Lochinvar: A Novel

Автор

Samuel Crockett

Жанр

Зарубежная классика

Год написания книги

2017

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Then in the beauty of a late and gracious gloaming, they rowed over softly to the blossoming heather of the loch-side, and took their way by two and two up the hill. The two women walked on in front in whispered sibylline converse, sometimes looking over their shoulders to insure that their husbands did not encroach too closely upon the mysteries.

At the top of the hill Wat and Kate with one instinct stopped a moment and looked down upon the peace of their moorland home. Jack Scarlett was dragging a rod across the loch from the stern of the returning boat. Jean Gordon and Mall, her maid, were setting the evening fire to "keep in" till the morning. The topmost chimney still gave forth a faint blue "pew" of peat-reek, which went straight up into the still night air and was lost among the thickening spear-points of the stars.

Kate took her husband's arm.

"Are you sorry, Wat?" she said, with something like the dew of tears in her voice, "that you gave up the command of a regiment to come to this quiet place – and to me?"

In the hearing of his cousin Wat only smiled at her question, but privately he took possession of his wife's hand, and kept it in his all the way as they went down the hill, till they came through the Earlstoun wood past the tree in which Sandy had hidden so long. But at the well-house gate Kate suddenly dropped Wat's hand, and she and Maisie darted simultaneously towards the great doorway of Earlstoun.

Their husbands stood petrified.

"There is baby crying, after all! Did I not tell you?" cried Kate and Maisie together, looking reproachfully at each other as they ran.

Wat and Will were left alone by the curb of the well-house of Earlstoun; they clasped hands silently in the dusk of the gloaming and looked different ways. And though they did not speak, the grip of their right hands was at once a thanksgiving and a prayer.

THE END

notes

1

Certain heelless and shapeless slippers, characteristic of the district.

2

Catechism.

3

Diligent.

4

Mole.

5

Weasel.

6

Unnecessary disturbance.

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