CHAPTER XXV.
THE NIGHT WATCH.
When Malcolm returned, Jean had retired for the night, and again it was Miss Horn who admitted him, and led him to her parlour. It was a low-ceiled room, with lean spider-legged furniture and dingy curtains. Everything in it was suggestive of a comfort slowly vanishing. An odour of withered rose-leaves pervaded the air. A Japanese cabinet stood in one corner, and on the mantelpiece a pair of Chinese fans with painted figures whose faces were embossed in silk, between which ticked an old French clock, whose supporters were a shepherd and shepherdess in prettily painted china. Long faded as was everything in it, the room was yet very rich in the eyes of Malcolm, whose home was bare even in comparison with that of the poorest of the fisher-women; they had a passion for ornamenting their chimneypieces with china ornaments, and their dressers with the most gorgeous crockery that their money could buy—a certain metallic orange being the prevailing hue; while in Duncan’s cottage, where woman had never initiated the taste, there was not even a china poodle to represent the finished development of luxury in the combination of the ugly and the useless.
Miss Horn had made a little fire in the old-fashioned grate, whose bars bellied out like a sail almost beyond the narrow chimney-shelf, and a tea-kettle was singing on the hob, while a decanter, a sugar basin, a nutmeg grater, and other needful things on a tray, suggested negus, beyond which Miss Horn never went in the matter of stimulants, asserting that, as she had no feelings, she never required anything stronger. She made Malcolm sit down at the opposite side of the fire, and mixing him a tumbler of her favourite drink, began to question him about the day, and how things had gone.
Miss Horn had the just repute of discretion, for, gladly hearing all the news, she had the rare virtue of not repeating things to the prejudice of others without some good reason for so doing; Malcolm therefore, seated thus alone with her in the dead of the night, and bound to her by the bond of a common well-doing, had no hesitation in unfolding to her all his adventures of the evening. She sat with her big hands in her lap, making no remark, not even an exclamation, while he went on with the tale of the garret; but her listening eyes grew—not larger—darker and fiercer as he spoke; the space between her nostrils and mouth widened visibly; the muscles knotted on the sides of her neck; and her nose curved more and more to the shape of a beak.
“There’s some deevilry there!” she said at length after he had finished, breaking a silence of some moments, during which she had been staring into the fire. “Whaur twa ill women come thegither, there maun be the auld man himsel’ atween them.”
“I dinna doobt it,” returned Malcolm. “An’ ane o’ the ’s an ill wuman, sure eneuch; but I ken naething aboot the tither—only ’at she maun be a leddy, by the w’y the howdy-wife spak till her.”
“The waur token, when a leddy collogues wi’ a wuman aneth her ain station, an’ ane ’at has keppit (caught in passing) mony a secret in her day, an’ by her callin’ has had mair opportunity—no to say farther—than ither fowk o’ duin’ ill things! An’ gien ye dinna ken her, that’s no rizzon ’at I sudna hae a groff guiss at her by the marks ye read aff o’ her. I’ll jist hae to tell ye a story sic as an auld wife like me seldom tells till a yoong man like yersel’.”
“Yer ain bridle sall rule my tongue, mem,” said Malcolm.
“I s’ lippen to yer discretion,” said Miss Horn, and straightway began.—“Some years ago—an’ I s’ warran’ it’s weel ower twinty —that same wuman, Bawby Cat’nach,—wha was nae hame-born wuman, nor had been lang aboot the toon—comin’ as she did frae naebody kent whaur, ’cep maybe it was the markis ’at than was—preshumed to mak up to me i’ the w’y o’ frien’ly acquantance—sic as a maiden leddy micht hae wi’ a howdy—an’ no ’at she forgot her proaper behaviour to ane like mysel’. But I cudna hae bidden (endured) the jaud, ’cep ’at I had rizzons for lattin’ her jaw wag. She was cunnin’, the auld vratch,—no that auld—maybe aboot forty,— but I was ower mony for her. She had the design to win at somethin’ she thoucht I kent, an’ sae, to enteece me to open my pock, she opent hers, an’ tellt me story efter story aboot this neebour an’ that—a’ o’ them things ’at ouchtna to ha’ been true, an ’at she ouchtna to ha’ loot pass her lips gien they war true, seein’ she cam by the knowledge o’ them so as she said she did. But she gat naething o’ me—the fat-braint cat!—an’ she hates me like the verra mischeef.”
Miss Horn paused and took a sip of her negus.