At the next moment Philip, suddenly sobered, was reproaching himself fiercely. What was he doing? He had come to tell Kate that he should come no more, and this was how he had begun! Yesterday he was in Douglas reading his father"s letters, and here he was to-day, forgetting himself, his aims in life, his duties, his obligations--everything.
"Philip," he thought, "you are as weak as water. Give up your plans; you are not fit for them; abandon your hopes--they are too high for you."
"How solemn we are all at once!" said Kate.
The hymn (a most doleful strain, dragged out to death on every note) was still coming from the Melliah field, and she added, slyly, shyly, with a mixture of boldness and nervousness, "Do you think this world is so very bad, then?"
"Well--aw--no," he faltered, and looking up he met her eye, and they both laughed.
"It"s all nonsense, isn"t it?" she said, and they began to walk down the glen.
"But where are we going?"
"Oh, we"ll come out this way just as well."
The scutch gra.s.s, the long rat-tail, and the golden cus.h.a.g were swishing against his riding-breeches and her print dress. "I must tell her now,"
he thought. In the narrow places she went first, and he followed with a lagging step, trying to begin. "Better prepare her," he thought. But he could think of no commonplace leading up to what he wished to say.
Presently, through a tangle of wild fuchsia, there was a smell of burning turf in the air and the sound of milking into a pail, and then a voice came up surprisingly as from the ground, saying:
"Aisy on the thatch, Miss Cregeen, ma"am."
It was old Joney, the shearer, milking her goat, and Kate had stepped on to the roof of her house without knowing it, for the little place was low and opened from the water"s edge and leaned against the bank.
Philip made some conventional inquiries, and she answered that she had been thirty years there, and had one son living with her, and he was an imbecile.
"There was once a flock at me, and I was as young as you are then, miss, and all as happy; but they"re laving me one by one, except this one, and he isn"t wise, poor boy."
Philip tried to steel his heart. "It is cruel," he thought, "it will hurt her; but what must be, must be." She began to sing and went carolling down the glen, keeping two paces in front of him. He followed like an a.s.sa.s.sin meditating the moment to strike. "He is going to say something," she thought, and then she sang louder.
"Kate," he called huskily.
But she only clapped her hands, and cried in a voice of delight, "The echo! Here"s the echo! Let"s shout to it."
Her kindling features banished his purpose for the time, and he delivered himself to her play. Then she called up the gill, "Ec--ho!
Ec--ho!" and listened, but there was no response, and she said, "It won"t answer to its own name. What shall I call?"
"Oh, anything," said Philip.
"Phil--ip! Phil--ip!" she called, and then said pettishly, "No, Philip won"t hear me either." She laughed. "He"s always so stupid though, and perhaps he"s asleep."
"More this way," said Philip. "Try now."
"You try."
Philip took up the call. "Kate!" he shouted, and back came the answer, _Ate!_ "Kate--y!"--_Ate--y_.
"Ah! how quick! Katey"s a good girl. Hark how she answers you," said Kate.
They walked a few steps, and Kate called again, "Philip!" There was no answer. "Philip is stubborn; he won"t have anything to do with me," said Kate.
Then Philip called a second time, "Katey!" And back came the echo as before. "Well, that"s too bad. Katey is--yes, she"s actually _following_ you!"
Philip"s courage oozed out of him. "Not yet," he thought.
_Traa-dy-liooar_--time enough. "After supper, when everybody is going!
Outside the mill, in the half light of candles within and darkness without! It will sound so ordinary then, "Good-bye! Haven"t you heard the news? Auntie Nan is reconciled at last to leaving Ballure and joining me in Douglas." That"s it; so simple, so commonplace."
The light was now coming between the trees on the closing west in long swords of sunset red. They could hear the jolting of the laden cart on its way down the glen. The birds were fairly rioting overhead, and all sorts of joyous sounds filled the air. Underfoot there were long ferns and gorse, which caught at her crinkling dress sometimes, and then he liberated her and they laughed. A trailing bough of deadly nightshade was hanging from the broken head of an old ash stump, whose wasted feet were overgrown by two scarlet-tipped toadstools, and she plucked a long tendril of it and wound it about her head, tipping her sun-bonnet back, and letting the red berries droop over her dark hair to her face. Then she began to sing,
O were I monarch o" the globe, Wi" thee to reign, wi" thee to reign.
Radiant gleams shot out of her black pupils, and flashes of love like lightning pa.s.sed from her eye to his.
Then he tried to moralise. "Ah!" he said, out of the gravity of his wisdom, "if one could only go on for ever like this, living from minute to minute! But that"s the difference between a man and a woman. A woman lives in the world of her own heart. If she has interests, they centre there. But a man has his interests outside his affections. He is compelled to deny himself, to let the sweetest things go by."
Kate began to laugh, and Philip ended by laughing too.
"Look!" she cried, "only look."
On the top of the bank above them a goat was skirmishing. He was a ridiculous fellow; sometimes cropping with saucy jerks, then kicking up his heels, as if an invisible imp had pinched him, then wagging his rump and laughing in his nostrils.
"As I was saying," said Philip, "a man has to put by the pleasures of life. Now here"s myself, for example. I am bound, do you know, by a kind of duty--a sort of vow made to the dead, I might say------"
"I"m sure he"s going to say something," thought Kate. The voice of his heart was speaking louder and quicker than his halting tongue. She saw that a blow was coming, and looked about for the means to ward it off.
"The fairy"s dubb!" she cried suddenly, and darted from his side to the water"s edge.
It was a little round pool, black as ink, lying quiet and apparently motionless under a noisy place where the waters swirled and churned over black moss, and the stream ran into the dark. Philip had no choice but to follow her.
"Cut me a willow! Your penknife! Quick, sir, quick! Not that old branch--a sapling. There, that"s it. Now you shall hear me tell my own fortune."
"An ordeal is it?" said Philip.
"Hush! Be quiet, still, or little Phonodoree wont listen. Hush, now hush!"
With solemn airs, but a certain sparkle in her eyes, she went down on her knees by the pool, stretched her round arm over the water, pa.s.sed the willow bough slowly across its surface, and recited her incantation:
Willow bough, willow bough, which of the four, Sink, circle, or swim, or come floating ash.o.r.e?
Which is the fortune you keep for my life, Old maid or young mistress or widow or wife?
With the last word she flung the willow bough on to the pool, and sat back on her heels to watch it as it moved slowly with the motion of the water.
"Bravo!" cried Philip.
"Be quiet. It"s swimming. No, it"s coming ash.o.r.e."
"It"s wife, Kate. No, it"s widow. No, it"s----"
"Do be serious. Oh, dear! it"s going--yes, it"s going round. Not that either. No, it has--yes, it has------oh!"