Orange Lily: Chapter X

“’Twas when the stacks get on their winter-hap,

And thack and rape secure the toil-worn crap;

Potato bings are snugged up frae skaith

Of coming winter’s biting, frosty breath.”

“Ae dreary, windy, winter night,

The stars shot down wi’ sklentin light,

Wi’ you, mysel’, I gat a fright.

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Each bristl’d hair stood like a stake,

When wi’ an eldritch stoor, quaick, quaick,

Amang the springs,

Awa ye squatter’d like a drake,

On whistling wings.”—Burns.

The girls had all passed through the side door first, therefore the young men and lads were a few steps behind. Two cousins of Gilhorn’s now turned to Tom jokingly—

“Well, boy! Danny took the conceit queerly out of you in that last trial. Ye’ll hardly sing before him again.”

“Ah! you want me to teach you a thing or two,” responded Danny, sticking his thumb with playful familiarity into Tom’s side. To do him justice, however young Gilhorn might be offensive to others, it was very hard to offend himself; which knowledge perhaps made the offended ones all the angrier.

“Keep your thumbs to yourself, please,” growled Tom; controlling himself enough not to answer with a blow, and only giving a quiet but decided shove of his elbow to ward off further playfulnesses.

“Give him a hit, Danny. Don’t let him hold his head over you, man!” cried his eldest cousin of nineteen or so, with glee, thinking a quarrel between the boys would be vastly amusing. The other lads closed round, idly sharing his opinion. No unkindliness stirred them; quarrels, indeed, even among men, were rarely attended with bad consequences thereabouts. But their lives were very dull. All day they worked in the fields apart; in the evenings there were next to no games in common; nought but a little ball play (if an unwindowed wall could be found), and little of that. Nothing but courting the girls for amusements; and when that palled, lounging round the public-houses, of which there were just as many as there were wells in the village district, namely, three—(and the latter ran dry in summer time, unless rain refilled them). So some angry words and a few blows between any two would stir the monotony of their fellows; give rise to some coarse mirth. Surely some praise is due that this did not happen far more often, and that so little mischief came of it. Young Gilhorn felt unusually brave with his cousins to back him; and also because—since they were still close to the Castle here in the shrubbery—his friends durst not let him do more than indulge in valiant demonstrations.

“‘Will you fight?” cried he, squaring up in front of Tom and attitudinizing like an impertinent spider; and the girls in front heard that, stopped, and ran back.

“Fight!” said Tom. And, at the word, a big fight began within him. Then—with a great gulp, and gazing at the Castle walls rising above them, lit by a single light high up—“Not here.”

A jeering, coarse laugh passed round the circle, which, though he had not the finer nerves of an aristocrat, made Tom long to knock them all down.

“Oh, Tom! Danny!—don’t quarrel,” prayed a frightened little voice from the outside of the group, and Lily Keag tried to slip in nearer them.

“I wonder, Danny, you would demean yourself to touch him with a pair of tongs,” shrilly exclaimed Susan Gilhorn, in contempt.

“Don’t fight to-night, after singing the hymns for next Sabbath together—don’t, Danny!” wept poor Lily, afraid of being forward; yet resolute to do her childish best to stop them, her face turned to Gilhorn pleadingly, but her hand laid on Tom’s coat-sleeve.

“I’ll thank you not to meddle,” retorted the former, rudely.

“Ay, ay! Lass—I mind—let me be,” muttered the other boy, doggedly, and did not shake off her hand, but removed it.

“Coward!” uttered young Gilhorn.

Tom turned upon him.

“I’ll not fight here!—because I think too much respect for Captain Alexander; nor yet this night. But meet me at the crossroad the morrow morn, before I go to the ploughing at six, Danny Gilhorn; and you’ll see which of us is the coward. Or at twelve, when I quit work; or in the evening, when it’s done.”

“Ay! ay! a fair offer,” cried the elder Gilhorn, perceiving with glee that his brother was bent on urging their young kinsman to a pitched battle; and entering into the plan with zest. “I’ll be by there, on my way to our fields, and see fair play for ye, Tom Coulter. You’re the boy for me! You’ll stop your work for no man.”

“Will you come?” reiterated Tom thunderingly to his rival.

“I’ll—I’ll—just murder you if I catch you, so you’d better keep out of my way,” stuttered Gilhorn, passionately.

“O! ye must go!” “Ay! ay! he’ll be there,” cried all the rest, laughing.

And, just then, the Reverend Robert Redhead, who had been visiting a sick man at the far lodge, came down the drive behind them with long, swinging strides, and passed, bidding them a cheery good-evening. All voices hushed as the clergyman neared, and the group reached the lodge in comparative silence, Tom walking quietly last. Then, when Mr. Redhead was out of sight, a babble of gibes and rough mirth broke out again, as the group stopped before separation. Tom, however, was not to be seen. He had likely struck homewards, by a short cut through the marsh.

“Let me convoy you back, Miss Keag,” simpered Danny, with a sudden return of his blandest suavity.

“Thank you kindly, but I’ll go my lone,” answered our little maiden, speaking for the first time since the quarrel; and now absolutely forgetting her good English. Therewith she turned up the narrow lane leading to her father’s farm.

