by Neil Munro
CHAPTER II
MISS FORTUNE'S TRYST BY WATER OF EARN, AND HOW I MARRED THE SAMEUNWITTINGLY
For the most part of a year I toiled and moiled like any crofter's sonon my father's poor estate, and dreary was the weird I had to dree, formy being there at all was an advertisement to the countryside of what afool was young Paul Greig. "The Spoiled Horn" was what they called me inthe neighbourhood (I learned it in the taunt of a drunken packman), forI had failed at being the spoon I was once designed for, and there wasnot a ne'er-do-weel peasant nor a bankrupt portioner came craving somebenefit to my father's door but made up for his deference to the lairdby his free manner with the laird's son. The extra tenderness of mymother (if that were possible) only served to swell my rebel heart, forI knew she was but seeking to put me in a better conceit of myself, andI found a place whereof I had before been fond exceedingly assume a newcomplexion. The rain seemed to fall constantly that year, and the earthin spring was sodden and sour. Hazel Den House appeared sunk in therotten leafage of the winter long after the lambs came home and thesnipe went drumming on the marsh, and the rookery in the holm plantationwas busy with scolding parents tutoring their young. A solemn house atits best--it is so yet, sometimes I think, when my wife is on a jauntat her sister's and Walter's bairns are bedded--it was solemn beyond alldescription that spring, and little the better for the coming of summerweather. For then the trees about it, that gave it over long billows ofuntimbered countryside an aspect of dark importance, by the same tokenrobbed it (as I thought then) of its few amenities. How it got the nameof Hazel Den I cannot tell, for autumn never browned a nut there. It waswych elm and ash that screened Hazel Den House; the elms monstrous andgrotesque with knotty growths: when they were in their full leaf behindthe house they hid the valley of the Clyde and the Highland hills, thatat bleaker seasons gave us a sense of companionship with the wide worldbeyond our infield of stunted crops. The ash towered to the number oftwo score and three towards the south, shutting us off from the viewthere, and working muckle harm to our kitchen-garden. Many a time myfather was for cutting them down, but mother forbade it, though hersyboes suffered from the shade and her roses grew leggy and unblooming."That," said she, "is the want of constant love: flowers are likebairns; ye must be aye thinking of them kindly to make them thrive." Andindeed there might be something in the notion, for her apple-ringieand Dutch Admiral, jonquils, gillyflowers, and peony-roses throvemarvellously, better then they did anywhere in the shire of Renfrewwhile she lived and tended them and have never been quite the same sinceshe died, even with a paid gardener to look after them.
A winter loud with storm, a spring with rain-rot in the fallen leaf, asummer whose foliage but made our home more solitary than ever, a shortautumn of stifling heats--that was the year the Spoiled Horn tasted thebitterness of life, the bitterness that comes from the want of anaim (that is better than the best inheritance in kind) and from aconsciousness that the world mistrusts your ability. And to cap all,there was no word about my returning to the prelections of ProfessorReid, for a reason which I could only guess at then, but learned laterwas simply the want of money.
My father comported himself to me as if I were doomed to fall into adecline, as we say, demanding my avoidance of night airs, preaching theHoratian virtues of a calm life in the fields, checking with a reddenedface and a half-frightened accent every turn of the conversation thatgave any alluring colour to travel or adventure. Notably he was dumb,and so was my mother, upon the history of his family. He had had fourbrothers: three of them I knew were dead and their tombs not in Mearnskirkyard; one of them, Andrew, the youngest, still lived: I feared itmight be in a bedlam, by the avoidance they made of all reference tohim. I was fated, then, for Bedlam or a galloping consumption--so Iapprehended dolefully from the mystery of my folk; and the notion sentme often rambling solitary over the autumn moors, cultivating a notunpleasing melancholy and often stringing stanzas of a solemn complexionthat I cannot recall nowadays but with a laugh at my folly.
A favourite walk of mine in these moods was along the Water of Earn,where the river chattered and sang over rocks and shallows or plungedthundering in its linn as it did ere I was born and shall do when I andmy story are forgotten. A pleasant place, and yet I nearly always had itto myself alone.
