Heather and Snow - George MacDonald (best book club books for discussion .txt) 📗

Kirsty interrupted him.

'Mr. Gordon,' she said sternly, 'be a man, and answer me. If you mean to marry her, say so, and go and tell her father-or my father, if you prefer. She is at the Knowe, miserable, poor child! that she did not meet you to-night. That was my doing; she could not help herself.

Gordon broke into a strained laugh.

'Well, you've got her, and you can keep her!' he said.

'You have not answered my question!'

'Really, Miss Barclay, you must not be too hard on a man! Is a fellow not to speak to a woman but he must say at once whether or not he intends to marry her?'

'Answer my question.'

'It is a ridiculous one!'

'You have been trystin' with her almost every night for something like a month!' rejoined Kirsty, 'and the question is not at all ridiculous.'

'Let it be granted then, and let the proper person ask me the question, and I will answer it. You, pardon me, have nothing to do with the matter in hand.'

'That is the answer of a coward,' returned Kirsty, her cheek flaming at last. 'You know the guileless nature of your old schoolmaster, and take advantage of it! You know that the poor girl has not a man to look to, and you will not have a woman befriend her! It is cowardly, ungrateful, mean, treacherous. You are a bad man, Francie! You always were a fool, but now you are a wicked fool! If I were her brother-if I were a man, I would thrash you!'

'It's a good thing you're not able, Kirsty! I should be frightened!' said Gordon, with a laugh and a shrug, thinking to throw the thing aside as done with.

'I said, if I was a man!' returned Kirsty. 'I did not say, if I was able. I am able.'

'I don't see why a woman should leave to any man what she's able to do for herself!' said Kirsty, as if communing with her own thoughts.- 'Francie, you're no gentleman; you are a scoundrel and a coward!' she immediately added aloud.

'Very well,' returned Francis angrily; 'since you choose to be treated as a man, and tell me I am no gentleman, I tell you I wouldn't marry the girl if the two of you went on your knees to me!-A common, silly, country-bred flirt!-ready for anything a man-'

Kirsty's whip descended upon him with a merciless lash. The hiss of it, as it cut the air with all the force of her strong arm, startled her mare, and she sprang aside, so that Kirsty, who, leaning forward, had thrown the strength of her whole body into the blow, could not but lose her seat. But it was only to stand upright on her feet, fronting her- call him enemy, antagonist, victim, what you will. Gordon was grasping his head: the blow had for a moment blinded him. She gave him another stinging cut across the hands.

'That's frae yer father! The whup was his, and his swoord never did fairer wark!' she said.-'I hae dune for him what I cud!' she added in a low sorrowful voice, and stepped back, as having fulfilled her mission.

He rushed at her with a sudden torrent of evil words. But he was no match for her in agility as, I am almost certain, he would have proved none in strength had she allowed him to close with her: she avoided him as she had more than once jinkit a charging bull, every now and then dealing him another sharp blow from his father's whip. The treatment began to bring him to his senses.

'For God's sake, Kirsty,' he cried, ceasing his attempts to lay hold of her, 'behaud, or we'll hae the haill hoose oot, and what'll come o' me than I daurna think! I doobt I'll never hear the last o' 't as 'tis!'

'Am I to trust ye, Francie?'

'I winna lay a finger upo' ye, damn ye!' he said in mingled wrath and humiliation.

Throughout, Kirsty had held her mare by the bridle, and she, although behaving as well as she could, had, in the fright the laird's rushes and the sounds of the whip caused her, added not a little to her mistress's difficulties. Just as she sprang on her back, the door opened, and faces looked peering out; whereupon with a cut or two she encouraged a few wild gambols, so that all the trouble seemed to have been with the mare. Then she rode quietly through the gate.

Gordon stood in a motionless fury until he heard the soft thunder of the mare's hoofs on the turf as Kirsty rode home at a fierce gallop; then he turned and went into the house, not to communicate what had taken place, but to lie about it as like truth as he might find possible.

About half-way home, on the side of a hill, across which a low wind, the long death-moan of autumn, blew with a hopeless, undulant, but not intermittent wail among the heather, Kirsty broke into a passionate fit of weeping, but ere she reached home all traces of her tears had vanished.

Gordon did not go the next day, nor the day after, but he never saw Phemy again. It was a week before he showed himself, and then he was not a beautiful sight. He attributed the one visible wale on his cheek and temple to a blow from a twig as he ran in the dusk through the shrubbery after a strange dog. Even at the castle they did not know exactly when he left it. His luggage was sent after him.

