The Lilac Sunbonnet | Page 3

but,
though he accepted word by word the Westminster Confession, and as

an inexorable addition the confessions and protests of the remnant of
the true kirk in Scotland (known as the Marrow kirk), he could not but
consider woman a poor makeshift, even as providing for the continuity
of the race. Surely she had not been created when God looked upon all
that he had made and found it very good. The thought preserved
Ralph's orthodoxy.
Ralph Peden had come out into the morning air, with his note-book and
a volume which he had been studying all the way from Edinburgh. As
he lay at length among the grass he conned it over and over. He
referred to passages here and there. He set out very calmly with that
kind of determination with which a day's work in the open air with a
book is often begun. Not for a moment did he break the monotony of
his study. The marshalled columns of strange letters were mowed down
before him.
A great humble-bee, barred with tawny orange, worked his way up
from his hole in the bank, buzzing shrilly in an impatient, stifled
manner at finding his dwelling blocked as to its exit by a mountainous
bulk. Ralph Peden rose in a hurry. The beast seemed to be inside his
coat. He had instinctively hated bees and everything that buzzed ever
since as a child he had made experiments with the paper nest of a
tree-building wasp. The humble-bee buzzed a little more,
discontentedly, thought of going back, crept out at last from beneath
the Hebrew Lexicon, and appeared to comb his hair with his feeler.
Then he slowly mounted along the broad blade of a meadow fox-tail
grass, which bent under him as if to afford him an elastic send-off upon
his flight. With a spring he lumbered up, taking his way over the single
field which separated his house from the edge of the Grannoch
water--where on the other side, above the glistening sickle-sweep of
sand which looked so inviting, yet untouched under the pines by the
morning sun, the hyacinths lay like a blue wreath of peat smoke in the
hollows of the wood.
But there was a whiff of real peat smoke somewhere in the air, and
Ralph Peden, before he returned to his book, was aware of the murmur
of voices. He moved away from the humble-bee's dwelling and

established himself on a quieter slope under a bush of broom. A
whin-chat said "check, check" above him, and flirted a brilliant tail; but
Ralph Peden was not afraid of whin-chats. Here he settled himself to
study, knitting his brows and drumming on the ground with the toe of
one foot to concentrate his attention. The whin-chat could hear him
murmuring to himself at intervals, "Surely that is the sense--it must be
taken this way." Sometimes, on the contrary, he shook his head at
Luther's Commentary, which lay on the short, warm turf before him, as
if in reproof. Ralph was of opinion that Luther, but for his great
protective reputation, and the fact that he had been dead some time,
might have been served with a libel for heresy--at least if he had
ministered to the Marrow kirk.
Then after a little he pulled his hat over his eyes to think, and lay back
till he could just see one little bit of Loch Grannoch gleaming through
the trees, and the farm of Nether Crae set on the hillside high above it.
He counted the sheep on the green field over the loch, numbering the
lambs twice because they frisked irresponsibly about, being full of
frivolity and having no opinions upon Luther to sober them.
Gradually a haze spun itself over the landscape, and Ralph Peden's
head slowly fell back till it rested somewhat sharply upon a spikelet of
prickly whin. His whole body sat up instantly, with an exclamation
which was quite in Luther's manner. He had not been sleeping. He
rejected the thought; yet he acknowledged that it was nevertheless
passing strange that, just where the old single- arched bridge takes a
long stride over the Grannoch lane, there was now a great black pot
a-swing above a blinking pale fire of peats and fir-branches, and a
couple of great tubs set close together on stones which he had not seen
before. There was, too, a ripple of girls' laughter, which sent a strange
stirring of excitement along the nerves of the young man. He gathered
his books to move away; but on second thoughts, looking through the
long, swaying tendrils of the broom under which he sat, he resolved to
remain. After all, the girls might be as harmless as his helper of
yesterday.
"Yet it is most annoying," he said; "I had been