Love idylls

Contents

The Fitting of the Peats.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Bonnet Laird, I

Chapter I The Bonnet Laird

Ninian Mac Lurg, Laird of Millwharchar, in the hill country of Galloway, took off his broad blue bonnet and wiped his brow. It was customary for lairds at that time to wear broad-brimmed hats which came from Edinburgh, or even as far as London, according to the standing of their territorial sasine upon the rolls of the county sheriff.

But there are lairds and lairds, bonnets and bonnets. So Ninian Mac Lurg wore a blue broad-piece almost as heavy as a steel cap, with a checked band of red and white Rob Roy tartan and a round button the brightest scarlet on the top, which to the initiate meant that the headgear had been manufactured no farther away than Kilmarnock in the neighbouring shire of Ayr. The Laird of Millwharchar's bonnet was no mere common bonnet, new coft from the shop of Rob Rorrison on the Plainstanes of Dumfries. It did not dazzle the beholder with the brilliance of its checked pattern. No flaunting feather cocked restlessly at an angle upon its right side, as was too much the fashion among the unhallowed young callants who roamed the country side after the lasses.

No — many times no, indeed. Ninian Mac Lurg's bonnet was a sober, serious, responsible piece of headgear, well befitting its stern wearer. Generally it was drawn firmly down on either side till the band touched the tips of the wearer's ears. It was worn doggedly, belligerently, almost insolently. For that was the way in which Ninian Mac Lurg wore all his garments, till even when lying upon a chair by his box-bed at nights they seemed able and willing at any moment to expound the catechism, contradict an opinion upon any subject by whomsoever advanced, or to deal either any unlicensed night-raker or Episcopalian dissenter a most discomposing buffet on the side of his head for the good of his soul.

Ninian Mac Lurg was looking for his daughter Bell. He had three other younger daughters and two sons, out somehow Bell took more looking after than all the others.

'The de'il's in the lassie," was his unpaternal way of explaining and denouncing this fact. "I declare I canna gang to the house o' God on the Lord's great day but it's 'Where's Mistress Bell?' 'What for brocht ye no Miss Isobel wi' ye, Laird?' — as if the feckless helicat lassie had been the minister himsel' !"

But after all there is no accounting for taste, and so the matter stood. Then not only was this strange popularity of his daughter a trouble to the laird at kirk or market; it was equally troublesome when he abode on his own acres.

Two stout sons he had, Alec and John by name, who laboured all day at plough and flail to satisfy their father, but at the gloaming went off on their own visitations at other farm towns, where the gloom was less pronounced than within the sphere of influence dominated by the severe Laird of Millwharchar.

"The man that shall tak' daughter o' mine frae aboot the hoose," he was wont to proclaim loud enough to be heard between kirk-door and marketcross, "maun hae three hunder pound o' coined siller and three hunder acres o' good plow land besides. He shall satisfy me upon three points o' doctrine according to the Presbyterian standards of our faith, and lastly he shall stand up to me, Ninian Mac Lurg, with a stieve cudgel of oak in his fist, and therewith he shall break my head. Then after that I will speak with him in the gate concerning my daughter."

All the same Bell Mac Lurg took a good deal of trouble inseparable from the task of finding such a paragon out of the laird's hands; and used her fine eyes so resolutely and to such purpose among the faithful on Sabbath mornings at kirk, that young bloods from distant parishes, who for years had systematically neglected the stated assembling of themselves together, became constant and devout attenders upon ordinances at the Kirk of Dullarg. Moreover, some curious and recondite motive induced them to congregate along the west wall — a spot not much in favour with the general body of the faithful, inasmuch as not only was it hot in summer and cold and draughty in winter, but what was worse — from the seats along the west wall one could not watch the minister's movements during time of sermon, nor yet make certain that on the top of the shut pulpit Bible there was not room for the most microscopic of written "notes." All the same these highly undesirable benches were now generally better filled than the rest of the kirk. And it has really nothing to do with the matter to add that the square black-lettered pew of the Mac Lurgs was placed at the lower angle of the west wall, and that Bell Mac Lurg never passed a sprig of thyme or sleep-dispelling southernwood to her sisters without having a whole battery of admiring eyes directed upon her movements.

