KIRSTEEN hurried out of the room, out of the fumes of the toddy and the atmosphere of the half-festive, half-doleful occasion which made a not altogether unpleasant excitement in the monotony of the home life. She gazed in at the open door of the parlour, and saw the three younger children gathered in the firelight upon the hearthrug munching their apples, and the sweets with which they had been allowed to fill their pockets. The firelight made still more ruddy the red heads and freckled faces of the boys, and lit up Jeanie, who sat on a footstool a little higher than her brothers, in her more delicate tints. Kirsteen was much attached to her younger sister, who promised to be the beauty of the family, and thought her like an angel, especially as seen through the dew of her wet eyes. “Dinna make a noise,” she said; “be awfu’ quiet or you’ll be sent to your beds;” and then closed the door softly and stole through the dark passage towards the principal entrance. There was no light save a ruddy gleam from the kitchen in the depths of that dark passage which traversed the whole breadth of the house, and that which shone through the crevices of the dining-room door. She had to find her way groping, but she was very well used to this exercise, and knew exactly where the hall-table and the heavy wooden chairs on each side stood. The outer door stood half open according to the habit of the country where there were no burglars to fear, and little to tempt them, and a perfect capacity of self-defence inside. There was a full moon that night, but it had not yet risen, though the sky was full of a misty light which preceded that event. A faint shadow of the group of trees outside was thrown upon the doorway; they were birches slender and graceful, with their leaves half blown away by the October gales; those that remained were yellow with the first touches of the frost, and in themselves gave forth a certain light. Kirsteen stole out to a bench that stood against the wall, and sat down in a corner. She was not afraid of cold with her uncovered head and bare arms. All the moods of the elements were familiar to the Highland girl. She thought it mild, almost warm: there was no wind, the yellow birches perceptible in their faint colour stood up like a group of long-limbed youths dangling their long locks in the dim light: the further landscape was but faintly visible, the shoulder of the hill against the sky, and a single gleam of the burn deep down among the trees.
She sat pressing herself into the corner of the seat, and the long pent-up tears poured forth. They had been getting too much for her, like a stream shut in by artificial barriers, and now came with a flood, like the same stream in spate and carrying every obstruction away. It was almost a pleasure to see (if there had been any one to do so) the good heart with which Kirsteen wept: she made no noise, but the tears poured forth in a great shower, relieving her head and her heart. They were very heavy, but they were not bitter. They meant a great deal of emotion and stirring up of her whole being, but though her feelings were very poignant they were not without pleasure. She had never felt so elevated above herself, above every dull circumstance that surrounded her. She had been very sorry and had shed tears plentifully when the other boys went away. But this was not the same. She perhaps did not confess to herself, yet she knew very well that it was not altogether for Robbie. Robbie had his share, but there was another now. For years Kirsteen and Ronald Drummond had been good friends. When he went away before she had felt a secret pang, and had been very eager to hear the news of the battles and that he was safe: but something had changed this friendship during the last summer while he had been at home. Not a word had been said: there was no love-making; they were both too shy to enter upon any revelation of feeling, nor was there any opportunity for explanations, since they were always surrounded by companions, always in the midst of a wandering, easy-minded party which had no respect for any one’s privacy. But Kirsteen when she marked her brother’s handkerchiefs with her hair had fully intended that Ronald should see it, and be struck with the similarity of the initials and ask for or take one of them at least. Her heart beat high when this happened according to her prevision; and when he stooped and whispered, “Will ye wait for me, Kirsteen, till I come back?” the answering whisper, “That I will!” had come from the bottom of her heart. She had scarcely been aware of what was said in the hurry of the moment. But it had come back to her, every syllable and every tone as soon as it was all over. Their spirits had floated together in that one moment, which was only a moment, yet enough to decide the course of two lives. They were too much bound by the laws of their youthful existence to think of breaking any observance in order to expand these utterances, or make assurance sure. That Ronald should spend his last evening at home with his mother and sister, that Kirsteen should be present at Robbie’s parting supper, was as the laws of the Medes and the Persians to these two. No emergency could be imagined of sufficient weight to interfere with such necessities of life. And there was something in their simple absolutism of youthful feeling which was better expressed in the momentary conjunction, in the sudden words so brief and pregnant, than in hours of lovers’ talk, of which both boy and girl would have thought shame. “Will ye wait for me till I come back?” What more could have been said in volumes? and “That I will!” out of the fervour of a simple heart? Kirsteen thought it all over again and again. He seemed to stand by her side bending a little over her with a look half smile, half tears in his eyes; and she was aware again of the flash of the sweet discovery, the gold thread of the little letters put to his lips, and then the question, “Will ye wait?” Wait! for a hundred years, for all the unfathomed depths of life, through long absence and silence, each invisible to the other. “That I will!” She said it over and over again to herself.
