"Yes," interposed Kezia, "or I would not give sixpence for his peace of mind these next six months."
"It is all right if you tell us," said little Keren-happuch, who was her father"s playmate. Jemima ruled him, Kezia teased him--the privilege of beauty--but it was generally little Keren-happuch who fetched his slippers and sat with her cheek against the back of his hand as he smoked and read in his great wicker chair by the north window.
There was the sound of quick nervous footsteps with an odd halt in their fall on the gravel walk outside. The three girls ran to the door in a tumultuous greeting, even Jemima losing her staidness for the occasion. Ralph could hear only the confused babble of tongues and the expressions, "Now you hear, father--" "Now you understand--" "Listen to me, father--" as one after another took up the tale.
Ralph retold the story that night from the very beginning to the professor, who listened silently, punctuating his thoughts with the puffs of his pipe.
When he had finished, there was an unwonted moisture in the eyes of Professor Thriepneuk--perhaps the memory of a time when he too had gone a-courting.
He stretched the hand which was not occupied with his long pipe to Ralph, who grasped it strongly.
"You have acted altogether as I could have desired my own son to act; I only wish that I had one like you. Let the Marrow Kirk alone, and come and be my a.s.sistant till you see your way a little into the writer"s trade. Pens and ink are cheap, and you can take my cla.s.ses in the summer, and give me quietness to write my book on "The Abuses of Ut with the Subjunctive.""
"But I must find lodgings--" interrupted Ralph.
"You must find nothing--just bide here. It is the house of your nearest kin, and the fittest place for you. Your meat"s neither here nor there, and my la.s.ses--"
"They are the best and kindest in the world," said Ralph.
The professor glanced at him with a sharp, quizzical look under his eyebrows. He seemed as if he were about to say something, and then thought better of it and did not. Perhaps he also had had his illusions.
As Ralph was going to his room that night Kezia met him at the head of the stairs. She came like a flash from nowhere in particular.
"Good-night, Ralph," she said; "give your Winsome a kiss from me-- the new kind--like this!"
Then Kezia vanished, and Ralph was left wondering, with his candle in his hand.
CHAPTER XL.
A TRIANGULAR CONVERSATION.
It was the day of the fast before the Communion in the Dullarg.
The services of the day were over, and Allan Welsh, the minister of the Marrow kirk, was resting in his study from his labours.
Manse Bell came up and knocked, inclining her ear as she did so to catch the minister"s low-toned reply.
"Mistress Winifred Charteris frae the Craig Ronald to see ye, sir."
Allan Welsh commanded his emotion without difficulty--what of it he felt--as indeed he had done for many years.
He rose, however, with his hand on the table as though for support, as Winsome came in. He received her in silence, bending over her hand with a certain grave reverence.
Winsome sat down. She was a little paler but even lovelier in the minister"s eyes than when he had seen her before. The faint violet shadows under her lower lids were deeper, and gave a new depth to her sapphire eyes whose irises were so large that the changeful purple lights in them came and went like summer lightnings.
It was Winsome who first spoke, looking at him with a strange pity and a stirring of her soul that she could not account for. She had come unwillingly on her errand, disliking him as the cause of her lover"s absence--one of the last things a woman learns to forgive.
But, as she looked on Allan Welsh, so bowed and broken, his eyes fallen in, looking wistfully out of the pain of his life, her heart went out to him, even as she thought that of a truth he was Ralph Peden"s enemy.
"My grandfather," she said, and her voice was low, equable, and serious, "sent me with a packet to you that he instructed me only to give into your own hands."
Winsome went over to the minister and gave him a sealed parcel.
Allan Welsh took it in his hand and seemed to weigh it.
"I thank you," he said, commanding his voice with some difficulty.
"And I ask you to thank Walter Skirving for his remembrance of me.
It is many years since we were driven apart, but I have not forgotten the kindness of the long ago!"
He opened the parcel. It was sealed with Walter Skirving"s great seal ring which he wore on his watch-chain, lying on the table before him as he kept his never-ending vigil. There was a miniature and a parcel of letters within.
It was the face of a fair girl, with the same dark-blue eyes of the girl now before him, and the same golden hair--the face of an earlier but not a fairer Winifred. Allan Welsh set his teeth, and caught at the table to stay his dizzying head. The letters were his own. It was Walter Skirving"s stern message to him. From the very tomb his own better self rose in judgment against him. He saw what he might have been--the sorrow he had wrought, and the path of ultimate atonement.
He had tried to part two young lovers who had chosen the straight and honest way. It was true that his duty to the kirk which had been his life, and which he himself was under condemnation according to his own standard, had seemed to him to conflict with the path he had marked out for Ralph.
But his own letters, breaking from their brittle confining band, poured in a cataract of folded paper and close-knit writing which looked like his own self of long ago, upon the table before him.
He was condemned out of his own mouth.
Winsome sat with her face turned to the window, from which she could see the heathery back of a hill which heaved its bulk between the manse and the lowlands at the mouth of the Dee. There was a dreamy look in her eyes, land her heart was far away in that Edinburgh town from which she had that day received a message to shake her soul with love and pity.
The minister of the Dullarg looked up.
"Do you love him?" he asked, abruptly and harshly.
Winsome looked indignant and surprised. Her love, laid away in the depths of her heart, was sacred, and not thus to be at the mercy of every rude questioner. But as her eye rested on Allan Welsh, the unmistakable accent of sincerity took hold on her--that accent which may ask all things and not be blamed.
"I do love him," she said--"with all my heart."
That answer does not vary while G.o.d is in his heaven.
The eye of Allan Welsh fell on the miniature. The woman he had loved so long ago took part in the conversation.
"That is what you said twenty years ago!" the unseen Winsome said from the table.
"And he loves you?" he asked, without looking up.
"If I did not believe it, I could not live!"
Allan Welsh glanced with a keen and sudden scrutiny at Winsome Charteris; but the clearness of her eye and the gladness and faith at the bottom of it satisfied him as to his thought.
This Ralph Peden was a better man than he. A sad yearning face looked up at him from the table, and a voice thrilled in his ears across the years--
"So did not you!"
"You know," said Allan Welsh, again untrue to himself, "that it is not for Ralph Peden"s good that he should love you." The formal part of him was dictating the words.
"I know you think so, and I am here to ask you why," said Winsome fearlessly.