CHAPTER II.

BOB MEFFIN’S AMENDS.

Fourteen years passed--not without their changes. It was a fine frosty winter afternoon when two knots of homely men and women--forming two distinct coteries--were gathered at one end of Dalroy village, where, on the right side of the little street stood the Dalroy ‘smiddy,’ and on the left was ‘the smiddy well’--a dipping-in-well famous throughout the village for the excellence of its ‘tea-water.’ Horses were waiting to be shod round the smiddy door, while their temporary owners--dark figures in the ruddy glow of the furnace, prepared to hold their rustic parliament. At the centre of attraction over the way maids and matrons took their turn in filling their cans and pitchers.

Very nearly at the same moment Jean Kinloch came in sight--emerging from the blue haze made up of the frost and the gloaming, while there was heard, with the peculiar distinctness of such a sound in such weather, the rumbling of a cart, with cart, horse, and driver still unseen, sounding louder and louder as it drew near in the opposite direction.

Jean had a plaid pinned over her cap, and carried a bright pitcher dangling lightly from one wrist; she was sniffing with satisfaction ‘the caller air,’ which sent her rich blood coursing through her veins, and yet not refusing to welcome the hot blast which met her as she crossed in front of the smiddy door.

Of course, Jean’s arrival was hailed before she was within ear-shot by a double chorus of half-approving, half-ironical comments--the purport of which she could very well guess--beginning with ‘Here comes the Miss Fraser’s Jean.’

Jean had remained in the service of the Manse family all these years, though both the minister and his wife were dead, and the Manse was no longer the home of the remnant of the household. Impoverished as such remnants usually are, and consisting only of Jean’s young ladies, they could hardly have continued to live on, in genteel poverty, if Jean, who was so closely allied to them as to be styled theirs by inalienable possession, had not worked their double work on diminished wages.

‘Jean’s true to a minute,’ said another speaker, a man in the smiddy. ‘She’s nae daidler either at meat or wark.’

‘Ay, lasses, ye may stand about,’ a woman at the well took up the theme, without hearing the man’s contribution to the subject. ‘Jean Kinloch’s no sma’ graith--least of a’ in her ain opinion.’ It was like a version of that climax of commendation pronounced on the virtuous woman in Proverbs, ‘Let her own works praise her in the gates,’ with the grudging qualification that must have mingled with the praise.

Jean did not mind much either the concentrated scrutiny or the sifting analysis of her merits and demerits, to which, with her knowledge of the world, she knew she was exposed. Like a pillar of strength in her self-reliance and composure, her fine presence was unimpaired by her servant’s costume, and her goodly prime untouched by any token of decay. Though she had not risen in worldly rank and prosperity, this was a very different Jean from the miserable lass, high-souled and innocent as she was, who had sat in a back seat in Logan Kirk to hear Bob Meffin cried with another woman.

Before Jean could say ‘Gude day’ to anybody, while she was still coming forward in the mingled lights of a cold primrose in the western sky behind her, and a warm saffron from the glare of the smiddy at her right hand, the cart--the rumble of which had been constantly increasing--rattled up, bringing cart, horse, and driver into the illumination. And even before the din of its progress had ceased or the half-dazzled eyes could distinguish the face of the new comer, a voice, which seemed to issue from the past, suddenly called in eager excited tones, ‘Jean Kinloch!’

Jean turned startled, and with a shock even to her well-strung nerves, at the imperative summons. In spite of changes in the speaker, to which those in herself were infinitesimal, she recognised, without a moment’s hesitation, her old lover. She had not seen him since six months before that day in Logan Kirk, on the last occasion when the two had parted a fond loving lad and lass--a plighted bridegroom and bride. She had heard little of him in the interval, for his sister Eppie had married a soldier and ‘followed the drum,’ while with her departure Jean had lost all chance of news of her recreant lover.

Taken by surprise as she was, Jean cried out with shaken accents, in turn, ‘Bob Meffin!’ Then she recalled, as any true woman would have recalled, instantaneously, the whole circumstances, the scene, the spectators. Some of them had known the two in their green youth, and were doubtless speculating already, with keen interest and a sense of the ridiculous, how Jean Kinloch would meet Bob Meffin now that the pair had reached the years of discretion--after what had once been between them, after the falseness of Bob which had separated them.

