“I thank you, sir,” she said, lifting up her head and letting her eyes dwell on me with some of their former haughtiness; “I am honoured indeed. Your position, your manse, your glebe! How many acres did you say it was? Your income, good as that of a laird. And you come offering all these to Mary Gordon? Sir, I bid you carry your business transactions to the county market-place. Mary Gordon is not to be bought and sold. When she loves, she will give herself for love and love alone. Aye, were it to a poke-laden houseless cadger by the roadside, or a ploughman staggering between the furrows!”
And with that she rose and walked swiftly to the door. I could hear her foot die away through the courtyard; and going blankly to the window, I watched her slim figure glance between the clumps of trees, now in the light, now in the shadow, and anon lost in the yellowing depths of the forest.
Nor, though I watched all through the long hot afternoon, did she return till she came home riding upon her father’s horse, with Sandy Gordon himself walking bareheaded beside his daughter, as if he had been escorting a queen on her coronation day.
CHAPTER XIX.
ANOTHER WAY OF LOVE.
(Comment and Addition by Hob MacClellan.)
Lord! Lord! Was there ever a more bungled affair—a more humiliating confession. Our poor Quintin—great as he was at the preaching, an apostle indeed, none in broad Scotland to come within miles of him in the pulpit—with a lass was simply fair useless. I must e’en tell in a word how mine own wooing sped, that I may prove there was some airt and spunk left among the MacClellans.
For by Quintin’s own showing the girl had no loop-hole left, being wooed as if she had been so many sacks of corn. She was fairly tied up to refuse so hopeless and fushionless a suitor.
But of all this there was no suspicion at the time, neither in the parish of Balmaghie, or yet even among ourselves at Ardarroch. For though nothing gets wind so quickly in a parish as the news that the minister is “seekin”—that is, going from home courting, yet such was my brother’s repute for piety “within the bounds of the Presbytery,” such the reverence in which he was held, that the popular voice considered him altogether trysted to no maiden, but to the ancient and honourable Kirk of Scotland as she had been in the high days of her pride and purity.
“Na,” they would say, “our minister will never taingle himsel’ wi’ marriage engagements while there is a battle to be fought for the Auld Banner o’ Blue.” So whereas another might not so much as look over the wall, my brother might have stolen all the horses before their eyes.
And I think it was this great popular repute of him which first set his fellow-ministers against him, far more than any so-called “defections” and differences either ecclesiastical or political.
I have seen him at a sacrament at Dalry hold the listening thousands so that they swayed this way and that like barley shaken by the winds. Never beheld I the like—the multitude of the folk all bending their faces to one point—careless young lads from distant farms, light-headed limmers of lasses, bairns that had been skipping about the kirk-yard and playing “I spy” among the tombstones while other ministers were preaching—all now fixed and spellbound when my brother rose to speak, and his full bell-like voice sounded out from the preaching-tent over their heads.