The Lilac Sunbonnet, Samuel Rutherford Crockett [best ebook reader for ubuntu TXT] 📗

be ahint yer time than me!"
Haying sped this Parthian shaft, Andra betook himself over the moor with his backful of spoil.


CHAPTER XXV.
BARRIERS BREAKING.
"Andra is completely spoiled," exclaimed Winsome; "he is a clever boy, and I fear we have given him too much of his own will. Only Jess can manage him."
Winsome felt the reference to be somewhat unfortunate. It was, of course, no matter to her whether a servant lass put a flower in Ralph Peden's coat; though, even as she said it, she owned to herself that Jess was different from other servant maids, both by nature and that quickness of tongue which she had learned when abroad.
Still, the piquant resentment Winsome felt, gave just that touch, of waywardness and caprice which was needed to make her altogether charming to Ralph, whose acquaintance with women had been chiefly with those of his father's flock, who buzzed about him everywhere in a ferment of admiration.
"Your feet are wet," said Winsome, with charming anxiety.
Andra was assuredly now far over the moor. They had rounded the jutting point of rock which shut in the linn, and were now walking slowly along the burnside, with the misty sunlight shining upon them, with a glistering and suffused green of fresh leaf sap in its glow. So down that glen many lovers had walked before.
Ralph's heart beat at the tone of Winsome's inquiry. He hastened to assure her that, as a matter of personal liking, he rather preferred to go with his feet wet in the summer season.
"Do you know," said Winsome, confidingly, "that if I dared I would run barefoot over the grass even yet. I remember to this day the happiness of taking off my stockings when I came home from the Keswick school, and racing over the fresh grass to feel the daisies underfoot. I could do it yet."
"Well, let us," said Ralph Peden, the student in divinity, daringly.
Winsome did not even glance up. Of course, she could not have heard, or she would have been angry at the preposterous suggestion. She thought awhile, and then said:
"I think that, more than anything in the world, I love to sit by a waterside and make stories and sing songs to the rustle of the leaves as the wind sifts among them, and dream dreams all by myself."
Her eyes became very thoughtful. She seemed to be on the eve of dreaming a dream now.
Ralph felt he must go away. He was trespassing on the pleasaunce of an angel.
"What do you like most? What would you like best to do in all the world?" she asked him.
"To sit with you by the waterside and watch you dream," said Ralph, whose education was proceeding by leaps and bounds.
Winsome risked a glance at him, though well aware that it was dangerous.
"You are easily satisfied," she said; "then let us do it now."
So Ralph and Winsome sat down like boy and girl on the fallen trunk of a fir-tree, which lay across the water, and swung their feet to the rhythm of the wimpling burn beneath.
"I think you had better sit at the far side of that branch," said Winsome, suspiciously, as Ralph, compelled by the exigencies of the position, settled himself precariously near to her section of the tree-trunk.
"What is the matter with this?" asked Ralph, with an innocent look. Now no one counterfeits innocence worse than a really innocent man who attempts to be more innocent than he is.
So Winsome looked at him with reproach in her eyes, and slowly she shook her head. "It might do very well for Jess Kissock, but for me it will balance better if you sit on the other side of the branch. We can talk just as well."
Ralph had thought no more of Jess Kissock and her flower from the moment he had seen Winsome. Indeed, the posy had dropped unregarded from his button-hole while he was gathering up the trout. There it had lain till Winsome, who had seen it fall, accidentally set her foot on it and stamped it into the grass. This indicates, like a hand on a dial, the stage of her prepossession. A day before she had nothing regarded a flower given to Ralph Peden; and in a little while, when the long curve has at last been turned, she will not regard it, though a hundred women give flowers to the beloved.
"I told you I should come," said Ralph, beginning the personal tale which always waits at the door, whatever lovers may say when they first meet. Winsome was meditating a conversation about the scenery of the dell. She needed also some botanical information which should aid her in the selection of plants for a herbarium. But on this occasion Ralph was too quick for her. "I told you I should come," said Ralph boldly, "and so you see I am here," he concluded, rather lamely.
"To see my grandmother," said Winsome, with a touch of archness in her tone or in her look--Ralph could not tell which, though he eyed her closely. He wished for the first time that the dark-brown eyelashes which fringed her lids were not so long. He fancied that, if he could only have seen the look in the eyes hidden underneath, he might have risked changing to the other side of the unkindly frontier of fir-bough which marked him off from the land of promise on the farther side.
But he could not see, and in a moment the chances were past.
"Not only to see your grandmother, who has been very kind to me, but also to see you, who have not been at all kind to me," answered Ralph.
"And pray, Master Ralph Peden, how have I not been kind to you?" said Winsome with dignity, giving him the full benefit of a pair of apparently reproachful eyes across the fir-branch.
Now Ralph had strange impulses, and, like Winsome, certainly did not talk by rule.
"I do wish," he said complainingly, with his head a little to one side, "that you would only look at me with one eye at a time. Two like that are too much for a man."
This is that same Ralph Peden whose opinions on woman were written in a lost note-book which at this present moment is--we shall not say where.


