Scotch Marriages, Volume 1 by Sarah Tytler

‘Ower the muir among the heather,' Jean Kinloch walked straight and / fast on a sunny sabbath morning in autumn. She was only nineteen years / of age but already she was tall and broad-shouldered, with the perfect / proportions and perfect development of health and strength. She was / nearer to a beautiful woman than to a bonnie lassie. She had the / dark-haired, black-browed, grey-eyed face, with the clear-cut features / and clear complexion which one is accustomed to associate with the / highest type of Norman beauty. But Jean's white square teeth, and round / somewhat massive chin, were departures from the type as it is usually / to be met with. And if she had the dignity and earnestness which on / occasions break into sunshine -- incomparably sweeter, more pathetic, / even more radiant, relieved against the almost sombre background, than / an all-pervading, soulless light-heartedness can be -- it was not Norman / dignity and earnestness. It was the self-respect and sedateness of the / Scotch peasant woman, on whom a Hebrew stamp has been deeply impressed, / who is enamoured of duty as other women are enamoured of pleasure, to / whom the sternest doctrines of Calvinism are invested with an awful / beauty. These are the Lord's decrees, and though He should slay her, / yet will she trust in Him.

Jean's dress had lost the picturesqueness which would have / distinguished her grand-mother's, but it was good of its kind -- if / somewhat severe in the tone and cut, and only remarkable as worn by / Jean Kinloch. But Jean carried a bible which was no modern, cheaply / printed, cheaply bound Bible Society's volume: it was a valuable / hereditary possession in a couple of small volumes bound in fine and / lasting russian leather with flaps fastened by burnished silver clasps, / while there was dim gold on the edges of the yellow leaves with their / clear delicate print. A bible not unlike it is to be seen among the / relics of Burns. It was given by the peasant farmer's son to his / Highland Mary -- the girl whom he was to immortalise by two out of the / most exquisite love-laments in any language -- in that autumn when she / came down and ‘shore' the harvest with him among the

/ ‘banks and braes and streams around / The Castle o' Montgomery.'

But Jean Kinloch's bible was not a love-gift, on which, as it was held / in the man's left hand over a running stream, the woman and her lover / clasped hands, and swore in the sight of their God to be faithful to / death. Such bibles with the broken sixpences of a more worldly form of / troth-plight were already gone out of fashion. This book possessed a / different distinction, having been Jean's mother's kirking bible.

Jean was bound on a long and fatiguing walk even for her youth and / vigour, so that she had got up by daybreak, before even the minister, / the earliest riser in the manse, had replaced the Greek and Hebrew / studies of ordinary days, by the preparatory devotions peculiar / to the sabbath day, while the rest of the household lay in silent / unconsciousness. She had set out ere the raw mist had cleared away, in / order to reach Logan Kirk in time for the forenoon ‘diet of worship.'

The only sufficient warrant in Jean's eyes for such a distant / expedition on that ‘sawbath day' which she had been taught to reverence / so intensely, would have been an exceptional privilege of sitting down / at one of the sacred ‘tables,' after they had been jealously ‘fenced. ' / Then she would have heard it ‘served' by some grand minister, a very / patriarch and prophet in one, a man famed in Jean's circle for lofty / austere piety, impassioned zeal, and immense experience with learning / to match, though the latter quality was held in small account compared / to the recommendations which went before it. Such a minister was a fit / successor to ‘Holy Renwick' and ‘gude Cargill' and the other heroes and / martyrs who endured to the end -- till they were shot down in peat bogs, / or mounted steadfastly and triumphantly the long ladder to the high / gallows in the Grass Market of Edinburgh.

But young Jean was not journeying on so unexceptionable and profitable / an errand. It was her own private affairs which sent her forth to cross / the broad moor on the sabbath morning, and any competent judge might / easily guess that Jean's affairs were in dire confusion when she took / such a step.

Jean's story was not unprecedented in her rank of life, though it is to / be hoped that hers was an extreme case. She had been courted for years, / young as she was, and at last trothplighted to a young ploughman. / Their marriage had been fixed to take place in the following spring at / Whitsunday, one of the two great feeing, flitting, and marrying terms / among Scotch agricultural labourers. Jean had been making manifold / happy preparations in her quiet womanly way by little purchases from / pedlars, by seams sewed diligently in the half hours which were / honestly hers, by plans made over and over again with fond deliberation / and reiteration for the laying out of her little savings and her next / half year's wages. She had been undecided whether she herself should / invest in a chest of drawers, or help Bob to buy an eight-day clock, / either of which would be an ‘honesty,' that is a standing mark of / respectability in their ‘cot house' and might descend as an heirloom / to their children.

In the meantime the bridegroom elect had left Dalroy, which was his / native parish as well as Jean's, and gone ‘to better himself' on a / farm in the parish of Logan. But it did not seem to her to matter / much -- except where their feelings were concerned, that he should have / little communication with her, either personally or by letter in the / interval. He might or he might not, after the pitting of the potatoes, / the last pressing job of the rural year,

/ tak his stick into his hand