Jean was equal to the occasion; she stepped up to the cart, to which Bob sat nailed, with the intention of speaking to him, and doing her part in the interchange of such light questions and answers, as might be expected between old acquaintances who had known each other well in youth, and who happened to encounter each other in later years. As to any nearer relation which had ever existed between them, Jean’s attitude showed that she, at least, meant to behave as if she had forgotten it as utterly as the most trifling incident of her girlish days.

But unfalteringly as Jean carried out this line of conduct, in the few paces that intervened between her and Bob Meffin, which she crossed steadily with every eye upon her, and with her own eyes not fixed on the ground, but raised to catch his, she took in at a glance the whole man--including every indication of the transformation he had undergone since the last time she had seen him.

That Bob Meffin had been a gallant-looking young fellow in his degree, stalwart, lithe, fit to heave up the biggest sheaves on the stack which was in the process of building--as Jean had shorn foremost on her harvest rig--and to dance longest and with lightest foot at harvest home or bridal.

This Bob Meffin was a broken-down, fast-ageing man, while Jean was still in her prime. His back was bent, while hers was straight; his hair had grown thin, and hung in uncared-for grey locks under his faded cap, while hers, in its undiminished profusion and without one dead white thread, was carefully disposed beneath her spotless white cap. His cheeks and forehead were weather-worn, dragged, and wrinkled, while hers remained fresh, round, and smooth. His working clothes had lost all the smartness with which the Bob Meffin of old had worn his most patched jacket and most clay-clogged shoon. Before that lightning-flash of womanly observation, they gave evidence of such untidiness and neglect in absent buttons, ragged cuffs, and the frayed, dangling ends of his neckerchief, as not only cast the utmost discredit on the wife who had supplanted Jean, but told in graphic language that Bob had lost all personal pride and even proper sense of what was due in the dress of a respectable ploughman, who had risen to be foreman over the younger men on the farm.

Here were the wrong doer and the wrong sufferer. A fine moral could have been pointed from the difference between them, even though a hair-splitting casuist might have urged that it was not a case of retribution alone, since the constant exposure and the coarse fare of a ploughman, even when he carries the clearest of consciences within his bosom, is apt to tell upon him betimes, and make him look elderly before he is forty. As for Jean, though she had undergone ‘a disappointment,’ having continued in domestic service, she had of necessity missed such parallel drudgery and lack of sufficiently nourishing food, as she had once looked forward to willingly and cheerfully. But such causes make the ploughman’s wife keep pace with her husband in ageing prematurely.

Still Bob Meffin had altered with a vengeance; and Jean could hardly believe the testimony of her eyes and was impressed by the change. For surely nobody will say that because Adam delved and Eve span, because Jean had been a servant lass and Bob a ploughman all their respective lives, they had not the feelings of their kind, so that Jean should fail to have a sensitive perception that her former hero had lost, in the rough battle of life, all the glamour with which he had once been surrounded?

Was Jean pleased that it should be so? That she had lived to see how Bob Meffin had been punished for his desertion of her and degradation of another? She could not tell, there was such a tumult of pride and pain in her heart.

But she went up to him where he sat and said with the easiest manner imaginable, ‘Is this you, Bob? How are you, and how are your wife and bairns?’

‘My wife!’ cried Bob aghast. ‘Do you no ken, Jean, she’s dead and gane a year and a half syne?’

Jean received another shock in which there were appalling elements. The dead woman had been one against whom Jean--Christian woman as she was--had borne a sore grudge for many a day. Nay, only a moment ago, Jean had been sharply summing up, with rising disdain and not without a sense of bitter satisfaction, what she had reckoned as so many unanswerable proofs of Leezbeth Red’s wifely incompetency, while all the time Jean’s successful rival had passed away long months ago without Jean’s knowledge, to give in her--Leezbeth’s--account to the Great Judge.

‘Poor woman!’ said Jean more softly; ‘she had gotten her ca’ early.’

‘She was never a strong woman,’ said Bob, speaking without the awkwardness which must have accompanied the discussion of his living wife’s qualities with Jean. He spoke also with that little hush of reverence, which is found in every man or woman with a spark of generosity and awe in the soul, when he or she refers to the dead--once so near, but who has gone far beyond all kindly communion and familiar every-day life.

