AT THE WEAVER’S STONE
It was late in the afternoon when
Archie drew near by the hill path to the Praying Weaver’s
Stone. The Hags were in shadow. But still
through the gate of the Slap the sun shot a last
arrow which sped far and straight across the surface
of the moss here and there touching and shining on
a tussock and lighted at length on the gravestone
and the small figure awaiting him there. The
emptiness and solitude of the great moors seemed to
be concentred there and Kirstie pointed out by that
finger of sunshine for the only inhabitant. His
first sight of her was thus excruciatingly sad like
a glimpse of a world from which all light comfort
and society were on the point of vanishing. And
the next moment when she had turned her face to him
and the quick smile had enlightened it the whole
face of nature smiled upon him in her smile of welcome.
Archie’s slow pace was quickened; his legs hasted
to her though his heart was hanging back. The
girl upon her side drew herself together slowly
and stood up expectant; she was all languor her face
was gone white; her arms ached for him her soul was
on tip-toes. But he deceived her pausing a few
steps away not less white than herself and holding
up his hand with a gesture of denial.
“No, Christina, not to-day,”
he said. “To-day I have to talk to you
seriously. Sit ye down, please, there where you
were. Please!” he repeated.
The revulsion of feeling in Christina’s
heart was violent. To have longed and waited
these weary hours for him, rehearsing her endearments to
have seen him at last come to have been
ready there, breathless, wholly passive, his to do
what he would with and suddenly to have
found herself confronted with a grey-faced, harsh
schoolmaster it was too rude a shock.
She could have wept, but pride withheld her.
She sat down on the stone, from which she had arisen,
part with the instinct of obedience, part as though
she had been thrust there. What was this?
Why was she rejected? Had she ceased to please?
She stood here offering her wares, and he would none
of them! And yet they were all his! His
to take and keep, not his to refuse though! In
her quick petulant nature, a moment ago on fire with
hope, thwarted love and wounded vanity wrought.
The schoolmaster that there is in all men, to the
despair of all girls and most women, was now completely
in possession of Archie. He had passed a night
of sermons, a day of reflection; he had come wound
up to do his duty; and the set mouth, which in him
only betrayed the effort of his will, to her seemed
the expression of an averted heart. It was the
same with his constrained voice and embarrassed utterance;
and if so if it was all over the
pang of the thought took away from her the power of
thinking.
He stood before her some way off.
“Kirstie, there’s been too much of this.
We’ve seen too much of each other.”
She looked up quickly and her eyes contracted.
“There’s no good ever comes of these secret
meetings. They’re not frank, not honest
truly, and I ought to have seen it. People have
begun to talk; and it’s not right of me.
Do you see?”
“I see somebody will have been
talking to ye,” she said sullenly.
“They have more than one of them,”
replied Archie.
“And whae were they?”
she cried. “And what kind o’ love
do ye ca’ that, that’s ready to gang
round like a whirligig at folk talking? Do ye
think they havena talked to me?”
“Have they indeed?” said
Archie, with a quick breath. “That is what
I feared. Who were they? Who has dare ?”
Archie was on the point of losing his temper.
As a matter of fact, not any one had
talked to Christina on the matter; and she strenuously
repeated her own first question in a panic of self-defence.
“Ah, well! what does it matter?”
he said. “They were good folk that wished
well to us, and the great affair is that there are
people talking. My dear girl, we have to be wise.
We must not wreck our lives at the outset. They
may be long and happy yet, and we must see to it,
Kirstie, like God’s rational creatures and not
like fool children. There is one thing we must
see to before all. You’re worth waiting
for, Kirstie! worth waiting for a generation; it would
be enough reward.” And here he remembered
the schoolmaster again, and very unwisely took to
following wisdom. “The first thing that
we must see to is that there shall be no scandal about
for my father’s sake. That would ruin all;
do ye no see that?”
Kirstie was a little pleased, there
had been some show of warmth of sentiment in what
Archie had said last. But the dull irritation
still persisted in her bosom; with the aboriginal
instinct, having suffered herself, she wished to make
Archie suffer.
And besides, there had come out the
word she had always feared to hear from his lips,
the name of his father. It is not to be supposed
that, during so many days with a love avowed between
them, some reference had not been made to their conjoint
future. It had in fact been often touched upon,
and from the first had been the sore point. Kirstie
had wilfully closed the eye of thought; she would
not argue even with herself; gallant, desperate little
heart, she had accepted the command of that supreme
attraction like the call of fate, and marched blindfold
on her doom. But Archie, with his masculine sense
of responsibility, must reason; he must dwell on some
future good, when the present good was all in all
to Kirstie; he must talk and talk lamely,
as necessity drove him of what was to be.
