Between Whiles Part 17

"Handsome!" cried Elspie; "is it handsome,--the face all a spatter with the color of the hair? He's nice eyes of his own, but his skin's deesgustin'." Which speech, if Donald had overheard it, would have caused that there should never have been this story to tell. But luckily Donald did not. All that he bore away from the McCloud farm-house that June morning was a picture of a face and flitting figure, and the sound in his ears of a voice,--a picture and a sound which he was destined to see and hear all his life.

He scarcely spoke on his way back to the boat, and Katie perplexed herself vainly trying to account for his silence. It must be, she thought, that he had been vexed by the sight of so many girls and the sound of their idle chatter. He would have liked it better if n.o.body but the family had been at home. What a shame for a man to live alone as he did, and get into such unsocial ways! He grew more and more averse to society each year. Now, if he were only married, and had a bright home, where people came and went, with a bit of a tea now and then, how good it would be for him,--take the stiffness out of his ways, and make him more as he used to be fifteen, or even ten years ago! And so the good Katie went on in her placid mind, trotting along silently by his side, waiting for him to speak.

"Where did she get the heather?"

"What!" exclaimed Katie. The irrelevant question sounded like the speech of one talking in his sleep. "Oh," she continued, "ye mean Elspie!"

"Ay," said Donald. "She'd a bit of heather in her belt,--the true heather, not sticks like yon," pointing a contemptuous finger toward Katie's bonnet. "Where did she get it?"

"Mother's always the heather growing in the house," answered Katie. "She says she's homesick unless she sees it. It was grandmother brought it over in the first, and it's never been let die out."

"My mother the same," said Donald. "It's the first blossom I remember, an' I'm thinking it will be the last," he continued, gazing at Katie absently; but his face did not look as if it were absently he gazed.

There was a glow on his cheeks, and an intense expression in his eyes which Katie had never seen there. They warmed her heart.

"Yes," she said, "one can never forget what one has loved in the youth."

"True, Katie, true. There's nothing like one's own and earliest,"

replied Donald, full of his new and thrilling emotion; and as he said it he reached out his hand and took hold of Katie's, as if they were boy and girl together. "Many's the time I've raced wi' ye this way, Katie,"

he said affectionately.

"Ay, when I was a wee thing; an' ye always let go my hand at last, and pretended I could outrin ye," laughed Katie, blissful tears filling her eyes.

What a happy day was this! Had it not been an inspiration to bring Donald back to the old farm-house? Katie was sure it had. She was filled with sweet reveries; and so silent on the way home that her merry friends joked her unmercifully about her long walk inland with the Captain.

It was late in the night, or rather it was early the next morning, when the "Heather Bell" reached her wharf.

"I'll go up with ye, Katie," said Donald. "It's not decent for ye to go alone."

And when he bade her good-night he looked half-wistfully in her face, and said: "But it's a lonely house for ye to come to, Katie, an' not a soul but yourself in it." And he held her hand in his affectionately, as a cousin might.

Katie's heart beat like a hammer in her bosom at these words, but she answered gravely: "Yes, it was sorely lonely at first, an' I wearied myself out to get them to give me Elspie to learn the business wi' me; but I'm more used to it now."

"That is what I was thinkin'," said Donald, "that if the two o' ye were here together, ye'd not be so lonely. Would she not like to come?"

"Ay, that would she," replied the unconscious Katie; "she pines to be with me. I'm more her mother than the mother herself; but they'll never consent."

"She's bonny," said Donald. I'd not seen her since she was little."

"She's as good as she is bonny," said Katie, warmly; and that was the last word between Katie and Donald that night.

"As good as she is bonny." It rang in Donald's ears like a refrain of heavenly music as he strode away. "As good as she is bonny;" and how good must that be? She could not be as good as she was bonny, for she was the bonniest la.s.s that ever drew breath. Gray eyes and golden hair and pink cheeks and pink heather all mingled in Donald's dreams that night in fantastic and impossible combinations; and more than once he waked in terror, with the sweat standing on his forehead from some nightmare fancy of danger to the "Heather Bell" and to Elspie, both being inextricably entangled together in his vision.

The visions did not fade with the day. They pursued Donald, and haunted his down-sitting and his uprising. He tried to shake them off, drive them away; for when he came to think the thing over soberly, he called himself an old fool to be thus going daft about a child like Elspie.

"Barely twenty at the most, and me forty. She'd not look at an old fellow like me, and maybe't would be like a sin if she did," said Donald to himself over and over again. But it did no good. "As good as she is bonny, bonny, bonny," rang in his ears, and the blue eyes and golden hair and merry smile floated before his eyes. There was no help for it.