In addition Bob showed that grave composure of regret which might be expected from a reasonable man and a widower whose grief was a year and a half old. ‘Leezbeth was silly from the time of our marriage,’ continued Bob, not uttering a supercilious reflection on the limited mental capacity of his wife, simply expressing himself in the vernacular for delicate health. ‘She had mostly to keep her bed, for the last year or twa of her life.’

That sentence explained much. The misfortune of having married a sickly wife doomed to die prematurely, may only serve to call forth the deeper tenderness of the rich man whose personal independence and the necessaries--nay, the soothing solaces of whose life, remain altogether untouched by the calamity. But it is a crushing blow to the poor man, however faithfully and gallantly he may bear it. Bob’s slouching gait, haggard face, grey hair and uncared-for clothes were all easily accounted for now, without farther severe reflection either on himself or on his dead wife. They spoke of hard work doubled when rest should have come; of the son of the soil returning from his day’s darg,

Wat, wat, wat and weary,

with neither a blazing ingle nor a clean hearth-stone, not a single creature-comfort to sustain him; of ill or uncooked food such as a dainty townbred beggar would have turned from in supreme disgust; of a father who had to be father and mother in one to his helpless children; of long nights of waking and watching for the labouring man whose sleep ought to have been sweet.

Jean, who understood the circumstances so well, was not the woman to be unmoved by them. ‘But your bairns, Bob?’ she suggested kindly, turning instinctively to what seemed to her the single prospect of better days for the speaker. ‘They will be getting on, and rising up to be a blessing to you?’

‘They are that already, woman,’ said Bob heartily, while his careworn face brightened inexpressibly, ‘though the auldest of the two lasses, Lizzie and Peggy, is but growing thirteen, and they have to take turn and turn about at their schulin’ and at keepin’ the house. They are as gude and clever, though I should na say sae, as lasses can be. My word! Jean, they can kindle a fire and put out a bannock that would not disgrace yoursel’.’

Here was a trace of the old Bob with his impetuosity and sanguineness. Jean smiled faintly in listening to him, even while she asked herself sternly, how she could be such a weak and wicked sinner as to feel a pang of jealous resentment shoot through her. It was because she heard this poor man who had suffered so much, refer in terms which proved his high esteem for the only thing of value that remained to him--his bairns and Leezbeth Red’s--not Jean’s--to her, who must go a lone woman to her grave through his treachery.

‘For the bit laddie,’ continued Bob with a slight fall and wistful yearning in his voice, ‘he’s but a wee chappie of three years. We lost twa weans between him and the lasses. He’s no stout--I’m whiles frightened that he has his mither’s constitution. But his sisters and a gude auld body of a wife in our cotton do the best they can for him, and wha kens but that we’ll be permitted to pu’ him through--and live to see him a braw man some day?’ Bob lifted his bent head with glistening eyes at the remote but inspiring prospect.

Jean thought of a manse child that had died in its infancy, on which she had doted as women like her are apt to lavish passionate affection on little children. ‘I hope sae too, Bob, my man,’ she said in the kindly phraseology of her class, and addressing him all the more gently, because she sought, in her own mind, to atone for the unreasonable, unrighteous anger she had felt stirring in her heart against him, for his very fatherliness, only a moment before. ‘I’ll be right glad to hear that your laddie has thriven.’

Bob’s face brightened more and more, as he leapt down from the cart-head, and stood by Jean’s side. But in spite of the decided action a certain hesitation and agitation began to appear in his manner.

The movement served to remind Jean of what she had been losing consciousness of, that she and Bob Meffin were central figures in an attentive circle scrutinising their proceedings, and probably catching scraps of their conversation.

