The Lilac Sunbonnet Part 5

Winsome disdained an answer, but stood to her own tub, where some of the lighter articles--pillow-slips, and fair sheets of "seventeen-hundred" linen were waiting her daintier hand.

As Winsome and Meg washed, Ralph Peden carried water, learning the wondrous science of carrying two cans over a wooden hoop; and in the frankest tutelage Winsome put her hand over his to teach him, and the relation of master and pupil a.s.serted its ancient danger.

It had not happened to Winsome Charteris to meet any one to whom she was attracted with such frank liking. She had never known what it was to have a brother, and she thought that this clear-eyed young man might be a brother to her. It is a fallacy common among girls that young men desire them as sisters. Ralph himself was under no such illusion, or at least would not have been, had he had the firmness of mind to sit down half a mile from his emotions and coolly look them over. But in the meanwhile he was only conscious of a great and rising delight in his heart.

As Winsome Charteris bent above the wash-tub he was at liberty to observe how the blood mantled on the clear oval of her cheek. He had time to note--of course entirely as a philosopher--the pale purple shadow under the eyes, over which the dark, curling lashes came down like the fringe of the curtain of night.

"Why--I wonder why?" he said, and stopped aghast at his utterance aloud of his inmost thought.

"What do you wonder?" said Winsome, glancing up with a frank dewy freshness in her eyes.

"I wonder why--I wonder that you are able to do all this work," he said, with an attempt to turn the corner of his blunder.

Winsome shook her head.

"Now you are trying to be like other people," she said; "I do not think you will succeed. That was not what you were going to say.

If you are to be my friend, you must speak all the truth to me and speak it always." A thing which, indeed, no man does to a woman.

And, besides, n.o.body had spoken of Ralph Peden being a friend to her. The meaning was that their hearts had been talking while their tongues had spoken of other things; and though there was no thought of love in the breast of Winsome Charteris, already in the intercourse of a single morning she had given this young Edinburgh student of divinity a place which no other had ever attained to.

Had she had a brother, she thought, what would he not have been to her? She felt specially fitted to have a brother. It did not occur to her to ask whether she would have carried her brother's college note-book, even by accident, where it could be stirred by the beating of her heart.

"Well," Ralph said at last, "I will tell you what I was wondering.

You have asked me, and you shall know: I only wondered why your eyelashes were so much darker than your hair."

Winsome Charteris was not in the least disturbed.

"Ministers should occupy their minds with something else," she said, demurely. "What would Mr. Welsh say? I am sure he has never troubled his head about such things. It is not fitting," Winsome said severely.

"But I want to know," said this persistent young man, wondering at himself.

"Well," said Winsome, glancing up with mischief in her eye, "I suppose because I am a very lazy sort of person, and dark window- blinds keep out the light."

"But why are they curled up at the end?" asked unblushingly the author of the remarks upon Eve formerly quoted.

"It is time that you went up and saw my grandmother!" said Winsome, with great composure.

"Juist what I was on the point o' remarkin' mysel'!" said Meg Kissock.

CHAPTER VII.

CONCERNING TAKING EXERCISE.

Winsome and Ralph walked silently and composedly side by side up the loaning under the elder-trees, over the brook at the watering- place to which in her hoydenish girlhood Winsome had often ridden the horses when the ploughmen loosed Bell and Jess from the plough. In these days she rode without a side-saddle. Sometimes she did it yet when the spring gloamings were gathering fast, but no one knew this except Jock Forrest, the ploughman, who never told any more than he could help.

Silence deep as that of yesterday wrapped about the farmhouse of Craig Ronald. The hens were all down under the lee of the great orchard hedge, chuckling low to themselves, and nestling with their feathers spread balloon-wise, while they flirted the hot summer dust over them. Down where the gra.s.s was in shadow a mower was sharpening his blade. The clear metallic sound of the "strake"

or sharpening strop, covered with pure white Loch Skerrow sand set in grease, which scythemen universally use in Galloway, cut through the slumberous hum of the noonday air like the blade itself through the gra.s.s. The bees in the purple flowers beneath the window boomed a mellow ba.s.s, and the gra.s.shoppers made love by millions in the couch gra.s.s, chirring in a thousand fleeting raptures.

"Wait here while I go in," commanded Winsome, indicating a chair in the cool, blue-flagged kitchen, which Meg Kissock had marked out in white, with whorls and crosses of immemorial antiquity--the same that her Pictish forefathers had cut deep in the hard Silurian rocks of the southern uplands.

It was a little while before, in the dusk of the doorway Winsome appeared, looking paler and fairer and more infinitely removed from him than before. Instinctively he wished himself out with her again on the broomy knowe. He seemed somehow nearer to her there.

