CHAPTER I.
JEAN SCORNED.
‘Ower the muir among the heather,’ Jean Kinloch walked straight and fast on a sunny sabbath morning in autumn. She was only nineteen years of age but already she was tall and broad-shouldered, with the perfect proportions and perfect development of health and strength. She was nearer to a beautiful woman than to a bonnie lassie. She had the dark-haired, black-browed, grey-eyed face, with the clear-cut features and clear complexion which one is accustomed to associate with the highest type of Norman beauty. But Jean’s white square teeth, and round somewhat massive chin, were departures from the type as it is usually to be met with. And if she had the dignity and earnestness which on occasions break into sunshine--incomparably sweeter, more pathetic, even more radiant, relieved against the almost sombre background, than an all-pervading, soulless light-heartedness can be--it was not Norman dignity and earnestness. It was the self-respect and sedateness of the Scotch peasant woman, on whom a Hebrew stamp has been deeply impressed, who is enamoured of duty as other women are enamoured of pleasure, to whom the sternest doctrines of Calvinism are invested with an awful beauty. These are the Lord’s decrees, and though He should slay her, yet will she trust in Him.
Jean’s dress had lost the picturesqueness which would have distinguished her grand-mother’s, but it was good of its kind--if somewhat severe in the tone and cut, and only remarkable as worn by Jean Kinloch. But Jean carried a bible which was no modern, cheaply printed, cheaply bound Bible Society’s volume: it was a valuable hereditary possession in a couple of small volumes bound in fine and lasting russian leather with flaps fastened by burnished silver clasps, while there was dim gold on the edges of the yellow leaves with their clear delicate print. A bible not unlike it is to be seen among the relics of Burns. It was given by the peasant farmer’s son to his Highland Mary--the girl whom he was to immortalise by two out of the most exquisite love-laments in any language--in that autumn when she came down and ‘shore’ the harvest with him among the
‘banks and braes and streams around The Castle o’ Montgomery.’
But Jean Kinloch’s bible was not a love-gift, on which, as it was held in the man’s left hand over a running stream, the woman and her lover clasped hands, and swore in the sight of their God to be faithful to death. Such bibles with the broken sixpences of a more worldly form of troth-plight were already gone out of fashion. This book possessed a different distinction, having been Jean’s mother’s kirking bible.
Jean was bound on a long and fatiguing walk even for her youth and vigour, so that she had got up by daybreak, before even the minister, the earliest riser in the manse, had replaced the Greek and Hebrew studies of ordinary days, by the preparatory devotions peculiar to the sabbath day, while the rest of the household lay in silent unconsciousness. She had set out ere the raw mist had cleared away, in order to reach Logan Kirk in time for the forenoon ‘diet of worship.’
The only sufficient warrant in Jean’s eyes for such a distant expedition on that ‘sawbath day’ which she had been taught to reverence so intensely, would have been an exceptional privilege of sitting down at one of the sacred ‘tables,’ after they had been jealously ‘fenced.’ Then she would have heard it ‘served’ by some grand minister, a very patriarch and prophet in one, a man famed in Jean’s circle for lofty austere piety, impassioned zeal, and immense experience with learning to match, though the latter quality was held in small account compared to the recommendations which went before it. Such a minister was a fit successor to ‘Holy Renwick’ and ‘gude Cargill’ and the other heroes and martyrs who endured to the end--till they were shot down in peat bogs, or mounted steadfastly and triumphantly the long ladder to the high gallows in the Grass Market of Edinburgh.
But young Jean was not journeying on so unexceptionable and profitable an errand. It was her own private affairs which sent her forth to cross the broad moor on the sabbath morning, and any competent judge might easily guess that Jean’s affairs were in dire confusion when she took such a step.
Jean’s story was not unprecedented in her rank of life, though it is to be hoped that hers was an extreme case. She had been courted for years, young as she was, and at last trothplighted to a young ploughman. Their marriage had been fixed to take place in the following spring at Whitsunday, one of the two great feeing, flitting, and marrying terms among Scotch agricultural labourers. Jean had been making manifold happy preparations in her quiet womanly way by little purchases from pedlars, by seams sewed diligently in the half hours which were honestly hers, by plans made over and over again with fond deliberation and reiteration for the laying out of her little savings and her next half year’s wages. She had been undecided whether she herself should invest in a chest of drawers, or help Bob to buy an eight-day clock, either of which would be an ‘honesty,’ that is a standing mark of respectability in their ‘cot house’ and might descend as an heirloom to their children.
