II

O’ER CRAG AND TORRENT

I

Lexie Drummond had a place of her own in the hearts of the Mosgiel people. To begin with, she was lonely; and lonely folk have a remarkable way of exacting secret homage. Lexie worked at a loom in the woollen factory, and lived by herself in one of the factory cottages near by. I wish you could have seen it. The door invariably stood open, even when Lexie was away at her work. Everything was faultlessly natty and clean. An enormous tabby cat, ‘Matey,’ purred on the mat, while a golden canary sang bravely from his cage in the creeper just outside the door. Lexie had a trim little garden, in which she grew lavender and mignonette, roses and carnations. Lexie’s white carnations always took the prize at our local Flower Show. Lexie mothered Mosgiel. If anybody was in trouble, she would be sure to drop in; and, in cases of serious sickness, she would often stay the night. Some people would deny that Lexie was beautiful; yet she had a loveliness peculiar to herself. She was tall, finely-built, and wonderfully strong. When Roger Gunton, the heaviest man on the plain, was seized with sudden illness, and his body was racked with excruciating pain, Lexie alone could turn him from side to side, and he would allow nobody else to touch him. If her face lacked the vivacity and sparkle of more voluptuous beauties, it possessed, nevertheless, a quiet gravity, a serious winsomeness, that rendered it extremely attractive. The furrows in her face, and the strands of grey in her hair, made her look older than she really was.

Everybody knew Lexie’s age; her name was a perpetual reminder of the number of her years. For, in an unguarded moment, she had once revealed the circumstance that she was born on the day on which the Princess of Wales—afterwards Queen Alexandra—was married, and she was named after the royal bride. Mosgiel never forgot personal details of that kind. In addition to all this, Mosgiel vaguely suspected that Lexie carried a secret in her breast. She came to Mosgiel only a few years before I did; and everybody felt that her previous history was involved in tantalizing mystery.

II

It was Friday night. In the dining-room at the Mosgiel manse we were enjoying a quiet evening by the fire. I was lounging in an armchair with a novel. I could afford to be restful, for, that week, I had but one sermon to prepare. On the approaching Sunday, the anniversary of the Sunday school was to be celebrated; in the morning John Broadbanks and I were exchanging pulpits in honour of the occasion; and, availing myself of a minister’s immemorial prerogative, I had decided to preach an old sermon at Silverstream.

All at once we were startled by the ringing of the front door bell. It was the Sunday school superintendent. ‘We are in an awful hole,’ he exclaimed, after having discussed the weather, the health of our respective families, and a few other inevitable preliminaries. ‘Lexie Drummond has been taken ill, and the doctor won’t hear of her leaving the house for a week or two. She has been preparing the children for their part-songs, and has the whole programme at her fingers’ ends; I don’t know how on earth we are going to manage without her.’ I promised to run down and see Lexie about it first thing in the morning; and did so. Lexie was confined to her bed, and old Janet Davidson was nursing her. ‘Matey’ was curled up close to his mistress’s feet, while the canary was singing blithely from his cage near the open window. I saw at a glance that Lexie had been crying, and I attributed her grief to anxiety and disappointment in connection with the anniversary. She quickly undeceived me.

‘You’ll never notice that I’m not there,’ she said, with a watery smile. ‘The children know their parts thoroughly, and Bella Christie, who has been helping me, is as familiar with the program as I am.’ I assured her that we should miss her sadly; but expressed my relief that everything had been so well arranged.

‘And now, Lexie,’ I said, as I took her hand in parting, ‘you must worry no more about it; we will do our very best to make it pass off well.’

‘Oh,’ she replied, quickly, recognizing in my words a reference to her tell-tale eyes, ‘it wasn’t the anniversary that I was worrying about; indeed, it was silly of me to cry at all!’ And, to show how extremely silly it was, she broke, with womanish perversity, into a fresh outburst of tears.

‘She has something she wants to tell you,’ Janet interposed, ‘but she doesn’t like to.’

Lexie pretended to look vexed at the old lady’s garrulity; but I fancied that I detected, behind the frown, a look of real relief.

‘Some other time,’ she said. ‘Good-bye, I shall think of you all to-morrow!’   Janet opened the door and I left her.

