Kitabı oku: «The Shoes of Fortune», sayfa 7
A pact it was; I went out from Miss Walkinshaw’s lodging that afternoon travelling secretary to the fat priest.
CHAPTER XVI
RELATES HOW I INDULGED MY CURIOSITY AND HOW LITTLE CAME OF IT
Dunkerque in these days (it may be so no longer) was a place for a man to go through with his nose in his fingers. Garbage stewed and festered in the gutters of the street so that the women were bound to walk high-kilted, and the sea-breeze at its briskest scarcely sufficed to stir the stagnant, stenching atmosphere of the town, now villainously over-populated by the soldiery with whom it was France’s pleasant delusion she should whelm our isle.
“Pardieu!” cried Father Hamilton, as we emerged in this malodorous open, “‘twere a fairy godfather’s deed to clear thee out of this feculent cloaca. Think on’t, boy; of you and me a week hence riding through the sweet woods of Somme or Oise, and after that Paris! Paris! my lad of tragedy; Paris, where the world moves and folk live. And then, perhaps, Tours, and Bordeaux, and Flanders, and Sweden, Seville, St. Petersburg itself, but at least the woods of Somme, where the roads are among gossamer and dew and enchantment in the early morning – if we cared to rise early enough to see them, which I promise thee we shall not.”
His lips were thick and trembling: he gloated as he pictured me this mad itinerary, leaning heavily on my arm – Silenus on an ash sapling – half-trotting beside me, looking up every now and then to satisfy himself I appreciated the prospect. It was pleasant enough, though in a measure incredible, but at the moment I was thinking of Miss Walkinshaw, and wondering much to myself that this exposition of foreign travel should seem barely attractive because it meant a severance from her. Her sad smile, her brave demeanour, her kind heart, her beauty had touched me sensibly.
“Well, Master Scrivener!” cried the priest, panting at my side, “art dumb?”
“I fancy, sir, it is scarcely the weather for woods,” said I. “I hope we are not to put off our journey till the first of April a twelvemonth.” A suspicion unworthy of me had flashed into my mind that I might, after all, be no more than the butt of a practical joke. But that was merely for a moment; the priest was plainly too eager on his scheme to be play-acting it.
“I am very grateful to the lady,” I hastened to add, “who gave me the chance of listing in your service. Had it not been for her you might have found a better secretary, and I might have remained long enough in the evil smells of Dunkerque that I’ll like all the same in spite of that, because I have so good a friend as Miss Walkinshaw in it.”
“La! la! la!” cried out Father Hamilton, squeezing my arm. “Here’s our young cockerel trailing wing already! May I never eat fish again if ‘tisn’t a fever in this woman that she must infect every man under three score. For me I am within a month of the period immune, and only feel a malaise in her company. Boy, perpend! Have I not told thee every woman, except the ugliest, is an agent of the devil? I am the first to discover that his majesty is married and his wife keeps shop when he is travelling – among Jesuits and Jacobites and such busy fuel for the future fires. His wife keeps shop, lad, and does a little business among her own sex, using the handsomest for her purposes. Satan comes back to the boutique. ‘What!’ he cries, and counts the till, ‘these have been busy days, good wife.’ And she, Madame Dusky, chuckles with a ‘Ha! Jack, old man, hast a good wife or not? Shalt never know how to herd in souls like sheep till thou hast a quicker eye for what’s below a Capuchin hood.’ This – this is a sweet woman, this Walkinshaw, Paul, but a dangerous. ‘Ware hawk, lad, ‘ware hawk!”
I suppose my face reddened at that; at least he looked at me again and pinched, and “Smitten to the marrow; may I drink water and grow thin else. Sacré nom de nom! ‘tis time thou wert on the highways of Europe.”
“How does it happen that a countrywoman of mine is here alone?” I asked.
“I’ll be shot if thou art not the rascalliest young innocent in France. Aye! or out of Scotland,” cried Father Hamilton, holding his sides for laughter.
