Young Lachie did not bide long on our side of the water: a day or two and he was away back to his people, but not before he and I, in a way, patched up once more a friendship that had never been otherwise than distant, and was destined so to remain till the end, when he married my aunt, Nannie Ruadh of the Boshang Gate, whose money we had been led to look for as a help to our fallen fortunes. She might, for age, have been his mother, and she was more than a mother to the child he brought to her from Carlunnan without so much as by your leave, the day after they took up house together. “That’s my son,” said he, “young Lachie.” She looked at the sturdy little fellow beating with a knife upon the bark of an ashen sapling he was fashioning into a whistle, and there was no denying the resemblance. The accident was common enough in those days. “Who is the mother?” was all she said, with her plump hand on the little fellow’s head. “She was So-and-so,” answered her husband, looking into the fire; “we were very young, and I’ve paid the penalty by my rueing it ever since.”
Nannie Ruadh took the child to her heart that never knew the glamour of her own, and he grew up, as I could tell in a more interesting tale than this, to be a great and good soldier, who won battles for his country. So it will be seen that the Dame Dubh’s story to us in the cot by Aora had not travelled very far when it had not in six years reached the good woman of Boshang Gate, who knew everybody’s affairs between the two stones of the parish. M’Iver and I shared the secret with MacLachlan and the nurse of his dead lover; it went no farther, and it was all the more wonderful that John should keep his thumb on it, considering its relevancy to a blunder that made him seem a scoundrel in the eyes of Mistress Betty. Once I proposed to him that through her father she might have the true state of affairs revealed to her.
“Let her be,” he answered, “let her be. She’ll learn the truth some day, no doubt.” And then, as by a second thought, “The farther off the better, perhaps,” a saying full of mystery.
The Dark Dame, as I say, gave me the cure for a sore heart. Her news, so cunningly squeezed from her by John Splendid, relieved me at once of the dread that MacLachlan, by his opportunities of wooing, had made himself secure in her affections, and that those rambles by the river to Carlunnan had been by the tryst of lovers. A wholesome new confidence came to my aid when the Provost, aging and declining day by day to the last stroke that came so soon after, hinted once that he knew no one he would sooner leave the fortunes of his daughter with than with myself. I mooted the subject to his wife too, in one wild valour of a sudden meeting, and even she, once so shy of the topic, seemed to look upon my suit with favour.
“I could not have a goodson more worthy than yourself,” she was kind enough to say. “Once I thought Betty’s favour was elsewhere, in an airt that scarcely pleased me, and------”
“But that’s all over,” I said, warmly, sure she thought of MacLachlan.
“I hope it is; I think it is,” she said. “Once I had sharp eyes on my daughter, and her heart’s inmost throb was plain to me, for you see, Colin, I have been young myself, long since, and I remember. A brave heart will win the brawest girl, and you have every wish of mine for your good fortune.”
Then I played every art of the lover, emboldened the more since I knew she had no tie of engagement. Remembering her father’s words in the harvest-field of Elrigmore, I wooed her, not in humility, but in the confidence that, in other quarters, ere she ever came on the scene, had given me liberty on the lips of any girl I met in a lane without more than a laughing protest Love, as I learned now, was not an outcome of the reason but will’s mastership. Day by day I contrived to see my lady. I was cautious to be neither too hot nor too cold, and never but at my best in appearance and in conversation. All my shyness I thrust under my feet: there is one way to a woman’s affections, and that is frankness to the uttermost. I thought no longer, ere I spoke, if this sentiment should make me ridiculous, or that sentiment too readily display my fondness, but spoke out as one in a mere gallantry.
At first she was half alarmed at the new mood I was in, shrinking from this, my open revelation, and yet, I could see, not unpleased altogether that she should be the cause of a change so much to my advantage. I began to find a welcome in her smile and voice when I called on the household of an afternoon or evening, on one pretext or another, myself ashamed sometimes at the very flimsiness of them. She would be knitting by the fire perhaps, and it pleased me greatly by some design of my conversation to make her turn at once her face from the flames whose rosiness concealed her flushing, and reveal her confusion to’the yellow candle-light. Oh! happy days. Oh! times so gracious, the spirit and the joy they held are sometimes with me still. We revived, I think, the glow of that meeting on the stair when I came home from Germanie, and the hours passed in swallow flights as we talked of summer days gone bye.
