“What might ye be looking for?” said Miss Jean, trembling very much, and with the tears coming to her eyes.
“Where is it?” Kirsteen said. She was perfectly still and quiet, her voice low, her face very white, her eyes cast down. It was evident that she felt no need of explanation, nor power of giving one. There was but one thing for her in the world, and that was the paper with the news—which at the first hearing had gone like a stone to the bottom of her heart, like a sword piercing through and through.
Miss Jean had no power to resist or to pretend that she did not understand. She rose, trembling, and unlocked her escritoire and brought the paper out, fumbling in the depths of a pigeon-hole in which she had buried it, that it might never be seen more. She was very tremulous, her face drawn, her eyes full of moisture. “I canna think how you could make anything out of that,” she said almost querulously in the excess of her feeling. “There’s nothing, nothing in that, to say who it was. No person could divine. It might be somebody you never heard of.”
It is possible that after the utter and undoubting convictions of the first moment such a thought might have come to Kirsteen’s mind too. She put out her hand for the paper. Miss Jean kept on talking in a fretful tone. “You’ve had no tea, not a thing since two o’clock, and now it’s eleven at night—you’ve had no rest—work, work, as if your bread depended on it; and it’s no such thing. I suppose you think you’re made of something different from the ordinary, no mere flesh and blood.”
Kirsteen paid no attention. She did not hear, the words were as a vague accompaniment, like the sound of wheels and faint voices and footsteps out of doors. She opened the paper with steady nervous hands that did not tremble, and read over again every word. Then she turned to the list “Casualties.” Casualties! Accidents!—was that a word to use for the list of the dead? When she had read it her hands dropped on her knee with the paper held in them, and from her colourless lips there came a faint sound, inarticulate, hoarse, the knell of hope. There had not been any hope in her heart: but to say that and to know that hope is over, are two things. In the one there was still a possibility—the other was death itself. Oh, the possibility had been very faint, very feeble! She had worked on all day, struggled on to preserve it, not asking for conviction. Sometimes to know the worst is what we desire. Sometimes we would prefer to put it from us, not to make sure, for a little. But there it was: no further doubt, “Captain Drummond;” his name and no other. “Will ye wait till I come back?” He was standing by her, saying it—and lying there—with the handkerchief. It was all past, the whole story, as if it had happened a hundred years ago.
“Miss Kirsteen—most likely you are making yourself miserable about nothing. How can ye tell by a story like that who it is? Oh, my bonny dear, I am asking no questions, but to see you like that just breaks my heart.”
Kirsteen smiled in spite of herself at the idea of any heart being broken but her own, of any one being miserable who had not known him, who had never seen him, who did not even know his name. She said nothing for a few moments and then she spoke with a voice quite tuneless and flat, but steady. “Miss Jean—I will have to go for a day or two—to the Highlands.”
“Certainly, my dear—whenever ye please,” said Miss Jean, though not without a catching of her breath; for who would look after the work, with herself so much out of the use of it, and the season still so throng?
“Not to leave you—with so much in hand—why should I?” said Kirsteen, “it’s not as if it was for anybody but me. But so soon as can be: just the time to go and to come back.”
“Oh, my dear young lady—whenever ye please, and for as long as ye please: but ye will come back?”