A LEAF FROM CHRISTINA’S PSALM-BOOK
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
octosyllabics 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 find 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 kirkyard. 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.
“Daftlike!” 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 naething 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 kirkyard, 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 manoeuvre 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 shürely 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 stirk,”
“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
undissuadably 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 heed, 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 leear?” 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 good-night 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, Dandle 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 way. 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 countryside.
“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,” said she. “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 hame-coming, 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, woman-like, 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 ran 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 Elliotts of auld!”
All the time she sang she looked steadfastly
before her, her knees straight, her hands upon her
knee, 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,”
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 withinsides 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 slily.
She looked down; she was one blush.
“I maun have forgotten to change them,”
said she; and went in to 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.