III

The anniversary passed off happily; Lexie was soon herself again; and, a fortnight later, I saw her in her old place at church. We knew that she would insist on taking her class in the afternoon; so, to save her the long walk home, we took her to the manse to dinner. ‘Several of the teachers have been telling me of the address that you gave on the evening of the Sunday school anniversary,’ she said, on our way to the manse. ‘I wish you would let me see the manuscript.’

‘I can do better than that,’ I replied. ‘The address was printed in yesterday’s Taieri Advocate. I have several copies to spare if you care to have one.’

On arrival at the manse she insisted on going round the garden and admiring the flowers before composing herself on the sofa in the dining-room. I gave her the paper I had promised her, and hurried away to prepare for dinner. When I returned a few minutes later the paper was lying on the floor beside her, and she was crying as if her heart would break. By a supreme effort she regained her self-possession, promised to explain in the afternoon, and, in obedience to the summons, took her place at table.

During dinner I mentally reviewed the address which had so strangely reopened the fountains of her grief. It was the address which, under the title ‘The Little Palace Beautiful,’ appears in The Golden Milestone. It begins: ‘There are only four children in the wide, wide world, and each of us is the parent of at least one of them.’ The first of the four is The Little Child that Never Was. ‘He is,’ the address says, ‘an exquisitely beautiful child. He is the child of all lonely men and lonely women, the child of their dreams and their fancies, the child that will never be born. He is the son of the solitary.’ And the address goes on to quote from Ada Cambridge’s Virgin Martyrs:

Every wild she-bird has nest and mate in the warm April weather,
   But a captive woman, made for love, no mate, no nest, has she.
In the spring of young desire, young men and maids are wed together,
   And the happy mothers flaunt their bliss for all the world to see;
Nature’s sacramental feast for them—an empty board for me.
   Time, that heals so many sorrows, keeps mine ever freshly aching,
Though my face is growing furrowed and my brown hair turning white.
   Still I mourn my irremediable loss, asleep or waking;
Still I hear my son’s voice calling ‘Mother’ in the dead of night,
   And am haunted by my girl’ s eyes that will never see the light.

  As the address came back to me, I began to understand. I remembered what the gossips said about the mystery in Lexie’s life. What was it, I wondered, that she meant to tell me after dinner?

IV

‘You don’t know me!’ she cried passionately, when, once more, we found ourselves alone together. ‘You treat me as if I were a good woman; you let me work at the church, and you bring me into your home; but you don’t know me; really, really, you don’t! I have committed a great sin, a very great sin; and I am suffering for it; and others are suffering for it.’ She paused, as if wondering how to begin her story, and then started afresh.

  ‘I was brought up in the country,’ she said, ‘not far from Hokitui. My parents both died when I was a little girl; my guardians followed them a few years ago; so that now I am quite alone. At school I became very fond of Davie Bannerman, and he made no secret of his partiality for me. He used to bring me something—an apple or a cake or a picture or some sweets—every day. When I was nineteen we became engaged and were both very happy about it. Everybody in the Hokitui district loved Davie; he was handsome and good-natured; I used to think his laugh the grandest music I had ever heard. But I was proud, terribly proud. And, being proud, I was selfish. And, being selfish, I was jealous. Davie was good to everybody; yet I could not bear to see him paying attention to anybody but myself. He was a member of the Hokitui church, and used to spend a good deal of time there. I had no interest in such things in those days, and I was angry with him for neglecting me. But most of all was I jealous of Sadie McKay. Sadie was his cousin; she was one of the church girls; and I hated to think, when he was not with me, that he was with her. Davie always took my scoldings merrily, and quickly coaxed me into a better mind. And I dare say that all would have gone well but for the accident that spoiled everything.

  ‘Sadie was riding in from the farm one morning when, on the outskirts of Hokitui, she met a traction engine. Her horse bolted, and was soon out of control. As luck would have it, Davie was standing at a shop door near the township corner, and saw the horse galloping madly towards him. He rushed into the road and managed to check the animal before Sadie was thrown; but, in doing so, he was hurled to the ground, and the horse trod on his right arm, crushing it. He lay in the hospital for nearly two months; but I never went near him. When he left the hospital he wrote to me. It was a pitiful scrawl, written with his left hand; his right was amputated. “I have had a heavy loss,”  he said, “and I do not know how I can manage without my arm; but now I must suffer a still heavier loss, and I do not know how I can live without you. But it would not be right for me to burden you, and you must find somebody else, Lexie, who can care for you better than I can.”