In those days there was no thought of the constant communications we have now, no weekly mails, no rapid courses overland, no telegraph for an emergency. When a young man went away he went for good—away; every trace of him obliterated as if he had not been. It was a four months’ voyage to India round by the Cape. Within the course of the year his mother might hope to hear that he had arrived. And if an Indian letter had come even at that long interval for a girl in another family, what a host of questions would she not have had to go through! “A letter for Kirsteen! Who’s writing to Kirsteen? What is he writing to her about? What is the meaning of it all? I must know what that means!” such would have been the inquiries that would have surged up in a moment, making poor Kirsteen the object of everybody’s curious gaze and of every kind of investigation. She never dreamed of any such possibility. Robbie, when he wrote home, which he would no doubt do in time, might mention the companion of his voyage; Agnes Drummond might say “There’s a letter from our Ronald.” These were the only communications that Kirsteen could hope for. She was very well aware of the fact, and raised no thought of rebellion against it. When she gave that promise she meant waiting for interminable years—waiting without a glimpse or a word. Nor did this depress her spirits: rather it gave a more elevating ideal form to the visionary bond. All romance was in it, all the poetry of life. He would be as if he were dead to her for years and years. Silence would fall between them like the grave. And yet all the time she would be waiting for him and he would be coming to her.
And though Kirsteen cried, it was not altogether for trouble. It was for extreme and highly-wrought feeling, sorrow and happiness combined. Through all her twenty years of life there had been nothing to equal that moment, the intensity of it, the expectation, the swift and sudden realisation of all vague anticipations and wishes. It was only a minute of time, a mere speck upon the great monotonous level of existence, and yet there would be food enough in it for the thoughts of all future years. When the thunder-shower of tears was exhausted, she sat quite still in a kind of exalted contentment, going over it and over it, never tired. The hot room and the smoky glare of the candles, and the fumes of the whisky and the sound of all the voices, had been intolerable to her; but in the fresh coldness of the night air, in that great quiet of Nature, with the rustle of the leaves going through it like breath, and the soft distant tinkle of the burns, what room and scope there was for remembering; which was what Kirsteen called thinking—remembering every tone and look, the way in which he approached the table where her work was lying, her wonder if he would notice, the flush of perception on his face as he said, “It’s my name too,” and then that tender theft, the act that left Robbie for ever without one of his pocket-handkerchiefs,—she thought with a gleam of fun how he would count them and count them, and wonder how he had lost it—the little visionary letters put to his lips. Oh that her heart had been sewn in with the hair to give to him! But so it was, so it was! He had that pledge of hers, but she had nothing of his, nor did she want anything to remind her, to bind her faith to him, though it should be years before she saw him again. The tears started into her eyes again with that thought, which gave her a pang, yet one which was full of sweetness: for what did it matter how long he was away, or how dark and still the time and space that separated them now. “Will ye wait for me till I come back?” that would be the gold thread that should run through all the years.
The sound of a little movement in the dining-room from which all this time she had heard the murmur of the voices, the tinkle of the glasses, made her pause and start. It was the ladies withdrawing to the parlour. She thought with a little gasp that they would find the children scorching their cheeks on the hearthrug, instead of being sent off to bed as should have been done, and held her breath expecting every moment the call of “Kirsteen!” which was her mother’s appeal against fate. But either the general license of the great family event, or the sedative effect of her mouthful of champagne and glass of toddy, or the effect of Aunt Eelen’s conversation which put her always on her defence whatever was the subject, had subdued Mrs. Douglas: there came no call, and Kirsteen, though with a slightly divided attention, and one ear anxiously intent upon what was going on indoors, pursued her thoughts. It gave them a more vivid sweetness that they were so entirely her own, a secret which she might carry safely without any one suspecting its existence under cover of everything that was habitual and visible. It would be her life, whatever was going on outside. When she was dull—and life was often dull at Drumcarro—when her mother was more exacting than usual, her father more rough, Mary and the children more exasperating, she would retire into herself and hear the whisper in her heart, “Will ye wait till I come back?”—it would be like a spell she said to herself—just like a spell; the clouds would disperse and the sun break out, and her heart would float forth upon that golden stream.
