Archie was sedulous at church. Sunday after Sunday he
sat down and stood up with that small company, heard the voice of
Mr. Torrance leaping like an ill-played clarionet from key to
key, and had an opportunity to study his moth-eaten gown and the
black thread mittens that he joined together in prayer, and
lifted up with a reverent solemnity in the act of
benediction. Hermiston pew was a little square box,
dwarfish in proportion with the kirk itself, and enclosing a
table not much bigger than a footstool. There sat Archie,
an apparent prince, the only undeniable gentleman and the only
great heritor in the parish, taking his ease in the only pew, for
no other in the kirk had doors. Thence he might command an
undisturbed view of that congregation of solid plaided men,
strapping wives and daughters, oppressed children, and uneasy
sheep-dogs. It was strange how Archie missed the look of
race; except the dogs, with their refined foxy faces and
inimitably curling tails, there was no one present with the least
claim to gentility. The Cauldstaneslap party was scarcely
an exception; Dandie perhaps, as he amused himself making verses
through the interminable burden of the service, stood out a
little by the glow in his eye and a certain superior animation of
face and alertness of body; but even Dandie slouched like a
rustic. The rest of the congregation, like so many sheep,
oppressed him with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day following
day—of physical labour in the open air, oatmeal porridge,
peas bannock the somnolent fireside in the evening, and the
night-long nasal slumbers in a box-bed. Yet he knew many of
them to be shrewd and humorous, men of character, notable women,
making a bustle in the world and radiating an influence from
their low-browed doors. He knew besides they were like
other men; below the crust of custom, rapture found a way; he had
heard them beat the timbrel before Bacchus—had heard them
shout and carouse over their whisky-toddy; and not the most
Dutch-bottomed and severe faces among them all, not even the
solemn elders themselves, but were capable of singular gambols at
the voice of love. Men drawing near to an end of
life’s adventurous journey—maids thrilling with fear
and curiosity on the threshold of entrance—women who had
borne and perhaps buried children, who could remember the
clinging of the small dead hands and the patter of the little
feet now silent—he marvelled that among all those faces
there should be no face of expectation, none that was mobile,
none into which the rhythm and poetry of life had entered.
“O for a live face,” he thought; and at times he had
a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living
gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to
waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to
him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the
Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.
On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the
spring had come at last. It was warm, with a latent shiver
in the air that made the warmth only the more welcome. The
shallows of the stream glittered and tinkled among bunches of
primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth arrested Archie by
the way with moments of ethereal intoxication. The grey
Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from
the sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its
beauty; an essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him,
not resident in particulars but breathing to him from the
whole. He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write
poetry—he did so sometimes, loose, galloping octo-syllabics
in the vein of Scott—and when he had taken his place on a
boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree
that was already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised
him that he should have nothing to write. His heart perhaps
beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the
universe. By the time he came to a corner of the valley and
could see the kirk, he had so lingered by the way that the first
psalm was finishing. The nasal psalmody, full of turns and
trills and graceless graces, seemed the essential voice of the
kirk itself upraised in thanksgiving, “Everything’s
alive,” he said; and again cries it aloud, “thank
God, everything’s alive!” He lingered yet a
while in the kirk-yard. A tuft of primroses was blooming
hard by the leg of an old black table tombstone, and he stopped
to contemplate the random apologue. They stood forth on the
cold earth with a trenchancy of contrast; and he was struck with
a sense of incompleteness in the day, the season, and the beauty
that surrounded him—the chill there was in the warmth, the
gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp earthy
smell that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The
voice of the aged Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. And
he wondered if Torrance also felt in his old bones the joyous
influence of the spring morning; Torrance, or the shadow of what
once was Torrance, that must come so soon to lie outside here in
the sun and rain with all his rheumatisms, while a new minister
stood in his room and thundered from his own familiar
pulpit? The pity of it, and something of the chill of the
grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.