“Is thy infernal climate of fogs and rains so pleasant that a woman of spirit should abide there for ever an’ she have the notion to travel otherwheres? La! la! la! Master Scrivener, and thou must come to an honest pious priest for news of the world. But, boy, I’m deaf and dumb; mine eyes on occasion are without vision. Let us say the lady has been an over-ardent Jacobite; ‘twill suffice in the meantime. And now has’t ever set eyes on Charles Edward?”
I told him I had never had any hand in the Jacobite affairs, if that was what he meant.
His countenance fell at that.
“What!” he cried, losing his Roman manner, “do you tell me you have never seen him?”
But once, I explained, when he marched into Glasgow city with his wild Highlanders and bullied the burgesses into providing shoes for his ragged army.
“Ah,” said he with a clearing visage, “that will suffice. Must point him out to me. Dixmunde parish was a poor place for seeing the great; ‘tis why I go wandering now.”
Father Hamilton’s hint at politics confirmed my guess about Miss Walkinshaw, but I suppose I must have been in a craze to speak of her on any pretence, for later in the day I was at Thurot’s lodging, and there must precognosce again.
“Oh, mon Dieu, quelle espièglerie!” cried out the captain. “And this a Greig too! Well, I do not wonder that your poor uncle stayed so long away from home; faith, he’d have died of an ennui else. Miss Walkinshaw is – Miss Walkinshaw; a countryman of her own should know better than I all that is to be known about her. But ‘tis not our affair, Mr. Greig. For sure ‘tis enough that we find her smiling, gentle, tolerant, what you call the ‘perfect lady’ —n’est ce pas?And of all the virtues, upon my word, kindness is the best and rarest, and that she has to a miracle.”
“I’m thinking that is not a corsair’s creed, Captain Thurot,” said I, smiling at the gentleman’s eagerness. He was standing over me like a lighthouse, with his eyes on fire, gesturing with his arms as they had been windmill sails.
“No, faith! but ‘tis a man’s, Master Greig, and I have been happy with it. Touching our fair friend, I may say that, much as I admire her, I agree with some others that ours were a luckier cause without her. Gad! the best thing you could do, Mr. Greig, would be to marry her yourself and take her back with you to Scotland.”
“What! byway of Paris in Father Hamilton’s glass coach,” I said, bantering to conceal my confusion at such a notion.
“H’m,” said he. “Father Hamilton and the lady are a pair.” He walked a little up and down the room as if he were in a quandary. “A pair,” he resumed. “I fancied I could see to the very centre of the Sphinx itself, for all men are in ourselves if we only knew it, till I came upon this Scotswoman and this infernal Flemish-English priest of Dix-munde. Somehow, for them Antoine Thurot has not the key in himself yet. Still, ‘twill arrive, ‘twill arrive! I like the lady – and yet I wish she were a thousand miles away; I like the man too, but a Jesuit is too many men at once to be sure of; and, Gad! I can scarcely sleep at nights for wondering what he may be plotting. This grand tour of his-”
“Stop, stop!” I cried, in a fear that he might compromise himself in an ignorance of my share in the tour in question; “I must tell you that I am going with Father Hamilton as his secretary, although it bothers me to know what scrivening is to be accomplished in a glass coach. Like enough I am to be no more, in truth, than the gentleman’s companion or courier, and it is no matter so long as I am moving.”
“Indeed, and is it so?” cried Captain Thurot, stopping as if he had been shot. “And how happens it that this priest is willing to take you, that are wholly a foreigner and a stranger to the country?”
“Miss Walkinshaw recommended me,” said I.
“Oh!” he cried, “you have not been long of getting into your excellent countrywoman’s kind favour. Is it that Tony Thurot has been doing the handsome by an ingrate? No, no, Monsieur, that were a monstrous innuendo, for the honour has been all mine. But that Miss Walkinshaw should be on such good terms with the priest as to trouble with the provision of his secretary is opposed to all I had expected of her. Why, she dislikes the man, or I’m a stuffed fish.”