‘Jean,’ said her old lover, lost to, or careless of, their public position, a broken red rising in his face while his eyes fell before hers, ‘I’m pleased to have seen you here, lass; and I own I had a notion we might forgather, after I had been with the cart for draff at the brewery, and made up my mind to come this way, because I had a doubt about a nail in ane of Bruce the horse’s shoon--the back fit on the hinder side--which Jamie Caird could put richt. Jean, I leed to you when we were young, I’ll never deny it; but oh! woman, ye dinna ken what it is for a man to own to a lee, whether to man or woman. And ye dinna ken how I was tempted--a thochtless lad as I was, in the same place with a bonnie fulish young lass who took a liking to him, and would let him see her heart richt or wrang. Jean, I’ll no say ill of the dead to whom I did wrang, who was the mither of my bairns. She did her best, puir feckless thing, when she had gotten me--no sic a bargain after all, since I was neither so clever nor so handy as to make up for her lack of pith and experience--and she was a tried woman, racked wi’ pain and faint with heart sickness, longing to be gane to her rest, her worst enemy might have pitied her, puir Leezbeth! long before she gaed aff the face of the earth. I would be a muckle brute to blame her at this time of the day, and to throw a’ the wyte of my faut on her. Still, Jean, the truth must be spoken, and gin ye had kenned, even at the time, there was some puir excuse for a moment’s madness of passion and its miserable consequences--you were aye so strong yoursel’ that you micht hae had some mercy on the weak--and we were weak as water, baith Leezbeth and me. But it’s a’ ower now, Jean, and you are to the fore and a “wanter” yet. Woman, gin you would suffer me to make some amends--a’ that’s in my power. I’ve keepet my place and risen to be foreman at Blawart Brae in spite of a’. I’ve gude thirty pounds a year o’ wages, and I’ve paid up my debt this last twalmonth. If I had onybody to manage for me I micht do weel yet. It’s not to certain puirtith I’m bidding you, Jean. And there’s my little cummers,’ continued the infatuated man, with a flash of exultant hope, well-nigh conviction, at the mention of his young daughters; ‘they will be proud to do your will, and wait on you like a queen; you could rear them into fine women like yoursel’. The wee chappie would be a fash to you, no doubt, but you are never the woman to heed sic fash, and oh! lass, you dinna ken what a takin’ way he has wi’ him, how he is the pet of ilka body that comes near him, though he’s ill-grown and weakly. He tholes his trouble like a bit man, and when he’s no clean knocked on the head wi’t, and wallied like the young grass in simmer-time when there has not been a shower to slocken its drouth for sax weeks, he’s the plaisantest o’ God’s creatures you ever saw. Jean, you would like Jockie as gin he were your ain, and you micht be the saving of my laddie,’ pleaded Bob passionately, as he had never pled before, not even for Jean’s young love.

Jean was so confounded at the turn matters had taken, and the advantage Bob Meffin was seeking to wrest from her pity, and the softening of her heart towards him and his, that she hardly gave their full meaning to the first words of this second suit, and it was not for a moment that the extent of their presumption struck her. ‘The deil’s in the man!’ Jean said under her breath, in spite of her principles, her decorum, and the recollection that she had served in a minister’s family for a large part of her life. Was there no end to the conceit of men, in themselves and their bairns? And so he thought he could make her amends! Doubtless he imagined she was still hankering after his fickle love, and pining for his sake, while she being an honest woman had banished him from her thoughts, as a married man, fourteen years before. By his careless use of the slighting term ‘wanter,’ which complaisant contemptuous married couples applied to single men but particularly to single women, he betrayed that he shared in the coarse popular scorn of old maids, and the mean opinion that they would be only too glad to snatch at any--the most wretched, chance of changing their condition and escaping from its reproach. He, the middle-aged, battered, and broken-down ploughman with his two forward hempies of lasses, and his heavy handful of a sick bairn, concluding impudently that any husband was better than none, judged himself a fit match for an independent well-esteemed woman like Jean Kinloch! And he had been the very man, the leear, as he had rightly called himself, to the one woman, the worst enemy to the other, of the two who had trusted him. He had wrung Jean’s heart when it was young and tender, and lichtlied her for a lass like Leezbeth Red, leaving Jean to be the mark for the jests and scoffs of mocking tongues.

Jean was burning with indignation, and looking at it in her light, greater provocation could not have been given her. ‘Are you daft, Bob Meffin?’ She turned upon him with a pale face set like iron, and words which cut like swords. ‘Do you think I would have a gift of you, after what has come and gane? If I had been brodent on a man, I might have had my wale of a hantle better than you ever were, without waiting so long. Man, I’m weel content to be an auld maid, it’s no sic a forlorn lot as you marriet folk in your crouseness fancy. But I would be keen to get marriet gin I could consent to stand in a dead woman’s shoon, a lass who was like to have had “a misfortune”’--Jean used the apologetic phrase with strong contempt--‘who had so little truth and honesty in her that she could steal the fickle man’s heart and word which were not worth the taking, though they had been flung at her feet, kennin’ a’ the time they belonged to another woman--would I be plaguet wi’ her brats o’ bairns, think ye?’

