Red Rowans Part 39

"As a perpetual witness to their faith when they could no longer profess it, I suppose," said Tom Kennedy. "I like the idea."

"Would be rather difficult to carry out in Kensal Green, I should say," put in Paul, lightly. "It wouldn't do to bury by belief nowadays."

"But, surely," protested the Reverend James, "the Church custom of burying towards the east is strictly enforced in all English cemeteries." He might as well have kept silence as far as those three--who by chance were sitting together--were concerned, for their thoughts were far ahead of him.

"I don't know," replied Dr. Kennedy, absently, "I think a broad division would suffice. Those who hope--not necessarily for themselves personally--and those who don't. And most of us, who care to think at all, look 'sunward,' as Myers says, 'through the mist, and speak to each other softly of a hope.'"

"A mistake," broke in Paul's clearer voice. "It is better to thank with brief thanksgiving 'Whatever G.o.ds there be, that no life lives for ever----'"

"Finish the quotation, please," put in Marjory, quickly. "'That e'en the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.' What more can anyone want?" She stretched her hand, as she spoke, to the glitter and gleam on the far horizon, and then turned with a smile to her companions.

"And this is the sunniest spot in the whole glen--the first to get the light, and the last to lose it. I couldn't wish for a better resting-place."

"I should prefer the society of a cemetery," remarked Paul; "one's tombstone would not be so detestably conspicuous as it would be up here. Imagine it--Macleod of Gleneira, etc., etc.!"

"Why should you have a tombstone at all?" asked the girl, lightly. "I hate them; horrid, unsatisfactory things, full of texts that have nothing to do with you, yourself."

"Well," put in Major Bertie, who had just returned from a tour of inspection, "there's an epitaph up there, which, as the Americans say, wraps round everything, and makes discontent impossible--'To John Stewart, his ancestors and descendants.' That ought to satisfy you, Miss Carmichael; or you might compose your own curious derangement, like a fellow I knew in the regiment--cla.s.sical sort of chap. He used to write the most touching things, and weep over them profusely. Got blown up in the a.r.s.enal one day, and didn't need any of them. It's a fact, Macleod. Before your time. So, if you have a fancy that way, Miss Carmichael----"

"I'll note it in my will," she replied evasively; then, hearing a low voice beside her quoting the lines beginning, "He is beyond the shadow of night," she turned to Paul in quick surprise.

"I have the knack of reading your thoughts, you see, though I don't share them," he said quietly, adding in a lower tone: "And now, Kennedy, I hurry no man's cattle, but if you are to catch that coach you should be going, especially if Miss Carmichael is to see you to the top of the ridge."

The inexpressible charm, which was his by nature, born of a gracious remembrance of other folk's interest, was on him as he spoke, and contrasted sharply with the lack of it in the Reverend James Gillespie, who jumped to his feet in a moment in a desperate resolve.

"If you like, Miss Marjory, I will go so far, and escort you back."

Paul looked at him distastefully from head to foot, and Dr. Kennedy frowned, and set the suggestion aside decisively. "Thanks, Gillespie, but I have some business to talk over with my ward. Good-bye, Macleod, and thanks--for many kindnesses."

"Good-bye, and--and good luck! Miss Woodward, if you don't mind, I think we ought to be starting tea-wards. The downward path is easy, but there are plenty of beauties to admire on the way. I am always too much out of breath to do so on the upward path. Excelsior is not my motto."

Yet as they paused at the first turn he looked back towards the two figures cresting the rise, and remarked easily to his companion that Miss Carmichael was quite a picture on the hillside, and walked like a shepherd. And then, as easily, he proposed taking a _detour_ through a nut wood, and so by a path he knew back to the beach.

"Alice would like a cup of tea, please; she is rather tired," he said to his sister, when they arrived there, and Lady George gave a little gasp of relief. "Oh, Paul! I'm so glad! What a dear boy you are!"

And about the same time Tom Kennedy and Marjory Carmichael stood side by side on a neck of land connecting one range of hills with another.

The bog myrtle, crushed under their feet, sent an aromatic, invigorating scent into the air. The fresh cool sea breeze, which had gathered a heather perfume in its pa.s.sage over the windswept moor, blew in their faces, and a golden mist cloud, growing above the rising shadow of the little valley on either side of them, shut out the world below. The only sign of life, save those two standing hand in hand, being a stone-chat twittering on a boulder, and a group of scared sheep, waiting with backward turned heads for the next movement to send them with a headlong rush and a clatter of stones into the mists below.

But none came. For those two stood silent for a time.

"Oh, Tom!" she said at last; "was there ever anyone so good, so kind as you are?"

He paused a moment, looking into her tearful eyes, and something of the earth earthy, seemed to slip from him, leaving him a clearer vision.

"You shall answer that question for yourself, some day, my friend," he said. "A year hence--two years--three years. What does it matter?