He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew
with lowered eyes, for he feared he had already offended the kind
old gentleman in the pulpit, and was sedulous to offend no
further. He could not follow the prayer, not even the heads
of it. Brightnesses of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle
of falling water and singing birds, rose like exhalations from
some deeper, aboriginal memory, that was not his, but belonged to
the flesh on his bones. His body remembered; and it seemed
to him that his body was in no way gross, but ethereal and
perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it an
exquisite tenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of
beautiful instincts and destined to an early death. And he
felt for old Torrance—of the many supplications, of the few
days—a pity that was near to tears. The prayer
ended. Right over him was a tablet in the wall, the only
ornament in the roughly masoned chapel—for it was no more;
the tablet commemorated, I was about to say the virtues, but
rather the existence of a former Rutherford of Hermiston; and
Archie, under that trophy of his long descent and local
greatness, leaned back in the pew and contemplated vacancy with
the shadow of a smile between playful and sad, that became him
strangely. Dandie’s sister, sitting by the side of
Clem in her new Glasgow finery, chose that moment to observe the
young laird. Aware of the stir of his entrance, the little
formalist had kept her eyes fastened and her face prettily
composed during the prayer. It was not hypocrisy, there was
no one further from a hypocrite. The girl had been taught
to behave: to look up, to look down, to look unconscious, to look
seriously impressed in church, and in every conjuncture to look
her best. That was the game of female life, and she played
it frankly. Archie was the one person in church who was of
interest, who was somebody new, reputed eccentric, known to be
young, and a laird, and still unseen by Christina. Small
wonder that, as she stood there in her attitude of pretty
decency, her mind should run upon him! If he spared a
glance in her direction, he should know she was a well-behaved
young lady who had been to Glasgow. In reason he must
admire her clothes, and it was possible that he should think her
pretty. At that her heart beat the least thing in the
world; and she proceeded, by way of a corrective, to call up and
dismiss a series of fancied pictures of the young man who should
now, by rights, be looking at her. She settled on the
plainest of them,—a pink short young man with a dish face
and no figure, at whose admiration she could afford to smile; but
for all that, the consciousness of his gaze (which was really
fixed on Torrance and his mittens) kept her in something of a
flutter till the word Amen. Even then, she was far too
well-bred to gratify her curiosity with any impatience. She
resumed her seat languidly—this was a Glasgow
touch—she composed her dress, rearranged her nosegay of
primroses, looked first in front, then behind upon the other
side, and at last allowed her eyes to move, without hurry, in the
direction of the Hermiston pew. For a moment, they were
riveted. Next she had plucked her gaze home again like a
tame bird who should have meditated flight. Possibilities
crowded on her; she hung over the future and grew dizzy; the
image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with the
inscrutable half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a
chasm. “I wonder, will I have met my fate?” she
thought, and her heart swelled.
Torrance was got some way into his first exposition, positing
a deep layer of texts as he went along, laying the foundations of
his discourse, which was to deal with a nice point in divinity,
before Archie suffered his eyes to wander. They fell first
of all on Clem, looking insupportably prosperous, and patronising
Torrance with the favour of a modified attention, as of one who
was used to better things in Glasgow. Though he had never
before set eyes on him, Archie had no difficulty in identifying
him, and no hesitation in pronouncing him vulgar, the worst of
the family. Clem was leaning lazily forward when Archie
first saw him. Presently he leaned nonchalantly back; and
that deadly instrument, the maiden, was suddenly unmasked in
profile. Though not quite in the front of the fashion (had
anybody cared!), certain artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her
own inherent taste, had arrayed her to great advantage. Her
accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart-burning, and almost of
scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company. Mrs. Hob had
said her say at Cauldstaneslap. “Daft-like!”
she had pronounced it. “A jaiket that’ll no
meet! Whaur’s the sense of a jaiket that’ll no
button upon you, if it should come to be weet? What do ye
ca’ thir things? Demmy brokens, d’ye say?
They’ll be brokens wi’ a vengeance or ye can win
back! Weel, I have nae thing to do wi’
it—it’s no good taste.” Clem, whose purse
had thus metamorphosed his sister, and who was not insensible to
the advertisement, had come to the rescue with a “Hoot,
woman! What do you ken of good taste that has never been to
the ceety?” And Hob, looking on the girl with pleased
smiles, as she timidly displayed her finery in the midst of the
dark kitchen, had thus ended the dispute: “The cutty looks
weel,” he had said, “and it’s no very like
rain. Wear them the day, hizzie; but it’s no a thing
to make a practice o’.” In the breasts of her
rivals, coming to the kirk very conscious of white under-linen,
and their faces splendid with much soap, the sight of the toilet
had raised a storm of varying emotion, from the mere unenvious
admiration that was expressed in a long-drawn “Eh!”
to the angrier feeling that found vent in an emphatic “Set
her up!” Her frock was of straw-coloured jaconet
muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle, so as to
display her demi-broquins of Regency violet, crossing with
many straps upon a yellow cobweb stocking. According to the
pretty fashion in which our grandmothers did not hesitate to
appear, and our great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and
capture of our great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to
mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between, a
cairngorm brooch maintained it. Here, too, surely in a very
enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses. She
wore on her shoulders—or rather on her back and not her
shoulders, which it scarcely passed—a French coat of
sarsenet, tied in front with Margate braces, and of the same
colour with her violet shoes. About her face clustered a
disorder of dark ringlets, a little garland of yellow French
roses surmounted her brow, and the whole was crowned by a village
hat of chipped straw. Amongst all the rosy and all the
weathered faces that surrounded her in church, she glowed like an
open flower—girl and raiment, and the cairngorm that caught
the daylight and returned it in a fiery flash, and the threads of
bronze and gold that played in her hair.
Archie was attracted by the bright thing like a child.
He looked at her again and yet again, and their looks
crossed. The lip was lifted from her little teeth. He
saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny skin. Her
eye, which was great as a stag’s, struck and held his
gaze. He knew who she must be—Kirstie, she of the
harsh diminutive, his housekeeper’s niece, the sister of
the rustic prophet, Gib—and he found in her the answer to
his wishes.
