Chapter 4

CRAIG-ELLACHIE

In spite of the high rapture of her sacrifice Christina found life distinctly dull when Sandy and Neil went off to Toronto leaving her behind. She felt as if she had been away on a long romantic journey since Allister's return; a journey that gave glimpses of wonderful countries still to be travelled, and then she had suddenly been dropped back into Orchard Glen and forbidden to travel any more.

And here she was milking and churning and feeding the hens and companying with Uncle in the barn yard. Of course Uncle Neil was the excellent company he had always been, full of song and story, and Christina could not find an opportunity to mourn over her lot even if she had been so minded. She was not the sort to wear a martyr's robe. She would play the part, but she refused to make up for it. So she went about her daily tasks, singing as blithely as that Spring morning when Allister opened the gate into a larger life for her, the gate which she had voluntarily shut, with herself inside. She bore her disappointment jauntily, walking erect as Eastern girls carry their burdens on their heads, growing straight and graceful in the effort.

And then she was too busy to fret. There was Grandpa who needed more help every morning with his dressing, and every evening with the Hindmost Hymn. There was her mother, whose tasks must now grow lighter each year, there was Jimmie to be helped with his lessons on Saturdays, there was a Sunday school class with two of the bad Martin children in it, and there was Mary's trousseau to help prepare against the wedding at Christmastime. For the courtship of MacGillivray's man had proceeded at a furious pace and through Ellen had been engaged for five years, Mary was to be the first to marry. And so, Christina's hands were very full, and John would often say to her, after an unusually busy day, or when a letter came from Sandy bewailing her lot:

"Just wait, Christine. In another year who knows what will happen?" And Christina's heart was content.

As Mary had to keep up her teaching until the Christmas holidays, and her evenings were mostly spent with the young man who drove over from Port Stewart quite a remarkable number of times a week, there was much to do in the preparation of her clothes. Ellen had stopped her own embroidering, to wait until Bruce was through college, and she took to doing towels and table-napkins and doilies for Mary.

"I can't help thinking that it's a dreadful waste for you to get married," declared Christina, one Saturday afternoon as they all sewed furiously in the big roomy kitchen. "You're just throwing away a teacher's certificate. My! If I had Greenwood school I'd never get married!" And Mary and Ellen laughed and looked at each other knowingly from their respective heights far above Christina's head.

She tried to keep up her studies by following Jimmie's course, and stayed home on Friday nights from the Temperance meeting to help him with his lessons.

One evening they had a long hunt through "The Lady of the Lake" for a line about the Harebell which Jimmie must quote in an essay. They were sitting around the long kitchen table, all except Mary who was out driving in the moonlight. Ellen was at one end writing to Bruce as usual, John at the other, reading the daily paper, Mrs. Lindsay was knitting, and Uncle Neil was strumming out fragments of old songs on his violin, his stockinged feet comfortable on the damper of the stove.

Even Uncle Neil's memory could not produce the Harebell, and Jimmie went rummaging through the book impatiently.

"Gavin Grant would tell me if he was here," Jimmie said. "He knows all this stuff off by heart."

"And plenty more," put in Uncle Neil to the tune of "Oh wert thou in the cauld blast?" "Gavin's mind is well stored. Mr. Sinclair says he reads Carlyle in the evenings with the Grant girls. I wonder if you could match that anywhere in this country?"

Christina felt self-accusing, remembering her superior feeling in Gavin's awkward presence. He had been very busy with the harvest and she had not seen him except at church for a long time. He had never attempted to walk home with her again, and she could not help wondering whether it was because he was shy, or because he did not care. Womanlike she would have given a good deal to know.

"I wish you would run over to Craig-Ellachie with that jar of black currants I promised the Grant Girls, Christina," said her mother.

"That's the seventeenth time you've been reminded of that," said Jimmie chidingly.

"I think John'll have to hitch up the team and take that jar over in the hay wagon," said Uncle Neil, "Christine doesn't seem to be able to manage it."

"She's shy about going to see Gavin," said John, looking at her with twinkling eyes over his paper. For John alone knew her guilty secret. She hastily promised to take the jar the very next day, and managed to get the conversation back to the Harebell, which in time showed its shy self and was set down in the essay.

It was nearly a week before Christina managed to get away on her difficult errand. She did not want to go, certainly, but she was afraid of attracting more comment from John and Uncle Neil by staying.

