“What! and leave you at the mercy of the sturdy beggar?” he cried lightly. “This is my gait as well as yours, I’m on my way across Whistlefield down to Roseneath—a long walk. I never thought to have such pleasant company. Come, give me your bundle to carry, and tell me, for I see you know, where we met.”
“I can carry my own bundle, sir, and I’ll give it to nobody,” said Kirsteen.
“What a churl you make me look—a bonny lass by my side over-weighted, and I with nothing but my gun. Give me the cloak then,” he said, catching it lightly from her arm. “If you will not tell me where we met tell me where you’re going, and I’ll see you home.”
“My home is not where I am going,” said Kirsteen. “Give me back my cloak, my Lord John. It’s not for you to carry for me.”
“I thought you knew me,” he cried. “Now that’s an unfair advantage, let me think, was it in the schoolroom at Dalmally? To be sure! You are the governess. Or was it?—”
He saw that he had made an unlucky hit. Kirsteen’s countenance glowed with proud wrath. The governess, and she a Douglas! She snatched the cloak from him and stood at bay. “My father,” she cried, “is of as good blood as yours, and though you can scorn at the Scots gentry in your own house you shall not do it on the hill-side. I have yon hill to cross,” said the girl with a proud gesture, holding herself as erect as a tower, “going on my own business, and meddling with nobody. So go before, sir, or go after, but if you’re a gentleman, as ye have the name, let me pass by myself.”
The young man coloured high. He took off his hat and stood aside to let her pass. After all there are arguments which are applicable to a gentleman that cannot be applied to sturdy beggars. But Kirsteen went on her way still more disturbed than by the first meeting. He had not recognized her, but if they should ever meet again he would recognize her. And what would he think when he knew it was Drumcarro’s daughter that had met him on the hill-side with her bundle on her arm, and been lightly addressed as a bonny lass. The governess at Dalmally! Hot tears came into Kirsteen’s eyes as she made her way across the stretch of moorland which lies between Loch Long and the little Gairloch, that soft and verdant paradise. She walked very quickly neither turning to the right hand nor the left, conscious of the figure following her at a distance. Oh, the governess! She will be a far better person than me, and know a great deal more, thought Kirsteen with keen compunction, me to think so much of myself that am nobody! I wish I was a governess or half so good. I’m a poor vagrant lass, insulted on the road-side, frighted with beggars, scared by gentlemen. Oh, if I had but taken that honest woman’s offer of Donald and the gig!
CHAPTER XVIII.
Kirsteen passed that night at Helensburgh, or Eelensburgh as everybody called it, and next day arrived at Glasgow a little after noon. She had the address there of a friend of Marg’ret’s where she would once again find herself in the serenity of a private house. She seemed to herself to have been living for a long time in public places—in houses where men could come in to drink or any stranger find a shelter, and almost to have known no other life but that of wandering solitude, continual movement, and the consciousness of having no home or refuge to which she belonged. Kirsteen had never made a day’s journey in her life before that dreadful morning when she set out in the dark, leaving all that was known and comprehensible behind her. She had never been in an inn, which was to her something of a bad place given over to revellings and dissipation, and profane noise and laughter, the “crackling of thorns under the pot.” These ideas modify greatly even with a single night’s experience of a quiet shelter and a kind hostess—but she looked forward to the decent woman’s house to which Marg’ret’s recommendation would admit her, with the longing of a wanderer long launched upon the dreary publicity of a traveller’s life, and feeling all the instincts of keen exclusivism, which belonged in those days to poorer Scotch gentry, jarred and offended at every turn. To find the house of Marg’ret’s friend was not easy in the great grimy city which was Kirsteen’s first experience of a town. The crowded streets and noises confused her altogether at first. Such visions of ugliness and dirt, the squalid look of the high houses, the strange groups, some so rich and well-to-do, some so miserable and wretched, that crowded the pavements, had never entered into her imagination before. They made her sick at heart; and London, people said, was bigger (if that were possible) and no doubt more dreadful still! Oh that it could all turn out a dream from which she might wake to find herself once more by the side of the linn, with the roar of the water, and no sickening clamour of ill tongues in her ear! But already the linn, and the far-off life by its side were away from her as if they had passed centuries ago.