Yet he followed obediently enough.

Within the shadowed "ben"-room of Craig Ronald all the morning this oddly a.s.sorted pair of old people had been sitting--as indeed every morning they sat, one busily reading and often looking up to talk; while the other, the master of the house himself, sat silent, a majestic and altogether pathetic figure, looking solemnly out with wide-open, dreamy eyes, waking to the actual world of speech and purposeful life only at rare intervals.

But Walter Skirving was keenly awake when Ralph Peden entered. It was in fact he, and not his partner, who spoke first--for Walter Skirving's wife had among other things learned when to be silent-- which was, when she must.

"You honour my hoose," he said; "though it grieves me indeed that I canna rise to receive yin o' your family an' name! But what I have is at your service, for it was your n.o.ble faither that led the faithful into the wilderness on the day o' the Great Apostasy!"

The young man shook him by the hand. He had no bashfulness here.

He was on his own ground. This was the very accent of the society in which he moved in Edinburgh.

"I thank you," he said, quietly and courteously, stepping back at once into the student of divinity; "I have often heard my father speak of you. You were the elder from the south who stood by him on that day. He has ever retained a great respect for you."

"It WAS a great day," Walter Skirving muttered, letting his arm rest on the little square deal table which stood beside him with his great Bible open upon it--"a great day--aye, Maister Peden's laddie i' my hoose! He's welcome, he's mair nor welcome."

So saying, he turned his eyes once more on the blue mist that filled the wide Grannoch Valley, and the bees hummed again in the honey-scented marshmallows so that all heard them.

"This is my grandmother," said Winsome, who stood quite quiet behind her chair, swinging the sunbonnet in her hand. From her flower-set corner the old lady held out her band. With a touch of his father's old-fashioned courtesy he stooped and kissed it.

Winsome instinctively put her hand quickly behind her as though he had kissed that. Once such practices have a beginning, who knows where they may end? She had not expected it of him, though, curiously, she thought no worse of him for his gallantry.

But the lady of Craig Ronald was obviously greatly pleased.

"The lad has guid bluid in him. That's the minnie [mother] o' him, nae doot. She was a Gilchrist o' Linwood on Nithsdale. What she saw in your faither to tak' him I dinna ken ony mair than I ken hoo it cam' to pa.s.s that I am the mistress o' Walter Skirving's hoose the day.--Come oot ahint my chair, la.s.sie; dinna be lauchin'

ahint folks's backs. D'ye think I'm no mistress o' my ain hoose yet, for a' that ye are sic a grand hoosekeeper wi' your way o't."

The accusation was wholly gratuitous. Winsome had been grave with a great gravity. But she came obediently out, and seated herself on a low stool by her grandmother's side. There she sat, holding her hand, and leaning her elbow on her knee. Ralph thought he had never seen anything so lovely in his life--an observation entirely correct. The old lady was clad in a dress of some dark stiff material, softer than brocade, which, like herself, was more beautiful in its age than even in youth. Folds of snowy lawn covered her breast and fell softly about her neck, fastened there by a plain black pin. Her face was like a portrait by Henry Raeburn, so beautifully venerable and sweet. The twinkle in her brown eyes alone told of the forceful and restless spirit which was imprisoned within. She had been reading a new volume of the Great Unknown which the Lady Elizabeth had sent her over from the Big House of Greatorix. She had laid it down on the entry of the young man. Now she turned sharp upon him.

"Let me look at ye, Maister Ralph Peden. Whaur gat ye the 'Ralph'?

That's nae westland Whig name. Aye, aye, I mind--what's comin' o'

my memory? Yer grandfaither was auld Ralph Gilchrist; but ye dinna tak' after the Gilchrists--na, na, there was no ane o' them weel faured--muckle moo'd [large-mouthed] Gilchrists they ca'ed them.

It'll be your faither that you favour."

And she turned him about for inspection with her hand.

"Grandmother--" began Winsome, anxious lest she should say something to offend the guest of the house. But the lady did not heed her gentle monition.

"Was't you that ran awa' frae a bonny la.s.s yestreen?" she queried, sudden as a flash of summer lightning.

It was now the turn of both the younger folk to blush. Winsome reddened with vexation at the thought that he should think that she had seen him run and gone about telling of it. Ralph grew redder and redder, and remained speechless. He did not think of anything at all.

"I am fond of exercise," he said falteringly.

The gay old lady rippled into a delicious silver stream of laughter, a little thin, but charmingly provocative. Winsome did not join, but she looked up imploringly at her grandmother, leaning her head back till her tresses swept the ground.

When Mistress Skirving recovered herself,