Christina felt the shock of their encountering glances, and
seemed to rise, clothed in smiles, into a region of the vague and
bright. But the gratification was not more exquisite than
it was brief. She looked away abruptly, and immediately
began to blame herself for that abruptness. She knew what
she should have done, too late—turned slowly with her nose
in the air. And meantime his look was not removed, but
continued to play upon her like a battery of cannon constantly
aimed, and now seemed to isolate her alone with him, and now
seemed to uplift her, as on a pillory, before the
congregation. For Archie continued to drink her in with his
eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain, and
stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In
the cleft of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and
the pale florets of primrose fascinated him. He saw the
breasts heave, and the flowers shake with the heaving, and
marvelled what should so much discompose the girl. And
Christina was conscious of his gaze—saw it, perhaps, with
the dainty plaything of an ear that peeped among her ringlets;
she was conscious of changing colour, conscious of her unsteady
breath. Like a creature tracked, run down, surrounded, she
sought in a dozen ways to give herself a countenance. She
used her handkerchief—it was a really fine one—then
she desisted in a panic: “He would only think I was too
warm.” She took to reading in the metrical psalms,
and then remembered it was sermon-time. Last she put a
“sugar-bool” in her mouth, and the next moment
repented of the step. It was such a homely-like
thing! Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties in kirk;
and, with a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her
colour flamed high. At this signal of distress Archie awoke
to a sense of his ill-behaviour. What had he been
doing? He had been exquisitely rude in church to the niece
of his housekeeper; he had stared like a lackey and a libertine
at a beautiful and modest girl. It was possible, it was
even likely, he would be presented to her after service in the
kirk-yard, and then how was he to look? And there was no
excuse. He had marked the tokens of her shame, of her
increasing indignation, and he was such a fool that he had not
understood them. Shame bowed him down, and he looked
resolutely at Mr. Torrance; who little supposed, good, worthy
man, as he continued to expound justification by faith, what was
his true business: to play the part of derivative to a pair of
children at the old game of falling in love.
Christina was greatly relieved at first. It seemed to
her that she was clothed again. She looked back on what had
passed. All would have been right if she had not blushed, a
silly fool! There was nothing to blush at, if she
had taken a sugar-bool. Mrs. MacTaggart, the
elder’s wife in St. Enoch’s, took them often.
And if he had looked at her, what was more natural than that a
young gentleman should look at the best-dressed girl in
church? And at the same time, she knew far otherwise, she
knew there was nothing casual or ordinary in the look, and valued
herself on its memory like a decoration. Well, it was a
blessing he had found something else to look at! And
presently she began to have other thoughts. It was
necessary, she fancied, that she should put herself right by a
repetition of the incident, better managed. If the wish was
father to the thought, she did not know or she would not
recognise it. It was simply as a manœuvre of
propriety, as something called for to lessen the significance of
what had gone before, that she should a second time meet his
eyes, and this time without blushing. And at the memory of
the blush, she blushed again, and became one general blush
burning from head to foot. Was ever anything so indelicate,
so forward, done by a girl before? And here she was, making
an exhibition of herself before the congregation about
nothing! She stole a glance upon her neighbours, and
behold! they were steadily indifferent, and Clem had gone to
sleep. And still the one idea was becoming more and more
potent with her, that in common prudence she must look again
before the service ended. Something of the same sort was
going forward in the mind of Archie, as he struggled with the
load of penitence. So it chanced that, in the flutter of
the moment when the last psalm was given out, and Torrance was
reading the verse, and the leaves of every psalm-book in church
were rustling under busy fingers, two stealthy glances were sent
out like antennæ among the pews and on the indifferent and
absorbed occupants, and drew timidly nearer to the straight line
between Archie and Christina. They met, they lingered
together for the least fraction of time, and that was
enough. A charge as of electricity passed through
Christina, and behold! the leaf of her psalm-book was torn
across.
Archie was outside by the gate of the graveyard, conversing
with Hob and the minister and shaking hands all round with the
scattering congregation, when Clem and Christina were brought up
to be presented. The laird took off his hat and bowed to
her with grace and respect. Christina made her Glasgow
curtsey to the laird, and went on again up the road for Hermiston
and Cauldstaneslap, walking fast, breathing hurriedly with a
heightened colour, and in this strange frame of mind, that when
she was alone she seemed in high happiness, and when any one
addressed her she resented it like a contradiction. A part
of the way she had the company of some neighbour girls and a
loutish young man; never had they seemed so insipid, never had
she made herself so disagreeable. But these struck aside to
their various destinations or were out-walked and left behind;
and when she had driven off with sharp words the proffered convoy
of some of her nephews and nieces, she was free to go on alone up
Hermiston brae, walking on air, dwelling intoxicated among clouds
of happiness. Near to the summit she heard steps behind
her, a man’s steps, light and very rapid. She knew
the foot at once and walked the faster. “If
it’s me he’s wanting, he can run for it,” she
thought, smiling.
Archie overtook her like a man whose mind was made up.
“Miss Kirstie,” he began.
“Miss Christina, if you please, Mr. Weir,” she
interrupted. “I canna bear the
contraction.”
“You forget it has a friendly sound for me. Your
aunt is an old friend of mine, and a very good one. I hope
we shall see much of you at Hermiston?”
“My aunt and my sister-in-law doesna agree very
well. Not that I have much ado with it. But still
when I’m stopping in the house, if I was to be visiting my
aunt, it would not look considerate-like.”