I should have had it always to myself but for one person--Isobel Fortunefrom the Kirkillstane. She seemed as little pleased to meet me thereas I was to meet her, though we had been brought up in the same schooltogether; and when I would come suddenly round a bend of the road andshe appeared a hundred yards off, I noticed that she half stopped andseemed, as it were, to swither whether she should not turn and avoid me.It would not have surprised me had she done so, for, to tell the truth,I was no very cheery object to contemplate upon a pleasant highway, withthe bawbee frown of a poetic gloom upon my countenance and the most curtof salutations as I passed. What she did there all her lone so oftenmildly puzzled me, till I concluded she was on a tryst with some younggentleman of the neighbourhood; but as I never saw sign of him, I didnot think myself so much the marplot as to feel bound to take anotherroad for my rambling. I was all the surer 'twas a lover she was out tomeet, because she reddened guiltily each time that we encountered (afine and sudden charm to a countenance very striking and beautiful, as Icould not but observe even then when weightier affairs engaged me); butit seemed I was all in error, for long after she maintained she was,like myself, indulging a sentimental humour that she found go very wellin tune with the noise of Earn Water.
As it was her habit to be busily reading when we thus met, I had littledoubt as to the ownership of a book that one afternoon I found onthe road not long after passing her. It was--of all things in theworld!--Hervey's "Meditations."
"It's an odd graveyard taste for a lass of that stamp," thought I,hastening back after her to restore the book, and when I came up to hershe was--not red this time, but wan to the very lips, and otherwise insuch confusion that she seemed to tremble upon her legs, "I think thisis yours, Isobel," says I: we were too well acquaint from childhood forany address more formal.
"Oh, thank you, Paul," said she hastily. "How stupid of me to lose it!"She took it from me; her eye fell (for the first time, I felt sure) uponthe title of the volume, and she bit her lip in a vexation. I was allthe more convinced that her book was but a blind in her rambles, andthat there was a lover somewhere; and I think I must have relaxed mysilly black frown a little, and my proud melancholy permitted a faintsmile of amusement. The flag came to her face then.
"Thank you," said she very dryly, and she left me in the middle of theroad, like a stirk. If it had been no more than that, I should havethought it a girl's tantrum; but the wonder was to come, for beforeI had taken three steps on my resumed way I heard her run after me. Istopped, and she stopped, and the notion struck me like a rhyme of songthat there was something inexpressibly pleasant in her panting breathand her heaving bosom, where a pebble brooch of shining red gleamed likean eye between her breasts.
"I'm not going to tell you a lie about it, Master Paul," she said,almost like to cry; "I let the book fall on purpose."
"Oh, I could have guessed as much as that, Isobel," said I, wonderingwho in all the world the fellow was. Her sun-bonnet had fallen from herhead in her running, and hung at her back on its pink ribbons, and acurl or two of her hair played truant upon her cheek and temple. Itseemed to me the young gentleman she was willing to let a book drop foras a signal of her whereabouts was lucky enough.
"Oh! you could have guessed!" she repeated, with a tone in which weredumbfounderment and annoyance; "then I might have saved myself thetrouble." And off she went again, leaving me more the stirk than everand greatly struck at her remorse of conscience over a little sophistryvery pardonable in a lass caught gallivanting. When she was gone and herfrock was fluttering pink at the turn of the road, I was seized for thefirst time with a notion that a girl like that some way set off, as wesay, or suited with, a fine landscape.
Not five minute
s later I met young David Borland of the Driepps, andthere--I told myself--the lover was revealed! He let on he was takinga short cut for Polnoon, so I said neither buff nor sty as to MistressIsobel.
The cool superiority of the gentleman, who had, to tell the truth, aslittle in his head as I had in the heel of my shoe, somewhat galled me,for it cried "Spoiled Horn!" as loud as if the taunt were bawled, so mytalk with him was short. There was but one topic in it to interest me.
"Has the man with the scarred brow come yet?" he asked curiously.
I did not understand.
"Then he's not your length yet," said he, with the manifest gratificationof one who has the hanselling of great news. "Oh! I came on him thismorning outside a tavern in the Gorbals, bargaining loudly about asaddle horse for Hazel Den. I'll warrant Hazel Den will get a start whenit sees him."
I did not care to show young Borland much curiosity in his story, and soit was just in the few words he gave it to me that I brought it home toour supper-table.
My father and mother looked at each other as if I had told them atragedy. The supper ended abruptly. The evening worship passed unusuallyfast, my father reading the Book as one in a dream, and we went to ourbeds nigh an hour before the customary time.