“Anyhow, she has done a handsome thing by me,” said I. “It is no wonder that so good a heart as hers should smother its repugnances (and the priest is a fat sow, there is no denying) for the sake of a poor lad from its own country. You are but making it the plainer that I owe her more than at first I gave her credit for.”
“Bless me, here’s gratitude!” cried the captain, laughing at my warmth. “Mademoiselle Walkinshaw has her own plans; till now, I fancied them somewhat different from Hamilton’s, but more fool I to fancy they were what they seemed! All that, my dear lad, need not prevent your enjoying your grand tour with the priest, who has plenty of money and the disposition to spend it like a gentleman.”
Finally I went to my Lord Clancarty, for it will be observed that I had still no hint as to the origin of the lady who was so good a friend of mine. Though the last thing in the world I should have done was to pry into her affairs for the indulgence of an idle curiosity, I would know the best of her before the time came to say farewell, and leave of her with me no more than a memory.
The earl was at the Café du Soleil d’Or, eating mussels on the terrace and tossing the empty shells into the gutter what time he ogled passing women and exchanged levitous repartee with some other frequenters of the place.
“Egad, Paul,” he cried, meeting me with effusion, “‘tis said there is one pearl to be found for every million mussels; but here’s a pearl come to me in the midst of a single score. An Occasion, lad; I sat at the dice last night till a preposterous hour this morning, and now I have a headache like the deuce and a thirst to take the Baltic. I must have the tiniest drop, and on an Occasion too. Voilà! Gaspard, une autre bouteille.”
He had his bottle, that I merely made pretence to help him empty, and I had my precognition.
But it came to little in the long run. Oh yes, he understood my interest in the lady (with rakish winking); ‘twas a delicious creature for all its hauteur when one ventured a gallantry, but somehow no particular friend to the Earl of Clancarty, who, if she only knew it, was come of as noble a stock as any rotten Scot ever went unbreeched; not but what (this with a return of the naturally polite man) there were admirable and high-bred people of that race, as instance my Uncle Andrew and myself. But was there any reason why such a man as Charlie Stuart should be King of Ireland? “I say, Greig, blister the old Chevalier and his two sons! There is not a greater fumbler on earth than this sotted person, who has drunk the Cause to degradation and would not stir a hand to serve me and my likes, that are, begad! the fellow’s betters.”
“But all this,” said I, “has little to do with Miss Walkinshaw. I have nothing to say of the Prince, who may be all you say, though that is not the repute he has in Scotland.”
“Bravo, Mr. Greig!” cried his lordship. “That is the tone if you would keep in the lady’s favour. Heaven knows she has little reason to listen to praise of such a creature, but, then, women are blind. She loves not Clancarty, as I have said; but, no matter, I forgive her that; ‘tis well known ‘tis because I cannot stomach her prince.”
“And yet,” said I, “you must interest yourself in these Jacobite affairs and mix with all that are here of that party.”
“Faith and I do,” he confessed heartily. “What! am I to be a mole and stay underground? A man must have his diversion, and though I detest the Prince I love his foolish followers. Do you know what, Mr. Greig? ‘Tis the infernal irony of things in this absurd world that the good fellows, the bloods, the men of sensibilities must for ever be wrapped up in poor mad escapades and emprises. And a Clancarty is ever of such a heart that the more madcap the scheme the more will he dote on it.”
A woman passing in a chair at this moment looked in his direction; fortunately, otherwise I was condemned to a treatise on life and pleasure.
“Egad!” he cried, “there’s a face that’s like a line of song,” and he smiled at her with unpardonable boldness as it seemed to me, a pleasant pucker about his eyes, a hint of the good comrade in his mouth.
She flushed like wine and tried to keep from smiling, but could not resist, and smiling she was borne away.
“Do you know her, my lord?” I could not forbear asking.
“Is it know her?” said he. “Devil a know, but ‘tis a woman anyhow, and a heart at that. Now who the deuce can she be?” And he proceeded, like a true buck, to fumble with the Mechlin of his fall and dust his stockings in an airy foppish manner so graceful that I swear no other could have done the same so well.