_Auf-wieder-sehn!_"

"_Auf-wieder-sehn!_"

The echo of her own reply came back to her from the mist as she stood, after he had gone, looking into the valley.

_Auf-wieder-sehn!_ Yes!--to such a tie as that there could be no other parting.

CHAPTER XXI.

The Reverend James Gillespie had a certain coa.r.s.e fibre in him, which made it only natural that the snub direct he had received from Dr.

Kennedy should make him more determined than he had been before on a _tete-a-tete_ with Marjory. Consequently, much to her disgust, she found him solemnly waiting for her on a tombstone in the old burying-ground. The spectacle was an irritating one.

"Why didn't you go down with the others?" she asked crossly. "You know quite well I didn't need--anyone." A certain politeness prevented her employing the personal p.r.o.noun. Not that her lover would have cared, since he came of a cla.s.s in which a certain amount of shrewishness in the wooed is not only considered correct, but, to a certain extent, propitious. And, although he had a veneer of polish on those points which had come into friction with his new world, love-making was not one of them. There he was, simply the cottier's son, full of inherited tradition in regard to rural coquetry. A fact which, at the outset, put Marjory at a disadvantage, since he refused to take the uncompromising hint, which she gave as soon as it dawned upon her what his purpose really was. And yet she could hardly refuse the man before he had asked her the momentous question. So it was with concentrated mixture of sheer wrath and intense amus.e.m.e.nt that she suddenly found him, as they paused by the wis.h.i.+ng-well, on his knees before her declaiming his pa.s.sion in set terms. The disposition to box his ears vanished in almost hysterical laughter, until the blank surprise on his face recalled her to the fact that the man was, at any rate, paying her the highest tribute in his power, and had a right to be heard. But not in that ridiculous position!

"You had better get up, Mr. Gillespie," she said peremptorily; "the ground is quite damp, and I can hear what you have to say much better when you are standing."

The facts were undeniable but the prosaic interruption had checked the flow of Mr. Gillespie's eloquence, and he stood red and stuttering until Marjory's slender stock of patience was exhausted, and she interrupted him, loftily:

"I suppose you meant just now to ask me to be your wife? If that was so----"

Her tone roused his temper. "Such was my intention," he interrupted sulkily. "I thought I spoke pretty plainly, and I fancy you must have been prepared for it."

Prepared! prepared for this!--this outrage on her girlish dreams. For it was her first proposal. What right had this man to thrust himself into her holy of holies and smirch the romance--the beauty of it all?

It is the feeling with which many a girl listens for the first time to a lover.

"Prepared!" she echoed. "Are you mad? The very idea is preposterous!"

His face was a study. "The Bishop," he began, "and Lady George didn't seem to--to think----"

"Then I am to understand that you have consulted them?" she asked, in supreme anger; but his sense of duty came to his aid and made him bold.

"The Bishop, of course. Apart from his spiritual authority, he has claims upon me which I should be indeed ungrateful to ignore, and--and it meant much to be sure of your welcome."

The real good feeling underlying the stilted words went straight to Marjory's sense of justice, and made her, metaphorically, pa.s.s the Bishop. Besides, this little discussion had, as it were, taken the personal flavour from the point at issue and left her contemptuously tolerant, as she had been many and many a time over the Reverend James's views of life.

"And Lady George," she asked, categorically, magisterially; "has she also claims to be consulted?"

He coughed. "I rather think she broached the subject. She--she saw I loved you." And here the man himself broke through the clerical coating. "For I do love you. It isn't preposterous. I would do my best to make you a good husband, and--and you could teach the school children anything you liked."

"The Bishop wouldn't approve of that," she replied impatiently, yet in kinder tones. "Oh! Mr. Gillespie, it only shows how little you understand--how little you know. You would never have dreamed of such a thing, you and the Bishop, if you had had the least conception of what I really am. Perhaps I had no right to call it preposterous, but it is impossible, utterly impossible, and he ought to have seen it."

This slur on his patron's ac.u.men roused the young man's doggedness. "I do not see why it should be either preposterous or impossible, unless you love someone else."

Then she turned and rent him, a whole torrent of indignant regret and dislike seeming to loosen her tongue. "Love! Oh! don't dare to mention the word. You don't understand it--it is profanation--I don't know anything about it myself, but _this_ must be wrong. Ah! Mr. Gillespie, for goodness sake let us talk about something else!"

"Then I am to understand that you refuse," he began.

"Refuse! of course I refuse." She felt she would have liked to go down among the whole posse of people--Paul Macleod among the number, for all she knew--who had deemed such a thing possible, and cry: "Listen!

I have refused him, do you hear? I hate him, and you, too." But the next moment the very thought of coming amongst them, with him, as if of her own free will, seemed to her unbearable, and she stopped short in the headlong course downwards, which she had begun.