The Lilac Sunbonnet Part 35

"We transplant badly, we plants of the hills. You must come back to me," said Winsome, after a pause of wondering silence.

Loch Ken lay like a dream in the clear dispersed light of the morning, the sun shimmering upon it as through translucent ground gla.s.s. Teal and moor-hen squattered away from the sh.o.r.e as Winsome and Ralph climbed the brae, and stood looking northward over the superb levels of the loch. On the horizon Cairnsmuir showed golden tints through his steadfast blue.

Whaups swirled and wailed about the rugged side of Bennan above their heads. Across the loch there was a solitary farm so beautifully set that Ralph silently pointed it out to Winsome, who smiled and shook her head.

"The Shirmers has just been let on a nineteen years' lease," she said, "eighteen to run."

So practical was the answer, that Ralph laughed, and the strain of his sadness was broken. He did not mean to wait eighteen years for her, fathers or no fathers.

Then beyond, the whole land leaped skyward in great heathery sweeps, save only here and there, where about some hill farm the little emerald crofts and blue-green springing oatlands cl.u.s.tered closest. The loch spread far to the north, sleeping in the sunshine. Burnished like a mirror it was, with no breath upon it.

In the south the Dee water came down from the hills peaty and brown. The roaring of its rapids could faintly be heard. To the east, across the loch, an island slept in the fairway, wooded to the water's edge.

It were a good place to look one's last on the earth, this wooded promontory, which might indeed have been that mountain, though a little one, from which was once seen all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. For there are no finer glories on the earth than red heather and blue loch, except only love and youth.

So here love and youth had come to part, between the heather that glowed on the Bennan Hill and the sapphire pavement of Loch Ken.

For a long time Winsome and Ralph were silent--the empty interior sadness, mixed of great fear and great hunger, beginning to grip them as they stood. Lives only just twined and unified were again to twain. Love lately knit was to be torn asunder. Eyes were to look no more into the answering eloquence of other eyes.

"I must go," said Ralph, looking down into his betrothed's face.

"Stay only a little," said Winsome. "It is the last time."

So he stayed.

Strange, nervous constrictions played at "cat's cradle" about their hearts. Vague noises boomed and drummed in their ears, making their own words sound strange and empty, like voices heard in a dream.

"Winsome!" said Ralph.

"Ralph!" said Winsome.

"You will never for a moment forget me?" said Winsome Charteris.

"You will never for a moment forget me?" said Ralph Peden.

The mutual answer taken and given, after a long silence of soul and body in not-to-be-forgotten communion, they drew apart.

Ralph went a little way down the birch-fringed hill, but turned to look a last look. Winsome was standing where he had left her.

Something in her att.i.tude told of the tears steadily falling upon her summer dress. It was enough and too much.

Ralph ran back quickly.

"I cannot go away, Winsome. I cannot bear to leave you like this!"

Winsome looked at him and fought a good fight, like the brave girl she was. Then she smiled through her tears with the sudden radiance of the sun upon a showery May morning when the white hawthorn is coming out.

At this a sob, dangerously deep, rending and sudden, forced itself from Ralph's throat. Her smile was infinitely more heart-breaking than her tears. Ralph uttered a kind of low inarticulate roar at the sight--being his impotent protest against his love's pain. Yet such moments are the ineffaceable treasures of life, had he but known it. Many a man's deeds follow his vows simply because his lips have tasted the salt water of love's ocean upon the face of the beloved.

"Be brave, Winsome," said Ralph; "it shall not be for long."

Yet she was braver than he, had he but known it; for it is the heritage of the woman to be the stronger in the crises which inevitably wait upon love and love's achievement.

Winsome bent to kiss, with a touch like a benediction, not his lips now but his brow, as he stood beneath her on the hill slope.

"Go," she said; "go quickly, while I have the strength. I will be brave. Be thou brave also. G.o.d be with thee!"

So Ralph turned and fled while he could. He dared not trust himself to look till he was past the hill and some way across the moor. Then he turned and looked back over the acres of heather which he had put between himself and his love.

Winsome still stood on the hill-top, the sun shining on her face.