Since the world began there have been but two roads out of this sort of mystic maze in which Donald now found himself lost,--but two roads, one bright with joy, one dark with sorrow. And which road should it be Donald's fate to travel must be for the child Elspie to say. After a few days of bootless striving with himself, during which time he had spent more hours with Katie than he had for a year before,--it was such a comfort to him to see in her face the subtle likeness to Elspie, and to hear her talk about plans of bringing her to Charlottetown for a visit if nothing more,--after a few days of this, Captain Donald, one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, sailing past Orwell Head, suddenly ran into the inlet where he had taken the picnic party, and, mooring the "Heather Bell" at Spruce Wharf, announced to his astonished mate that he should lie by there till Monday.

It was a bold step of Captain Donald's. But he was not a man for half-and-half ways in anything; and he had said grimly to himself that this matter must be ended one way or the other,--either he would win the child or lose her. He would know which. Girls had loved men twenty years older than themselves, and girls might again.

The Sunday pa.s.sed off better than his utmost hopes. Everybody except Elspie was cordially glad to see him. Visitors were not so common at the Orwell Head farm-houses that they could fail of welcome. The McCloud boys were thankful to hear all that Donald had to tell, and with the old father and mother he had always been a prime favorite. It had been a sore disappointment to them, as year after year went by, to see that there seemed no likelihood of his becoming Katie's husband. As the day wore on, even Elspie relaxed a little from her indifferent attention to him, and began to perceive that, spite of the odious freckles, he was, as the girls had said, a handsome man.

Partly because of this, and partly from innate coquetry, she said, when he was taking leave, "Ye'll not be comin' again for another year, maybe?"

"Ye'll see, then!" laughed Donald, with a sudden wise impulse to refrain from giving the reply which sprang to his lips,--"To-morrow, if ye'd ask me!"

And from the same wise, strangely wise impulse he curbed his desire to go again the next Sunday and the next. Not until three weeks had pa.s.sed did he go; and then Elspie was clearly and unmistakably glad to see him.

This was all Donald wanted. "I'll win her, the bonny thing!" he said to himself. "An' I'll not be long, either."

And he was right. A girl would have been hard indeed that would not have been touched by the beaming, tender face which Donald wore, now that hope lighted it up. His masterful bearing, too, was a pleasure to the spirited Elspie, who had no liking for milksops, and had sent off more than one lover because he came crawling too humbly to her feet.

Elspie had none of the gentle, quiet blood which ran in Katie's veins.

She had even been called Firebrand in her younger, childish days, so hot was her temper, so hasty her tongue. But the firm rule of the Scottish household and the pressure of the stern Scotch Calvinism preached in their kirk had brought her well under her own control.

"Eh, but the bonny la.s.s has hersel' well in hand," thought the admiring Donald more than once, as he saw her in some family discussion or controversy keep silence, with flus.h.i.+ng cheeks, when sharp words rose to her tongue.

All this time Katie was plodding away at her millinery, inexpressibly cheered by Donald's new friendliness. He came often to see her, and told her with the greatest frankness of his visits at the farm. He would take her some day, he said; the trouble was, he could never be sure beforehand when it would answer for him to stop there. Katie sunned herself in this new familiar intercourse, and the thought of Donald running up to the old farm of a Sunday as if he were one of the brothers going home. In the contentment of these thoughts she grew younger and prettier,--began to look as she did at twenty. And Donald, gazing scrutinizingly in her face one day, seeking, as he was always doing, for stray glimpses of resemblance to Elspie, saw this change, and impulsively told her of it.

"But ye're growin' young, Katie--d'ye know it?--young and bonny, my girl."

And Katie listened to the words with such sweet joy she feared her face would tell too much, and put up her hands to hide it, crying: "Ah, ye're tryin' to make me silly, you Donald, with such flatterin'. We're gettin'

old, Donald, you an' me," she added, with a guilty little undercurrent of thought in her mind. "D'ye mind that I was thirty last month?"

"Ay," replied Donald, gloomily, his face darkening,--"ay; I mind, by the same token, I'm forty. It's no need ye have to be callin' yersel' old.

But I'm old, an' no mistake." The thought, as Katie had put it, had been gall and wormwood to him. If Katie thought him old, what must he seem to Elspie!

It was early in June that Elspie had had the spinning-bee to which Katie had brought the unwelcome Donald. The summer sped past, but a faster summer than any reckoned on the calendar of months and days was speeding in Elspie's heart. Such great love as Donald's reaches and warms its object as inevitably as the heat of a fire warms those near it. Early in June the spinning-bee, and before the last flax was pulled, early in September, Elspie knew that she was restless till Donald came, glad when he was by her side, and strangely sorry when he went away. Still, she was not ready to admit to herself that it was anything more than her natural liking for any pleasant friend who broke in on the lonely monotony of the farm life.

The final drying of the flax, which is an important crop on most of the Prince Edward Island farms, is put off until autumn. After its first drying in the fields where it grew, it is stored in bundles under cover till all the other summer work is done, and autumn brings leisure. Then the flax camp, as it is called, is built,--a big house of spruce boughs; walls, flat roof, all of the green spruce boughs, thick enough to keep out rain. This is usually in the heart of a spruce grove. Thither the bundles of flax are carried and stacked in piles. In the centre of the inclosure a slow fire is lighted, and above this on a frame of slats the stalks of flax are laid for their last drying. It is a difficult and dangerous process to keep the fire hot enough and not too hot, to s.h.i.+ft and turn and lift the flax at the right moment. Sometimes only a sudden flinging of moist earth upon the fire saves it from blazing up into the flax, and sometimes one careless second's oversight loses the whole,--flax, spruce-bough house, all, in a light blaze, and gone in a breath.