At last we had even got the length of walking together in an afternoon or evening in the wood behind the town that has been the haunt in courting days of generations of our young people: except for a little melancholy in my lady, these were perhaps life’s happiest periods. The wind might be sounding and the old leaves flying in the wood, the air might chill and nip, but there was no bitterness for us in the season’s chiding. To-day, an old man, with the follies of youth made plain and contemptible, I cannot but think those eves in the forest had something precious and magic for memory. There is no sorrow in them but that they are no more, and that the world to come may have no repetition. How the trees, the tall companions, communed together in their heights among the stars! how the burns tinkled in the grasses and the howlets mourned. And we, together, walked sedate and slowly in those evening alleys, surrounded by the scents the dews bring forth, shone upon by silver moon and stars.
To-day, in my eld, it amuses me still that for long I never kissed her. I had been too slow of making a trial, to venture it now without some effort of spirit; and time after time I had started on our stately round of the hunting-road with a resolution wrought up all the way from my looking-glass at Elrigmore, that this should be the night, if any, when I should take the liberty that surely our rambles, though actual word of love had not been spoken, gave me a title to. A title! I had kissed many a bigger girl before in a caprice at a hedge-gate. But this little one, so demurely walking by my side, with never so much as an arm on mine, her pale face like marble in the moonlight, her eyes, when turned on mine, like dancing points of fire---Oh! the task defied me! The task I say--it was a duty, I’ll swear now, in the experience of later years.
I kissed her first on the night before M’Iver set out on his travels anew, no more in the camp of Argile his severed chief, but as a Cavalier of the purchased sword.
It was a night of exceeding calm, with the moon, that I had seen as a corn-hook over my warfare with MacLachlan in Tarra-dubh, swollen to the full and gleaming upon the country till it shone as in the dawn of day. We walked back and forth on the hunting-road, for long in a silence broken by few words. My mind was in a storm. I felt that I was losing my friend, and that, by itself, was trouble; but I felt, likewise, a shame that the passion of love at my bosom robbed the deprivation of much of its sorrow.
“I shall kiss her to-night if she spurns me for ever,” I said to myself over and over again, and anon I would marvel at my own daring; but the act was still to do. It was more than to do--it was to be led up to, and yet my lady kept every entrance to the project barred, with a cunning that yet astounds me.
We had talked of many things in our evening rambles in that wood, but never of M’Iver, whose name the girl shunned mention of for a cause I knew but could never set her right on. This night, his last in our midst, I ventured on his name. She said nothing for a little, and for a moment I thought, “Here’s a dour, little, unforgiving heart!” Then, softly, said she, “I wish him well and a safe return from his travelling. I wish him better than his deserts. That he goes at all surprises me. I thought it but John Splendid’s promise--to be acted on or not as the mood happened.”
“Yes,” I said; “he goes without a doubt. I saw him to-day kiss his farewells with half-a-dozen girls on the road between the Maltland and the town.”
“I daresay,” she answered; “he never lacked boldness.”
My chance had come.
“No, indeed, he did not,” said I; “and I wish I had some of it myself.”
“What! for so common a display of it?” she asked, rallying, yet with some sobriety in her tone.
“Not a bit,” I answered; “that--that--that I might act the part of a lover with some credit to myself, and kiss the one girl I know in that capacity.”
“Would she let you?” she asked, removing herself by a finger-length from my side, yet not apparently enough to show she thought herself the one in question.
“That, madame, is what troubles me,” I confessed in anguish, for her words had burst the bubble of my courage.
“Of course you cannot tell till you try,” she said, demurely, looking straight before her, no smile on the corners of her lips, that somehow maddened by their look of pliancy.
“You know whom I mean,” I said, pursuing my plea, whose rustic simplicity let no man mock at, remembering the gawky errors of his own experience.
“There’s Bell, the minister’s niece, and there’s Kilblaan’s daughter, and----”
“Oh, my dear! my dear!” I cried, stopping and putting my hand daringly on her shoulder. “You know it is not any of these; you must know I mean yourself. Here am I, a man travelled, no longer a youth, though still with the flush of it, no longer with a humility to let me doubt myself worthy of your best thoughts; I have let slip a score of chances on this same path, and even now I cannot muster up the spirit to brave your possible anger.”
She laughed a very pleasant soothing laugh and released her shoulder. “At least you give me plenty of warning,” she said.
