There was another silence during which Kirsteen, quite regardless of the rights of propriety which existed no more between Marg’ret and herself than between mother and daughter, took possession of Miss Jean Brown’s letter, while Marg’ret stood reflecting, entirely alarmed by the revelation made to her, and by the sudden re-birth of the vehement young creature who had been for a time so subdued and broken down by her first contest with the world. To keep Kirsteen back was, in the circumstances and with the strong convictions of the Scotch serving woman as to the force of a trothplight and the binding character of a vow, impossible. But to let her go thus unfriended, unaided, alone into an unknown world, far more unknown to Marg’ret than the ends of the earth would be to her representative now, was something more than could be borne. She suddenly exclaimed in a sharp tone with a cruel hope: “And where are ye to get the siller? It’s mad and mad enough any way, but madder still without a penny in your pocket. How are ye to get to London without money? It’s just impossible.”
“I can walk, others have done it before me. I’m well and strong and a grand walker,” said Kirsteen, but not till after a pause of consternation, this consideration not having crossed her mind before.
“Walk! it’s just hundreds of miles, and takes a week in the coach,” cried Marg’ret. “Ye cannot walk, no to say ye would want money even then, for I’m no supposing that you mean to beg your bread from door to door. Without money ye canna go a step. I’ll not permit it. Have ye anything of your ain?”
“I have the gold guinea my grandmother left me in her will; but I have no more. How should I have any more?”
Marg’ret stood for a moment undecided, while Kirsteen waited a little eager, a little expectant like a child. It did not occur to her to deprecate help from Marg’ret as a more high-minded heroine might have done. Marg’ret was a little Providence at Drumcarro. She had store of everything that the children wanted, and had been their resource all their lives. And Kirsteen had not realized the difference between money and other indispensable things. She waited like a child, following Marg’ret with her eyes until some expedient should be thought of. She breathed a sigh of suspense yet expectation when Marg’ret hurried away to her bedroom at the back of the house, seating herself again in the big chair to wait, not impatiently, for the solution of the problem. Marg’ret came back after a few minutes with a work-box in her hand. All kinds of things had come out of that box in the experience of the children at Drumcarro, things good and evil, little packets of powders for childish maladies, sweeties to be taken after the nauseous mouthful, needles and thimbles and scissors when these needful implements had all been lost, as happened periodically, even a ribbon or a pair of gloves in times of direst need. She began to turn over the well-remembered contents—old buttons, hooks and eyes from old gowns long departed, Marg’ret’s two brooches that formed all her jewellery wrapped up in separate pieces of paper. “My sister Jean,” said Marg’ret with her head bent over the box, “has often bidden me to come and see her in London town. You ken why I couldna go. I couldna thole to leave you that are leavin’ me without a tear. And she sent me what would do for my chairges. It was never touched by me. It took me a great deal of trouble to get Scotch notes for it, and here it is at the bottom of my box with many an auld relic on the top of it—just a’ I’ll have of ye when ye’ve got your will,” said Marg’ret, a tear dropping among the miscellaneous articles in the box. She took from the bottom a little parcel in an old letter, folded square and written closely to the very edge of the seal. “Hae! take it! and ye maun just do with it what pleasures yoursel’,” Marg’ret cried.
CHAPTER XVI.