In the meantime the bridegroom elect had left Dalroy, which was his native parish as well as Jean’s, and gone ‘to better himself’ on a farm in the parish of Logan. But it did not seem to her to matter much--except where their feelings were concerned, that he should have little communication with her, either personally or by letter in the interval. He might or he might not, after the pitting of the potatoes, the last pressing job of the rural year,
tak his stick into his hand
on his sabbath-day out, and cross ten miles of moor, as Jean was doing now, to visit her for a few hours. He might or he might not send her a formal letter or two, or a message occasionally by the carrier. What was his performance or failure in such trifles to Jean’s great trust in her lad? Yet of all classes of men, perhaps with the single exception of soldiers, not one is so notoriously fickle in love-making as Scotch ploughmen, not one is more exposed to special sources of temptation, and not one, alas! as Jean knew, though her pure mind recoiled from the grievous knowledge and refused absolutely to connect it with her lover, is more apt to fall into a particular form of vice.
But it is to be hoped that the class’s frequent fickleness and folly do not often attain the climax they reached here; for Jean had not only been courted, a solemn promise of marriage had been exchanged between her and her lover, and such promises are not broken--either by lord or lout, lady or lass, without causing such a scandal in their respective worlds, as proves the comparative rarity of the offence.
Jean had dwelt in her dream of perfect faith and security until two days before the sabbath in question. Then the sister of the lover, who was also Jean’s bosom friend, came to the back door of the manse and called out Jean in the middle of the day at the height of her household work, to break to her a catastrophe.
‘Oh Jean!’ said Eppie, taking the first word--before Jean could cry out was there anything wrong with Bob--and speaking with tears and groans and honest blushes--‘Oh! that ever I should see the day I would be black ashamed of my ain kith an’ kin--that ever I should have to say it to you--a lass that mither an’ me were proud to count as are of the family. There is word by Willie Broon the carrier--and I doubt it is ower true, for Willie, though he may take a drap, was never given to leein’--our Bob has played you fause, he has ta’en up with another lass--ane Leezbeth Red (Reid), a fellow-servant at Blawart Brae. Nae doubt she has set her cap at him ilka day and hour, ilka kye milking and horse suppering, and Bob was aye a simple chield--even mair sae when a fair flattering tongue than when red and white cheeks came in his way. The upshot is--and I could have seen him, my ain brither, in the mools afore I had to carry the tidings to you--and I’ll never speak to the other lass who has stealt him from you--never, be she ten times my gude sister--but it is richt you should ken at aince; they say Bob has done her a sair wrang, and there is nothing left for him but to marry her; so the twa are to be cried together this very incoming sabbath in Logan Kirk. They may be cried and marriet too,’ protested the informant in her righteous indignation for Jean, ‘but it’s no his friends that will ever own them after sic heartless deceit, and sic disgrace as they have brocht upon us a’.’
‘Dinna speak in that wild way, Eppie,’ said Jean with a little of her natural stateliness and reserve after the first deadly spasm of sick incredulity and terrible pain, when Jean had held her breath for a moment. ‘If it be sae that Bob has changed his mind without telling me, even if he has fallen into greater sin, still it is not for you to refuse to own his wife; though I ken you mean weel, what gude would that do to me? And now I maun go in, Eppie, for I am in the middle of ironing the minister’s best sark, and if I tarry longer the irons will get cauld.’ And the irons must not get cold though Jean’s heart should break. She must go on ironing in a dazed sort of way, but yet to the best of her ability, that special sark of the minister’s which he was to wear when he presided over the Synod next Tuesday.
Then Jean resolved to ascertain for herself, beyond the possibility of doubt, whether Bob Meffin were a traitor or a true man. It was not a subject to ask questions about, nor was she the woman to lay bare her heart to the public gaze. But this coming sabbath was Jean’s sabbath out, and she could, without saying a word to anybody else, get her unsuspecting mistress to grant her leave to spend the day in walking across the moor and attending public worship at Logan Kirk instead of waiting on the ministrations of her master at Dalroy.
