woman ony way; we've good warrandise for that - it's in the Bible - and

wha can doubt that the Apostle had some gowden-haired lassie in his mind
- Apostle and all, for what was he but just a man like yersel'?"

CHAPTER VI - A LEAF FROM CHRISTINA'S PSALM-BOOK
ARCHIE was sedulous at church. Sunday after Sunday he sat down and

stood up with that small company, heard the voice of Mr. Torrance
leaping like an ill-played clarionet from key to key, and had an

opportunity to study his moth-eaten gown and the black thread mittens
that he joined together in prayer, and lifted up with a reverent

solemnity in the act of benediction. Hermiston pew was a little square
box, dwarfish in proportion with the kirk itself, and enclosing a table

not much bigger than a footstool. There sat Archie, an apparent prince,
the only undeniable gentleman and the only great heritor in the parish,

taking his ease in the only pew, for no other in the kirk had doors.
Thence he might command an undisturbed view of that congregation of

solid plaided men, strapping wives and daughters, oppressed children,
and uneasy sheep-dogs. It was strange how Archie missed the look of

race; except the dogs, with their refined foxy faces and inimitably
curling tails, there was no one present with the least claim to

gentility. The Cauldstaneslap party was scarcely an exception; Dandie
perhaps, as he amused himself making verses through the interminable

burden of the service, stood out a little by the glow in his eye and a
certain superior animation of face and alertness of body; but even

Dandie slouched like a rustic. The rest of the congregation, like so
many sheep, oppressed him with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day

following day - of physical labour in the open air, oatmeal porridge,
peas bannock the somnolent fireside in the evening, and the night-long

nasal slumbers in a box-bed. Yet he knew many of them to be shrewd and
humorous, men of character, notable women, making a bustle in the world

and radiating an influence from their low-browed doors. He knew besides
they were like other men; below the crust of custom, rapture found a

way; he had heard them beat the timbrel before Bacchus - had heard them
shout and carouse over their whisky-toddy; and not the most Dutch-

bottomed and severe faces among them all, not even the solemn elders
themselves, but were capable of singular gambols at the voice of love.

Men drawing near to an end of life's adventurous journey - maids
thrilling with fear and curiosity on the threshold of entrance - women

who had borne and perhaps buried children, who could remember the
clinging of the small dead hands and the patter of the little feet now

silent - he marvelled that among all those faces there should be no face
of expectation, none that was mobile, none into which the rhythm and

poetry of life had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at
times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the

living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to
waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him,

and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh
out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.

On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had
come at last. It was warm, with a latentshiver in the air that made

the warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered
and tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth

arrested Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication. The
grey Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from

the sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an
essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in

particulars but breathing to him from the whole. He surprised himself
by a sudden impulse to write poetry - he did so sometimes, loose,

galloping octo-syllabics in the vein of Scott - and when he had taken
his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a

tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised
him that he should have nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in

time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe. By the time he
came to a corner of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so

lingered by the way that the first psalm was finishing. The nasal
psalmody, full of turns and trills and graceless graces, seemed the

essential voice of the kirk itself upraised in thanksgiving,
"Everything's alive," he said; and again cries it aloud, "thank God,

everything's alive!" He lingered yet a while in the kirk-yard. A tuft
of primroses was blooming hard by the leg of an old black table

tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random apologue. They
stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of contrast; and he was

struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day, the season, and the
beauty that surrounded him - the chill there was in the warmth, the

gross black clods about the openingprimroses, the damp earthy smell
that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice of the aged

Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. And he wondered if Torrance also
felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring morning;

Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must come so
soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his rheumatisms,

while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from his own
familiar pulpit? The pity of it, and something of the chill of the

grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.
He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew with

lowered eyes, for he feared he had already offended the kind old
gentleman in the pulpit, and was sedulous to offend no further. He

could not follow the prayer, not even the heads of it. Brightnesses
of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling water and singing

birds, rose like exhalations from some deeper, aboriginal memory, that
was not his, but belonged to the flesh on his bones. His body

remembered; and it seemed to him that his body was in no way gross,
but ethereal and perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it

an exquisitetenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of beautiful
instincts and destined to an early death. And he felt for old Torrance

- of the many supplications, of the few days - a pity that was near to
tears. The prayer ended. Right over him was a tablet in the wall, the

only ornament in the roughly masoned chapel - for it was no more; the
tablet commemorated, I was about to say the virtues, but rather the

existence of a former Rutherford of Hermiston; and Archie, under that
trophy of his long descent and local greatness, leaned back in the pew

and contemplated vacancy with the shadow of a smile between playful and
sad, that became him strangely. Dandie's sister, sitting by the side of

Clem in her new Glasgow finery, chose that moment to observe the young
laird. Aware of the stir of his entrance, the little formalist had kept

her eyes fastened and her face prettily composed during the prayer. It
was not hypocrisy, there was no one further from a hypocrite. The girl

had been taught to behave: to look up, to look down, to look
unconscious, to look seriously impressed in church, and in every

conjuncture to look her best. That was the game of female life, and she
played it frankly. Archie was the one person in church who was of

interest, who was somebody new, reputed eccentric, known to be young,
and a laird, and still unseen by Christina. Small wonder that, as

she stood there in her attitude of pretty decency, her mind should run
upon him! If he spared a glance in her direction, he should know she

was a well-behaved young lady who had been to Glasgow. In reason he
must admire her clothes, and it was possible that he should think her

pretty. At that her heart beat the least thing in the world; and she
proceeded, by way of a corrective, to call up and dismiss a series of

fancied pictures of the young man who should now, by rights, be looking
at her. She settled on the plainest of them, - a pink short young man

with a dish face and no figure, at whose admiration she could afford to
smile; but for all that, the consciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness of his gaze (which was really

fixed on Torrance and his mittens) kept her in something of a flutter
till the word Amen. Even then, she was far too well-bred to gratify her

curiosity with any impatience. She resumed her seat languidly - this was
a Glasgow touch - she composed her dress, rearranged her nosegay of

primroses, looked first in front, then behind upon the other side, and
at last allowed her eyes to move, without hurry, in the direction of

the Hermiston pew. For a moment, they were riveted. Next she had
plucked her gaze home again like a tame bird who should have meditated

flight. Possibilities crowded on her; she hung over the future and grew
dizzy; the image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with the

inscrutable half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a chasm. "I
wonder, will I have met my fate?" she thought, and her heart swelled.

Torrance was got some way into his first exposition, positing a deep
layer of texts as he went along, laying the foundations of his

discourse, which was to deal with a nice point in divinity, before
Archie suffered his eyes to wander. They fell first of all on Clem,

looking insupportably prosperous, and patronising Torrance with the
favour of a modified attention, as of one who was used to better things

in Glasgow. Though he had never before set eyes on him, Archie had no
difficulty in identifying him, and no hesitation in pronouncing him

vulgar, the worst of the family. Clem was leaning lazily forward when
Archie first saw him. Presently he leaned nonchalantly back; and that

deadly instrument, the maiden, was suddenly unmasked in profile. Though
not quite in the front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain

artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed
her to great advantage. Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart-