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<h2> XXIII. </h2>
<p>Sulby Glen is winding, soft, rich, sweet, and exquisitely beautiful. A
thin thread of blue water, laughing, babbling, brawling, whooping,
leaping, gliding, and stealing down from the mountains; great boulders
worn smooth and ploughed hollow by the wash of ages; wet moss and lichen
on the channel walls; deep, cool dubbs; tiny reefs; little cascades of
boiling foam; lines of trees like sentinels on either side, making the
light dim through the overshadowing leafage; gaunt trunks torn up by winds
and thrown across the stream with their heads to the feet of their
fellows; the golden fuschia here, the green trammon there; now and again a
poor old tholthan, a roofless house, with grass growing on its kitchen
floor; and over all the sun peering down with a hundred eyes into the dark
and slumberous gloom, and the breeze singing somewhere up in the tree-tops
to the voice of the river below.</p>
<p>Kate had run out on the stem of one of the fallen trees, and there Philip
found her, over the middle of the stream, laughing, dancing, waving his
hat in one hand, and making sweeping bows to her reflection in the water
below.</p>
<p>"Come back," he cried. "You terrible girl, you'll fall. Sit down there—don't
torment me, sit down."</p>
<p>After a curtsey to him she turned her attention to her skirts, wound them
about her ankles, sat on the trunk, and dangled her shapely feet half an
inch over the surface of the stream.</p>
<p>Then Philip had time to observe that the other end of the tree did not
reach the opposite bank, but dipped short into the water. So he barricaded
his end by sitting on it, and said triumphantly: "My hat, if you please."</p>
<p>Kate looked and gave a little cry of alarm and then a chuckle, and then
she said—</p>
<p>"You thought you'd caught me, didn't you? You can't, though," and she
dropped on to a boulder from which she might have skipped ashore.</p>
<p>"I can't, can't I?" said Philip; and he twisted a smaller boulder on his
side, so that Kate was surrounded by water and cut off from the bank. "My
hat now, madam," he said with majestic despotism. 10</p>
<p>She would not deliver it, so he pretended to leave her where she was.
"Good-bye, then; good evening," he cried over the laughter of the stream,
and turned away a step bareheaded.</p>
<p>A moment later his confidence was dashed. When he turned his head back
Kate had whipped off her shoes and stockings, and was ramming the one
inside the other.</p>
<p>"What are you doing?" cried Philip.</p>
<p>"Catch this—and this," she said, flinging the shoes across to him.
Then clapping his straw hat on the crown of her sun-bonnet, she tucked up
her skirts with both hands and waded ashore.</p>
<p>"What a clever boy you are! You thought you'd caught me again, didn't
you?" she said.</p>
<p>"I've caught your shoes, anyway," said Philip, "and until you give me my
hat I'll stick to them."</p>
<p>She was on the shingle, but in her bare feet, and could not make a step.</p>
<p>"My shoes, please?" she pleaded.</p>
<p>"My hat first," he answered.</p>
<p>"Take it."</p>
<p>"No; you must give it me."</p>
<p>"Never! I'll sit here all night first," said Kate.</p>
<p>"I'm willing," said Philip.</p>
<p>They were sitting thus, the one bare-headed, the other with bare feet, and
on the same stone, as if seats in the glen were scarce, when there came
the sound of a hymn from the field they had left, and then it was agreed
by way of mutual penalty that Kate should put on Philip's hat on condition
that Philip should be required to put on Kate's shoes.</p>
<p>At the next moment Philip, suddenly sobered, was reproaching himself
fiercely. What was he doing? He had come to tell Kate that he should come
no more, and this was how he had begun! Yesterday he was in Douglas
reading his father's letters, and here he was to-day, forgetting himself,
his aims in life, his duties, his obligations—everything. "Philip,"
he thought, "you are as weak as water. Give up your plans; you are not fit
for them; abandon your hopes—they are too high for you."</p>
<p>"How solemn we are all at once!" said Kate.</p>
<p>The hymn (a most doleful strain, dragged out to death on every note) was
still coming from the Melliah field, and she added, slyly, shyly, with a
mixture of boldness and nervousness, "Do you think this world is so very
bad, then?"</p>
<p>"Well—aw—no," he faltered, and looking up he met her eye, and
they both laughed.</p>
<p>"It's all nonsense, isn't it?" she said, and they began to walk down the
glen.</p>
<p>"But where are we going?"</p>
<p>"Oh, we'll come out this way just as well."</p>
<p>The scutch grass, the long rat-tail, and the golden cushag were swishing
against his riding-breeches and her print dress. "I must tell her now," he
thought. In the narrow places she went first, and he followed with a
lagging step, trying to begin. "Better prepare her," he thought. But he
could think of no commonplace leading up to what he wished to say.</p>
<p>Presently, through a tangle of wild fuchsia, there was a smell of burning
turf in the air and the sound of milking into a pail, and then a voice
came up surprisingly as from the ground, saying:</p>
<p>"Aisy on the thatch, Miss Cregeen, ma'am."</p>
<p>It was old Joney, the shearer, milking her goat, and Kate had stepped on
to the roof of her house without knowing it, for the little place was low
and opened from the water's edge and leaned against the bank.</p>
<p>Philip made some conventional inquiries, and she answered that she had
been thirty years there, and had one son living with her, and he was an
imbecile.</p>
<p>"There was once a flock at me, and I was as young as you are then, miss,
and all as happy; but they're laving me one by one, except this one, and
he isn't wise, poor boy."</p>
<p>Philip tried to steel his heart. "It is cruel," he thought, "it will hurt
her; but what must be, must be." She began to sing and went carolling down
the glen, keeping two paces in front of him. He followed like an assassin
meditating the moment to strike. "He is going to say something," she
thought, and then she sang louder.</p>
<p>"Kate," he called huskily.</p>
<p>But she only clapped her hands, and cried in a voice of delight, "The
echo! Here's the echo! Let's shout to it."</p>
<p>Her kindling features banished his purpose for the time, and he delivered
himself to her play. Then she called up the gill, "Ec—ho! Ec—ho!"
and listened, but there was no response, and she said, "It won't answer to
its own name. What shall I call?"</p>
<p>"Oh, anything," said Philip.</p>
<p>"Phil—ip! Phil—ip!" she called, and then said pettishly, "No,
Philip won't hear me either." She laughed. "He's always so stupid though,
and perhaps he's asleep."</p>
<p>"More this way," said Philip. "Try now."</p>
<p>"You try."</p>
<p>Philip took up the call. "Kate!" he shouted, and back came the answer, <i>Ate!</i>
"Kate—y!"—<i>Ate—y</i>.</p>
<p>"Ah! how quick! Katey's a good girl. Hark how she answers you," said Kate.</p>
<p>They walked a few steps, and Kate called again, "Philip!" There was no
answer. "Philip is stubborn; he won't have anything to do with me," said
Kate.</p>
<p>Then Philip called a second time, "Katey!" And back came the echo as
before. "Well, that's too bad. Katey is—yes, she's actually <i>following</i>
you!"</p>
<p>Philip's courage oozed out of him. "Not yet," he thought. <i>Traa-dy-liooar</i>—time
enough. "After supper, when everybody is going! Outside the mill, in the
half light of candles within and darkness without! It will sound so
ordinary then, 'Good-bye! Haven't you heard the news? Auntie Nan is
reconciled at last to leaving Ballure and joining me in Douglas.' That's
it; so simple, so commonplace."</p>
<p>The light was now coming between the trees on the closing west in long
swords of sunset red. They could hear the jolting of the laden cart on its
way down the glen. The birds were fairly rioting overhead, and all sorts
of joyous sounds filled the air. Underfoot there were long ferns and
gorse, which caught at her crinkling dress sometimes, and then he
liberated her and they laughed. A trailing bough of deadly nightshade was
hanging from the broken head of an old ash stump, whose wasted feet were
overgrown by two scarlet-tipped toadstools, and she plucked a long tendril
of it and wound it about her head, tipping her sun-bonnet back, and
letting the red berries droop over her dark hair to her face. Then she
began to sing,</p>
<p>O were I monarch o' the globe,<br/>
Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign.<br/></p>
<p>Radiant gleams shot out of her black pupils, and flashes of love like
lightning passed from her eye to his.</p>
<p>Then he tried to moralise. "Ah!" he said, out of the gravity of his
wisdom, "if one could only go on for ever like this, living from minute to
minute! But that's the difference between a man and a woman. A woman lives
in the world of her own heart. If she has interests, they centre there.