“Now this Miss Walkinshaw – ” I went on, determined to have some satisfaction from my interview.
“Confound your Miss Walkinshaw, by your leave, Mr. Greig,” he interrupted. “Can you speak of Miss Walkinshaw when the glory of the comet is still trailing in the heavens? And – hum! – I mind me of a certain engagement, Mr. Greig,” he went on hurriedly, drawing a horologe from his fob and consulting it with a frowning brow. “In the charm of your conversation I had nigh forgot, so adieu, adieu, mon ami!”
He gave me the tips of his fingers, and a second later he was gone, stepping down the street with a touch of the minuet, tapping his legs with his cane, his sword skewering his coat-skirts, all the world giving him the cleanest portion of the thoroughfare and looking back after him with envy and admiration.
CHAPTER XVII
WITNESSES THE LAST OF A BLATE YOUNG MAN
And all this time it may well be wondered where was my remorse for a shot fired on the moor of Mearns, for two wretched homes created by my passion and my folly. And where, in that shifting mind of mine, was the place of Isobel Fortune, whose brief days of favour for myself (if that, indeed, was not imagination on my part) had been the cause of these my wanderings? There is one beside me as I write, ready to make allowance for youth and ignorance, the untutored affection, the distraught mind, if not for the dubiety as to her feelings for myself when I was outlawed for a deed of blood and had taken, as the Highland phrase goes, the world for my pillow.
I did not forget the girl of Kirkillstane; many a time in the inward visions of the night, and of the day too, I saw her go about that far-off solitary house in the hollow of the hills. Oddly enough, ‘twas ever in sunshine I saw her, with her sun-bonnet swinging from its ribbons and her hand above her eyes, shading them that she might look across the fields that lay about her home, or on a tryst of fancy by the side of Earn, hearing the cushats mourn in a magic harmony with her melancholy thoughts. As for the killing of young Borland, that I kept, waking at least, from my thoughts, or if the same intruded, I found it easier, as time passed, to excuse myself for a fatality that had been in the experience of nearly every man I now knew – of Clancarty and Thurot, of the very baker in whose house I lodged and who kneaded the dough for his little bread not a whit the less cheerily because his hands had been imbrued.
The late Earl of Clare, in France called the Maréchal Comte de Thomond, had come to Dunkerque in the quality of Inspector-General of the Armies of France, to review the troops in garrison and along that menacing coast. The day after my engagement with Father Hamilton I finished my French lesson early and went to see his lordship and his army on the dunes to the east of the town. Cannon thundered, practising at marks far out in the sea; there was infinite manoeuvring of horse and foot; the noon was noisy with drums and the turf shook below the hoofs of galloping chargers. I fancy it was a holiday; at least, as I recall the thing, Dunkerque was all en fête, and a happy and gay populace gathered in the rear of the maréchales flag. Who should be there among the rest, or rather a little apart from the crowd, but Miss Walkinshaw! She had come in a chair; her dainty hand beckoned me to her side almost as soon as I arrived.
“Now, that’s what I must allow is very considerate,” said she, eyeing my red shoes, which were put on that day from some notion of proper splendour.
“Well considered?” I repeated.
“Just well considered,” said she. “You know how much it would please me to see you in your red shoes, and so you must put them on.”
I was young in these days, and, like the ass I was, I quickly set about disabusing her mind of a misapprehension that injured her nor me.
“Indeed, Miss Walkinshaw,” said I, “how could I do that when I did not know you were to be here? You are the last I should have expected to see here.”
“What!” she exclaimed, growing very red. “Does Mr. Greig trouble himself so much about the convenances? And why should I not be here if I have the whim? Tell me that, my fastidious compatriot.”
Here was an accountable flurry over a thoughtless phrase!
“No reason in the world that I know of,” said I gawkily, as red as herself, wondering what it was my foot was in.