  I returned the engagement ring, and that was the end of it. If he had lost his arm in any other way I could have endured life-long poverty with him; but to have lost his arm for Sadie!’ She paused and seemed to be looking out of the window, but I knew that her story was not finished.

  ‘A few months later I took a situation in Ashburton. There I met, at a party, a young Englishman—Horace Latchford—who took a fancy to me. He was visiting New Zealand for the sake of his health. He told me that he owned a large estate in Devonshire, and would make me a perfect queen. During his stay—a period of about four months—life was one long frolic. Six months later he sent for me to go to him; and I went. But my eyes were soon opened. There was no estate in Devonshire; Horace was often intoxicated when he came to see me; and, instead of getting married, I returned to New Zealand in disgust. I came to Mosgiel, partly because I knew that I could get good work in the factory, and partly because I knew that nobody here would know me. Since I returned from England, ten years ago, I have only met one person who knew me in the old days at Hokitui. I was spending a holiday at Moeraki, and she was staying at the same boarding-house. I did not tell her that I had settled at Mosgiel; but she told me that none of the Bannermans were now living at Hokitui. Davie, she said, was the first to leave. He went to one of the cities to learn a profession that did not imperatively demand the use of two hands.’

  She paused again, and I waited.

  ‘When I came to Mosgiel,’ she went on, ‘I got in the way of coming to the church. I became deeply impressed, and you received me into membership. And, every day since, as I have done little things, and taken little duties, in connection with the work, I have come to understand Davie as I never understood him in the old days. I hated his fondness for the church. And, every day now, my sin seems to be more and more terrible. Just lately it has been with me night and day. And when I read your address my punishment seemed greater than I could bear. I have prayed thousands of times that the dreadful tangle might be unravelled. I have not prayed selfishly; I could be perfectly contented if only I knew that Davie is happy, and that his faith in God and womanhood has not been shaken by my wickedness. We sang Lead, Kindly Light in church this morning. Do you think that God really guides us? Does He put us right even when we have done wrong? Will He straighten things out? I would give anything to be quite sure! I seem to be in a maze, and can find no way out of it!’

V

  It seemed an infinite relief to Lexie to have told me her story. She was much more often at the manse after that; a new bond seemed to have sprung up between us. I fancied that there came into Lexie’s face a deeper peace and a greater content. The peace was, however, rudely broken. About two years after Lexie had unburdened her soul to me, I opened the paper one morning and confronted a startling announcement. The personal paragraphs contained the statement that ‘Mr. David Bannerman, the brilliant Auckland solicitor, has been appointed Lecturer in Common Law at the Otago University.’ There followed a brief outline of the new professor’s career which left no shadow of doubt as to his identity.

  I particularly noticed that there was no reference to his marriage. What, if anything, was to be done? The Otago University was in Dunedin, only ten miles from Mosgiel. Ought I to allow these two people to drift on, perhaps for years, eating their hearts out within a few miles of each other? Was it not due to Davie that he should know that Lexie was at Mosgiel? He might desire to seek her; or he might desire to avoid her; in either case the information would be of value. I stated the position in this way to Lexie, but she would not hear of my taking any action. After a while, however, she agreed to my writing, telling the professor-elect that I knew of her whereabouts. I added that she was universally loved and honoured for her fine work in the church and in the district. I enclosed a copy of ‘The Little Palace Beautiful,’ and mentioned the fact that I had once caught her weeping bitterly as she read it. It took four days for a mail from Mosgiel to reach Auckland. After a long talk with Lexie, I posted my letter on a Sunday evening. On Friday afternoon I received a reply-paid telegram: ‘Wire lady’s address immediately.’

  The new professor was married three months after entering upon the duties of his chair at the University; and, when I last saw her, Lexie was enthroned in the centre of a charming little circle. I received a letter from her yesterday—the letter that suggested this record. She tells me, with pardonable pride, that her eldest boy has matriculated and also joined the church.

  ‘I am getting to be an old woman now,’ she says, ‘and I spend a lot of time in looking backward. Isn’t it wonderful? It all came right after all! But for the accident, Davie would never have been a professor; and, if we had been married in the old days, I should only have been a drag and a hindrance. As it is, we have passed o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent; but the Kindly Light that I once doubted has led us all the way!’

F. W. Boreham