Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (252 page)

“There is one thing I must be saying first of all, Mr. David,” said she.  “I think two of my kinsfolk have not behaved to you altogether very well.  And the one of them two is James More, my father, and the other is the Laird of Prestongrange.  Prestongrange will have spoken by himself, or his daughter in the place of him.  But for James More, my father, I have this much to say: he lay shackled in a prison; he is a plain honest soldier and a plain Highland gentleman; what they would be after he would never be guessing; but if he had understood it was to be some prejudice to a young gentleman like yourself, he would have died first.  And for the sake of all your friendships, I will be asking you to pardon my father and family for that same mistake.”

“Catriona,” said I, “what that mistake was I do not care to know.  I know but the one thing - that you went to Prestongrange and begged my life upon your knees.  O, I ken well enough it was for your father that you went, but when you were there you pleaded for me also.  It is a thing I cannot speak of.  There are two things I cannot think of into myself: and the one is your good words when you called yourself my little friend, and the other that you pleaded for my life.  Let us never speak more, we two, of pardon or offence.”

We stood after that silent, Catriona looking on the deck and I on her; and before there was more speech, a little wind having sprung up in the nor’-west, they began to shake out the sails and heave in upon the anchor.

There were six passengers besides our two selves, which made of it a full cabin.  Three were solid merchants out of Leith, Kirkcaldy, and Dundee, all engaged in the same adventure into High Germany.  One was a Hollander returning; the rest worthy merchants’ wives, to the charge of one of whom Catriona was recommended.  Mrs. Gebbie (for that was her name) was by great good fortune heavily incommoded by the sea, and lay day and night on the broad of her back.  We were besides the only creatures at all young on board the Rose, except a white-faced boy that did my old duty to attend upon the table; and it came about that Catriona and I were left almost entirely to ourselves.  We had the next seats together at the table, where I waited on her with extraordinary pleasure.  On deck, I made her a soft place with my cloak; and the weather being singularly fine for that season, with bright frosty days 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 grant 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 in a man, and that in 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  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 in what remained of the passage was extraordinary assiduous with the old lady, and on deck began to make a great deal more than I thought wise of Captain Sang.  Not but what the Captain seemed a worthy, fatherly man; but I hated to behold her in the least familiarity with anyone except myself.

Altogether, she was so quick to avoid me, and so constant to keep herself surrounded with others, that I must watch a long while before I could find my opportunity; and after it was found, I made not much of it, as you are now to hear.