Bob heard the terms of her answer with as much amazement as she had experienced at his proposal, with consternation added to the amazement, and with the pain of a great disappointment in the crestfallen and wounded expression of his face.

But at the last scornful words the man’s spirit kindled within him. He faced Jean, and replied to her with volleys of wrath: ‘Jean Kinloch, you may cast laith at me, you’ve ower gude richt, though I thocht--I was wrang--a’ the same I had a fulish notion it would be grander to forgi’e and forget, and that the lass I had lo’ed sae weel, when there was naebody to come atween us, micht be fit to play the grander part. But to cast laith at the silent dead for the wrong-doing of her youth, after she has paid the heavy cost--to cast laith, to my face, at my innocent bairns, my twa gude lasses and my stricken laddie, Jean Kinloch, you were na blate.’

‘Na, Bob, I didna mean--’ began Jean hesitatingly, but he would not hear her.

‘You’ve done what I’ll stand frae no man or woman born, no frae the woman I aince lo’ed as I lo’ed my life, and whom even when I gaed her up, because I couldna say “na” either to mysel’ or to anither, I would hae focht ony mither’s son in braid Scotland who would have dared to say that she was not amaist worthy to be worshipped. I thocht you were ower gude for me, and it was a comfort in repenting o’ my folly, that you were weel rid o’ me. But I tell you where you stand glowering there, you’re not the woman I thocht you; you’re not gude enough for the gift o’ my bairns that you have spoken tantingly o’--Jean Kinloch, you’re a hard, cauld woman this day.’

This was turning the tables in truth, and an astounding effect followed.

Bob Meffin’s words could hardly be called reasonable, and yet the utterance of them seemed to lift him above his fall and to lend a homely dignity to the sinner, as he walked away from the old love to whom he had not been true.

Jean felt it with a curious force. She had the strongest conception that Bob Meffin, who had jilted her in the past and was insulting her in the present--as she had thought only a moment before, who defended his dead wife and loved his children so fondly, was having the best of it in their contest. He had been foolish and false in word and deed, he might be what she had called him--the most conceited and audacious of men. He might share in the low views current as to ‘wanters’ and old maids, yet could it be that Bob Meffin had grown a better man than Jean was a woman, while he had been the sinner and she the sinned against? Had the simple, manly patience with which he had paid the penalty reversed the result in character, in the subtle workings by which good may triumph over evil? Had Bob become less and she more worldly-minded since they parted? Had his nature been softened, mellowed, purified in his ceaseless toil for his sick wife and helpless children, while she in her comparative ease, her leisure for her bible and her kirk, had lost sight of magnanimity and mercy and learnt only vindictiveness and malice? And if so, had she not been doubly defrauded? Was Bob to cheat her not only of earthly, but of heavenly happiness?

Jean’s sense of justice rebelled against the merest bewildered suspicion of such a sentence. But she was sorry for the words she had spoken; she had been mean enough to cherish the recollection of Bob’s offence after all these years, and, with a full knowledge of the apples of Sodom it had borne, to cast it up to the offender. And he had been perfectly right in his accusation--she had ‘cast laith’ at the dead wife whose soul had gone before the great tribunal--at Leezbeth Red’s and Bob Meffin’s innocent bairns, thus outraging the most sacred feelings of humanity. As Jean was a good woman she must take back her words in part, she must say she was sorry for having uttered them.

‘Forgi’e me, Bob,’ she said in a low tone, her handsome face working with suppressed emotion. ‘It was sma’ of me and unworthy of a Christian woman to let on about byganes--no to say it was cruel to say an unbecoming word o’ your dead wife and your living bairns.’

Alas! the original mercurial temperament of the man which no suffering had altogether subdued, leapt up on the slightest encouragement from the depth of alienation and despondency to the height of fresh love and hope. He was not merely propitiated, he was elevated by a single word of regret so as to be ready to repeat the affront he had given. ‘Will you no think better of it, Jean, lass, and make me a prood and happy man at last?’ he called out loudly and recklessly. Jean’s recent remorse for her harshness was nipped in the bud, and she was furious at the renewed outrage. ‘No me, niver, niver,’ she proclaimed to him and to all who might choose to listen.