But a man has his interests outside his affections. He is compelled to
deny himself, to let the sweetest things go by."</p>
<p>Kate began to laugh, and Philip ended by laughing too.</p>
<p>"Look!" she cried, "only look."</p>
<p>On the top of the bank above them a goat was skirmishing. He was a
ridiculous fellow; sometimes cropping with saucy jerks, then kicking up
his heels, as if an invisible imp had pinched him, then wagging his rump
and laughing in his nostrils.</p>
<p>"As I was saying," said Philip, "a man has to put by the pleasures of
life. Now here's myself, for example. I am bound, do you know, by a kind
of duty—a sort of vow made to the dead, I might say———"</p>
<p>"I'm sure he's going to say something," thought Kate. The voice of his
heart was speaking louder and quicker than his halting tongue. She saw
that a blow was coming, and looked about for the means to ward it off.</p>
<p>"The fairy's dubb!" she cried suddenly, and darted from his side to the
water's edge.</p>
<p>It was a little round pool, black as ink, lying quiet and apparently
motionless under a noisy place where the waters swirled and churned over
black moss, and the stream ran into the dark. Philip had no choice but to
follow her.</p>
<p>"Cut me a willow! Your penknife! Quick, sir, quick! Not that old branch—a
sapling. There, that's it. Now you shall hear me tell my own fortune."</p>
<p>"An ordeal is it?" said Philip.</p>
<p>"Hush! Be quiet, still, or little Phonodoree wont listen. Hush, now hush!"</p>
<p>With solemn airs, but a certain sparkle in her eyes, she went down on her
knees by the pool, stretched her round arm over the water, passed the
willow bough slowly across its surface, and recited her incantation:</p>
<p>Willow bough, willow bough, which of the four,<br/>
Sink, circle, or swim, or come floating ashore?<br/>
Which is the fortune you keep for my life,<br/>
Old maid or young mistress or widow or wife?<br/></p>
<p>With the last word she flung the willow bough on to the pool, and sat back
on her heels to watch it as it moved slowly with the motion of the water.</p>
<p>"Bravo!" cried Philip.</p>
<p>"Be quiet. It's swimming. No, it's coming ashore."</p>
<p>"It's wife, Kate. No, it's widow. No, it's——"</p>
<p>"Do be serious. Oh, dear! it's going—yes, it's going round. Not that
either. No, it has—yes, it has———oh!"</p>
<p>"Sunk!" said Philip, laughing and clapping his hands. "You're doomed to be
an old maid, Kate. Phonodoree says so."</p>
<p>"Cruel Brownie! I'm vexed that I bothered with him," said Kate, dropping
her lip. Then nodding to her reflection in the water where the willow
bough had disappeared, she said, "Poor little Katey! He might have given
you something else. Anything but that dear, eh?"</p>
<p>"What," laughed Philip, "crying? Because Phonodoree—never!"</p>
<p>Kate leapt up with averted face. "What nonsense you are talking!" she
said.</p>
<p>"There are tears in your eyes, though," said Philip.</p>
<p>"No wonder, either. You're so ridiculous. And if I'm meant for an old
maid, you're meant for an old bachelor—and quite right too!"</p>
<p>"Oh, it is, is it?"</p>
<p>"Yes, indeed. You've got no more heart than a mushroom, for you're all
head and legs, and you're going to be just as bald some day."</p>
<p>"I am, am I, mistress?"</p>
<p>"If I were you, Philip, I should hire myself out for a scarecrow, and then
having nothing under your clothes wouldn't so much matter."</p>
<p>"It wouldn't, wouldn't it?" said Philip.</p>
<p>She was shying off at a half circle; he was beating round her.</p>
<p>"But you're nearly as old as Methuselah already, and what you'll be when
you're a man——"</p>
<p>"Lookout!"</p>
<p>She made him an arch curtsey and leapt round a tree, and cried from the
other side, "I know. A squeaking old croaker, with the usual old song,
'Deed yes, friends, this world is a vale of sin and misery.' The men's the
misery and the women's the sin——"</p>
<p>"You rogue, you!" cried Philip.</p>
<p>He made after her, and she fled, still speaking, "What do you think a girl