“I am sorry,” said Archie.
“I thank you kindly, Mr. Weir,” she said.
“I whiles think myself it’s a great peety.”
“Ah, I am sure your voice would always be for
peace!” he cried.
“I wouldna be too sure of that,” she said.
“I have my days like other folk, I suppose.”
“Do you know, in our old kirk, among our good old grey
dames, you made an effect like sunshine.”
“Ah, but that would be my Glasgow clothes!”
“I did not think I was so much under the influence of
pretty frocks.”
She smiled with a half look at him. “There’s
more than you!” she said. “But you see
I’m only Cinderella. I’ll have to put all these
things by in my trunk; next Sunday I’ll be as grey as the
rest. They’re Glasgow clothes, you see, and it would
never do to make a practice of it. It would seem terrible
conspicuous.”
By that they were come to the place where their ways
severed. The old grey moors were all about them; in the
midst a few sheep wandered; and they could see on the one hand
the straggling caravan scaling the braes in front of them for
Cauldstaneslap, and on the other, the contingent from Hermiston
bending off and beginning to disappear by detachments into the
policy gate. It was in these circumstances that they turned
to say farewell, and deliberately exchanged a glance as they
shook hands. All passed as it should, genteelly; and in
Christina’s mind, as she mounted the first steep ascent for
Cauldstaneslap, a gratifying sense of triumph prevailed over the
recollection of minor lapses and mistakes. She had kilted
her gown, as she did usually at that rugged pass; but when she
spied Archie still standing and gazing after her, the skirts came
down again as if by enchantment. Here was a piece of nicety
for that upland parish, where the matrons marched with their
coats kilted in the rain, and the lasses walked barefoot to kirk
through the dust of summer, and went bravely down by the
burn-side, and sat on stones to make a public toilet before
entering! It was perhaps an air wafted from Glasgow; or
perhaps it marked a stage of that dizziness of gratified vanity,
in which the instinctive act passed unperceived. He was
looking after! She unloaded her bosom of a prodigious sigh
that was all pleasure, and betook herself to run. When she
had overtaken the stragglers of her family, she caught up the
niece whom she had so recently repulsed, and kissed and slapped
her, and drove her away again, and ran after her with pretty
cries and laughter. Perhaps she thought the laird might
still be looking! But it chanced the little scene came
under the view of eyes less favourable; for she overtook Mrs. Hob
marching with Clem and Dand.
“You’re shürely fey, lass!” quoth
Dandie.
“Think shame to yersel’, miss!” said the
strident Mrs. Hob. “Is this the gait to guide
yersel’ on the way hame frae kirk? You’re
shiirely no sponsible the day! And anyway I would mind my
guid claes.”
“Hoot!” said Christina, and went on before them
head in air, treading the rough track with the tread of a wild
doe.
She was in love with herself, her destiny, the air of the
hills, the benediction of the sun. All the way home, she
continued under the intoxication of these sky-scraping
spirits. At table she could talk freely of young Hermiston;
gave her opinion of him off-hand and with a loud voice, that he
was a handsome young gentleman, real well mannered and
sensible-like, but it was a pity he looked doleful.
Only—the moment after—a memory of his eyes in church
embarrassed her. But for this inconsiderable check, all
through meal-time she had a good appetite, and she kept them
laughing at table, until Gib (who had returned before them from
Crossmichael and his separative worship) reproved the whole of
them for their levity.
Singing “in to herself” as she went, her mind
still in the turmoil of a glad confusion, she rose and tripped
upstairs to a little loft, lighted by four panes in the gable,
where she slept with one of her nieces. The niece, who
followed her, presuming on “Auntie’s” high
spirits, was flounced out of the apartment with small ceremony,
and retired, smarting and half tearful, to bury her woes in the
byre among the hay. Still humming, Christina divested
herself of her finery, and put her treasures one by one in her
great green trunk. The last of these was the psalm-book; it
was a fine piece, the gift of Mistress Clem, in distinct
old-faced type, on paper that had begun to grow foxy in the
warehouse—not by service—and she was used to wrap it
in a handkerchief every Sunday after its period of service was
over, and bury it end-wise at the head of her trunk. As she
now took it in hand the book fell open where the leaf was torn,
and she stood and gazed upon that evidence of her bygone
discomposure. There returned again the vision of the two
brown eyes staring at her, intent and bright, out of that dark
corner of the kirk. The whole appearance and attitude, the
smile, the suggested gesture of young Hermiston came before her
in a flash at the sight of the torn page. “I was
surely fey!” she said, echoing the words of Dandie, and at
the suggested doom her high spirits deserted her. She flung
herself prone upon the bed, and lay there, holding the psalm-book
in her hands for hours, for the more part in a mere stupor of
unconsenting pleasure and unreasoning fear. The fear was
superstitious; there came up again and again in her memory
Dandie’s ill-omened words, and a hundred grisly and black
tales out of the immediate neighbourhood read her a commentary on
their force. The pleasure was never realised. You
might say the joints of her body thought and remembered, and were