The domestics at least were perplexed as to the wale on his face, until the man to whom Kirsty had spoken at the door hazarded a conjecture or two, which being not far from the truth, and as such accepted, the general admiration and respect which already haloed Corbyknowe's Kirsty, were thenceforward mingled with a little wholesome fear.

When Kirsty told her father and mother what she had done at castle Weelset, neither said a word. Her mother turned her head away, but the light in her father's eyes, had she had any doubt as to how they would take it, would have put her quite at her ease.


CHAPTER XIX

FRANCIS GORDON'S CHAMPION


Poor little Phemy was in bed, and had cried herself asleep. Kirsty was more tired than she had ever been before. She went to bed at once, but, for a long time, not to sleep.

She had no doubt her parents approved of the chastisement she had given Gordon, and she herself nowise repented of it; yet the instant she lay down, back came the same sudden something that set her weeping on the hillside. As then, all un-sent for, the face of Francie Gordon, such as he was in their childhood, rose before her, but marred by her hand with stripes of disgrace from his father's whip; and with the vision came again the torrent of her tears, for, if his father had then struck him so, she would have been bold in his defence. She pressed her face into the pillow lest her sobs should be heard. She was by no means a young woman ready to weep, but the thought of the boy-face with her blows upon it, got within her guard, and ran her through the heart. It seemed as if nevermore would she escape the imagined sight. It is a sore thing when a woman, born a protector, has for protection to become an avenger, and severe was the revulsion in Kirsty from an act of violence foreign to the whole habit, though nowise inconsistent with the character, of the calm, thoughtful woman. She had never struck even the one-horned cow that would, for very cursedness, kick over the milk-pail! Hers was the wrath of the mother, whose very presence in a calm soul is its justification-for how could it be there but by the original energy? The wrath was gone, and the mother soul turned against itself-not in judgment at all, but in irrepressible feeling. She did not for one moment think, I repeat, that she ought not to have done it, and she was glad in her heart to know that what he had said and she had done must keep Phemy and him apart; but there was the blow on the face of the boy she had loved, and there was the reflex wound in her own soul! Surely she loved him yet with her mother-love, else how could she have been angry enough with him to strike him! For weeks the pain lasted keen, and it was ever after ready to return. It was a human type of the divine suffering in the discipline of the sinner, which with some of the old prophets takes the shape of God's repenting of the evils he has brought on his people; and was the only trouble she ever kept from her mother: she feared to wake her own pain in the dearer heart. She could have told her father; for, although he was, she knew, just as loving as her mother, he was not so soft-hearted, and would not, she thought, distress himself too much about an ache more or less in a heart that had done its duty; but as she could not tell her mother, she would not tell her father. But her father and mother saw that a change had passed upon her, and partially, if not quite, understood the nature of it. They perceived that she left behind her on that night a measure of her gaiety, that thereafter she was yet gentler to her parents, and if possible yet tenderer to her brother.

For all the superiority constantly manifested by her in her relations with Francis, the feeling was never absent from her that he was of a race above her own; and now the visage of the young officer in her father's old regiment never, any more than that of her play-fellow, rose in her mind's eye uncrossed by the livid mark of her whip from the temple down the cheek! Whether she had actually seen it so, she did not certainly remember, but so it always came to her, and the face of the man never cost her a tear; it was only that of the boy that made her weep.

Another thing distressed her even more: the instant ere she struck the first, the worst blow, she saw on his face an expression so meanly selfish that she felt as if she hated him. That expression had vanished from her visual memory, her whip had wiped it away, but she knew that for a moment she had all but hated him-if it was indeed all but !

All the house was careful the next morning that Phemy should not be disturbed; and when at length the poor child appeared, looking as if her colour was not 'ingrain,' and so had been washed out by her tears, Kirsty made haste to get her a nice breakfast, and would answer none of her questions until she had made a proper meal.

'Noo, Kirsty,' said Phemy at last, 'ye maun tell me what he said whan ye loot him ken 'at I cudna win til him 'cause ye wudna lat me!'

'He saidna muckle to that. I dinna think he had been sair missin ye.'

'I see ye're no gaein to tell me the trowth, Kirsty! I ken by mysel he maun hae been missin me dreidfu'!'

'Ye can jeedge nae man by yersel, Phemy.