One famous Lord's Day as Ninian Mac Lurg opened the small pew door to marshal his family in before him, he stopped suddenly aghast. All four seats were piled high with branches of sweetscented "sidderwood," and as the laird said afterwards, "What with flowering thyme and other playactin' trash, the decent Millwharchar pew was steaming like a haystack that had heated."

Ninian Mac Lurg was not, however, a man without common sense. He had been, as the country side expressed it, a "gye boy" in his youth — which, being interpreted, meant that he had had some repute of wildness before the arrival of that inward grace which in the Bonnet Laird had now so entirely gained the mastery over original sin and actual transgression.

The Laird of Millwharchar, casting back into his own unhallowed youth, instantly divined whence the "rubbish" had come, and correctly estimated its meaning and purport. With a haughty gesture of his left hand he kept his family, as it were, at bay, while he entered the square "seat." Then, with an action exactly like a binder on the harvest-field, he took up the southernwood, the thyme, and yet rarer growths in his arms, pressed them into small compass, and strode with them to the bench along the west wall, which was already filled with the bachelordom, eligible or otherwise, of three parishes. Then, like to a sower on a windy day, he swept his mighty arm along the astonished row — and lo, their offerings to Venus, as one might say, the frankincense and mixed spices and myrrh were scattered in the very faces of those who had brought them to the temple. Thereafter Ninian Mac Lurg passed slowly down the west wall with his oaken staff in his hand ("thick as a bullock's hind leg," said Rob Gregory of the Boreland), and held it a moment under every young man's nose, giving him ample time to inhale the perfume of its polished knobs and sinewy compacted strength.

After that the western wall was more thickly populous than ever with daring and worshipful swains, but the Millwharchar "box-seat" remained for ever empty and swept — but wholly ungarnished.

"Bell — Bell Mac Lurg — oh, ye besom, wait till I lay hands on ye! The kye are yet on the hill. 'Tis not an hour to milking time! The lads are wauling their suppers, and gin ye dinna come, ye'll miss the worship o' God — and I'll daud the head a IT ye, my lass!"

This comprehensive denunciation Ninian addressed to the waving broom and nodding gowans of the "park" pastures which lay like a bright green fringe outside the gardens and orchards of Millwharchar. But only the girdling woods of Larbrax and his own white barn wall gave back the echo.

Thwarted outside, Ninian Mac Lurg went into the house, and relieved his feelings by subjecting his younger daughters to wholesome spiritual discipline. Then, being sore by reason of Bell's impudent evasion, he yet further regained his selfrespect by going to the hay-field in order to tell Alec and John that they were lazy good-for-nothings, who would not sleep that night with whole bones unless they worked twice as hard as they had been doing.

But these projects, agreeable and delightsome as they appeared, were instantly banished by a sight which fairly dumb-foundered the Laird of Millwharchar.

On the face of a brae some three hundred yards from the farmhouse his daughter Bell appeared, in the broad light of day, unblasted by the lightnings of heaven, calmly walking towards him with a young man on either side of her.

Chapter II The First Fitting Of The Peats

This is how it happened. As usual in such cases it was in no sense the lady's fault.

Bell Mac Lurg had gone out to the moor avowedly to "fit" such peats as had been drying on the heather, after being carried out of the "face," or wet bank of fibrous fuel, from which her father's strong arms had cut and "cast" them. It was a hot day, so Bell took with her a white summer bonnet of linen framed on wire, the materials for which she had bought out of her butter-money last Rood Fair — without, however, thinking it necessary to consult her father on the transaction. It was a becoming article of attire, but nevertheless the lady wore it mostly in her hand, or drooping over her shoulders by the strings.

Isobel Mac Lurg arrived at the peat-moss in due time, and sat down to recover herself upon a convenient tussock of dry heather, when she saw an apparition strange to be discerned in that wild place — that is, save and except when Mistress Bell by chance wandered thither. A tall young man was coming over the moss towards her.

Bell Mac Lurg shaded her brow with her bonnet. She did not need to lift it very high in order to do this, for the sun was already quickening his pace for the final plunge beneath the horizon.

"It cannot be Will Begbie," she mused. "Will is not so slender, and he always comes through the wood at any rate. It cannot be Allan of the Hill. He walks too fast for Allan. It must be someone new, someone I do not know. How interesting that will be ! But ought I to have ventured so far away from home? My father says that there are some of my Lord Dalmarnock's rebels lurking in the moss-hags yet! Shall I run home?"

She rose to her feet and kilted her coats with a pretty action of her hands at either side her already attenuated kirtle.

"No, I will not," she said; "upon second thought he does not look like a rebel — from a distance, that is !" Then she fell on her knees and began to "fit" the peats with the most intense and abstracted concentration, added to many turnings of her head to this side and that, besides divers pauses, finger on lip, to consider abstruse problems of architecture, drying and ventilation.

"It seems a difficult job, this which engrosses io Love Idylls

you so entirely, madam," said a voice close behind her. "Pardon me for enquiring if I can be of any assistance to you?"

Bell rose instantly to her feet with a little cry and — yes, explain it who will — the blushful colour of an infinite surprise mustered most becomingly upon her neck and cheeks. She could not have looked more astonished if the speaker had suddenly dropped from the new moon, which, like a blown leaf of autumn, floated already high above the horizon.

"I have startled you," said the new-comer, regretfully; "pray pardon me. I should be more sorry than I can say to discompose so fair a maiden."

In the first burst of surprise, Bell had placed one hand on her breast below her throat, as if to recover herself — Eve's attitude when Adam caught her that first time looking at the apple. Then she put her other hand up beside it with charming unconsciousness of her pose, and looked at him through her mantling eyelashes.

He was tall — taller even than she had thought when she diagnosed him from Will Begbie. He was, as it seemed at a first glance, somewhat shabbily dressed, yet he wore every article with such distinction that, as Bell put it to herself, "after a little you came quite to think him better put on than my Lord Queensberry himself." He was a young man, but yet not so very young either, a little on the shady side of thirty perhaps. But his face was so pale and thin that he looked older than his years, and when he took the military hat with its binding of tarnished gold lace off his head, Bell could see a frosting of early grey at his temples. His surcoat, unbuttoned all the way down the front, and dotted irregularly with gold buttons or the threads which had once attached them to it, was also white — or rather had once been white. The undercoat, belted easily at the waist, had likewise, doubtless, at the same time been red. It was still faced with gold lace, and had large silk pockets, from one of which the ear of a dead hare projected with a curious suggestion of listening to what was going on.

But by this time Bell had quite recovered herself. A brief, comprehensive glance at once reproachful, playful, tragic, and coquettish, had told her all that the pen has been able to pack into a longish paragraph. She decided that she would not be frightened any more — for the present, that is.

"And please, sir, who are you?" she asked, looking up again at the man in the white coat with the straggling gold buttons,

The young man laughed, and before answering glanced about him uneasily as if looking for someone.

"Glenmorrison would never forgive me if he knew I had told you, but I am called Adam

Home!"

"How strange I never had one — I mean I never knew any one of that name," said Bell instantly. "It must be very awkward."

"And why awkward?" queried Adam Home, smiling down at this pretty rustic who yet spoke so like a lady.

"Because," said Bell slowly, "if there were any one you liked very much — any one who liked you, that is, there is no nice 'little name' for them to call you by."

She seemed to turn the whole subject of this second transgression of Adam over in her mind. Then she shook that small dark head of hers, with the scarlet snood bound low about it, so vigorously that one or two crisp brown ringlets escaped from that slender band as gladly as children getting loose from school.