“That you know of,” she repeated, as confused as ever. “It seems to me, Mr. Greig, that the old gentleman who is tutoring you in the French language would be doing a good turn to throw in a little of the manners of the same. Let me tell you that I am as much surprised as you can be to find myself here, and now that you are so good as to put me in mind of the – of the – of the convenances, I will go straight away home. It was not the priest, nor was it Captain Thurot that got your ear, for they are by the way of being gentlemen; it could only have been this Irishman Clancarty – the quality of that country have none of the scrupulosity that distinguishes our own. You can tell his lordship, next time you see him, that Miss Walkinshaw will see day about with him for this.”
She ordered her chairmen to take her home, and then – burst into tears!
I followed at her side, in a stew at my indiscoverable blundering, my chapeau-de-bras in my hand, and myself like to greet too for sympathy and vexation.
“You must tell me what I have done, Miss Walkinshaw,” I said. “Heaven knows I have few enough friends in this world without losing your good opinion through an offence of whose nature I am entirely ignorant.”
“Go away!” she said, pushing my fingers from the side of her chair, that was now being borne towards the town.
“Indeed, and I shall not, Miss Walkinshaw, asking your pardon for the freedom,” I said, “for here’s some monstrous misconception, and I must clear myself, even at the cost of losing your favour for ever.”
She hid her face in her handkerchief and paid no more heed to me. Feeling like a mixture of knave and fool, I continued to walk deliberately by her side all the way into the Rue de la Boucherie. She dismissed the chair and was for going into the house without letting an eye light on young persistency.
“One word, Miss Walkinshaw,” I pleaded. “We are a Scottish man and a Scottish woman, our leelones of all our race at this moment in this street, and it will be hard-hearted of the Scottish woman if she will not give her fellow countryman, that has for her a respect and an affection, a chance to know wherein he may have blundered.”
“Respect and affection,” she said, her profile turned to me, her foot on the steps, visibly hesitating.
“Respect and affection,” I repeated, flushing at my own boldness.
“In spite of Clancarty’s tales of me?” she said, biting her nether lip and still manifestly close on tears.
“How?” said I, bewildered. “His lordship gave me no tales that I know of.”
“And why,” said she, “be at such pains to tell me you wondered I should be there?”
I got very red at that.
“You see, you cannot be frank with me, Mr. Greig,” she said bitterly.
“Well, then,” I ventured boldly, “what I should have said was that I feared you would not be there, for it’s there I was glad to see you. And I have only discovered that in my mind since you have been angry with me and would not let me explain myself.”
“What!” she cried, quite radiant, “and, after all, the red shoon were not without a purpose? Oh, Mr. Greig, you’re unco’ blate! And, to tell you the truth, I was just play-acting yonder myself. I was only making believe to be angry wi’ you, and now that we understand each ither you can see me to my parlour.”
“Well, Bernard,” she said to the Swiss as we entered, “any news?”
He informed her there was none.
“What! no one called?” said she with manifest disappointment.
“Personne, Madame.”
“No letters?”
Nor were there any letters, he replied.
She sighed, paused irresolute a moment with her foot on the stair, one hand at her heart, the other at the fastening of her coat, and looked at me with a face almost tragic in its trouble. I cannot but think she was on the brink of a confidence, but ere it came she changed her mind and dashed up the stair with a tra-la-la of a song meant to indicate her indifference, leaving me a while in her parlour while she changed her dress. She came back to me in a little, attired in a pale primrose-coloured paduasoy, the cuffs and throat embroidered in a pattern of roses and leaves, her hair unpowdered and glossy, wantoning in and out of a neck beyond description. The first thing she did on entrance was odd enough, for it was to stand over me where I lounged on her settee, staring down into my eyes until I felt a monstrous embarrassment.
“I am wonderin’,” said she, “if ye are the man I tak’ ye for.”
Her eyes were moist; I saw she had been crying in her toilet room.
“I’m just the man you see,” I said, “but for some unco’ troubles that are inside me and are not for airing to my friends on a fine day in Dunkerque.”
