Catriona
and nights, a steady, gentle wind, and scarce a sheet started all the
way through the North Sea, we sat there (only now and again walking to
and fro for warmth) from the first blink of the sun till eight or nine
at night under the clear stars. The merchants or Captain Sang would
sometimes glance and smile upon us, or pass a merry word or two and
give us the go-by again; but the most part of the time they were deep
in herring and chintzes and linen, or in computations of the slowness
of the passage, and left us to our own concerns, which were very little
important to any but ourselves.
At the first, we had a great deal to say, and thought ourselves pretty
witty; and I was at a little pains to be the _beau_, and she (I
believe) to play the young lady of experience. But soon we grew plainer
with each other. I laid aside my high, clipped English (what little
there was left of it) and forgot to make my Edinburgh bows and scrapes;
she, upon her side, fell into a sort of kind familiarity; and we dwelt
together like those of the same household, only (upon my side) with a
more deep emotion. About the same time the bottom seemed to fall out of
our conversation, and neither one of us the less pleased. Whiles she
would tell me old wives’ tales, of which she had a wonderful variety,
many of them from my friend red-headed Niel. She told them very pretty,
and they were pretty enough childish tales; but the pleasure to myself
was in the sound of her voice, and the thought that she was telling and
I listening. Whiles, again, we would sit entirely silent, not
communicating even with a look, and tasting pleasure enough in the
sweetness of that neighbourhood. I speak here only for myself. Of what
was in the maid’s mind, I am not very sure that ever I asked myself;
and what was in my own, I was afraid to consider. I need make no secret
of it now, either to myself or to the reader; I was fallen totally in
love. She came between me and the sun. She had grown suddenly taller,
as I say, but with a wholesome growth; she seemed all health, and
lightness, and brave spirits; and I thought she walked like a young
deer, and stood like a birch upon the mountains. It was enough for me
to sit near by her on the deck; and I declare I scarce spent two
thoughts upon the future, and was so well content with what I then
enjoyed that I was never at the pains to imagine any further step;
unless perhaps that I would be sometimes tempted to take her hand in
mine and hold it there. But I was too like a miser of what joys I had,
and would venture nothing on a hazard.
What we spoke was usually of ourselves or of each other, so that if
anyone had been at so much pains as overhear us, he must have supposed
us the most egotistical persons in the world. It befell one day when we
were at this practice, that we came on a discourse of friends and
friendship, and I think now that we were sailing near the wind. We said
what a fine thing friendship was, and how little we had guessed of it,
and how it made life a new thing, and a thousand covered things of the
same kind that will have been said, since the foundation of the world,
by young folk in the same predicament. Then we remarked upon the
strangeness of that circumstance, that friends came together in the
beginning as if they were there for the first time, and yet each had
been alive a good while, losing time with other people.
“It is not much that I have done,” said she, “and I could be telling
you the five-fifths of it in two-three words. It is only a girl I am,
and what can befall a girl, at all events? But I went with the clan in
the year ’45. The men marched with swords and fire-locks, and some of
them in brigades in the same set of tartan; they were not backward at
the marching, I can tell you. And there were gentlemen from the Low
Country, with their tenants mounted and trumpets to sound, and there
was a grand skirling of war-pipes. I rode on a little Highland horse on
the right hand of my father, James More, and of Glengyle himself. And
here is one fine thing that I remember, that Glengyle kissed me in the
face, because (says he) ‘my kinswoman, you are the only lady of the
clan that has come out,’ and me a little maid of maybe twelve years
old! I saw Prince Charlie too, and the blue eyes of him; he was pretty
indeed! I had his hand to kiss in front of the army. O, well, these
were the good days, but it is all like a dream that I have seen and
then awakened. It went what way you very well know; and these were the
worst days of all, when the red-coat soldiers were out, and my father
and uncles lay in the hill, and I was to be carrying them their meat in
the middle night, or at the short sight of day when the cocks crow.
Yes, I have walked in the night, many’s the time, and my heart great in
me for terror of the darkness. It is a strange thing I will never have
been meddled with by a bogle; but they say a maid goes safe. Next there
was my uncle’s marriage, and that was a dreadful affair beyond all.
Jean Kay was that woman’s name; and she had me in the room with her
that night at Inversnaid, the night we took her from her friends in the
old, ancient manner. She would and she wouldn’t; she was for marrying
Rob the one minute, and the next she would be for none of him. I will
never have seen such a feckless creature of a woman; surely all there
was of her would tell her ay or no. Well, she was a widow; and I can
never be thinking a widow a good woman.”
“Catriona!” says I, “how do you make out that?”
“I do not know,” said she; “I am only telling you the seeming in my
heart. And then to marry a new man! Fy! But that was her; and she was
married again upon my Uncle Robin, and went with him awhile to kirk and
market; and then wearied, or else her friends got claught of her and
talked her round, or maybe she turned ashamed; at the least of it, she
ran away, and went back to her own folk, and said we had held her in
the lake, and I will never tell you all what. I have never thought much
of any females since that day. And so in the end my father, James More,
came to be cast in prison, and you know the rest of it an well as me.”