The neighbors had passed on down the dark road, and Lily was all alone. Then, and then only, she took out her handkerchief slowly and prepared to indulge in the luxury of a cry, like any older person of her sex. First she rubbed her eyes a little, feeling them water; her lips twitched; her heart swelled. Then, being sure that she was for once in her life very miserable indeed, she let a small, stifled sob come, followed cautiously by others. Danny Gilhorn had insulted her—worse, Tom had gone without saying good night to her, for the first time in his life; meant to fight in the morning; would be all bloody and blackened and bruised. Her heart turned sick at the thought. If not so late and so dark, she would almost dare to pick her way through the marsh to his cottage and once more beg him to desist. Dare she—could she—? It was very dark, but for the cold, far stars, as she stopped and looked around. The glimpse of the marsh she caught through the hedge looked a gruesome, mysterious waste; the thin hedges, too, on either side shivered fearsomely in the night wind. Fancying a bogie behind every tree and horrors ready to spring out on her from the blackness of the banks on either side, she crept on doubting, fearing, crying—poor, little, honest heart, when … ! Something ghastly did rise from the ditch close to her, with an awful groan. A whitish ghost like a naked being, but going on all fours.

Lily gave one great scream; but next moment, as the horror began to crawl towards her, shaking a big head that seemed ready to eat her up, the poor child’s tongue clove to the roof of her mouth—and with an awful longing to run away, to her intense fear she found she could not stir an inch. She thought she must surely die, when a friendly shout came from the hedge overhead. A dark form jumped through the branches, and she felt Tom Coulter catch hold of her.

“What ails ye? What frighted ye?” he cried.

Lily could but gasp and point at the—thing! Tom burst into a great roar of laughter.

“What! ye don’t yet know your father’s own old sow? Sure, she’s got a trick of undoing her stye-door, and goes squandering away through the country. Ho, ho, ho! And you startled me, too, queerly.”

“But how came you there, Tom? Why did you not come back with me?” asked Lily, now recovered, but still gladly clinging to him.

“I thought—Gilhorn—would be seeing you home,” said Tom, slowly. “So I kept away, not to be in the road of you both; but still I was nearhand if you did want me.”

“Did ye think I’d have him, after what happened? Sure, I forbid him to come!”

“No! Did ye?”

“I did so.”

A short silence of utter ecstasy on Tom’s part.

Then, as if thinking he had had enough of a good time, the little maid took up her speech again, and severely reproached him. She neither scolded nor complained like one on his own level on these rare occasions, but took such high moral ground that Tom was utterly impressed with a sense of his own degraded mind. And she said shortly and honestly what she had to say, and had done with it. (A rare virtue, that last, in his eyes.) Still he turned upon her solemnly now, an unconvinced young heathen.

“Do you think any man could refuse to fight, if he was called a coward?”

Lily was absolutely silent; she could hardly go to such lengths as that.

“I did allow you were right, about not fighting this night,” went on Tom; apparently ready to agree with her so far as his conscience would permit. “I do allow it’s wrong to bear ill-will; and what’s more, I won’t, as sure as my name’s Tom Coulter. But I am confident that I’ll feel the better, and so will he, if I give him a few clouts on the head, just to teach him to be mannerly. Then we’ll shake hands and be friends.”

His frank, healthy voice reassured and convinced Lily wonderfully. His way of looking at things might not be quite right, but surely was not very far wrong.

“And you’re sure he’ll not hurt you much,” she ended, with a last touch of loving anxiety.

Certain sure,” said Tom.

“Nor you hurt him?”

“No more than I can help.”

They had reached the stackyard now; and stopped at these last words under the shelter of the great hayrick. Somehow, in stackyard or farmyard, amongst hay and straw and farm odors, Tom would lose sight utterly of the fancies of foreign lands that filled his mind at other hours, and the material-loving, simple, sensuous body and soul of him, nourished amongst wholesome-smelling, fresh-turned furrows, clave to the ideals of earthly happiness of those with whom he had been bred, and no blame to him. And then he would feel a longing to have, he too, his good farm and warm hearth in the time to come—and bonny wife. Just as these vain hopes revived with the old smells, the old associations—but troubling the poor servant-boy newly, wanting to be spoken while his speech was shamed—Lily uttered softly the old loving admonition since childhood,—

“Tom, you’ll remember your prayers to-night?”

“I will so,” said Tom; then, suddenly, “And you’ll promise to be my sweetheart; now and for always?”

There was a moment’s silence; then Lily answered,—“I will so.”

Tom put his arm round her neck, and gave her a hug like a bear or a brother; not having yet changed his boyish opinion that kissing, as a sign of affection, was a truly ridiculous custom. Thus, their second betrothal took place in the stackyard, while the chill autumn winds blew, and the darkness brooded over the ploughed fields of Ulster, but the bright little stars twinkled bravely overhead.

As young Tom walked home, and looked at his friendly Plough again, he felt joy reinstated in his heart and good will to all men, Dan Gilhorn—poor creature!—included. On reaching home, he found its inmates already retired to rest.

“Father,” said Tom, sitting down on his parent’s bed, as the latter roused up hearing his step in the kitchen, wherein father and son slept, “you waken earlier than I do. Could ye call me the morn’, well before six?”

“What for, my son?”

“I promised to fight a boy before working-time,” said Tom, coolly; “and it would look ill to be late.”

“I aye advise you to keep from the fighting,” remonstrated the quiet father.

“And so I mostly do,” said Tom, “but this time I be’d to fight.”

And he curtly told the cause of quarrel.

Fully satisfied, his father turned on his other side to sleep again.

“O! I’ll call ye in time; never fear.”

So Tom said his prayer, trying to put all malice against Dan Gilhorn far from him. And—in the full belief that he might be doing rather a good turn than otherwise to Danny by whacking him—and was undoubtedly taking the only means to make himself feel friendly unto the said young man—he fell asleep.

Order the new paperback edition of Orange Lily which includes an introduction, footnotes and a glossary of words by Dr Philip Robinson. The book also includes the short stories The Witch of Windy Hill and An Old Maid’s Marriage.