“Perhaps, like the lave of folks, ye dinna ken yoursel’,” she went on, speaking with no sprightly humour though in the Scots she was given to fall to in her moments of fun. “All men, Mr. Greig, mean well, but most of them fall short of their own ideals; they’re like the women in that, no doubt, but in the men the consequence is more disastrous.”
“When I was a girl in a place you know,” she went on even more soberly, “I fancied all men were on the model of honest John Walkinshaw – better within than without. He was stern to austerity, demanding the last particle of duty from his children, and to some he might seem hard, but I have never met the man yet with a kinder heart, a pleasanter mind, a more pious disposition than John Walkin-shaw’s. It has taken ten years, and acquaintance with some gentry not of Scotland, to make it plain that all men are not on his model.”
“I could fancy not, to judge from his daughter,” I said, blushing at my first compliment that was none the less bold because it was sincere.
At that she put on a little mouth and shrugged her shoulders with a shiver that made the snaps in her ears tremble.
“My good young man,” said she, “there you go! If there’s to be any friendship between you and Clementina Walkinshaw, understand there must be a different key from that. You are not only learning your French, but you are learning, it would seem, the manners of the nation. It was that made me wonder if you could be the man I took you for the first day you were in this room and I found I could make you greet with a Scots sang, and tell me honestly about a lass you had a notion of and her no’ me. That last’s the great stroke of honesty in any man, and let me tell you there are some women who would not relish it. But you are in a company here so ready with the tongue of flattery that I doubt each word they utter, and that’s droll enough in me that loves my fellow creatures, and used to think the very best of every one of them. If I doubt them now I doubt them with a sore enough heart, I’ll warrant you. Oh! am I not sorry that my man of Mearns should be put in the reverence of such creatures as Clancarty and Thurot, and all that gang of worldlings? I do not suppose I could make you understand it, Mr. Paul Greig, but I feel motherly to you, and to see my son – this great giant fellow who kens the town of Glasgow and dwelt in Mearns where I had May milk, and speaks wi’ the fine Scots tongue like mysel’ when his heart is true – to see him the boon comrade with folks perhaps good enough for Clementina Walkinshaw but lacking a particle of principle, is a sight to sorrow me.”
“And is it for that you seek to get me away with the priest?” I asked, surprised at all this, and a little resenting the suggestion of youth implied in her feeling like a mother to me. Her face was lit, her movement free and beautiful; something in her fascinated me.
She dropped in a chair and pushed the hair from her ears with a hand like milk, and laughed.
“Now how could you guess?” said she. “Am I no’ the careful mother of you to put you in the hands o’ the clergy? I doubt this play-acting rhetorician of a man from Dixmunde is no great improvement on the rest of your company when all’s said and done, but you’ll be none the worse for seeing the world at his costs, and being in other company than Clancarty’s and Thurot’s and Roscommon’s. He told me to-day you were going with him, and I was glad that I had been of that little service to you.”
“Then it seems you think so little of my company as to be willing enough to be rid of me at the earliest opportunity,” I said, honestly somewhat piqued at her readiness to clear me out of Dunkerque.
She looked at me oddly. “Havers, Mr. Greig!” said she, “just havers!”
I was thanking her for her offices, but she checked me. “You are well off,” she said, “to be away from here while these foolish manouvrings are on foot. Poor me! I must bide and see them plan the breaking down of my native country. It’s a mercy I know in what a fiasco it will end, this planning. Hearken! Do you hear the bugles? That’s Soubise going back to the caserne. He and his little men are going back to eat another dinner destined to assist in the destruction of an island where you and I should be this day if we were wiser than we are. Fancy them destroying Britain, Mr. Greig! – Britain, where honest John Walkinshaw is, that never said an ill word in his life, nor owed any man a penny: where the folks are guid and true, and fear God and want nothing but to be left to their crofts and herds. If it was England – if it was the palace of Saint James – no, but it’s Scotland, too, and the men you saw marching up and down to-day are to be marching over the moor o’ Mearns when the heather’s red. Can you think of it?” She stamped her foot. “Where the wee thack hooses are at the foot o’ the braes, and the bairns playing under the rowan trees; where the peat is smelling, and the burns are singing in the glens, and the kirk-bells are ringing. Poor Mr. Greig! Are ye no’ wae for Scotland? Do ye think Providence will let a man like Thomond ye saw to-day cursing on horseback – do ye think Providence will let him lead a French army among the roads you and I ken so well, affronting the people we ken too, who may be a thought dull in the matter of repartee, but are for ever decent, who may be hard-visaged, but are so brave?”