“And through all you had no friends?” said I.
“No,” said she; “I have been pretty chief with two-three lasses on the
braes, but not to call it friends.”
“Well, mine is a plain tale,” said I. “I never had a friend to my name
till I met in with you.”
“And that brave Mr. Stewart?” she asked.
“O, yes, I was forgetting him,” I said. “But he is a man, and that is
very different.”
“I would think so,” said she. “O, yes, it is quite different.”
“And then there was one other,” said I. “I once thought I had a friend,
but it proved a disappointment.”
She asked me who she was?
“It was a he, then,” said I. “We were the two best lads at my father’s
school, and we thought we loved each other dearly. Well, the time came
when he went to Glasgow to a merchant’s house, that was his second
cousin once removed; and wrote me two-three times by the carrier; and
then he found new friends, and I might write till I was tired, he took
no notice. Eh, Catriona, it took me a long while to forgive the world.
There is not anything more bitter than to lose a fancied friend.”
Then she began to question me close upon his looks and character, for
we were each a great deal concerned in all that touched the other; till
at last, in a very evil hour, I minded of his letters and went and
fetched the bundle from the cabin.
“Here are his letters,” said I, “and all the letters that ever I got.
That will be the last I’ll can tell of myself; ye know the lave [26] as
well as I do.”
“Will you let me read them, then?” says she.
I told her, _if she would be at the pains_; and she bade me go away and
she would read them from the one end to the other. Now, in this bundle
that I gave her, there were packed together not only all the letters of
my false friend, but one or two of Mr. Campbell’s when he was in town
at the Assembly, and to make a complete roll of all that ever was
written to me, Catriona’s little word, and the two I had received from
Miss Grant, one when I was on the Bass and one on board that ship. But
of these last I had no particular mind at the moment.
I was in that state of subjection to the thought of my friend that it
mattered not what I did, nor scarce whether I was in her presence or
out of it; I had caught her like some kind of a noble fever that lived
continually in my bosom, by night and by day, and whether I was waking
or asleep. So it befell that after I was come into the fore-part of the
ship where the broad bows splashed into the billows, I was in no such
hurry to return as you might fancy; rather prolonged my absence like a
variety in pleasure. I do not think I am by nature much of an
Epicurean: and there had come till then so small a share of pleasure in
my way that I might be excused perhaps to dwell on it unduly.
When I returned to her again, I had a faint, painful impression as of a
buckle slipped, so coldly she returned the packet.
“You have read them?” said I; and I thought my voice sounded not wholly
natural, for I was turning in my mind for what could ail her.
“Did you mean me to read all?” she asked.
I told her “Yes,” with a drooping voice.
“The last of them as well?” said she.
I knew where we were now; yet I would not lie to her either. “I gave
them all without afterthought,” I said, “as I supposed that you would
read them. I see no harm in any.”
“I will be differently made,” said she. “I thank God I am differently
made. It was not a fit letter to be shown me. It was not fit to be
written.”
“I think you are speaking of your own friend, Barbara Grant?” said I.
“There will not be anything as bitter as to lose a fancied friend,”
said she, quoting my own expression.
“I think it is sometimes the friendship that was fancied!” I cried.
“What kind of justice do you call this, to blame me for some words that
a tomfool of a madcap lass has written down upon a piece of paper? You
know yourself with what respect I have behaved—and would do always.”
“Yet you would show me that same letter!” says she. “I want no such
friends. I can be doing very well, Mr. Balfour, without her—or you.”
“This is your fine gratitude!” says I.
“I am very much obliged to you,” said she. “I will be asking you to
take away your—letters.” She seemed to choke upon the word, so that it
sounded like an oath.
“You shall never ask twice,” said I; picked up that bundle, walked a
little way forward and cast them as far as possible into the sea. For a
very little more I could have cast myself after them.
The rest of the day I walked up and down raging. There were few names
so ill but what I gave her them in my own mind before the sun went
down. All that I had ever heard of Highland pride seemed quite outdone;
that a girl (scarce grown) should resent so trifling an allusion, and
that from her next friend, that she had near wearied me with praising
of! I had bitter, sharp, hard thoughts of her, like an angry boy’s. If
I had kissed her indeed (I thought), perhaps she would have taken it
pretty well; and only because it had been written down, and with a
spice of jocularity, up she must fuff in this ridiculous passion. It
seemed to me there was a want of penetration in the female sex, to make
angels weep over the case of the poor men.
We were side by side again at supper, and what a change was there! She
was like curdled milk to me; her face was like a wooden doll’s; I could
have indifferently smitten her or grovelled at her feet, but she gave
me not the least occasion to do either. No sooner the meal done than
she betook herself to attend on Mrs. Gebbie, which I think she had a
little neglected heretofore. But she was to make up for lost time, and