Jean shed no tear nor did she sob and sigh audibly as she walked along to meet her destiny. But she was utterly unobservant of the nature she loved in the scene around her, either in its broad outlines or in its minute details. She had no attention to spare to-day for the spreading heathery moor, as fresh and free almost as the blue sky above it, on a sunny morning like this, when what had been the summer’s glistening dew-drops were just beginning to fall heavily and hoarily in the first suspicion of frost.
Jean had no notice to give to the sweet pungent smell of the heather, to the varying hues of the purple milkwort, the yellow rock rose, the nodding white-flowered grass of Parnassus which diversified the red ling. She did not listen to the hum of the big bee--a splendid fellow in black and gold, who was continually crossing her path and sounding his drone in her ear, or to the twitter of the brown and grey linnet which brushed her very skirts as he rose from the broom, or to the crow of the moor cock and to the cry of the plover. Yet all these noises were made doubly distinct by the sabbath stillness which rendered itself felt even on the moor when no sportsmen were shooting there, no quarry men or bands of late shearers taking near cuts to their quarries and fields.
Now and then Jean roused herself from her painful abstraction, and tried to control her racked heart and brain, by what she had always known as the potent spell of duty. It was the sabbath day, and therefore she was not her own mistress; though it was her ‘day out,’ she ought not, as a Christian woman, to be engrossed with her own worldly concerns, however imperative. She should try at least to engage in some mental exercise befitting the day--since, as Jean held, its divine obligation was not affected by her human distress. She made a great effort and prepared to repeat aloud, as she walked, one of the psalms with which her memory was stored, using it as the early Christians raised the symbol of the cross for a charm against distracting worldly thoughts.
She began mechanically to say the first psalm, the earliest learnt by Scotch children, one of the most familiar throughout life. But
All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice,
in its call to universal praise--associated closely as it is with the noblest, simplest, most moving melody which ever rang rudely yet thrillingly through barn kirk or along bleak hill-side, faltered and died away on Jean’s quivering lips.
The staunch-hearted woman began again with the psalm which holds the second place in the regard of her nation--
The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want;
and when she had reached the fourth verse, she found that her choice was more appropriate:
Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale, Yet will I fear none ill,
said Jean steadfastly--and truly, it was like voluntarily descending into ‘death’s dark vale’ to go on with the end in view for which Jean journeyed this day. And if she had got her choice, the girl in her magnificent bloom of young womanhood, with all her warm interest in life--which her religion sanctified but did not stifle, would far rather have lain her down and died, than found Bob Meffin a leear, a still more cruel sinner against another woman than against Jean herself.
Jean was not well known to the congregation of Logan Kirk; she had not been there more than once or twice in her life before, and the one person in the neighbourhood with whom she was well acquainted she did not expect to see in the kirk this morning.
She reached the little kirk close to the adjoining hamlet, both of the ‘drystane dyke’ order of architecture, just as the most primitive of bells commenced to make discord instead of harmony, clattering and tinkling instead of clashing and booming its summons.
Nobody recognised Jean as she passed through the groups in the roughly kept kirkyard, and though she did not absolutely shrink from observation, being too brave and upright to take, as if by natural instinct, to hiding her head, she certainly did not desire notice. She was glad to get into a back seat without attracting any further remark--than what was casually bestowed on a strange face, from the fellow-worshippers who were equally strange to her.
The country people--most of them farmers and farm-servants with the village hand-loom weavers--tramped and tumbled in, with the want of ceremony which used to distinguish a Scotch rural congregation. The minister and precentor took their places, and Jean fixed mute imploring eyes on the latter as if the decision of her fate rested with him. He was a homely, elderly man, distinguished among his compeers by the _sobriquet_, derived from his office in the kirk, of ‘Singing Johnny,’ a souter by trade, but a less thirsty and a more theological souter than his great namesake. As he rose for the secular rite which in Scotland precedes the religious services, even the most austerely devout listened attentively with human interest. And if the congregation had only known, so as to watch a young woman in the obscurity of the back seats, they might have been aroused by the fading of the rich colour in her face, the rigid set of her mouth, and the desperate light as of a creature at bay, in what ought to have been her reasonable grey eyes, to comprehend that her hands were clasped tight--even clenched--under the shelter of the book-board in an agony.
