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Though well aware that she was playing this night with the sharpest of edged tools, till her messengers should return and her combinations should close, Jess was perfectly able and willing to give herself up to the game of conversational give-and-take with Ebie Farrish. She was a girl of few genteel accomplishments, but with her gipsy charm and her frankly pagan nature she was fitted to go far.
It was her heritage from some Pict, who held back under the covert of his native woods so long as the Roman tortoise crept along, shelved in iron, but who drave headlong into a gap with all his men, when, some accident of formation showed the one chance given in a long day's march. Ebie thought he had never seen Jess so beautiful.
Ebie thought that some tramps were trespassing on the good nature of the mistress of the house, and he had the feeling of loyalty to his master's interests which distinguished the Galloway ploughman of an older time.
He was mortally afraid of bogles, and would not have crossed the kirkyard after the glimmer of midnight without seeing a dozen corpse- candles; but tramps were quite another matter, for Ebie was not in the least afraid of mortal man except only of Allan Welsh, the Marrow minister.
"But hoo div ye ken, or, raither, what gars ye think that ye're no the first that I hae likit, Jess?" "Oh, I ken fine," said Jess, who was a woman of knowledge, and had her share of original sin. "But hoo div ye ken?" persisted Ebie. "Fine that," said Jess, diplomatically. "But tell us, Jess," said Ebie, who was in high good humour at these fascinating accusations.
Still, aunt Ebie seemed to love moss and leaves as much as some people love souls, and I thought she had chosen them as the least dangerous objects of affection; whereas my father seemed most to love souls, and would have saved mine or another's at the expense of all the forests and vines of Eden. To Miss Peabody I wrote of this visit in a manner which shows its reviving effect upon me:
Indeed, Ebie and Jock were ready to take their oath that they never went up and down that wooden ladder, from which three of the rounds were missing, without seeing Jock Gordon's eyes shining like a cat's out of the dark of the manger where, like an ape, he sat all night cross-legged. IT was early afternoon at Craig Ronald. Afternoon is quite a different time from morning at a farm.
A trout leaped in the calm water, and Ebie stopped thinking of the eternities to remember where he had set a line. Far off a cock crew, and the well-known sound warned Ebie that he had better be drawing near his bed.
Its very aspect cried out, though never so mercifully, "My sermon is endless!" Aunt Ebie, hunching her shoulders in mirthful appreciation, said, "Nathaniel always hated it!" Why not?
At that moment Jess Kissock was putting Winsome Charteris's letter into her pocket. There is no doubt that poor, ignorant Ebie, with his highly developed body and the unrestrained and irregular propensities of his rudimentary soul, was nearer the Almighty that night than his keen-witted and scheming sweetheart.
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