CHAPTER XXVI.
SUCH SWEET PERIL.
Winsome looked away down the glen, and strove to harden her face into a superhuman indignation.
"That he should dare--the idea!"
But it so happened that the idea so touched that rare gift of humour, and the picture of herself looking at Ralph Peden solemnly with one eye at a time, in order at once to spare his susceptibilities and give the other a rest, was too much for her. She laughed a peal of rippling merriment that sent all the blackbirds indignant out of their copses at the infringement of their prerogative.
Ralph's humour was slower and a little grimmer than Winsome's, whose sunny nature had blossomed out amid the merry life of the woods and streams. But there was a sternness in both of them as well, that was of the heather and the moss hags. And that would in due time come out. It is now their day of love and bounding life. And there are few people in this world who would not be glad to sit just so at the opening of the flower of love. Indeed, it was hardly necessary to tell one another.
Laughter, say the French (who think that their l'amour is love, and so will never know anything), kills love. But not the kind of laughter that rang in the open dell which peeped like the end of a great green-lined prospect glass upon the glimmering levels of Loch Grannoch; nor yet the kind of love which in alternate currents pulsed to and fro between the two young people who sat so demurely on either side of the great, many-spiked fir-branch.
"Is not this nice?" said Winsome, shrugging her shoulders contentedly and swinging her feet.
Their laughter made them better friends than before. The responsive gladness in each other's eyes seemed part of the midsummer stillness of the afternoon. Above, a red squirrel dropped the husks of larch tassels upon them, and peered down upon them with his bright eyes. He was thinking himself of household duties, and had his own sweetheart safe at home, nestling in the bowl of a great beech deep in the bowering wood by the loch.
"I liked to hear you speak of your father to-day," said Winsome, still swinging her feet girlishly. "It must be a great delight to have a father to go to. I never remember father or mother."
Her eyes were looking straight before her now, and a depth of tender wistfulness in them went to Ralph's heart. He was beginning to hate the branch.
"My father," he said, "is often stern to others, but he has never been stern to me--always helpful, full of tenderness and kindness. Perhaps that is because I lost my mother almost before I can remember."
Winsome's wet eyes, with the lashes curving long over the under side of the dark-blue iris, were turned full on him now with the tenderness of a kindred pity.
"Do you know I think that your father was once kind to my mother. Grandmother began once to tell me, and then all at once would tell me no more--I think because grandfather was there."
"I did not know that my father ever knew your mother," answered Ralph.
"Of course, he would never tell you if he did," said the woman of experience, sagely; "but grandmother has a portrait in an oval miniature of your father as a young man, and my mother's name is on the back of it."
"Her maiden name?" queried Ralph.
Winsome Charteris nodded. Then she said wistfully: "I wish I knew all about it. I think it is very hard that grandmother will not tell me!"
Then, after a silence which a far-off cuckoo filled in with that voice of his which grows slower and fainter as the midsummer heats come on, Winsome said abruptly, "Is your father ever hard and-- unkind?"
Ralph started to his feet as if hastily to defend his father. There was something in Winsome's eyes that made him sit down again--something shining and tender and kind.
"My father," he said, "is very silent and reserved, as I fear I too have been till I came down here" (he meant to say, "Till I met you, dear," but he could not manage it), "but he is never hard or unkind, except perhaps on matters connected with the Marrow kirk and its order and discipline. Then he becomes like a stone, and has no pity for himself or any. I remember him once forbidding me to come into the study, and compelling me to keep my own garret- room for a month, for saying that I did not see much difference between the Marrow kirk and the other kirks. But I am sure he could never be unkind or hurtful to any one in the world. But why do you ask, Mistress Winsome?"
"Because--because--" she paused, looking down now, the underwells of her sweet eyes brimming to the overflow--"because something grandfather said once, when he was very ill, made me wonder if your father had ever been unkind to my mother."
Two great tears overflowed from under the dark lashes and ran down Winsome's cheek. Ralph was on the right side of the branch now, and, strangely enough, Winsome did not seem to notice it. He had a lace-edged handkerchief in his hand which had been his mother's, and all that was loving and chivalrous in his soul was stirred at the sight of a woman's tears. He