The McClouds' flax camp had been built in the edge of the spruce grove where the picnickers had held their dance and merry-making on that June day, memorable to Donald and Elspie and Katie. It was well filled with flax, in the drying of which n.o.body was more interested than Elspie. She had big schemes for spinning and weaving in the coming winter. A whole piece of linen she had promised to Katie, and a piece for herself, and, as Elspie thought it over, maybe a good many more pieces than one she might require for herself before spring. Who knew?

It was October now, and many a Sunday evening had Elspie walked with Donald alone down to Spruce Wharf, and lingered there watching the last curl of steam from the "Heather Bell" as she rounded the point, bearing Donald away. Elspie could not doubt why Donald came. Soon she would wonder why he came and went so many times silent; that is, silent in words, eloquent of eye and hand,--even the touch of his hand was like a promise.

No one was defter and more successful in this handling of the flax over the fire than Elspie. It had sometimes happened that she, with the help of one brother, had dried the whole crop. It was not thought safe for one person to work at it alone for fear of accident with the fire. But it fell out on this October afternoon, a Sat.u.r.day, that Elspie, feeling sure of Donald's being on his way to spend the Sunday with her, had walked down to the wharf to meet him. Seeing no signs of the boat, she went back to the flax camp, lighted the fire, and began to spread the flax on the slats. There was not much more left to be dried,--"not more than three hours' work in all," she said to herself. "Eh, but I'd like to have done with it before the Sabbath!" And she fell to work with a will, so briskly to work that she did not realize how time was flying,--did not, strangest of all, hear the letting off of steam when the "Heather Bell" moored at the wharf; and she was still busily turning and lifting and separating the stalks of flax, bending low over the frame, heated, hurrying, her whole heart in her work, when Donald came striding up the field from the wharf,--striding at his greatest pace, for he was disturbed at not finding Elspie at the landing to meet him.

He turned his head toward the spruce grove, thinking vaguely of the June picnic, and what had come of his walking away from the dance that morning, when suddenly a great column of smoke and fire rolled up from the grove, and in the same second came piercing shrieks in Elspie's voice. The grove was only a few rods away, but it seemed to Donald an eternity before he reached the spot, to see not only the spruce boughs and flax on fire, but Elspie tossing up her arms like one crazed, her gown all ablaze. The brave, foolish girl, at the first blazing of the stalks on the slats, had darted into the corner of the house and s.n.a.t.c.hed an armful of the piled flax there to save it; but as she pa.s.sed the flaming centre the whole sheaf she carried had caught fire also, and in a twinkling of an eye had blazed up around her head, and when she dropped it, had blazed up again fiercer than ever around her feet.

With a groan Donald seized her. The flames leaped on him, too, as if to wrestle with him; his brown beard crackled, his hair, but he fought through it all. Throwing Elspie on the ground, he rolled her over and over, crying aloud, "Oh, my darlin', if I break your sweet bones, it is better than the fire!" And indeed it seemed as if it must break her bones, so fiercely he rolled her over and over, tearing off his woollen coat to smother the fire; beating it with his tartan cap, stamping it with his knees and feet "Oh, my darlin'! make yourself easy. I'll save ye! I'll save ye if I die for it," he cried.

And through the smoke and the fire and the terror Elspie answered back: "I'll not leave ye, my Donald. We're gettin' it under." And with her own scorched hands she pulled the coat-flaps down over the smouldering bits of flax, and tore off her burning garments.

Not a coward thread in her whole body had little Elspie, and in less time than the story could ever be told, all was over, and safely; and there they sat on the ground, the two, locked in each other's arms,--Donald's beard gone, and much of his hair; Elspie's pretty golden hair also blackened, burned. It was the first thing Donald saw after he made sure danger was past. Laying his hand on her head, he said, with a half-sob,--he was hysterical now there was nothing more to be done: "Oh, your bonny hair, my darlin'! It's all scorched away."

"It'll grow!" said Elspie, looking up in his eyes archly. Her head was on his shoulder, and she nestled closer; then she burst into tears and laughter together, crying: "Oh, Donald, it was for you I was callin'.

Did ye hear me? I said to myself when the fire took hold, 'O G.o.d, send Donald to save me!'"

"An' he sent me, my darlin'," answered Donald. "Ye are my own darlin'; say it, Elspie, say it!" he continued. "Oh, ye bonny bairn, but I've loved ye like death since the first day I set eyes on your bonny face!

Say ye're my darlin'!"

But he knew it without her saying a word; and the whispered "Yes, Donald, I'm your darlin' if you want me," did not make him any surer.