gladdened, but her essential self, in the immediate theatre of
consciousness, talked feverishly of something else, like a
nervous person at a fire. The image that she most
complacently dwelt on was that of Miss Christina in her character
of the Fair Lass of Cauldstaneslap, carrying all before her in
the straw-coloured frock, the violet mantle, and the yellow
cobweb stockings. Archie’s image, on the other hand,
when it presented itself was never welcomed—far less
welcomed with any ardour, and it was exposed at times to
merciless criticism. In the long vague dialogues she held
in her mind, often with imaginary, often with unrealised
interlocutors, Archie, if he were referred to at all came in for
savage handling. He was described as “looking like a
stork,” “staring like a caulf,” “a face
like a ghaist’s.” “Do you call that
manners?” she said; or, “I soon put him in his
place.” “‘Miss Christina, if
you please, Mr. Weir!’ says I, and just flyped
up my skirt tails.” With gabble like this she would
entertain herself long whiles together, and then her eye would
perhaps fall on the torn leaf, and the eyes of Archie would
appear again from the darkness of the wall, and the voluble words
deserted her, and she would lie still and stupid, and think upon
nothing with devotion, and be sometimes raised by a quiet
sigh. Had a doctor of medicine come into that loft, he
would have diagnosed a healthy, well-developed, eminently
vivacious lass lying on her face in a fit of the sulks; not one
who had just contracted, or was just contracting, a mortal
sickness of the mind which should yet carry her towards death and
despair. Had it been a doctor of psychology, he might have
been pardoned for divining in the girl a passion of childish
vanity, self-love in excelsis, and no more. It is to
be understood that I have been painting chaos and describing the
inarticulate. Every lineament that appears is too precise,
almost every word used too strong. Take a finger-post in
the mountains on a day of rolling mists; I have but copied the
names that appear upon the pointers, the names of definite and
famous cities far distant, and now perhaps basking in sunshine;
but Christina remained all these hours, as it were, at the foot
of the post itself, not moving, and enveloped in mutable and
blinding wreaths of haze.
The day was growing late and the sunbeams long and level, when
she sat suddenly up, and wrapped in its handkerchief and put by
that psalm-book which had already played a part so decisive in
the first chapter of her love-story. In the absence of the
mesmerist’s eye, we are told nowadays that the head of a
bright nail may fill his place, if it be steadfastly
regarded. So that torn page had riveted her attention on
what might else have been but little, and perhaps soon forgotten;
while the ominous words of Dandie—heard, not heeded, and
still remembered—had lent to her thoughts, or rather to her
mood, a cast of solemnity, and that idea of Fate—a pagan
Fate, uncontrolled by any Christian deity, obscure, lawless, and
august—moving indissuadably in the affairs of Christian
men. Thus even that phenomenon of love at first sight,
which is so rare and seems so simple and violent, like a
disruption of life’s tissue, may be decomposed into a
sequence of accidents happily concurring.
She put on a grey frock and a pink kerchief, looked at herself
a moment with approval in the small square of glass that served
her for a toilet mirror, and went softly downstairs through the
sleeping house that resounded with the sound of afternoon
snoring. Just outside the door, Dandie was sitting with a
book in his hand, not reading, only honouring the Sabbath by a
sacred vacancy of mind. She came near him and stood
still.
“I’m for off up the muirs, Dandie,” she
said.
There was something unusually soft in her tones that made him
look up. She was pale, her eyes dark and bright; no trace
remained of the levity of the morning.
“Ay, lass? Ye’ll have yer ups and downs like
me, I’m thinkin’,” he observed.
“What for do ye say that?” she asked.
“O, for naething,” says Dand. “Only I
think ye’re mair like me than the lave of them.
Ye’ve mair of the poetic temper, tho’ Guid kens
little enough of the poetic taalent. It’s an ill gift
at the best. Look at yoursel’. At denner you
were all sunshine and flowers and laughter, and now you’re
like the star of evening on a lake.”
She drank in this hackneyed compliment like wine, and it
glowed in her veins.
“But I’m saying, Dand”—she came nearer
him—“I’m for the muirs. I must have a
braith of air. If Clem was to be speiring for me, try and
quaiet him, will ye no?”
“What way?” said Dandie. “I ken but
the ae way, and that’s leein’. I’ll say
ye had a sair heid, if ye like.”
“But I havena,” she objected.
“I daursay no,” he returned. “I said I
would say ye had; and if ye like to nay-say me when ye come back,
it’ll no mateerially maitter, for my
chara’ter’s clean gane a’ready past
reca’.”
“O, Dand, are ye a lecar?” she asked,
lingering.
“Folks say sae,” replied the bard.
“Wha says sae?” she pursued.
“Them that should ken the best,” he
responded. “The lassies, for ane.”
“But, Dand, you would never lee to me?” she
asked.
“I’ll leave that for your pairt of it, ye
girzie,” said he. “Ye’ll lee to me fast
eneuch, when ye hae gotten a jo. I’m tellin’ ye
and it’s true; when you have a jo, Miss Kirstie,
it’ll be for guid and ill. I ken: I was made that way
mysel’, but the deil was in my luck! Here, gang awa
wi’ ye to your muirs, and let me be; I’m in an hour
of inspiraution, ye upsetting tawpie!”