Again and again he had touched on marriage; again
and again been driven back into indistinctness by a
memory of Lord Hermiston. And Kirstie had been
swift to understand and quick to choke down and smother
the understanding; swift to leap up in flame at a
mention of that hope, which spoke volumes to her vanity
and her love, that she might one day be Mrs. Weir
of Hermiston; swift, also, to recognise in his stumbling
or throttled utterance the death-knell of these expectations,
and constant, poor girl! in her large-minded madness,
to go on and to reck nothing of the future. But
these unfinished references, these blinks in which
his heart spoke, and his memory and reason rose up
to silence it before the words were well uttered,
gave her unqualifiable agony. She was raised up
and dashed down again bleeding. The recurrence
of the subject forced her, for however short a time,
to open her eyes on what she did not wish to see; and
it had invariably ended in another disappointment.
So now again, at the mere wind of its coming, at the
mere mention of his father’s name who
might seem indeed to have accompanied them in their
whole moorland courtship, an awful figure in a wig
with an ironical and bitter smile, present to guilty
consciousness she fled from it head down.
“Ye havena told me yet,” she said, “who
was it spoke?”
“Your aunt for one,” said Archie.
“Auntie Kirstie?” she cried. “And
what do I care for my Auntie Kirstie?”
“She cares a great deal for her niece,”
replied Archie, in kind reproof.
“Troth, and it’s the first I’ve
heard of it,” retorted the girl.
“The question here is not who
it is, but what they say, what they have noticed,”
pursued the lucid schoolmaster. “That is
what we have to think of in self-defence.”
“Auntie Kirstie, indeed!
A bitter, thrawn auld maid that’s fomented trouble
in the country before I was born, and will be doing
it still, I daur say, when I’m deid! It’s
in her nature; it’s as natural for her as it’s
for a sheep to eat.”
“Pardon me, Kirstie, she was
not the only one,” interposed Archie. “I
had two warnings, two sermons, last night, both most
kind and considerate. Had you been there, I promise
you you would have grat, my dear! And they opened
my eyes. I saw we were going a wrong way.”
“Who was the other one?” Kirstie demanded.
By this time Archie was in the condition
of a hunted beast. He had come, braced and resolute;
he was to trace out a line of conduct for the pair
of them in a few cold, convincing sentences; he had
now been there some time, and he was still staggering
round the outworks and undergoing what he felt to
be a savage cross-examination.
“Mr. Frank!” she cried. “What
nex’, I would like to ken?”
“He spoke most kindly and truly.”
“What like did he say?”
“I am not going to tell you;
you have nothing to do with that,” cried Archie,
startled to find he had admitted so much.
“O, I have naething to do with
it!” she repeated, springing to her feet.
“A’body at Hermiston’s free to pass
their opinions upon me, but I have naething to do
wi’ it! Was this at prayers like? Did
ye ca’ the grieve into the consultation?
Little wonder if a’body’s talking, when
ye make a’body yer confidants! But as you
say, Mr. Weir, most kindly, most considerately, most
truly, I’m sure I have naething to
do with it. And I think I’ll better be
going. I’ll be wishing you good evening,
Mr. Weir.” And she made him a stately curtsey,
shaking as she did so from head to foot, with the
barren ecstasy of temper.
Poor Archie stood dumbfounded.
She had moved some steps away from him before he recovered
the gift of articulate speech.
“Kirstie!” he cried. “O, Kirstie
woman!”
There was in his voice a ring of appeal,
a clang of mere astonishment that showed the schoolmaster
was vanquished.
She turned round on him. “What
do ye Kirstie me for?” she retorted. “What
have ye to do wi’ me? Gang to your ain freends
and deave them!”
He could only repeat the appealing “Kirstie!”
“Kirstie, indeed!” cried
the girl, her eyes blazing in her white face.
“My name is Miss Christina Elliott, I would have
ye to ken, and I daur ye to ca’ me out
of it. If I canna get love, I’ll have respect,
Mr. Weir. I’m come of decent people, and
I’ll have respect. What have I done that
ye should lightly me? What have I done? What
have I done? O, what have I done?” and
her voice rose upon the third repetition. “I
thocht I thocht I thocht I was
sae happy!” and the first sob broke from her
like the paroxysm of some mortal sickness.
Archie ran to her. He took the
poor child in his arms, and she nestled to his breast
as to a mother’s, and clasped him in hands that
were strong like vices. He felt her whole body
shaken by the throes of distress, and had pity upon
her beyond speech. Pity, and at the same time
a bewildered fear of this explosive engine in his arms,
whose works he did not understand, and yet had been
tampering with. There arose from before him the
curtains of boyhood, and he saw for the first time
the ambiguous face of woman as she is. In vain
he looked back over the interview; he saw not where
he had offended. It seemed unprovoked, a wilful
convulsion of brute nature....