“Kirsteen, you need not be violent nor speak like that, for how could my mother give it up—the last thing he ever touched, that he put to his lips?—like a kiss to us—her and me!”
“No,” said Kirsteen, “for none of you. It was mine, his name is marked in the corner in my coarse red hair, that nobody ever thought anything of. He said it was like a thread of gold. He bade me to wait till he came back. Now he’ll never come back—but I’ll wait—till I go to him. Give me my handkerchief with his kiss upon it; there’s nobody has a right to touch it,—for it is mine!”
Agnes in her mild reasoning was no match for this fiery spirit. She could only cry helplessly standing like a ghost among the shadows, but the early moon came in at the window and shone full upon Kirsteen, who was neither ghost nor shadow. The aspect of command that was in her daunted the other. “I will go and ask my mother,” she said.
“Tell her,” said Kirsteen, “that I have come straight from London, travelling night and day. I have scarce tasted bite or sup, nor slept in my bed since the news came. I knew it was him without any name, for I knew that was what he would do. She has many, many a thing to mind her of him, the house he was born in, and his picture and all, and his dear name. And I have nothing but that. And I will have it, for it belongs to me!”
“I will go and ask my mother,” Agnes said.
The moon shone in through the small window, throwing upon Kirsteen’s figure the reflection of the solid wooden frame-work, so that she looked as if she were in a prison looking out upon the outside world through black iron bars. She stood quite still for some time with her white face turned to it looking through those bars to the light. And she never forgot that moment when she stood gazing up into the white orb in the clear summer sky which had looked down upon him lying silent upon the field. It seemed to Kirsteen in the fever of her weariness and exhaustion that she could see that scene, the awful silence, the other dead lying about in dark muffled heaps, and the moon shining upon the handkerchief in his hands. There were faint sounds in the house of doors opening and shutting, and of voices. A sudden cry—which perhaps was from his mother. It would be natural that his mother should resist, that she should wish to keep it. But Kirsteen felt that nothing could stand against herself and her right.
In a few minutes Agnes came back, still crying. “I am sorry,” she said, “to keep you in this dark room, but I’ve told them to bring the candles!”
“The candles are not needed, there’s nothing needed but one thing.”
“Oh, Kirsteen,” said Agnes, “be content with something less than that. My mother says she cannot—oh, she cannot!—give that up.”
“Did ye tell her it was mine, and I’ve come to get my own?”