But she clung to her brother’s neighbourhood, she knew
not why.
“Will ye no gie’s a kiss, Dand?” she
said. “I aye likit ye fine.”
He kissed her and considered her a moment; he found something
strange in her. But he was a libertine through and through,
nourished equal contempt and suspicion of all womankind, and paid
his way among them habitually with idle compliments.
“Gae wa’ wi’ ye!” said he.
“Ye’re a dentie baby, and be content wi’
that!”
That was Dandie’s way; a kiss and a comfit to
Jenny—a bawbee and my blessing to Jill—and goodnight
to the whole clan of ye, my dears! When anything approached the
serious, it became a matter for men, he both thought and
said. Women, when they did not absorb, were only children
to be shoo’d away. Merely in his character of
connoisseur, however, Dandie glanced carelessly after his sister
as she crossed the meadow. “The brat’s no that
bad!” he thought with surprise, for though he had just been
paying her compliments, he had not really looked at her.
“Hey! what’s yon?” For the grey dress was
cut with short sleeves and skirts, and displayed her trim strong
legs clad in pink stockings of the same shade as the kerchief she
wore round her shoulders, and that shimmered as she went.
This was not her way in undress; he knew her ways and the ways of
the whole sex in the country-side, no one better; when they did
not go barefoot, they wore stout “rig and furrow”
woollen hose of an invisible blue mostly, when they were not
black outright; and Dandie, at sight of this daintiness, put two
and two together. It was a silk handkerchief, then they
would be silken hose; they matched—then the whole outfit
was a present of Clem’s, a costly present, and not
something to be worn through bog and briar, or on a late
afternoon of Sunday. He whistled. “My denty
May, either your heid’s fair turned, or there’s some
ongoings!” he observed, and dismissed the subject.
She went slowly at first, but ever straighter and faster for
the Cauldstaneslap, a pass among the hills to which the farm owed
its name. The Slap opened like a doorway between two
rounded hillocks; and through this ran the short cut to
Hermiston. Immediately on the other side it went down
through the Deil’s Hags, a considerable marshy hollow of
the hill tops, full of springs, and crouching junipers, and pools
where the black peat-water slumbered. There was no view
from here. A man might have sat upon the Praying
Weaver’s stone a half century, and seen none but the
Cauldstaneslap children twice in the twenty-four hours on their
way to the school and back again, an occasional shepherd, the
irruption of a clan of sheep, or the birds who haunted about the
springs, drinking and shrilly piping. So, when she had once
passed the Slap, Kirstie was received into seclusion. She
looked back a last time at the farm. It still lay deserted
except for the figure of Dandie, who was now seen to be
scribbling in his lap, the hour of expected inspiration having
come to him at last. Thence she passed rapidly through the
morass, and came to the farther end of it, where a sluggish burn
discharges, and the path for Hermiston accompanies it on the
beginning of its downward path. From this corner a wide
view was opened to her of the whole stretch of braes upon the
other side, still sallow and in places rusty with the winter,
with the path marked boldly, here and there by the burn-side a
tuft of birches, and—two miles off as the crow
flies—from its enclosures and young plantations, the
windows of Hermiston glittering in the western sun.
Here she sat down and waited, and looked for a long time at
these far-away bright panes of glass. It amused her to have
so extended a view, she thought. It amused her to see the
house of Hermiston—to see “folk”; and there was
an indistinguishable human unit, perhaps the gardener, visibly
sauntering on the gravel paths.
By the time the sun was down and all the easterly braes lay
plunged in clear shadow, she was aware of another figure coming
up the path at a most unequal rate of approach, now half running,
now pausing and seeming to hesitate. She watched him at
first with a total suspension of thought. She held her
thought as a person holds his breathing. Then she consented
to recognise him. “He’ll no be coming here, he
canna be; it’s no possible.” And there began to
grow upon her a subdued choking suspense. He was
coming; his hesitations had quite ceased, his step grew firm and
swift; no doubt remained; and the question loomed up before her
instant: what was she to do? It was all very well to say
that her brother was a laird himself: it was all very well to
speak of casual intermarriages and to count cousinship, like
Auntie Kirstie. The difference in their social station was
trenchant; propriety, prudence, all that she had ever learned,
all that she knew, bade her flee. But on the other hand the
cup of life now offered to her was too enchanting. For one
moment, she saw the question clearly, and definitely made her
choice. She stood up and showed herself an instant in the
gap relieved upon the sky line; and the next, fled trembling and
sat down glowing with excitement on the Weaver’s
stone. She shut her eyes, seeking, praying for
composure. Her hand shook in her lap, and her mind was full
of incongruous and futile speeches. What was there to make
a work about? She could take care of herself, she
supposed! There was no harm in seeing the laird. It
was the best thing that could happen. She would mark a
proper distance to him once and for all. Gradually the
wheels of her nature ceased to go round so madly, and she sat in
passive expectation, a quiet, solitary figure in the midst of the
grey moss. I have said she was no hypocrite, but here I am
at fault. She never admitted to herself that she had come
up the hill to look for Archie. And perhaps after all she
did not know, perhaps came as a stone falls. For the steps
of love in the young, and especially in girls, are instinctive
and unconscious.
