Читать книгу Inchbracken - Robert Cleland - Страница 11

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Mary Brown arose even earlier than her wont on the morning that succeeded the gale. The air was fresh and sweet with the scent of bog myrtle, fir, and early heather. The hillsides, new washed, were vividly green in their clothing of pasture coppice and feathery birch. The sombre moors were warming into crimson when they met the morning sun, and the shadows among the rocks and distant hilltops showed the whole gamut of blues and purple greys.

Mary perforce had to take a morning walk. Their breakfast-room was at some distance from the cottage in which she spent the night, and the sweet air tempted her to extend the stroll through the village to an old bridge that crossed the stream at its western extremity. There she sat down on the stone parapet to sun herself, and thaw out the chilliness which she had absorbed from the walls of her damp little cottage chamber.

How the poor seem to thrive and bloom and flourish into ripe and hearty old age in those houses with their turf and stone walls! vying in health and gaiety with the lusty house leek that ridges the roof thatch! Can it be that they are made of another clay from those who walk on planked floors, and shiver at every draught that sifts through an ill-adjusted casement? Mary was no hothouse plant: her health was good, and she had always spent much of her time out of doors, careless of weather; but the clammy dampness and closeness of the little cottage rooms oppressed her, and she now drank in the pure clear air of the hills with thirsty content.

The swiftly passing waters beneath the bridge, were a darker brown after the rain, and spotted with patches of white foam, and they sung with a low continuous movement as they slid over the rocks and broke on the piers of the arch. Down the stream on a grassy flat the village women were spreading out their little heaps of wet linen fresh wrung from the stream, to bleach in the sun. Farther on a few cattle had come down to drink; and beyond that, cottage roofs and palings closed in the view.

In the village street the grey shadows of the cottages alone broke the monotony of the deserted road, till as she looked a figure issued from the door of the inn, and slowly came towards her. The distance was too great to enable her to identify the person; yet some vague association, indefinite but altogether pleasant, was called up by the gait and set of the shoulders as he approached, and added a new chord of feeling which filled up the harmony of the peaceful scene. The breeze flitting through a neighbouring wood came laden with a spicier fragrance of resinous pine, and the hum of vagrant bees mixed with the melody of babbling waters, and all the music of all the sunny mornings she had ever known came back on her with a mysterious gladness as she watched the approaching stranger. He was coming nearer, however, and she turned her head till he would pass.

The gentleman came forward smoking an early cigar, and likewise enjoying the quiet beauty of the morning. The view looking up the glen was wilder than in other directions. About a mile above the village the woods ended, and the shoulders of the hills swept down into the ascending valley in breadths of green pasture and brown and purple moor, while the jagged outline of the more distant hills, bounded in the background a broad bank of grey which stood sharply out against the transparent horizon.

The steep ascent of the old-fashioned bridge, and its brown stone parapet, picked out in all the sunlit greens and yellows of moss and wall rue, made a bold foreground to the picture, and the sable-clad figure of Mary Brown on the summit, gave life and purpose to the whole.

The gentleman ascended the bridge. Mary's back seemed not unfamiliar to him, but it was only on casting a side-long glance in passing that a recognition became possible.

'Mary Brown!'

Mary started. Her thoughts had wandered away in a day-dream; she looked round, and there stood the stranger at her elbow, with both hands held out.

"He was coming nearer, … she turned her head till he would pass." Page 24.

'Ken--Mister--Captain Drysdale!' The light came suddenly into her eyes, and perhaps a shade of warmer color into her cheeks as she gave her hand.

'Why not Kenneth, as of old? Am I to say "Miss Brown?" I fear you have a bad memory for old friends!'

'Not that--but who would have expected to see you here?'

'And who could have thought to see you here,---sitting upon a bridge, in Glen Effick, at seven o'clock in the morning?'

'We live in this village now. But where have you fallen from? When we heard of you last you were at Gibraltar.'

'And so I was till the other day, when the doctors ordered me home on sick leave. But tell me. How come you to be staying in this poor little place? Some of your old charity doings I suppose. Will you not let me drive you over to the manse, my gig is getting ready now. As you may suppose, I was storm-staid here last night, and I am just setting out for home. Though, of course, I shall be only too glad to wait till you are ready to start.'

'Then you have not heard of my dear father's death, and that Roderick has been appointed to the Free Church congregation in the parish.'

'I knew about Doctor Brown, and felt deeply grieved. But I understood Roderick had succeeded him in the parish. The General always said he intended that he should.'

'General Drysdale meant to be very kind; but Roderick has joined the Free Church, so he could not accept, and I fear both the General and Lady Caroline are a good deal displeased. But you know he had to do what he thought right. Tell me, however, have you been very ill?'

'Oh! I have been broiling on that terrible rock all the summer, like the rest, and I had a pretty sharp attack of fever. But the week at sea, coming home, has set me up again. But about you and Roddie,--do you mean to say that for his church crotchets he has dragged you out of the old manse where you were born? And that you and he are living down here? Where do you live, by the way? Not in the village tavern, surely!--with its pipe-smoking and toddy-drinking--and yet I see no place else.'

'We live in the cottages. Several of the villagers each give us a room, so we are not so badly off for space, though the rooms are pretty far apart.'

'I would not have believed that your brother could have behaved so badly as to bring you down to that. And I did not think my mother would have allowed it. Were you not asked to stay at Inchbracken?'

