Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (293 page)

In the meantime Archie was drawing rapidly near, and he at least was consciously seeking her neighbourhood.  The afternoon had turned to ashes in his mouth; the memory of the girl had kept him from reading and drawn him as with cords; and at last, as the cool of the evening began to come on, he had taken his hat and set forth, with a smothered ejaculation, by the moor path to Cauldstaneslap.  He had no hope to find her; he took the off chance without expectation of result and to relieve his uneasiness.  The greater was his surprise, as he surmounted the slope and came into the hollow of the Deil’s Hags, to see there, like an answer to his wishes, the little womanly figure in the grey dress and the pink kerchief sitting little, and low, and lost, and acutely solitary, in these desolate surroundings and on the weather-beaten stone of the dead weaver.  Those things that still smacked of winter were all rusty about her, and those things that already relished of the spring had put forth the tender and lively colours of the season.  Even in the unchanging face of the death-stone, changes were to be remarked; and in the channeled lettering, the moss began to renew itself in jewels of green.  By an afterthought that was a stroke of art, she had turned up over her head the back of the kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious and yet pensive face.  Her feet were gathered under her on the one side, and she leaned on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round, tapered to a slim wrist, and shimmered in the fading light.

Young Hermiston was struck with a certain chill.  He was reminded that he now dealt in serious matters of life and death.  This was a grown woman he was approaching, endowed with her mysterious potencies and attractions, the treasury of the continued race, and he was neither better nor worse than the average of his sex and age.  He had a certain delicacy which had preserved him hitherto unspotted, and which (had either of them guessed it) made him a more dangerous companion when his heart should be really stirred.  His throat was dry as he came near; but the appealing sweetness of her smile stood between them like a guardian angel.

For she turned to him and smiled, though without rising.  There was a shade in this cavalier greeting that neither of them perceived; neither he, who simply thought it gracious and charming as herself; nor yet she, who did not observe (quick as she was) the difference between rising to meet the laird, and remaining seated to receive the expected admirer.

“Are ye stepping west, Hermiston?” said she, giving him his territorial name after the fashion of the country-side.

“I was,” said he, a little hoarsely, “but I think I will be about the end of my stroll now.  Are you like me, Miss Christina?  The house would not hold me.  I came here seeking air.”

He took his seat at the other end of the tombstone and studied her, wondering what was she.  There was infinite import in the question alike for her and him.

“Ay,” she said.  “I couldna bear the roof either.  It’s a habit of mine to come up here about the gloaming when it’s quaiet and caller.”

“It was a habit of my mother’s also,” he said gravely.  The recollection half startled him as he expressed it.  He looked around.  “I have scarce been here since.  It’s peaceful,” he said, with a long breath.

“It’s no like Glasgow,” she replied.  “A weary place, yon Glasgow!  But what a day have I had for my homecoming, and what a bonny evening!”

“Indeed, it was a wonderful day,” said Archie.  “I think I will remember it years and years until I come to die.  On days like this — I do not know if you feel as I do — but everything appears so brief, and fragile, and exquisite, that I am afraid to touch life.  We are here for so short a time; and all the old people before us — Rutherfords of Hermiston, Elliotts of the Cauldstaneslap — that were here but a while since riding about and keeping up a great noise in this quiet corner — making love too, and marrying — why, where are they now?  It’s deadly commonplace, but, after all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.”

He was sounding her, semi-consciously, to see if she could understand him; to learn if she were only an animal the colour of flowers, or had a soul in her to keep her sweet.  She, on her part, her means well in hand, watched, womanlike, for any opportunity to shine, to abound in his humour, whatever that might be.  The dramatic artist, that lies dormant or only half awake in most human beings, had in her sprung to his feet in a divine fury, and chance had served her well.  She looked upon him with a subdued twilight look that became the hour of the day and the train of thought; earnestness shone through her like stars in the purple west; and from the great but controlled upheaval of her whole nature there passed into her voice, and rang in her lightest words, a thrill of emotion.

“Have you mind of Dand’s song?” she answered.  “I think he’ll have been trying to say what you have been thinking.”

“No, I never heard it,” he said.  “Repeat it to me, can you?”

“It’s nothing wanting the tune,” said Kirstie.

“Then sing it me,” said he.

“On the Lord’s Day?  That would never do, Mr. Weir!”

“I am afraid I am not so strict a keeper of the Sabbath, and there is no one in this place to hear us, unless the poor old ancient under the stone.”

“No that I’m thinking that really,” she said.  “By my way of thinking, it’s just as serious as a psalm.  Will I sooth it to ye, then?”

“If you please,” said he, and, drawing near to her on the tombstone, prepared to listen.

She sat up as if to sing.  “I’ll only can sooth it to ye,” she explained.  “I wouldna like to sing out loud on the Sabbath.  I think the birds would carry news of it to Gilbert,” and she smiled.  “It’s about the Elliotts,” she continued, “and I think there’s few bonnier bits in the book-poets, though Dand has never got printed yet.”

And she began, in the low, clear tones of her half voice, now sinking almost to a whisper, now rising to a particular note which was her best, and which Archie learned to wait for with growing emotion: —

“O they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane,
   In the rain and the wind and the lave,
They shoutit in the ha’ and they routit on the hill,
   But they’re a’ quaitit noo in the grave.
Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotte of auld!”

All the time she sang she looked steadfastly before her, her knees straight, her hands upon her knee, her head cast back and up.  The expression was admirable throughout, for had she not learned it from the lips and under the criticism of the author?  When it was done, she turned upon Archie a face softly bright, and eyes gently suffused and shining in the twilight, and his heart rose and went out to her with boundless pity and sympathy.  His question was answered.  She was a human being tuned to a sense of the tragedy of life; there were pathos and music and a great heart in the girl.

