Was there ever such a child, Yaverland asked himself triumphantly, as if he had proved a disputed point. He persuaded himself that the exquisite exhibition of her personality which delighted him all through the meal they presently shared on the rock beside this red pool was vouchsafed to him only because he had been wise enough not to treat her as a woman. She was as spontaneous as a little squirrel that plays unwatched in the early morning at the fringe of the wood. There was no movement of her beautiful bright-coloured person, no upward or downward singing of her soft Scotch voice, that did not precisely express some real action of her soul. But if he had spoken only one word of love it would not have been so. She would have blurred her clear gestures by traditional languors, she would have kept her mind busy draping her with the graces expected of a courted maiden instead of letting it run enquiringly about the marvels of the earth; for the old wives and the artists have been so busy with this subject of love that they have made a figure of the lover, and the young woman who finds herself a bride can no more behave naturally than a young man who finds himself a poet. Oh, he was doing the sensible thing. There was no day in his life which he was more certain that he had spent wisely than this which he dawdled away playing with Ellen as a little boy might play with a little girl, on the edge of the two lochs to which this glen led. By the first, a dull enough stretch of water had it not been for its name, which she loved and made him love by repeating it, "Loganlee, Loganlee." She made him go on ahead for a few yards and then ran to him, clapping her hands, because he had come to a halt on the bridge that spanned a little tributary to the loch.
"There, I knew you'd stop! There's no stranger ever gets across this bridge without stopping and looking over. They call it the Lazy Brig. The old folk say it's because there's a fairy sitting by the burn, a gossiping buddy who casts a spell on strangers so that he can have a good look at them and talk about them afterwards to the other fairies." But at the second loch, Glencorse Pond, she nearly quarrelled with him, though she was pleased with his evident awe at the place. Here black wild hills ran down to a half-moon of wind-fretted water, near a mile long, and dark trees stood on its banks with such a propriety of desolate beauty that it seemed as if it must be a conscious work of art; one could believe that the scene had been wrought by some winged artist divine enough to mould mountains yet possessed by an ecstasy of human, grief. There was a little island on the loch, a knoll of sward so thickly set with tall swaying firs that from this distance it looked like a bunch of draggled crow's feathers set in the water, and from this there ran to the northern shore a broad stone causeway, so useless that it provoked the imagination and made the mind's eye see a string of hatchet-faced men, wrapped in cloaks and swinging lanthorns, passing that way at midnight. It was, Ellen said, a reservoir; but it was no ordinary reservoir, for under its waters lay an ancient chapel and its graveyard.
"Mrs. Bonar, the ploughman's wife who lives in the cottage up yonder on Bell's Hill—do you see it?—told me she'd often seen the ghosts rising up through the water at night. And I said to her, 'That's most interesting. And what do the ghosts look like?' 'Och, the very dead spit of thon incandescent mantles my daughter has in her wee flat in Edinburgh.' Was that not a fine way for a ghost to look?"
He laughed at that, but presently laughed at a private jest of his own, and so fell into disgrace. For in answer to her enquiring gaze he said, "A reservoir with a churchyard at the bottom of it. I wondered what cocktail Edinburgh took to keep itself so gay." To his surprise, tears came into her eyes. "Oh, you English!" she snapped. "Cackling at the Scotch is your one accomplishment."
But they soon made friends. The skies intervened to patch it up between them, for presently there broke out a huge windy conflagration of a sunset, which was itself so fine a scarlet show and wrought such magical changes on the common colour of things that she had constantly to call his attention by little intimate cries and tuggings at the sleeve. This was not soft summer glow, no liquefaction of tints; but the world became mineral as they looked. The field by the road was changed from a dull winter green to a greenish copper; the bramble bushes cast long steel-blue shadows, and their scarlet and purple leaves looked like snips of painted tin; and the Glencorse Burn on the other side of the field was overhung by bare trees of gold. Every window of the farmhouse across the valley was a loophole of flame; and here it was evident, from the passing of a multitude of figures about the farm buildings and a babblement that drove in gusts across the valley, there was happening some event that matched the prodigiousness of the strange appearance lent it by the sunset.
"There's an awful argy-bargying at Little Vantage," said Ellen, "I wonder what's going on."
When they crossed over the burn and turned into the road that led back to the farmhouse they found the dykes plastered with intimations of a sale of live stock. "Ah, it's a roup! Old Mr. Gumley must be dead, poor soul!" And indeed the road was lined with farmers' gigs, paint and brass-work blazing with the evening light till they looked like fiery chariots that would presently lift to heaven. About the yard gate there was a great press of hale farmers, gilt and ruddy from the sunset they faced, and vomiting jests at each other out of their great bearded mouths; and in the yard sheep with golden fleece and cattle as bright as dragons ran hither and thither before the sticks of boys who looked like demons with the orange glow on their faces, and who cursed and spat to show they would some-day be men. Richard and Ellen had to stand back for a moment while a horse was led out; and as it passed a paunchy farmer jocularly struck it between the eyes and roared, "Ye're no for me, ye auld mare, wi' your braw beginnings of the ringbone!" And there was so much glee at the mention of deformity in the thick voice, and so much patience in the movement of the mare's long unshapely head, that the incident was as unpleasing as if it had been an ill-favoured spinster who had been insulted. Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest sound of a whimper from Ellen.
"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.
"Nothing," she quivered. "There's something awful sad about the evening sometimes. I've got an end of the world feeling." And indeed there was something awesome and unnatural about this quiet hour in which there was so much light and so little heat, in this furnace of the skies from which there flowed so glacial a wind. "Supposing the end of the world is like this," said Ellen, nearly crying. "A lot of beefy, red-faced angels buying us up and taking us off to their own places without a word to us of where we're to go to, and commenting most unfeelingly on all our failings...."
"You funny person," he murmured, "you're tired. Probably hungry. Where's that cottage you talked about where they'll give us tea?"