'I fear she and General Drysdale are too much displeased with my brother for bringing the Free Church controversy into the parish, and with me for following him, even to waste another thought upon either of us. And perhaps, Captain Drysdale, it is wrong in me to stand here talking to you, when I know how deeply we have offended your family. Perhaps they might not like it.'

'And what then? Miss Brown. Am I still in pinafores at eight-and-twenty, that my mamma is to give consent before I may be allowed to speak to my very oldest friend? Why! Mary, girl, I have had you in my arms before you could walk, and I have fished you out of more than one burn, where you might very well have been drowned if I had not been near. And you know when you were eight years old you promised'--

'Pray stop! Captain Drysdale. Those are old stories, and neither you nor I are to be bound by the foolish speeches of our childhood. Dear old Kilrundle! I shall never forget our happy days there. But things have changed--I think this must be your gig.'

It was his gig, and with a very hearty shake-hands on either side, he got into it, and drove away.

'Prettier than ever,' he kept saying to himself, and the touch of the soft hands and the light in the violet eyes seemed to remain with him, and to vibrate about his heart, like the echo of a pleasant strain, till an hour later be alighted at Inchbracken.

Mary Brown strolled back to the village, her thoughts running on many things at once, the pleasant memories of the long ago and the somewhat sordid experiences of the present. Had Mrs. Sangster of Auchlippie been by, and known what was passing in her mind, she would surely have told her she was looking back to the fleshpots of Egypt, and exhorted her to take warning by the melancholy fate of Lot's wife.

Mrs. Sangster was a lady who took a particular interest in her own side of the ecclesiastical contest; and indeed it paid her to do so. She was the wife of the great man of the congregation, and seeing how mightily her consequence had prospered under the schism, she might well be zealous. From being an unpretending gentleman farmer, and the smallest heritor in the parish, her husband was now one of the few landed proprietors adhering to the Free Church, and one of those, therefore, whom she delighted to honour. Their snug home with its arable land and pastures, had now become a territorial designation attached to his name by an accented 'of,' like a German 'von,' and when he attended the General Assembly at Edinburgh he found himself sitting in committee and on platforms with the Church's solitary Marquis and the great magnates of the cause, while Madame had her seat in the Assembly among the honourable women, behind the Moderator's chair.

Fortunately for Mary, Mrs. Sangster did not appear. It was only her messenger in the person of a bare-foot herd laddie, who brought an invitation to drink tea; so Mary might let her thoughts linger in Egypt as they would. Indeed, in her case the rebuke could hardly be held to apply, seeing it was not the Free Church she had followed into the wilderness, but only the steps of her dear brother, that she might support and minister to him wherever and however he might need her help; consequently her religion manifested itself only as it had always done, in charities and good deeds, and as she had little to say on controversial subjects she was held to be 'juist a wee cauldrife'--a weakly sister after the pattern of Martha, troubled about many things and much serving, but hardly sound on the importance of the Headship, seeing she was disposed to look on all ministers as alike good, whether they had come out or stayed in.

Mary lingered long over her breakfast, but at length it was concluded, and she rose and returned to the study over the way. In the distance coming down the hill road, she now descried her brother jogging slowly down towards her.

'Eppie,' she cried, 'here comes my brother at last; will you make him some tea?'

'Hoot, mem! He's no wantin' his breakfast, I'm thinkin', or he'd be for makin' mair speed, saw ye e'er a hungry man danderin' down the road like yon? But preserve us a'! What's yon he's carryin' afore him on the bit pownie? It micht e'en be a bairn by the looks o' the bun'le, an' the tent he taks on't.' 'A' weel, sir!' she shouted as he drew near, 'Ye've had a sore traivel. Hoo's a' wi' ye, sir? An' wad ye like a dish o' tea, sir! Or a drap kale? My pat's on this twa hour, an I'm thinkin' there's a hantle mair fushion in that, nor a' yer dribblin' teapats. Tak tent, sir!' she added as he proceeded to alight before the door, 'gie us the bun'le an' ye'll licht easy. Lord sakes! sir, wha's acht the bairn? A gangin' fit's aye gettin', folk says, but wha'ar gat ye the wein?'

'Well Eppie! It's a poor little shipwrecked sailor, and I believe an orphan. I picked it up among the wreck of a ship that was lost at Effick Mouth last night, and we must care for it till we find out whom it belongs to. Though I fear its parents are among those lost in the shipwreck. Poor little soul! See how it takes to you already, Eppie!'

'The bonny lamb! an' sae it diz, an' it micht tak up wi' waur folk nor Eppie Ness. I'se tent ye, my birdie! Hoot awa! Miss Mary, what ken a young thing like you about fendin' for a bairnie? Young folk hae muckle to learn, an' yer time 'ull come, hinnie, or I'm muckle mistaen. I'll seek out the bit cradle whaur my ain bonny wee lambie lay, 'at's been wi' the Lord noo gaun on twenty year, gin ye'll haud this wee birdie, Miss Mary. An' ye can be seein' til its claes, an' we'll hae to mak meat til't.'

So the baby was carried into the house, undressed and bathed and fed, and put to sleep in Eppie's cradle. When the shawls were removed they disclosed a little girl dressed in many delicate embroideries, and around its body was entwined part of a gold chain corresponding to the links which Roderick had observed in the grasp of the drowned woman on the beach. These properties they carefully folded up and put away to assist in the future identification of the child, and Roderick wrote a letter to the Edinburgh Witness describing the waif he had rescued from the sea, in hopes it might meet the eye of some friend or relation.