Do not shrink; here has come the ordeal you have looked for many a day. Well said your prophetic heart, that it drew near in the hush and silence of this fated time. They stand there, arched and canopied, under these familiar trees, the hamlet’s quiet houses receding behind them—Burnside yonder, the limit of the scene, and the burn, the kindly country voice, singing a quiet measure to keep them calm. An old man and a young, learned with experiences of life: the elder, fresh and noble, daring to meet the world with open face, aware of all the greatest truths and mysteries of the wonderful existence which we call common life, but nothing more; the younger trained in a more painful school, with his lesson of self-forgetting newly conned, with knowledge sadder than his father’s, with a heart and conscience quivering still with self-inflicted wounds—they stand there bareheaded under the cloudy sky—not with the salutation of common respect, which might permit them to pass on. A courtly natural grace about them both, makes their attitude all the more remarkable. With blanched cheeks and failing eyes, Menie Laurie’s face droops; she dares not look up, but waits, trembling so greatly that she can scarcely stand, for what has to be said.
Mrs Laurie, with a sudden impulse of protection, draws her child’s arm within her own—moves forward steadily, all her pride of mother and of woman coming to her aid; bows to her right hand and her left; says she is glad to see that this is really Mr Randall, and not the wraith her simple Jenny had supposed; and, speaking thus in a voice which is but a murmur of inarticulate sound to Menie, bows again, and would pass on.
But John Home of Crofthill lays his hand upon her sleeve. “You and me have no outcast to settle. Leave the bairns to themselves.”
With a startled glance Mrs Laurie looks round her, at the old man’s face of anxious friendliness, at the deep flush on Randall’s brow, and at her own Menie’s drooping head. “Shall I leave you, Menie?” Menie makes no answer—as pale and as cold as marble, with a giddy pain in her forehead, unable to raise her swimming eyes—but she makes a great effort to support herself, as her mother gradually looses her hand from her arm.
Passive, silent, her whole mind absorbed with the pain it takes to keep herself erect, and guide her faltering steps along the road; but Randall is by Menie’s side once more.
Father and mother have gone on, back towards the cottage; silently, without a word, these parted hearts follow them side by side. If she had any power left but what is wanted for her own support, she would wonder why Randall does not speak. She does wonder, indeed, faintly, even through her pain. With downcast eyes like hers, he walks beside her, through this chill dewy air, between these rustling hedges, in a conscious silence, which every moment becomes more overpowering, more strange.
“Menie!” With a sudden start she acknowledges her name; but there is nothing more.
“I said, when we parted, that you were disloyal to me and to Nature,” said Randall, after another pause. “Menie, I have learned many a thing since then. It was I that was disloyal to Nature—but never to you.”
Still no answer; this giddiness grows upon her, though she does not miss a syllable of what he says.
“There is no question between us—none that does not fade like a vapour before the sunlight I see. Menie, can you trust me again?”