The sound of a heavy yet soft step aroused Kirsteen at this moment from her dreams; but she was set at ease by the sight of a great whiteness which she at once identified as Marg’ret’s apron coming slowly round the corner of the house. “I just thought I would find you here,” said Marg’ret. “It’s natural in me after that warm kitchen and a’ the pots and pans, to want a breath of air—but what are you doing here with your bare neck, and nothing on your head? I’m just warning you for ever, you’ll yet your death of cold.”
“I could not bear it any longer,” said Kirsteen, “the talking and all the faces and the smell of the toddy.”
“Hoot,” said Marg’ret, “what ails ye at the smell of the toddy? In moderation it’s no an ill thing—and as for the faces, you wouldna have folk without faces, you daft bairn; that’s just a silly speech from the like of you.”
“There’s no law against being silly,” Kirsteen said.
“Oh, but that’s true. If there was, the jails would be ower full: though no from you, my bonnie dear. But I ken weel what it is,” said Marg’ret, putting her arm round the girl’s shoulder. “Your bit heart’s a’ stirred up, and ye dinna ken how ye feel. Tak’ comfort, my dear bairn, they’ll come back.”
Kirsteen shed a few more ready tears upon Marg’ret’s shoulder, then she gave that vigorous arm a push, and burst from its hold with a laugh, “There’s one of Robbie’s handkerchiefs lost or stolen,” she said. “Where do ye think he’ll ever find it? and R. D. worked upon it with a thread of my hair.”
“Bless me!” said Marg’ret with alarm, “who would meddle with the laddie’s linen? but you’re meaning something mair than meets the eye,” she added, with a pat upon the girl’s shoulder; “I’ll maybe faddom it by and by. Gang away ben, the ladies will be wondering where ye are, and it’s eerie out here in the white moonlight.”
“Not eerie at all: ye mean soft and sweet,” said Kirsteen, “the kind of light for thinking in; and the moon is this minute up. She’s come for you and not for me.”
“I cannot faddom you the nicht any more than I can faddom what ye say,” said Marg’ret. “There’s mair in it than Robbie and his handkerchief. But I maun go in and fasten up the straps and put his keys in his pocket, or he’ll forget them. Laddies are a great handful, they’re aye forgetting. But they’re like the man’s wife, they’re ill to have, but worse to want. Gang in, gang in out of the night air,” said Marg’ret with a faint sob, softly pushing Kirsteen before her. The smell of the peat fires, which was pleasant, and of the smoke of the candles, which was not, and of the penetrating fumes of the toddy again filled Kirsteen’s nostrils as she came in. She had no right to be fastidious, for she had been brought up in the habit and knowledge of all these odours. When she entered, another scent, that of the tea with which the ladies were concluding the evening, added its more subtle perfume. In those days people were not afraid of strong tea, mixed with a great deal of green to modify the strong black Congou, and it had been “masking” for half an hour before the fire: they were not afraid of being “put off their sleep.”
“And do ye mean to say, Christina, that there’s nobody coming about the house that would do for your girls?”
“Oh, for mercy’s sake, Eelen, say not a word about that: we’ve had trouble enough on that subject,” said Mrs. Douglas in her injured voice.
“Are you meaning Anne? Well, I mind Drumcarro’s vow, but there is no doubt that was a missalliance. I’m meaning men in their own position of life.”
“Where are they to see men in their own position, or any men?” said the mother shaking her head. “Bless me, Kirsteen, is that you? I don’t like people to go gliding about the house like that, so that ye never can hear them. When your aunt and me were maybe talking—what was not meant for the like of you.”
“Hoot, there was no hairm in it,” said Aunt Eelen, “if all the lasses in the town had been here.”
“But it’s an ill custom,” said Mrs. Douglas. “However, as you’re here ye may just get me my stocking, Kirsteen, and take up a stitch or two that I let fall. Na, na, no strangers ever come here. And now that my Robbie’s going, there will be fewer than ever. I wish that your father would not keep that laddie out of his bed, and him starting so early. And, eh, me, to think that I’m his mother, and most likely will never see him in this world again!”