‘Ay, he kens best. I ken naething but him—and you, Kirsty!’
Kirsty said no more. Her heart was too full.
Steenie stood still, and throwing back his head, stared for some moments up into the great heavens over him. Then he said:
‘It’s a bonny day, the day the bonny man bides in! The ither day—the day the lave o’ ye bides in—the day whan I’m no mysel but a sair ooncomfortable collie—that day’s ower het—and sometimes ower cauld; but the day he bides in is aye jist what a day sud be! Ay, it’s that! it’s that!’
He threw himself down, and lay for a minute looking up into the sky. Kirsty stood and regarded him with loving eyes.
‘I hae a’ the bonny day afore me!’ he murmured to himself. ‘Eh, but it’s better to be a man nor a beast! Snootie’s a fine beast, and a gran’ collie, but I wud raither be mysel—a heap raither—aye at han’ to catch a sicht o’ the bonny man! Ye maun gang hame to yer bed, Kirsty!— Is’t the bonny man comes til ye i’ yer dreams and says, “Gang til him, Kirsty, and be mortal guid til him”? It maun be surely that!’
‘Willna ye gang wi’ me, Steenie, as far as the door?’ rejoined Kirsty, almost beseechingly, and attempting no answer to what he had last said.
It was at times such as this that Kirsty knew sadness. When she had to leave her brother on the hillside all the long night, to look on no human face, hear no human word, but wander in strangest worlds of his own throughout the slow dark hours, the sense of a separation worse than death would wrap her as in a shroud. In his bodily presence, however far away in thought or sleep or dreams his soul might be, she could yet tend him with her love; but when he was out of her sight, and she had to sleep and forget him, where was Steenie, and how was he faring? Then he seemed to her as one forsaken, left alone with his sorrows to an existence companionless and dreary. But in truth Steenie was by no means to be pitied. However much his life was apart from the lives of other men, he did not therefore live alone. Was he not still of more value than many sparrows? And Kirsty’s love for him had in it no shadow of despair. Her pain at such times was but the indescribable love-lack of mothers when their sons are far away, and they do not know what they are doing, what they are thinking; or when their daughters seem to have departed from them or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl broken. And yet how few, when the air of this world is clearest, ever come into essential contact with those they love best! But the triumph of Love, while most it seems to delay, is yet ceaselessly rushing hitherward on the wings of the morning.
‘Willna ye gang as far as the door wi’ me, Steenie?’ she said.
‘I wull do that, Kirsty. But ye’re no feart, are ye?’