He arose instinctively, she also; for she saw she had gained a point, and scored the impression deeper, and she had wit enough left to flee upon a victory.  They were but commonplaces that remained to be exchanged, but the low, moved voices in which they passed made them sacred in the memory.  In the falling greyness of the evening he watched her figure winding through the morass, saw it turn a last time and wave a hand, and then pass through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if something went along with her out of the deepest of his heart.  And something surely had come, and come to dwell there.  He had retained from childhood a picture, now half obliterated by the passage of time and the multitude of fresh impressions, of his mother telling him, with the fluttered earnestness of her voice, and often with dropping tears, the tale of the “Praying Weaver,” on the very scene of his brief tragedy and long repose.  And now there was a companion piece; and he beheld, and he should behold for ever, Christina perched on the same tomb, in the grey colours of the evening, gracious, dainty, perfect as a flower, and she also singing —

“Of old, unhappy far off things,
And battles long ago,”

of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their descendants, who lingered a little in their places, and would soon be gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour.  By one of the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together in his memory.  Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of things serious as life and death and his dead mother.  So that in all ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor pair of children.  The generations were prepared, the pangs were made ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.

In the same moment of time that she disappeared from Archie, there opened before Kirstie’s eyes the cup-like hollow in which the farm lay.  She saw, some five hundred feet below her, the house making itself bright with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry.  For they were only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship which rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the relaxation of supper.  Already she knew that Robert must be within-sides at the head of the table, “waling the portions”; for it was Robert in his quality of family priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who officiated.  She made good time accordingly down the steep ascent, and came up to the door panting as the three younger brothers, all roused at last from slumber, stood together in the cool and the dark of the evening with a fry of nephews and nieces about them, chatting and awaiting the expected signal.  She stood back; she had no mind to direct attention to her late arrival or to her labouring breath.

“Kirstie, ye have shaved it this time, my lass?” said Clem.  “Whaur were ye?”

“O, just taking a dander by mysel’,” said Kirstie.

And the talk continued on the subject of the American War, without further reference to the truant who stood by them in the covert of the dusk, thrilling with happiness and the sense of guilt.

The signal was given, and the brothers began to go in one after another, amid the jostle and throng of Hob’s children.

Only Dandie, waiting till the last, caught Kirstie by the arm.  “When did ye begin to dander in pink hosen, Mistress Elliott?” he whispered slyly.

She looked down; she was one blush.  “I maun have forgotten to change them,” said she; and went into prayers in her turn with a troubled mind, between anxiety as to whether Dand should have observed her yellow stockings at church, and should thus detect her in a palpable falsehood, and shame that she had already made good his prophecy.  She remembered the words of it, how it was to be when she had gotten a jo, and that that would be for good and evil.  “Will I have gotten my jo now?” she thought with a secret rapture.

And all through prayers, where it was her principal business to conceal the pink stockings from the eyes of the indifferent Mrs. Hob — and all through supper, as she made a feint of eating and sat at the table radiant and constrained — and again when she had left them and come into her chamber, and was alone with her sleeping niece, and could at last lay aside the armour of society — the same words sounded within her, the same profound note of happiness, of a world all changed and renewed, of a day that had been passed in Paradise, and of a night that was to be heaven opened.  All night she seemed to be conveyed smoothly upon a shallow stream of sleep and waking, and through the bowers of Beulah; all night she cherished to her heart that exquisite hope; and if, towards morning, she forgot it a while in a more profound unconsciousness, it was to catch again the rainbow thought with her first moment of awaking.

CHAPTER VII — ENTER MEPHISTOPHELES

Two days later a gig from Crossmichael deposited Frank Innes at the doors of Hermiston.  Once in a way, during the past winter, Archie, in some acute phase of boredom, had written him a letter.  It had contained something in the nature of an invitation or a reference to an invitation — precisely what, neither of them now remembered.  When Innes had received it, there had been nothing further from his mind than to bury himself in the moors with Archie; but not even the most acute political heads are guided through the steps of life with unerring directness.  That would require a gift of prophecy which has been denied to man.  For instance, who could have imagined that, not a month after he had received the letter, and turned it into mockery, and put off answering it, and in the end lost it, misfortunes of a gloomy cast should begin to thicken over Frank’s career?  His case may be briefly stated.  His father, a small Morayshire laird with a large family, became recalcitrant and cut off the supplies; he had fitted himself out with the beginnings of quite a good law library, which, upon some sudden losses on the turf, he had been obliged to sell before they were paid for; and his bookseller, hearing some rumour of the event, took out a warrant for his arrest.  Innes had early word of it, and was able to take precautions.  In this immediate welter of his affairs, with an unpleasant charge hanging over him, he had judged it the part of prudence to be off instantly, had written a fervid letter to his father at Inverauld, and put himself in the coach for Crossmichael.  Any port in a storm!  He was manfully turning his back on the Parliament House and its gay babble, on porter and oysters, the race-course and the ring; and manfully prepared, until these clouds should have blown by, to share a living grave with Archie Weir at Hermiston.

To do him justice, he was no less surprised to be going than Archie was to see him come; and he carried off his wonder with an infinitely better grace.

“Well, here I am!” said he, as he alighted.  “Pylades has come to Orestes at last.  By the way, did you get my answer?  No?  How very provoking!  Well, here I am to answer for myself, and that’s better still.”

“I am very glad to see you, of course,” said Archie.  “I make you heartily welcome, of course.  But you surely have not come to stay, with the Courts still sitting; is that not most unwise?”