In her hand was the lilac sunbonnet, making a splash of faint pure colour against the blonde whiteness of her dress. Ralph could just catch the golden shimmer of her hair. He knew but he could not see how it crisped and tendrilled about her brow, and how the light wind blew it into little cirrus wisps of sun-flossed gold. The thought that for long he should see it no more was even harder than parting. It is the hard things on this earth that are the easiest to do. The great renunciation is easy, but it is infinitely harder to give up the sweet, responsive delight of the eye, the thought, the caress. This also is human. G.o.d made it.

The lilac sunbonnet waved a little heartless wave which dropped in the middle as if a string were broken. But the shining hair blew out, as a waft of wind from the Bennan fretted a moving patch across the loch.

Ralph flung out his hand in one of the savage gestures men use when they turn bewildered and march away, leaving the best of their lives behind them.

So shutting his eyes Ralph plunged headlong into the green glades of the Kenside and looked no more. Winsome walked slowly and sedately back, not looking on the world any more, but only twining and pulling roughly the strings of her sunbonnet till one came off. Winsome threw it on the gra.s.s. What did it matter now? She would wear it no longer. There was none to cherish the lilac sunbonnet any more.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWA'.

Winsome came back to a quiet Craig Ronald. The men were in the field. The farmsteading was hushed, Meg not to be seen, the dogs silent, the bedroom blind undrawn when she entered to find the key in the door. She went within instantly and threw herself down upon the bed. Outside, the morning sun strengthened and beat on the shining white of the walls of Craig Ronald, and on Ralph far across the moors.

Winsome must wait. We shall follow Ralph. It is the way of the world at any rate. The woman always must wait and nothing said.

With the man are the keen interests of the struggle, the grip of opposition, the clash of arms. With the woman, naught worth speaking of--only the silence, the loneliness, and waiting.

Ralph went northward wearing Winsome's parting kiss on his brow like an insignia of knighthood. It meant much to one who had never gone away before. So simple was he that he did not know that there are all-experiencing young men who love and sail away, clearing as they go the decks of their custom-staled souls for the next action.

He stumbled, this simple knight, blindly into the ruts and pebbly water courses down which the winter rains had rushed, tearing the turf clean from the granite during the November and February rains.

So he journeyed onward, heedless of his going.

To him came Jock Gordon, skipping like a wild goat down the Bennan side.

"Hey, mon, d'ye want to drive intil Loch Ken? Ye wad mak' braw ged-bait. Haud up the hill, breest to the brae."

Through his trouble Ralph heard and instinctively obeyed. In a little while he struck the beautiful road which runs north and south along the side of the long loch of Ken. Now there are fairer bowers in the south sunlands. There are Highlands and Alp-lands of sky-piercing beauty. But to Galloway, and specially to the central glens and flanking desolations thereof, one beauty belongs. She is like a plain girl with beautiful eyes. There is no country like her in the world for colour--so delicately fresh in the rain- washed green of her pasture slopes, so keen the viridian [Footnote: Veronese green] of her turnip-fields when the dew is on the broad, fleshy, crushed leaves, so tender and deep the blue in the hollow places. It was small wonder that Ralph had set down in the note-book in which he sketched for future use all that pa.s.sed under his eye:

"Hast thou seen the glamour that follows The falling of summer rain- The mystical blues in the hollows, The purples and greys on the plain?"

It is true that all these things were but the idle garniture of a tale that had lost its meaning to Ralph this morning; but yet in time the sense that the beauty and hope of life lay about him stole soothingly upon his soul. He was glad to breathe the gracious breaths of spraying honeysuckle running its creamy riot of honey-drenched petals over the hedges, and flinging daring reconnaissances even to the tops of the dwarf birches by the wayside.

So quickly Nature eased his smart, that--for such is the nature of the best men, even of the very best--at the moment when Winsome threw herself, dazed and blinded with pain, upon her low white bed in the little darkened chamber over the hill at Craig Ronald, Ralph was once more, even though with the gnaw of emptiness and loss in his heart, looking forward to the future, and planning what the day would bring to him on which he should return.

Even as he thought he began to whistle, and his step went lighter, Jock Gordon moving silently along the heather by his side at a dog's trot. Let no man think hardly of Ralph, for this is the nature of the man. It was not that man loves the less, but that with him in his daring initiative and strenuous endeavour the future lies.