wants with a——Oh! Oh! Oo!"</p>
<p>Her tirade ended suddenly. She had plunged into a bed of the prickly
gorse, and was feeling in twenty places at once what it was to wear low
shoes and thin stockings.</p>
<p>"With a Samson, eh?" cried Philip, striding on in his riding breeches, and
lifting the captured creature in his arms. "Why, to carry her, you
torment, to carry her through the gorse like this."</p>
<p>"Ah!" she said, turning her face over his shoulder, and tickling his neck
with her breath.</p>
<p>Her hair caught in a tree, and fell in a dark shower over his breast. He
set her on her feet; they took hands, and went carolling down the glen
together:</p>
<p>"The brightest jewel in my crown, Wad be my queen, wad be my queen."</p>
<p>The daylight lingered as if loth to leave them. There was the fluttering
of wings overhead, and sometimes the last piping of birds. The wind
wandered away, and left their voices sovereign of all the air.</p>
<p>Then there came a distant shout; the cheer of the farm people on reaching
home with the Melliah.. It awakened Philip as from a fit of intoxication.</p>
<p>"This is madness," he thought. "What am I doing?" "He is going to speak
now," she told herself.</p>
<p>Her gaiety shaded off into melancholy, and her melancholy burst into wild
gaiety again. The night had come down, the moon had risen, the stars had
appeared. She crept closer to Philip's side, and began to tell him the
story of a witch. They were near to the house the witch had lived in.
There it was—that roofless cottage—that tholthan under the
deep trees like a dungeon.</p>
<p>"Have you never heard of her, Philip? No? The one they called the
Deemster's lady?"</p>
<p>"What Deemster?" said Philip.</p>
<p>"This one, Deemster Mylrea, who is said to be dying."</p>
<p>"He is dying; he is killing himself; I saw him to-day,' said Philip.</p>
<p>"'Well, she was the blacksmith's daughter, and he left her, and she went
mad and cursed him, and said she was his wife though they hadn't been to
church, and he should never marry anybody else. Then her father turned her
out, and she came up here all alone, and there was a baby, and they were
saying she killed it, and everybody was afraid of her. And all the time
her boy was making himself a great, great man until he got to be Deemster.
But he never married, never, though times and times people were putting
this lady on him and then that; but when they told the witch, she only
laughed and said, 'Let him, he'll get lave enough!' At last she was old
and going on two sticks, and like to die any day, and then he crept out of
his big house unknown to any one and stole up here to the woman's cottage.
And when she saw the old man she said, 'So you've come at last, boy; but
you've been keeping me long, bogh, you've been keeping me long.' And then
she died. Wasn't that strange?"</p>
<p>Her dark eyes looked up at him and her mouth quivered.</p>
<p>"Was it witchcraft, then?" said Philip.</p>
<p>"Oh, no; it was only because he was her husband. That was the hold she had
of him. He was tempted away by a big house and a big name, but he <i>had</i>
to come back to her. And it's the same with a woman. Once a girl is the
wife of somebody, she <i>must</i> cling to him, and if she is ever false
she must return. Something compels her. That's if she's really his wife—really,
truly. How beautiful, isn't it? Isn't it beautiful?"</p>
<p>"Do you think that, Kate? Do you think a man, like a woman, would cling
the closer?"</p>
<p>"He couldn't help himself, Philip."</p>
<p>Philip tried to say it was only a girl's morality, but her confidence
shamed him. She slipped her moist fingers into his hand again. They were
close by the deserted tholthan, and she was creeping nearer and nearer to
his side. A bat swirled above their heads and she made a faint cry. Then a
cat shot from under a gooseberry bush, and she gave a little scream. She
was breathing irregularly. He could smell the perfume of her fallen hair.