"No," she repeated emphatically, "it would not

be nice at all!"

Adam Home stood smiling before her, his hat

still in his hand.

The Fitting of the Peats i 3

"And may I ask what names fulfil these severe conditions sufficiently to be eligible for your favour?"

"Why," said Bell to herself, "I declare he talks like Fontinbras, in that book I hide from father, writ by Mistress Aphra Something or other."

But aloud she said, "Well, I like William, though it is common, but Charles and Francis are best of all. Willie, Charlie, and Frank are so sweet to say !"

And she looked as if she had experience of them all.

The young man bowed.

"I am fortunate enough to be able to oblige you with two of these. My full name happens to be Adam Charles Francis Charteris Home !"

"You are not deceiving me!" she said, looking up at him with an innocence which added without words, "for I could not possibly deceive you !"

"On my honour, no !" he cried, with a quick rebound from the somewhat formal gravity of demeanour he had hitherto observed. "I would not attempt to deceive one on whose countenance Nature has marked both sweetness of disposition and trustful innocence, in addition to a delicate beauty all its own."

"Lord, Lord," cried the girl, clapping her hands,

"it is wonderful! How well you know me, and without ever setting eye on me before !"

But if Mr. Home of the many praenomens had been at all an observant man, he would have noticed a very roguish smile lurking about the corners of Mistress Bell's mouth, which might have caused him to modify at least one clause of his somewhat flowery eulogium.

But at that moment his eyes were ranging the heather and trying to pierce into the dark woods which edged the Millwharchar Moss to the eastward.

Chapter III Pretty Mistress Bell

"You do not ask me my name — it must be because you know it already," said Bell, who did not approve of young men looking over her head at fine scenery, still less as if they were looking out for some one else. It was a trait of male character to which she had been little accustomed. So to the spoilt little beauty this grave young man with his stately periods, his tantalising errant eyes, his tarnished clothes, and his noble bearing, was like a spur in the flank of a mettlesome steed.

Adam Home's eyes returned slowly to his pretty companion's, lingering by the way on hillock and hollow with a sedulous and anxious regard.

"Nay," he said, "but indeed I know not your name ! Will you tell me to to whom I have the honour of speaking?"

"Is it not usual for gentlemen to ascertain that first, before speaking at all?" said Bell tartly enough.

At this Master Adam Home started as if a wasp had stung him.

"By Heaven, you are right, madam," he said, lifting his hat ceremoniously; "still I think the circumstances may plead for me. This is, if I mistake not, Millwharchar Moor, and these brown shaggy hillocks at the back are denominated Lamachan and the Black Craig of Dee."

Bell inclined her head, hoping that if he went on in such language as that she might be preserved from smiling too obviously. But she replied gravely enough : "Indeed they are, and the effort to denom — I cannot mind that most excellent word — proves you a Scot and a countryman. It is as good as an introduction at the Assembly Rooms of the town of Edinburgh. If it please your Highness" (she made him a low curtsey), "I am nominate— thank you, denominate — Bell, or otherwise Isobel Mac Lurg, eldest surviving daughter of Ninian, Laird of Millwharchar."

The young man bowed again, with yet more humble and respectful observance.

"Mistress Isobel," he said, "I come to you with something more than the commonplaces of introduction. Your kindness or cruelty may mean my life or death. So fair a lady must needs in this amorous country of ours have had such a sentence addressed to her before — but never by a man in such a case as I."

The Fitting of the Peats \j

The mirth gradually died out of Bell's eyes as he spoke.

"The fact is," he went on, "that I and a companion have had a small difficulty with the Hanoverian Government, in which we have come off somewhat at the worse. There is a price upon our humble heads which would make you safe of new bonnets to the end of your life, and which if he chose, it would greatly enrich your father to obtain. For our sins we have been compelled to take refuge with certain wild outlaws of these inmost hills, headed by one Hector Faa, who calls himself of the Honest Party, but who in fact is ready to be honest or dishonest just as may suit him best !