“I am going to kiss you now,” I said, with great firmness.
She walked a little faster, panting as I could hear, and I blamed myself that I had alarmed her.
“At least,” I added, “I’ll do it when we get to Bealloch-an-uarain well.”
She hummed a snatch of Gaelic song we have upon that notable well, a song that is all an invitation to drink the waters while you are young and drink you may, and I suddenly ventured to embrace her with an arm. She drew up with stern lips and back from my embrace, and Elrigmore was again in torment.
“You are to blame yourself,” I said, huskily; “you let me think I might. And now I see you are angry.”
“Am I?” she said, smiling again. “I think you said the well, did you not!”
“And may I?” eagerly I asked, devouring her with my eyes.
“You may--at the well,” she answered, and then she laughed softly.
Again my spirits bounded.
“But I was not thinking of going there to-night,” she added, and the howlet in the bush beside me hooted at my ignominy.
I walked in a perspiration of vexation and alarm. It was plain that here was no desire for my caress, that the girl was but probing the depth of my presumption, and I gave up all thought of pushing my intention to performance. Our conversation turned to more common channels, and I had hoped my companion had lost the crude impression of my wooing as we passed the path that led from the hunting-road to the Bealloch-an-uarain.
“Oh!” she cried here, “I wished for some ivy; I thought to pluck it farther back, and your nonsense made me quite forget.”
“Cannot we return for it?” I said, well enough pleased at the chance of prolonging our walk.
“No; it is too late,” she answered abruptly. “Is there nowhere else here where we could get it?”
“I do not think so,” I said, stupidly. Then I remembered that it grew in the richest profusion on the face of the grotto we call Bealloch-an-uarain. “Except at the well,” I added.
“Of course it is so; now I remember,” said she; “there is plenty of it there. Let us haste and get it” And she led the way up the path, I following with a heart that surged and beat.
When our countryside is changed, when the forest of Creag Dubh, where roam the deer, is levelled with the turf, and the foot of the passenger wears round the castle of Argile, I hope, I pray, that grotto on the brae will still lift up its face among the fern and ivy. Nowadays when the mood comes on me, and I must be the old man chafing against the decay of youth’s spirit, and the recollection overpowers of other times and other faces than those so kent and tolerant about me, I put my plaid on my shoulders and walk to Bealloch-an-uarain well. My children’s children must be with me elsewhere on my saunters; here I must walk alone. I am young again when looking on that magic fountain, still the same as when its murmur sounded in my lover’s ears. Here are yet the stalwart trees, the tall companions, that nodded on our shy confessions; the ivy hangs in sheeny spray upon the wall. Time, that ranges, has here no freedom, but stands, shackled by links of love and memory to the rocks we sat on. I sit now there and muse, and beside me is a shadow that never ages, with a pale face averted, looking through leafless boughs at the glimpse of star and moon. I see the bosom heave; I see the eyes flash full, then soften half-shut on some inward vision. For I am never there at Bealloch-an-uarain, summer or spring, but the season, in my thought, is that of my wife’s first kiss, and it is always a pleasant evening and the birds are calling in the dusk.
I plucked my lady’s ivy with a cruel wrench, as one would pluck a sweet delusion from his heart, and her fingers were so warm and soft as I gave her the leaves! Then I turned to go.
“It is time we were home,” I said, anxious now to be alone with my vexation.
“In a moment,” she said, plucking more ivy for herself; and then she said, “Let us sit a little; I am wearied.”
My courage came anew. “Fool!” I called myself. “You may never have the chance again.” I sat down by her side, and talked no love but told a story.
It is a story we have in the sheilings among the hills, the tale of “The Sea Fairy of French Foreland”; but I changed it as I went on, and made the lover a soldier.
I made him wander, and wandering think of home and a girl beside the sea. I made him confront wild enemies and battle with storms, I set him tossing upon oceans and standing in the streets of leaguered towns, or at grey heartless mornings upon lonely plains with solitude around, and yet, in all, his heart was with the girl beside the sea.
She listened and flushed. My hero’s dangers lit her eyes like lanthorns, my passions seemed to find an echo in her sighs.
Then I pitied my hero, the wandering soldier, so much alone, so eager, and unforgetting, till I felt the tears in my eyes as I imaged his hopeless longing.
She checked her sighs, she said my name in the softest whisper, laid her head upon my shoulder and wept. And then at last I met her quivering lips.