Johnny dallied with the matter in hand, perfectly unaware of the torture he was inflicting. He laboured under no press of business as at Martinmas or Whitsunday; this was a sabbath between terms when little was doing in Johnny’s line. He was able to rise in a deliberate manner, to sleek down his stubbly hair as he was wont to do, before raising the psalm tune, to look around him with even more philosophical indifference; indeed, the only customary act which he refrained from doing as if to distinguish his secular from his religious duties, was that of putting up his hands before his mouth and giving a preliminary cough behind the screen. At last he proclaimed sonorously: ‘There is a purpose of marriage between Tammas Proodfit and Ailison Clinkscales--for the second time,’ not that the purpose had been entertained, dropped and resumed, but that the announcement had been made before and would ring out once again in the ears of the listening kirk.
One woman was listening intently with bent head as if she would fain catch even the sound of a pin’s fall, through the thick tumultuous beating of her heart. At the words spoken there was the faintest rustle of relaxation in her attitude. The couple whose intention had been thus sounded abroad were entire strangers to her. What had she to do with a Tammas Proodfit and an Ailison Clinkscales, or what had they to do with her? It was not to hear them ‘cried’ that she had walked ten miles across the moor.
After the proclamation there was a distinct pause, which had the air of being instituted for sensational effect, unless Johnny had no more ‘purposes of marriages’ in the background to fire off at the congregation.
One fainting heart leapt up with half wild relief and joy. After all it was a base report without a word of truth in it. Bob was to be proved innocent as the babe unborn.
Woe’s me! Johnny was even then fumbling with another set of lines in his horny fingers; he lifted up his voice afresh and called all present to witness that there was also a purpose of marriage ‘between Robert Meffin and Leezbeth Red for the first time.’ Having discharged his lay functions, he stopped abruptly to look up, in expectation of the folded paper which the minister rose and bent over the pulpit to hand to him, taking Singing Johnny into his confidence as it were, with regard to the psalms and paraphrases appropriate to the sermon, which were to be sung during the service, for which the precentor was to find the fitting tunes on the spur of the moment.
Even after the commencement of the second proclamation, the formal employment of the full christian name struck so unfamiliarly on Jean’s ears, as to stay the flood of anguish for an instant longer, till the enunciation of the surname in company with the name she had heard given to her rival, rendered doubt no longer possible. It was all over, as Jean had heard said after her father and mother had drawn their last breath. It was too true: this was her Bob Meffin and no other whom she had heard cried with another woman in order to repair as far as might be a shameful wrong.
Jean felt like the rest of us when the catastrophe we have most dreaded has come upon us, that she had not known how much she had hoped against hope--how hard a battle hope had fought for bare life, till it lay slain stark and cold at her feet.
For she had not come there with any intention of protesting against the marriage which would be celebrated within the next few weeks. Such a step is even rarer in Scotland than in England; neither could there be any appeal under the circumstances. It was only that Bob Meffin had lied to her and before the Lord, had fallen from what Jean had judged to be the glory of his manhood and dragged down another with him in his fall. Thenceforth the two who had been all in all could be less than nothing to each other.
Jean had listened to the sentence which blighted her youthful hopes, crushed her tenderest affections, and left her in the flower of her beauty, in all her sense and goodness, for no fault of her own, a lass ‘lichtlied’--scorned before the world--that sorest humiliation to a woman. And it was all for the wiles of another lass with regard to whom Jean knew full well, without any vanity or arrogance on her part, that Leezbeth Red and such as she were not worthy to be named in the same breath with her--Jean, since they could not save either themselves or the men whom they had never loved with a noble unselfish love, from gross sin and degradation.
But unless in the involuntary shiver which ran through her--while long rays of sunshine were finding their way into the kirk windows and into the open door, lighting up and warming even the remotest corner--and in the breath drawn in and let out again with a dry inaudible sob, Jean gave no sign. She neither screamed nor fainted, she made no ‘dust’ or disturbance in the kirk of all places, she would have thought that neither maidenly--‘wiselike’ she would have called it--nor reverent. Bob Meffin was a fallen sinner, that was all, though it was enough for her to carry branded on her heart to her dying day. And she would never see or speak with him again, though she had loved him with all her heart. And what power of passion and depth of tenderness existed in that heart may be fairly conceived in the light of a biblical compliment which her master the minister once paid her. He had been watching Jean with his younger children when he exclaimed suddenly, ‘Jean, your mistress is right, you’re a fine young woman; you remind me of that riddle of Samson’s, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.”’