He was in agony of pain and delight. His heart was leaping in his bosom;
his eyes were burning.</p>
<p>"She's right," he thought. "Love is best. It is everything. It is the
crown of life. Shall I give it up for the Dead Sea fruit of worldly
success? Think of the Deemster! Wifeless, childless, living solitary,
dying alone, unregretled, unmourned. What is the wickedness you are
plotting? Your father is dead, you can do him neither good nor harm. This
girl is alive. She loves you. Love her. Let the canting hypocrites prate
as they will."</p>
<p>She had disengaged her hand, and was creeping away from him in the half
darkness, treading softly and going off like a gleam.</p>
<p>"Kate!" he called.</p>
<p>He heard her laughter, he heard the drowsy hum of the gill, he could smell
the warm odour of the gorse bushes.</p>
<p>"But this is madness," he thought. "This is the fever of an hour. Yield
now and I am ruined for life. The girl has come between me and my aims, my
vows, my work—everything. She has tempted me, and I am as weak as
water."</p>
<p>"Kate!"</p>
<p>She did not answer.</p>
<p>"Come here this moment, Kate. I have something to say to you."</p>
<p>"Bite!" she said, coming back and holding an apple to his lips. She had
plucked it in the overgrown garden.</p>
<p>"Listen! I'm leaving Ramsey for good—don't intend to practise in the
northern courts any longer—settling in Douglas—best work lies
there, you see—worst of it is—we shan't meet again soon—not
very soon, you know—not for years, perhaps——"</p>
<p>He began by stammering, and went on stuttering, blurting out his words,
and trembling at the sound of his own voice.</p>
<p>"Philip, you must not go!" she cried. "I'm sorry, Kate, very sorry. Shall
always remember so tenderly—not to say fondly—the happy boy
and girl days together."</p>
<p>"Philip, Philip, you must not go—you cannot go—you shall not
go!"</p>
<p>He could see her bosom heaving under her loose red bodice. She took hold
of his arm and dragged at it.</p>
<p>"Won't you spare me? Will you shame me to death? Must I tell you? If you
won't speak, I will. You cannot leave me, Philip, because—because—what
do I care?—because I love you!"</p>
<p>"Don't say that, Kate!"</p>
<p>"I love you, Philip—I love you—I love you!"</p>
<p>"Would to God I had never been born!"</p>
<p>"But I will show you how sweet it is to be alive. Take me, take me—I
am yours!"</p>
<p>Her upturned face seemed to flash. He staggered like one seized with
giddiness. It was a thing of terror to behold her. Still he struggled.
"Though apart, we shall remember each other, Kate."</p>
<p>"I don't want to remember. I want to have you with me."</p>
<p>"Our hearts will always be together."</p>
<p>"Come to me then, Philip, come to me!"</p>
<p>"The purest part of our hearts—our souls——"</p>
<p>"But I want <i>you!</i> Will you drive a girl to shame herself again? I
want <i>you</i>, Philip! I want your eyes that I may see them every day;
and your hair, that I may feel it with my hands; and your lips—can I
help it?—yes, and your lips, that I may kiss and kiss them!"</p>
<p>"Kate! Kate! Turn your eyes away. Don't look at me like that!" She was
fighting for her life. It was to be now or never.</p>
<p>"If you won't come to me, I'll go to you!" she cried; and then she sprang
upon him, and all grew confused, the berries of the nightshade whipped his
forehead, and the moon and the stars went out.</p>
<p>"My love! My darling! My girl!"</p>
<p>"You won't go now?" she sobbed.</p>
<p>"God forgive me, I cannot."</p>
<p>"Kiss me. I feel your heart beating. You are mine—mine—mine!
Say you won't go now!"</p>
<p>"God forgive us both!"</p>
<p>"Kiss me again, Philip! Don't despise me that I love you better than
myself!"</p>
<p>She was weeping, she was laughing, her heart was throbbing up to her
throat. At the next moment she had broken from his embrace and was gone.</p>
<p>"Kate! Kate!"</p>
<p>Her voice came from the tholthan.</p>
<p>"Philip!"</p>
<p>When a good woman falls from honour, is it merely that she is a victim of
momentary intoxication, of stress of passion, of the fever of instinct?
No. It is mainly that she is a slave of the sweetest, tenderest, most
spiritual and pathetic of all human fallacies—the fallacy that by
giving herself to the man she loves she attaches him to herself for ever.
This is the real betrayer of nearly all good women that are betrayed. It
lies at the root of tens of thousands of the cases that make up the
merciless story of man's sin and woman's weakness. Alas! it is only the
woman who clings the closer. The impulse of the man is to draw apart. He
must conquer it or she is lost. Such is the old cruel difference and
inequality of man and woman as nature made them—the old trick, the
old tragedy.</p>
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