It was a golden September day when she went up over the hills with a basket of apples from their best tree, and the special jar of her mother's black currant jelly. The air was motionless, the sky a perfect soft unclouded blue, the hills were amber, the hollows amethyst. The branches of the orchard trees behind the village houses sagged, heavy with their harvest, and gay as orchards gotten up for a garden party, all hung with fairy lantern globes of yellow and red. The gardens were filled with ripened corn and great golden pumpkins. The wild asters along the fences glowed softly purple.

Christina stepped over the warm yellow stubble singing, and climbed the hill to the old berry patch, where the briars grew more riotously every year. Gavin's cows were straying through the green and yellow tangle on his side of the fence and a bell rang musically through the still aisles. The Wizard of Autumn had been up here on the hills with his paints and had touched the sumachs along the fences till they looked like trees of flame. And he had been working on a bit of woodbine that now draped the old rail fence as with a scarlet curtain. A blue jay flashed through the golden silence waking the echoes with his noisy laughter and the flickers high up in the dead stumps called jeeringly to each other.

Christina came out of the Slash into the yellow sunshine of Gavin's fields, and as she did so, she suddenly dropped down behind the raspberry bushes that fringed the fence, quite in a panic. For a loud musical voice arose from the field just beyond the brow of the hill, Gavin was ploughing the back meadow and singing, and the song made Christina's heart heat hotly:

"Will ye gang to the Hielan's, Leezie Lindsay? Will ye gang to the Hielan's wi' me?"

Hidden by the hill, and the screening bushes, she slipped away and took a devious course down the valley. But there was a lump in her throat as she went.

She ran past a clump of cedars and came out into view of Craig-Ellachie. The Grant Girls had given their home this name because of its association with their clan's history, but Nature had encouraged them, for behind the house, set back against the dark pine woods, rose a hill crowned by a towering rock. The cosy old white-washed house was set in the centre of a saucer-like valley. It was the original log house in which their parents had lived and had been added to here and there till it was beautifully picturesque just as the home of the Grant Girls should be.

But visitors to Craig-Ellachie never saw anything else after their first glimpse of the garden.

Every one wondered how it was that the Grant Girls' garden should outbloom all others, and that nobody else ever had any hope of first prize at the Fall fairs. One said it was the sheltered location of the place, others the low elevation, still others that it was the southern slope that made the Craig-Ellachie garden unfold the earliest crocus in Spring and hold safely the latest aster in Autumn. But wise folk, like Christina's mother, always held that it was the tender care of the three gardeners and the sunlight of their presence that made their flowers the wonder of the countryside.

Christina drew a breath of delight as it came into view. Dahlias and asters, rows and rows of them, clumps of feathery cosmos, hedges of flaming gladioli, dazzling golden glow and a dozen others she did not recognise made a glorious array. And the blooms were not confined to the garden proper that was spread out on the south side of the house. They overflowed into the vegetable garden at the back, and spread around the lawn at the front. They strayed away along the fences and completely hedged the orchard. They even encroached upon the barnyard; the manure heap was screened from view by a wall of sunflowers and golden glow and a rainbow avenue of late phlox led down to the pig-pens.

Christina entered by the barnyard and came up through the kitchen garden where rows of cauliflower and cabbage and tomatoes alternated with pansies and mignonette and scarlet salvia. Every bed of onions was fringed with sweet alyssum, and rows of beets were flanked with rosemary and lavender. She opened the little wire gate that led into the garden proper and walked up under a long arched canopy of climbing roses and sweet peas that seemed, like the Grant Girls, to take no heed of the passing of time but bloomed on as though it were June. As she disappeared into its green shade her eye caught a movement in one of the brown fields behind the barn. The two younger sisters were there digging potatoes.

There had been a day when the Grant Girls did all the work of field and farmyard, and their hands were hard and their backs bent. But since Gavin had grown to man's estate their lives had been easier. Indeed they were never done telling tales of how Gavie had forbidden their going into the fields. They boasted of his high handed airs, for hadn't he even chased Janet out of the barnyard, with the pitchfork, mind you, when she was determined to help him in with the hay. Eh indeed he was a thrawn lad, and nobody could manage oor Gavie!

And now that they had fallen upon easier days and Gavin's strong arms had taken up the heavier work, they had resumed many of the older tasks that long ago most farm women had gladly handed over to factory or