"No. My brother will take care of you."
He went straight as an arrow up the hill. They stood and watched him go. At what seemed the top, he turned and waved his cap, then vanished.
Christina felt disappointed. She did not much care for either of the very peculiar young men, but any company was better than none; a man was better than a woman; and two men were better than one! If these were not equal to admiring her as she deserved, what more remunerative labour than teaching them to do so?
The thing that chiefly disappointed her in them was, that they had so little small talk. It was so stupid to be always speaking sense! always polite! always courteous!—"Two sir Charles Grandisons," she said, "are two too many!" And indeed the History of Sir Charles Grandison had its place in the small library free to them from childhood; but Christina knew nothing of him except by hearsay.
The young men had been brought up in a solemn school—had learned to take life as a serious and lovely and imperative thing. Not the less, upon occasions of merry-making, would they frolic like young colts even yet, and that without the least reaction or sense of folly afterwards. At the same time, although Ian had in the village from childhood the character, especially in the workshops of the carpenter, weaver, and shoemaker, of being 'full of humour, he was in himself always rather sad, being perplexed with many things: his humour was but the foam of his troubled sea.
Christina was annoyed besides that Mercy seemed not indifferent to the opinion of the men. It was from pure inexperience of the man-world, she said to herself, that the silly child could see anything interesting in them! GENTLEMEN she must allow them—but of such an old-fashioned type as to be gentlemen but by courtesy—not gentlemen in the world's count! She was of the world; they of the north of Scotland! All day Mercy had been on their side and against her! It might be from sheer perversity, but she had never been like that before! She must take care she did not make a fool of herself! It might end in some unhappiness to the young goose! Assuredly neither her father nor mother would countenance the thing! She must throw herself into the breach! But which of them was she taking a fancy to?
She was not so anxious about her sister, however, as piqued that she had not herself gathered one expression of homage, surprised one look of admiration, seen one sign of incipient worship in either. Of the two she liked better the ploughman! The other was more a man of the world—but he was not of her world! With him she was a stranger in a very strange land!
Christina's world was a very small one, and in its temple stood her own image. Ian belonged to the universe. He was a gentleman of the high court. Wherever he might go throughout God's worlds, he would be at home. How could there be much attraction between Christina and him?
Alister was more talkative on the way back than he had been all day. Christina thought the change caused by having them, or rather her, to himself alone; but in reality it sprang from the prospect of soon rejoining his brother without them. Some of the things he said, Mercy found well worth hearing; and an old Scotch ballad which he repeated, having learned it of a lowland nurse, appeared to her as beautiful as it was wild and strange. For Christina, she despised the Scotch language: it was vulgar! Had Alister informed her that Beowulf, "the most important of all the relics of the Pagan Anglo-Saxon, is written in undeniable Scotch, the English of the period," it would have made no difference to Christina! Why should it? She had never yet cared for any book beyond the novels of a certain lady which, to speak with due restraint, do not tend to profitable thought. At the same time, it was not for the worst in them that she liked them; she did not understand them well enough to see it. But there was ground to fear that, when she came to understand, shocked at first, she would speedily get accustomed to it, and at length like them all the better for it.
In Mercy's unawakened soul, echoed now and then a faint thrill of response to some of the things Alister said, and, oftener, to some of the verses he repeated; and she would look up at him when he was silent, with an unconscious seeking glance, as if dimly aware of a beneficent presence. Alister was drawn by the honest gaze of her yet undeveloped and homely countenance, with its child-look in process of sublimation, whence the woman would glance out and vanish again, leaving the child to give disappointing answers. There was something in it of the look a dog casts up out of his beautiful brown eyes into the mystery of his master's countenance. She was on the edge of coming awake; all was darkness about her, but something was pulling at her! She had never known before that a lady might be lovely in a ballad as well as in a beautiful gown!