In the meantime Archie was drawing rapidly near, and he at
least was consciously seeking her neighbourhood. The
afternoon had turned to ashes in his mouth; the memory of the
girl had kept him from reading and drawn him as with cords; and
at last, as the cool of the evening began to come on, he had
taken his hat and set forth, with a smothered ejaculation, by the
moor path to Cauldstaneslap. He had no hope to find her; he
took the off chance without expectation of result and to relieve
his uneasiness. The greater was his surprise, as he
surmounted the slope and came into the hollow of the Deil’s
Hags, to see there, like an answer to his wishes, the little
womanly figure in the grey dress and the pink kerchief sitting
little, and low, and lost, and acutely solitary, in these
desolate surroundings and on the weather-beaten stone of the dead
weaver. Those things that still smacked of winter were all
rusty about her, and those things that already relished of the
spring had put forth the tender and lively colours of the
season. Even in the unchanging face of the death-stone,
changes were to be remarked; and in the channeled lettering, the
moss began to renew itself in jewels of green. By an
afterthought that was a stroke of art, she had turned up over her
head the back of the kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly
her vivacious and yet pensive face. Her feet were gathered
under her on the one side, and she leaned on her bare arm, which
showed out strong and round, tapered to a slim wrist, and
shimmered in the fading light.
Young Hermiston was struck with a certain chill. He was
reminded that he now dealt in serious matters of life and
death. This was a grown woman he was approaching, endowed
with her mysterious potencies and attractions, the treasury of
the continued race, and he was neither better nor worse than the
average of his sex and age. He had a certain delicacy which
had preserved him hitherto unspotted, and which (had either of
them guessed it) made him a more dangerous companion when his
heart should be really stirred. His throat was dry as he
came near; but the appealing sweetness of her smile stood between
them like a guardian angel.
For she turned to him and smiled, though without rising.
There was a shade in this cavalier greeting that neither of them
perceived; neither he, who simply thought it gracious and
charming as herself; nor yet she, who did not observe (quick as
she was) the difference between rising to meet the laird, and
remaining seated to receive the expected admirer.
“Are ye stepping west, Hermiston?” said she,
giving him his territorial name after the fashion of the
country-side.
“I was,” said he, a little hoarsely, “but I
think I will be about the end of my stroll now. Are you
like me, Miss Christina? The house would not hold me.
I came here seeking air.”
He took his seat at the other end of the tombstone and studied
her, wondering what was she. There was infinite import in
the question alike for her and him.
“Ay,” she said. “I couldna bear the
roof either. It’s a habit of mine to come up here
about the gloaming when it’s quaiet and caller.”
“It was a habit of my mother’s also,” he
said gravely. The recollection half startled him as he
expressed it. He looked around. “I have scarce
been here since. It’s peaceful,” he said, with
a long breath.
“It’s no like Glasgow,” she replied.
“A weary place, yon Glasgow! But what a day have I
had for my homecoming, and what a bonny evening!”
“Indeed, it was a wonderful day,” said
Archie. “I think I will remember it years and years
until I come to die. On days like this—I do not know
if you feel as I do—but everything appears so brief, and
fragile, and exquisite, that I am afraid to touch life. We
are here for so short a time; and all the old people before
us—Rutherfords of Hermiston, Elliotts of the
Cauldstaneslap—that were here but a while since riding
about and keeping up a great noise in this quiet
corner—making love too, and marrying—why, where are
they now? It’s deadly commonplace, but, after all,
the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.”
He was sounding her, semi-consciously, to see if she could
understand him; to learn if she were only an animal the colour of
flowers, or had a soul in her to keep her sweet. She, on
her part, her means well in hand, watched, womanlike, for any
opportunity to shine, to abound in his humour, whatever that
might be. The dramatic artist, that lies dormant or only
half awake in most human beings, had in her sprung to his feet in
a divine fury, and chance had served her well. She looked
upon him with a subdued twilight look that became the hour of the
day and the train of thought; earnestness shone through her like
stars in the purple west; and from the great but controlled
upheaval of her whole nature there passed into her voice, and
rang in her lightest words, a thrill of emotion.
“Have you mind of Dand’s song?” she
answered. “I think he’ll have been trying to
say what you have been thinking.”
“No, I never heard it,” he said.
“Repeat it to me, can you?”
“It’s nothing wanting the tune,” said
Kirstie.
“Then sing it me,” said he.
“On the Lord’s Day? That would never do, Mr.
Weir!”
“I am afraid I am not so strict a keeper of the Sabbath,
and there is no one in this place to hear us, unless the poor old
ancient under the stone.”
“No that I’m thinking that really,” she
said. “By my way of thinking, it’s just as
serious as a psalm. Will I sooth it to ye, then?”
“If you please,” said he, and, drawing near to her
on the tombstone, prepared to listen.
She sat up as if to sing. “I’ll only can
sooth it to ye,” she explained. “I wouldna like
to sing out loud on the Sabbath. I think the birds would
carry news of it to Gilbert,” and she smiled.
