“Why did you come out, then, just at this moment?” I cried. The woman contemplated me in the gleam from the fire from top to toe. “You’re the English gentleman that’s biding up at the house,” she said. “’Deed, I just heard a step, that was nae doubt your step, and I thought it might be my man; but there has naebody, far less a lady, whatever she had on, passed my door coming or going. Is that you, Geordie?” she cried suddenly, as a step became audible approaching the gate from the outer side.
“Ay, it’s just me,” responded her husband out of the gloom.
“Have ye met a leddy as ye came along? The gentleman here will have it that there’s been a leddy passing the gate, and there’s been no leddy. I would have seen her through the window even if I hadna opened the door.”
“I’ve seen no leddy,” said Geordie, letting himself in with considerable noise at the foot entrance, which I now remembered to have closed behind me when I passed through it a few minutes before. “I’ve met no person; it’s no’ an hour for leddies to be about the roads on Sabbath day at e’en.”
It was at this moment that a wild suggestion darted into my mind. How it came I cannot tell. I was not the sort of man, I said to myself, for any such folly. My imagination had been a little touched, to be sure, by that curious affair of the footsteps; but this, which seemed to make my heart stand still and sent a shiver through me, was very different, and it was a folly not to be entertained for a moment. I stamped my foot upon it instantly, crushing it on the threshold of the mind. “Apparently either you or I must be mistaken,” I said, with a laugh at the high tone of Geordie, who himself had evidently been employed in a jovial way—quite consistent, according to all I had heard, with very fine principles in respect to the Sabbath. I had a laugh over this as I went away, insisting upon the joke to myself as I hurried up the avenue. It was extremely funny, I said to myself; it would be a capital story among my other Scotch experiences. But somehow my laugh died away in a very feeble sort of quaver. The night had grown dark even when I emerged from under the trees, by reason of a great cloud, full of rain, which had rolled up over the sky, quenching it out. I was very glad to see the lights of the house gleaming steadily before me. The blind had not been drawn over the end window of the drawing-room, and from the darkness without I looked in upon a scene which was full of warmth and household calm. Though it was August there was a little glimmer of fire. The reading of the sermon was over. Old Mr. Campbell still sat at a little table with the book before him, but it was closed. Charlotte in the foreground, with little Harry and Mary on either side of her, was “hearing their paraphrase.” [A]
The boys were putting a clever dog through his tricks in a sort of clandestine way behind backs, at whom Charlotte would shake a finger now and then with an admonitory smiling look. Charley was reading or writing at the end of the room. The soft little chime of the children’s voices, the suppressed laughter and whispering of the boys, the father’s leisurely remark now and then, made up a soft murmur of sound which was like the very breath of quietude and peace. How did I dare, their favoured guest, indebted so deeply as I was to their kindness, to go in among them with that mysterious message and disturb their tranquillity once more?
When I went into the drawing-room, which was not till an hour later, Charlotte looked up at me smiling, with some playful remark as to my flight from the evening reading. But as she caught my eye her countenance changed. She put down her book, and after a little consideration walked to that end window through which I had looked, and which was in a deep recess, making me a little sign to follow her. “How dark the night is,” she said, with a little pretence of looking out, and then in a hurried under-tone, “Mr. Temple, you have heard something more?”
“Not any more, but certainly the same thing repeated. I have seen the lady again.”
“And who is she? Tell me frankly, Mr. Temple. Just the same thing—that Colin is in trouble? no details? I cannot imagine who can take so much interest. But you asked her for her name?”
“I asked her, but she gave me no reply. She waved her hand and went on. I begged her to see you, and not to give me such a commission; but it was of no use. I don’t know if I ought to trouble you with a vague warning that only seems intended to give pain.”