Chapter Eight.
Kenneth and Jessie.
“Will cannot hinder nor keenness foresee
What Destiny holds in the darkness for me.”
Tupper.
Scene: Dugald’s garden on the cliff top. You have to climb up to it from the road that goes winding through a wooded ravine, up a few steep gravel steps. It is spring-time, and the soft west wind goes sighing through the trees.
It is gloomy enough in the ravine below, but here the sun is brightly shining, and primroses are blooming on the borders, and the blue myosotis that rivals the noonday sky in the brightness of its colour.
On a wooden dais, near the keeper’s door, Kenneth is lying rolled in his plaid and propped up with pillows. On the arm of the dais old Nancy’s cat is seated, blinking in the sunshine and singing. On the pathway is Kooran, and book in hand—’tis Burns’s poems—Archie is seated on a stone.
Kenneth’s mother comes out and stands beside her boy, smiling and talking for a little, then goes in again. Dugald himself comes up the path, gun on shoulder, singing low, but he finishes the line in a louder voice when he sees Kenneth.
“Ah, lad! out once more,” he cries joyfully. “Och, man! it’s myself that is glad to see you.”
The moisture had gathered in the honest fellow’s eye. Kenneth smiled faintly.
“You’ll soon see me on foot again, the doctor says.”
“But, man, if I live to be as auld as Methuselah, I’ll never forget that dreary nicht your Kooran came howling to the door. He would hardly give me time to put my plaid on, and then he led me away and away to Brownie’s Howe, and I found your body—there seemed no life in it—and carried you hame here on my shoulder.
“Ay, and Kooran has never left ye one hour since then, nor Nancy’s cat either. She came here the very day after Nancy’s funeral. Poor auld Nancy! How quietly she wore away. And how sensible she was to the last. And she told me a story about the laird, our dear laird McGregor, that you maunna hear noo, Kenneth. Good-bye. I’m off to the hills. Mind to keep the wind from him, Archie.”
“How I should like to go too, Archie,” said Kenneth.
“Oh!” said the boy, “that will soon be now. And oh! how bonnie the woods are, and the birds have all begun to build.”
“Are the woods very bonnie, Archie?”
“Oh! delightful,” cried the boy. “The moss is so soft and green under the trees. The wild flowers are creeping out and blowing on the banks. The pine trees are all stuck over with long white-green fingers.”
“I know,” said Kenneth.
“The birch tree stems are whiter than ever I saw them, just like silver, Kennie.”
“Yes.”
“And their branches are trailing down with the weight of their bonnie wee glittering leaves.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Then the needles on the larch trees were never so soft and green before, I’m sure, and they are just covered with red tassels.”
“Yes.”
“And the rowan trees (Rowan tree—the mountain ash) are covered with white flowers. What lots of scarlet roddans they’ll have in autumn! And the birds are all building, as I said. I have a hoody-craw’s nest in a Scotch fir in Alva, and a kestrel’s in a terribly tall tree at Aultmore. That magpie is building a brand-new nest; I knew she’d have to.”
“Well?”
“Well, there are five eggs in a laverock’s among the corn, and I know where there is a ptarmigan’s and a whaup’s, far away up among the mountains.”
“Oh! I do so long to be well, Archie.”
“And the sheep, Archie?” continued poor Kenneth. “I’ve dreamed about them so often since I’ve been sick. I always see them lookin’ up, Archie, with their bonnie brown een” (eyes), “and wonderin’ what has come of me. And I’m sure Kooran wants to see them.”
“Kooran could see them any day, and they’re doin’ finely, but Kooran won’t leave you.”
“Dear me, what shall I do?” cried Archie’s mother, running distractedly up the garden with a bucketful of greens in her hand. To have seen her half-scared looks, one would have imagined something terrible was about to happen. “Gentry coming, and I’m no’ dressed.”
The gently arrived about five minutes afterwards, little Jessie, Miss Gale, and Miss Grant.
As soon as she found herself on the garden path Jessie, who had a bunch of primroses in her hand, and some long drooping crimson-tipped twigs from the larch, started to run. But she paused half-way, and an expression of sadness stole over her face, as she noticed how wan and white Kenneth was looking.
She advanced more slowly and tendered the flowers.
“Poor boy!” she said; “are you very, very ill?”
Kenneth took the flowers, and a flush of joy lit his pale cheeks as he replied,—
“Not now, Miss Jessie. The doctor says I have nothing to do but get well.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” cried Jessie.
Her governess now came up, and Miss Grant. The latter had been often before to see the invalid, but Jessie and Miss Gale had only recently arrived from Inverness-shire, and were loud in their praises of its magnificent scenery. Archie went and brought a chair for Jessie, so that she could sit while she talked to the invalid boy. Archie was improving. He even spoke to Jessie to-day, and promised to bring her something very nice if she would accept it. The something very nice ultimately proved to be a young hedgehog, so young that its spines had only just turned hard.
Presently the ladies went into the keeper’s cottage. Archie lay down on the gravel-path with his head on Kooran’s neck, and Jessie sat and talked to Kenneth.
What was she telling him? He looked intensely interested. His eyes were dilated, his hands clasped, his face flushed. It was but a simple story she was telling him, told in simple child’s language. The story of her own London life, her life in society. But it was all, all so new to Kenneth.
Ah! little did innocent Jessie know that her prattle had lighted the fires of ambition in that boy’s soul. But so it was. She had inaugurated a new phase in his existence. She had inadvertently led him to see that there were other—can I say better worlds than his?
So Jessie went away, with many a promise to come again when he was stronger, and could play soft melodies on the flute,—melodies, she said, that made her feel she wanted to cry, but that she loved all the same.
Jessie went away. She had found the boy on this bright lovely spring morning but a boy; she left him a man at heart.
Archie came and sat by him, and recommenced his tales of mountain and moorland and forest. He told him of the fairy knoll and the smugglers’ cave, about the heather, now so green and promising, about early lambs, and all the little incidents of life in the hills. Kenneth listened, but his thoughts were far away.
These glens and wilds, dearly though he loved them, were not all the world. The poets and writers that had so charmed him hitherto, and served to throw a glamour of romance over the beautiful land in which he lived—Burns, Ossian, Tannahill, Campbell, Scott, and the Ettrick Shepherd,—they had made him love it, oh! so dearly love it, with that burning, passionate patriotism which only the heart can feel.
“That beats beneath a Scottish plaid.”
But—had he not been living too much in the past? was there not a power setting in that was threatening to tear Scotland from the hands of the Scotch? Ought he to stay among these mountains and dream dreams, instead of going out into the world beyond to work or fight for the dear land that gave him birth? Ought he not to try even to gather wealth for the sake of those he would leave behind?
Clouds were gathering over the glen. A foreigner was soon to take possession of it, with no more love for the soil than if the heather that grew on every acre of it had not been dyed a hundred times over with the blood of the hero and the patriot. Could he stay at home and see his father’s grave, poor old Nancy’s too, levelled?
His thin hands covered his face, the boy sobbed quietly, and the tears trickled through his fingers.