinds keep out the light."

"But why are they curled up at the end?" asked unblushingly the
author of the remarks upon Eve formerly quoted.

"It is time that you went up and saw my grandmother!" said
Winsome, with great composure.

"Juist what I was on the point o' remarkin' mysel'!" said Meg
Kissock.

CHAPTER VII.

CONCERNING TAKING EXERCISE.

Winsome and Ralph walked silently and composedly side by side up
the loaning under the elder-trees, over the brook at the watering-
place to which in her hoydenish girlhood Winsome had often ridden
the horses when the ploughmen loosed Bell and Jess from the
plough. In these days she rode without a side-saddle. Sometimes
she did it yet when the spring gloamings were gathering fast, but
no one knew this except Jock Forrest, the ploughman, who never
told any more than he could help.

Silence deep as that of yesterday wrapped about the farmhouse of
Craig Ronald. The hens were all down under the lee of the great
orchard hedge, chuckling low to themselves, and nestling with
their feathers spread balloon-wise, while they flirted the hot
summer dust over them. Down where the grass was in shadow a mower
was sharpening his blade. The clear metallic sound of the "strake"
or sharpening strop, covered with pure white Loch Skerrow sand set
in grease, which scythemen universally use in Galloway, cut
through the slumberous hum of the noonday air like the blade
itself through the grass. The bees in the purple flowers beneath
the window boomed a mellow bass, and the grasshoppers made love by
millions in the couch grass, chirring in a thousand fleeting
raptures.

"Wait here while I go in," commanded Winsome, indicating a chair
in the cool, blue-flagged kitchen, which Meg Kissock had marked
out in white, with whorls and crosses of immemorial antiquity--the
same that her Pictish forefathers had cut deep in the hard
Silurian rocks of the southern uplands.

It was a little while before, in the dusk of the doorway Winsome
appeared, looking paler and fairer and more infinitely removed
from him than before. Instinctively he wished himself out with her
again on the broomy knowe. He seemed somehow nearer to her there.
Yet he followed obediently enough.

Within the shadowed "ben"-room of Craig Ronald all the morning
this oddly assorted pair of old people had been sitting--as indeed
every morning they sat, one busily reading and often looking up to
talk; while the other, the master of the house himself, sat
silent, a majestic and altogether pathetic figure, looking
solemnly out with wide-open, dreamy eyes, waking to the actual
world of speech and purposeful life only at rare intervals.

But Walter Skirving was keenly awake when Ralph Peden entered. It
was in fact he, and not his partner, who spoke first--for Walter
Skirving's wife had among other things learned when to be silent--
which was, when she must.

"You honour my hoose," he said; "though it grieves me indeed that
I canna rise to receive yin o' your family an' name! But what I
have is at your service, for it was your noble faither that led
the faithful into the wilderness on the day o' the Great
Apostasy!"

The young man shook him by the hand. He had no bashfulness here.
He was on his own ground. This was the very accent of the society
in which he moved in Edinburgh.

"I thank you," he said, quietly and courteously, stepping back at
once into the student of divinity; "I have often heard my father
speak of you. You were the elder from the south who stood by him
on that day. He has ever retained a great respect for you."

"It WAS a great day," Walter Skirving muttered, letting his arm
rest on the little square deal table which stood beside him with
his great Bible open upon it--"a great day--aye, Maister Peden's
laddie i' my hoose! He's welcome, he's mair nor welcome."

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