“It’s about the Elliotts,” she continued,
“and I think there’s few bonnier bits in the
book-poets, though Dand has never got printed yet.”
And she began, in the low, clear tones of her half voice, now
sinking almost to a whisper, now rising to a particular note
which was her best, and which Archie learned to wait for with
growing emotion:—
“O they rade in the rain, in the days that
are gane,
In the rain and the wind and the lave,
They shoutit in the ha’ and they routit on the hill,
But they’re a’ quaitit noo in the grave.
Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotte of auld!”
In the rain and the wind and the lave,
They shoutit in the ha’ and they routit on the hill,
But they’re a’ quaitit noo in the grave.
Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotte of auld!”
All the time she sang she looked steadfastly before her, her
knees straight, her hands upon her knee, her head cast back and
up. The expression was admirable throughout, for had she
not learned it from the lips and under the criticism of the
author? When it was done, she turned upon Archie a face
softly bright, and eyes gently suffused and shining in the
twilight, and his heart rose and went out to her with boundless
pity and sympathy. His question was answered. She was
a human being tuned to a sense of the tragedy of life; there were
pathos and music and a great heart in the girl.
He arose instinctively, she also; for she saw she had gained a
point, and scored the impression deeper, and she had wit enough
left to flee upon a victory. They were but commonplaces
that remained to be exchanged, but the low, moved voices in which
they passed made them sacred in the memory. In the falling
greyness of the evening he watched her figure winding through the
morass, saw it turn a last time and wave a hand, and then pass
through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if something went along
with her out of the deepest of his heart. And something
surely had come, and come to dwell there. He had retained
from childhood a picture, now half obliterated by the passage of
time and the multitude of fresh impressions, of his mother
telling him, with the fluttered earnestness of her voice, and
often with dropping tears, the tale of the “Praying
Weaver,” on the very scene of his brief tragedy and long
repose. And now there was a companion piece; and he beheld,
and he should behold for ever, Christina perched on the same
tomb, in the grey colours of the evening, gracious, dainty,
perfect as a flower, and she also singing—
“Of old, unhappy far off things,
And battles long ago,”
And battles long ago,”
of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars
composed, their weapons buried with them, and of these strange
changelings, their descendants, who lingered a little in their
places, and would soon be gone also, and perhaps sung of by
others at the gloaming hour. By one of the unconscious arts
of tenderness the two women were enshrined together in his
memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his
eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from
being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the
zone of things serious as life and death and his dead
mother. So that in all ways and on either side, Fate played
his game artfully with this poor pair of children. The
generations were prepared, the pangs were made ready, before the
curtain rose on the dark drama.
In the same moment of time that she disappeared from Archie,
there opened before Kirstie’s eyes the cup-like hollow in
which the farm lay. She saw, some five hundred feet below
her, the house making itself bright with candles, and this was a
broad hint to her to hurry. For they were only kindled on a
Sabbath night with a view to that family worship which rounded in
the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the relaxation
of supper. Already she knew that Robert must be
within-sides at the head of the table, “waling the
portions”; for it was Robert in his quality of family
priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who officiated.
She made good time accordingly down the steep ascent, and came up
to the door panting as the three younger brothers, all roused at
last from slumber, stood together in the cool and the dark of the
evening with a fry of nephews and nieces about them, chatting and
awaiting the expected signal. She stood back; she had no
mind to direct attention to her late arrival or to her labouring
breath.
“Kirstie, ye have shaved it this time, my lass?”
said Clem. “Whaur were ye?”
“O, just taking a dander by mysel’,” said
Kirstie.
And the talk continued on the subject of the American War,
without further reference to the truant who stood by them in the
covert of the dusk, thrilling with happiness and the sense of
guilt.
The signal was given, and the brothers began to go in one
after another, amid the jostle and throng of Hob’s
children.
Only Dandie, waiting till the last, caught Kirstie by the
arm. “When did ye begin to dander in pink hosen,
Mistress Elliott?” he whispered slyly.
She looked down; she was one blush. “I maun have
forgotten to change them,” said she; and went into prayers
in her turn with a troubled mind, between anxiety as to whether
Dand should have observed her yellow stockings at church, and
should thus detect her in a palpable falsehood, and shame that
she had already made good his prophecy. She remembered the
words of it, how it was to be when she had gotten a jo, and that
that would be for good and evil. “Will I have gotten
my jo now?” she thought with a secret rapture.
And all through prayers, where it was her principal business
to conceal the pink stockings from the eyes of the indifferent
Mrs. Hob—and all through supper, as she made a feint of
eating and sat at the table radiant and constrained—and
again when she had left them and come into her chamber, and was
alone with her sleeping niece, and could at last lay aside the
armour of society—the same words sounded within her, the
same profound note of happiness, of a world all changed and
renewed, of a day that had been passed in Paradise, and of a
night that was to be heaven opened. All night she seemed to
be conveyed smoothly upon a shallow stream of sleep and waking,
and through the bowers of Beulah; all night she cherished to her
heart that exquisite hope; and if, towards morning, she forgot it
a while in a more profound unconsciousness, it was to catch again
the rainbow thought with her first moment of awaking.