"Now there is pressing need for my friend and myself to get to France, both on account of the cause which we have at heart, and because the search for us grows daily more hot and close. Also for my own part I am greatly weary of a damp and dreary cave in the rocks, and of the society of Hector Faa, the hill gipsy, and his ignorant tatterdemalions."

"You are not a murderer?" cried Bell, standing a little farther off defensively; "you have never taken human life?"

The grave young man, Adam Home, laughed a little self-contemptuous ironic laugh. "Indeed, I cannot flatter me that I have. I was never in but one affair, and that was a ravelled, unsatisfactory piece of business. It took me all my time to keep the swords of King George's Hessians off my own crown."

"Then you are a rebel," she said, panting a little — "how lovely !"

"I am very glad you think so," he said. "I am in hopes that in that capacity I may make a similarly favourable impression upon your father, and mayhap induce him to accommodate us with horses, and conduct us privately to some cove on the southern shore of Galloway, whence we may obtain boat for France."

As he had been speaking, Bell's countenance had gradually been falling. As soon as he had finished she came a step nearer him, and held up her clasped hands with a sweet penitential innocence which was not on this occasion all assumed.

"Oh, do not!" she cried, "do not! For God's dear sake — yes, and your own, never dream of going to my father. If you are of the Pretender's party, or favourable to my Lord Kenmure, he will have no pity upon you — not though your case were ten times as needful."

"Mistress Isobel," said Adam gravely, "I will not conceal from you that we have heard some such reports of the laird of this bleak heritage as discouraged us from approaching him directly. But that was before we knew that he owned a jewel so rare that to possess it, nay even to gaze upon it — were worth — were worth "

"Who may you be calling it?" inquired Bell pointedly, as he stammered and paused for a fitting price with which to round his phrase.

The unexpected interrogatory knocked the bottom out of his compliment. Adam Home laughed, coloured, and finally said: "I'faith, Mistress Bell, you have not your wit to seek. We will be having you at Versailles yet, clattering up the great gallery upon the prettiest of red heels, and parrying and reposting with each courtier as you go."

"Indeed I were better employed fitting the peats," said Bell; "but to your needs. I am concerned, sir, for your necessities and those of your friend. But I do urgently dissuade you from approaching my father. He would of a surety hand you over to the Government, without question or pity, being a strong friend of their party."

"But he is a gentleman, a laird on his own property. He would surely have some compassion on misfortunate men whose heads are already forfeit to the executioner's axe !"

Bell shook her own pretty head, and felt her neck with a little shudder as if to make sure that it was rightly attached at top and bottom.

"Ah," she cried, again interrupting him, "you do not know my father when you speak so. He is a strong, fierce man, a Covenant man of the sternest sort, and he hath sworn that if ever he catch any of the Pretender's folk, he will slay them like so many rats in a trap !"

"That he might not find so easy," said the youth. "We are at least men of our hands, we rebels of the moss and cave !"

"I see, sir, that you know not my father," she answered, not without a certain satisfaction; "he could break a dozen" (she was about to say "of you," but refrained), "a dozen men in his fingers at once. There is none in all the countryside can stand against him for a moment — no, not even Sir Alexander Gordon himself."

Then a quaintly wilful look stole over her face as she looked at the young man in the frayed coat.

"But there may be a way," she said; "my father goeth to Wigton to-morrow. I know where there are horses on the moors which you can catch with a feed of corn at any time. Saddles there are in the stable, and that shall be unlocked. I will put plenty of providing for man and beast behind the park dyke in a hollow of the rock which I shall show you. I myself will set you on your way, and, it may be, provide a safe escort who will hold his tongue — a neighbour lad who will do the thing I tell him, and who will guide you to the shore at a place where a boat may be obtained."

It was now the young man's turn to shake his head, which he did slowly and sadly enough.

''Nay, my fairest lady," he said sententiously, "I thank you from my heart, but it cannot be. It shall never be said that Adam Home took another man's horse and provend without asking his leave."