She laughed, herself, half bitterly, half contemptuously, at the picture she drew. Outside, in the sunny air of the afternoon, the bugles of Soubise filled the street with brazen cries, and nearer came the roar of pounding drums. I thought I heard them menacing the sleep of evening valleys far away, shattering the calm of the hearth of Hazel Den.
“The cause for which – for which so many are exile here,” I said, looking on this Jacobite so strangely inconsistent, “has no reason to regret that France should plan an attack on Georgius Rex.”
She shook her head impatiently. “The cause has nothing to do with it, Mr. Greig,” said she. “The cause will suffer from this madness more than ever it did, but in any case ‘tis the most miserable of lost causes.”
“Prince Charlie-”
“Once it was the cause with me, now I would sooner have it Scotland,” she went on, heedless of my interruption. “Scotland! Scotland! Oh, how the name of her is like a dirge to me, and my heart is sore for her! Where is your heart, Mr. Greig, that it does not feel alarm at the prospect of these crapauds making a single night’s sleep uneasy for the folks you know? Where is your heart, I’m asking?”
“I wish I knew,” said I impulsively, staring at her, completely bewitched by her manner so variable and intense, and the straying tendrils of her hair.
“Do you not?” said she. “Then I will tell you. It is where it ought to be – with a girl of the name of Isobel Fortune. Oh, the dear name! oh, the sweet name! And when you are on your travels with this priest do not be forgetting her. Oh, yes! I know you will tell me again that all is over between the pair of you, and that she loved another – but I am not believing a word of that, Mr. Greig, when I look at you – (and will ye say ‘thank ye’ for the compliment that’s there?) – you will just go on thinking her the same, and you will be the better man for it. There’s something tells me she is thinking of you though I never saw her, the dear! Let me see, this is what sort of girl she will be.”
She drew her chair closer to the settee and leaned forward in front of me, and, fixing her eyes on mine, drew a picture of the girl of Kirkillstane as she imagined her.
“She will be about my own height, and with the same colour of hair-”
“How do you know that? I never said a word of that to you,” I cried, astonished at the nearness of her first guess.
“Oh, I’m a witch,” she cried triumphantly, “a fair witch. Hoots! do I no’ ken ye wadna hae looked the side o’ the street I was on if I hadna put ye in mind o’ her? Well, she’s my height and colour – but, alack-a-day, no’ my years. She ‘ll have a voice like the mavis for sweetness, and ‘ll sing to perfection. She’ll be shy and forward in turns, accordin’ as you are forward and shy; she ‘ll can break your heart in ten minutes wi’ a pout o’ her lips or mak’ ye fair dizzy with delight at a smile. And then” – here Miss Walkinshaw seemed carried away herself by her fancy portrait, for she bent her brows studiously as she thought, and seemed to speak in an abstraction – “and then she’ll be a managing woman. She’ll be the sort of woman that the Bible tells of whose value is over rubies; knowing your needs as you battle with the world, and cheerful when you come in to the hearthstone from the turmoil outside. A witty woman and a judge of things, calm but full of fire in your interests. A household where the wife’s a doll is a cart with one wheel, and your Isobel will be the perfect woman. I think she must have travelled some, too, and seen how poor is the wide world compared with what is to be found at your own fire-end; I think she must have had trials and learned to be brave.”