The 12th of January was a still, gray winter day, not very cold and exceedingly calm, the winds all hushed, the clouds hanging low, with a possibility of rain—a possibility which is never remote in a Highland landscape. As the slow daylight began to bring the hills into sight, not with any joyous sunrising but with a faint diffusion of gray upon the dark, a gradual growing visible of the greater points, then very slowly of the details of the landscape, there came also into sight, first ghost-like, a moving, noiseless shadow, then something which consolidated into the slim figure of a woman, a solitary traveller moving steadily along the dewy mountain road. It came in sight like the hills, not like an interruption to the landscape but a portion of it, becoming visible along with it, having been in the dark as well as in the light. Before the day was fully awake it was there, a gliding shadow going straight up the hills and over the moors, at the same measured pace, not so much quick as steady, with a wonderful still intensity of progress. The road was more than dewy, it was glistening wet with the heavy damps of the night, every crevice among the rocks green and sodden, every stone glistening. The traveller did not keep exactly to the road, was not afraid of the wet hillside turf, nor even of a gray dyke to climb if it shortened the way. She passed lightly over bits of moss among the rustling, faded heather, and spots of suspicious greenness which meant bog, choosing her footing on the black roots of the wild myrtle, and the knolls of blackberries, like one to the manner born. She gave a soul to the wild and green landscape, so lonely, so washed with morning dews. She was going—where? From the impossible to the possible—from the solitudes of the hills into the world.
Kirsteen had been walking for hours before she thus came into sight, and the dark and the silence had filled her with many a flutter of terror. It took something from what might have been in other circumstances the overwhelming excitement of thus leaving home to encounter that other bewildering and awful sensation of going out into the night, with every one asleep and all wrapped in the profound blackness of winter, through which it was hard enough even for the most familiar to find a way. This horror and alarm had so occupied her mind, and the sensation of being the one creature moving and conscious in that world of darkness that she had scarcely realized the severance she was making, the tearing asunder of her life. Even Marg’ret, repressing her emotion lest a sob should catch some wakeful ear in the sleeping house, had faded from Kirsteen’s mind when she took the first step into the dark. She knew there were no wild beasts who could devour her, no robbers who would seize her, as she had fancied when a child: she had a trembling sense that God would protect her from ghosts and spiritual evils; but her young soul trembled with fears both physical and spiritual, just as much as when she had wandered out in the dark at six years old. Reason convinces but does not always support the inexperienced spirit. When the ever wakeful dogs at the little clachan heard the faint footfall upon the edge of the path and barked, Kirsteen was half-consoled and half-maddened with terror. If some one should wake and wonder, and suspect a midnight thief, and burst open a door and find her; but on the other hand it was a little comfort to feel that even a dog was waking in that black expanse of night.
She had already come a long way, before the daylight, when she and the landscape that inclosed her came dimly, faintly into sight in the first gray of the morning. Her eyes had got accustomed to the darkness, her heart a little calmed and sustained by the fact that nothing had happened to her yet, no hidden malefactor in the dark, nor sheeted whiteness from the churchyard interrupting her on her way. Her heart had beat while she passed, loud enough to have wakened the whole clachan, but nothing had stirred, save the dogs—and safe as in the warmest daylight she had got by the graves. Nothing could be so bad as that again. Partly by familiar knowledge and partly by the consciousness of certain gradations in the darkness as she became used to it, she had got forward on her way until she had reached the head of the loch where the water was a guide to her. Kirsteen had resolved that she would not venture to approach the town or cross the loch in the boat, the usual way, but taking a large sweep round the end of the loch, strike at once into the wilds which lay between her and the comparatively higher civilization of the regions within reach of Glasgow. If she could but reach that great city, which was only second in her dim conceptions to London itself, she would feel that she was safe, but not before. She came round the head of the loch in the beginnings of the dawn and had pushed her way far into the gloomy mystery of Hell’s Glen, with its bare hills rising to the dim sky on either side, before the height of noon. It is gloomy there even when the height of noon means the dazzling of a Highland summer day. But when the best of the daylight is a dull gray, the long lines of the glen, unbroken by anything but a shepherd’s hut here and there at long intervals, and the road that could be seen winding through like a strip of ribbon all the way gave the fugitive a mingled sense of serenity and of that tingling, audible solitude and remoteness from all living aid or society which thrills every nerve. When she was half way through the glen, however, the thrill was subdued by that experience of no harm as yet which is the most perfect of support, and Kirsteen began to be conscious that she had eaten nothing and scarcely rested since she set out. She had swallowed a mouthful as she walked—she had thrown herself down for a moment on the hillside—but now it seemed possible to venture upon a little real rest.