"Is not this somewhat nice in a man who by his own account came over to take a king's crown?"

"You little Whig!" he cried admiringly. "I knew not that you had been so well trained in your father's opinions."

"Nay," she answered, "'tis all the same to me — one way or the other. But I acknowledge your side hath the prettiest fashions in dress, and also the most glosing tongues. So for the safety of other poor innocent maids I ought to help you all out of the country as fast as needs be."

Chapter IV A Lesson In Architecture

Bell told herself that she liked to flout this sobersides of a cavalier, because he took every saucy saying with a little quick uplift of the head which showed him unaccustomed to be so treated by any woman. And ever as soon as she had got in her shot, she knelt down and fell to fitting peats with much becoming earnestness and innocence. Adam Home was longer this time in finding anything to say in reply.

At last he broke silence, as if he had finished reviewing the whole field.

"Nay, Mistress Bell," he said, "I sincerely thank you for your kind and courteous offer. It is well intended. But I am sure that Glenmorrison would never agree to it. It would not consort well with the spirit of a gentleman."

Bell looked up sharply.

"Doth it consort with the spirit of a gentleman to stand with his thumbs in his pocket-holes while a girl fits peats on her knees?"

Again there came over the grave face the startled look which the minx had so quickly learned to try for as a sufficient reward.

"My dear lady," he cried, with a quick change of mood, "I crave a thousand pardons. To my undying shame I had not observed your occupation, so intent was I on yourself and my wretched affairs. Permit me "

He knelt down beside her, and at the first attempt succeeded in knocking over no less than five of the "fittings" which Bell had been engaged so busily in constructing before his arrival, and which she had persevered with in spite of so many interruptions.

The girl gave a little cry of horror on thus beholding her work undone.

"Hold — hold !" she cried, "you mistake. These are not ninepins. This is Millwharchar peat moor, not a skittle alley. That is not the way to fit peats, but thus — and thus."

And seizing his wrists she showed him how to take the first peat, set it angle-wise on its stronger base, face and balance it with a second, buttress it with a third, and finally, having built a fort after the manner of stooked sheaves in a harvest-field, how to put the all-important "crown" upon the work — "to turn the rain," as Bell explained technically.

"Now," she said, "take care that you do it. exactly right after this, and when you turn round see that you knock no more of my 'fittings' down, or else they will say — 'What blundering bullock has been among the peats?' "

" 'Tis the first time that ever I was called a blundering bullock," said the young man, starting half round as on a pivot at her speech.

"It will not be the last if you do not keep more watch over your feet," said the girl with a vicious click of her pretty teeth; "pray endeavour to finish one fair job without whirling round every moment like a teetotum."

The young man worked a while in silence, feeling a little sullen at being thus thwarted and tantalised by one whom he had thought to be no more than an ignorant pretty maiden of the country. But Bell's saucily unconscious air of command piqued him, and he resolved to excel in the occupation to which he had been set.

It was not long before she looked again.

"Ah, that is better — much better," she cried, sitting upon her own knees and letting the wide summer bonnet fall back from her head, so that the latter stood out against the sky with a certain comely and shapely determination. Adam Home thought he had never seen the like anywhere before. .

He did not feel the necessity of leaving the country to be so pressing or immediate as it had been.

But he was to be quickly and somewhat unpleasantly reminded of the duty on which he had come. For at the very moment when Bell had again taken his wrist to help him with a "fitting" of peats whose moist slipperiness prevented them from being easily "set," a shadow fell between them, and there, within three yards, stood the figure of a man, silently and, as it appeared, somewhat contemptuously regarding their occupation. Bell's first instinct was to start up to her feet and apologise for having been the means of causing her companion to be discovered at so trivial a task. But after one glance at the regardant intruder, the young man on his knees went calmly on with his peat-fitting, turning his head to the side and studying the architecture after the manner of his mistress, and "hefting" the peats in his hand as if his whole soul were in the work before him.