Kirsty went in again, and took Steenie’s shoes, tying them in her apron.
‘His feet’s no sic a weicht noo!’ she said, as together they carried their burden home.
The mother met them at the door.
‘Eh!’ she cried, ‘I thoucht the Lord had taen ye baith, and left me my lane ’cause I was sae hard-hertit til him! But noo ’at he’s broucht ye back—and Steenie, what there is o’ him, puir bairn!—I s’ never say anither word, but jist lat him du as he likes.—There, Lord, I hae dune! Pardon thoo me wha canst.’
They carried the forsaken thing up the stair, and laid it on Kirsty’s bed, looking so like and so unlike Steenie asleep. Marion was so exhausted, both mind and body, that her husband insisted on her postponing all further ministration till the morning; but at night Kirsty unclothed the untenanted, and put on it a long white nightgown. When the mother saw it lying thus, she smiled, and wept no more; she knew that the bonny man had taken home his idiot.
CHAPTER XXX
FROM SNOW TO FIRE
My narrative must now go a little way back in time, and a long way from the region of heather and snow, to India in the year of the mutiny. The regiment in which Francis Gordon served, his father’s old regiment, had lain for months besieged in a well known city by the native troops, and had begun to know what privation meant, its suffering aggravated by that of not a few women and children. With the other portions of the Company’s army there shut up, it had behaved admirably. Danger and sickness, wounds and fatigue, hunger and death, had brought out the best that was in the worst of them: when their country knew how they had fought and endured, she was proud of them. Had their enemies, however, been naked Zulus, they would have taken the place within a week.
Francis Gordon had done his part, and well.
It would be difficult to analyze the effect of the punishment Kirsty had given him, but its influence was upon him through the whole of the terrible time—none the less beneficent that his response to her stinging blows was indignant rage. I dare hardly speculate what, had she not defended herself so that he could not reach her, he might not have done in the first instinctive motions of natural fury. It is possible that only Kirsty’s skill and courage saved him from what he would never have surmounted the shame of—taking revenge on a woman avenging a woman’s wrong: from having deserved to be struck by a woman, nothing but repentant shame could save him.
When he came to himself, the first bitterness of the thing over, he could not avoid the conviction, that the playmate of his childhood, whom once he loved best in the world, and who when a girl refused to marry him, had come to despise him, and that righteously. The idea took a firm hold on him, and became his most frequently recurrent thought. The wale of Kirsty’s whip served to recall it a good many nights; and long after that had ceased either to smart or show, the thought would return of itself in the night-watches, and was certain to come when he had done anything his conscience called wrong, or his judgment foolish.