Still Margaret said nothing. The old woman pondered the past, but the girl’s brain was all throbbing and thrilling with the future. The sound of something coming was in her ears, a ringing, a singing, a general movement and flutter of she knew not what. To Bell the quiet was everything; to Margaret, she herself was the universe, and all the horizon was not too big to hold the rustling pinions and approaching foot-balls of the life to come.
“I think I will take a walk down the road,” she said, suddenly, over Bell’s head.
“Take a hap with you, in case it should get cauld. Sometimes there’s a wind gets up when the sun goes down. And you’ll no bide too long, Miss Margret,” Bell called after her as she ran lightly away.
Margaret did not care for the wind getting up, nor foresee the possibility of the evening chillness after the warmth of the day. It was always chilly at night so near the sea; but seventeen years’ experience to the contrary had not dispelled Margaret’s conviction that as the weather was at one bright moment, so would it always be.
The road down which Margaret went was not very attractive as a road. The hedges were low and the country bare. It is true that even the rigor of Fife farming had not cut down the wild roses, which made two broken lines of exquisite bloom on either side of the way. Long branches all bloomed to the very tips waved about in the soft air, and concealed the fact that the landscape on either side was limited to a potato-field on the right and a turnip-field on the left. But the wild roses were enough for Margaret. Were they not repeated all over the skies in those puffs of snowy vapor tinted to the same rose hue, and in the girl’s cheeks, which bloomed as softly, when the exercise, and the flowering of the flowers, and the reflection of the sunset reflections had got into her young veins? The color and sweetness rapt her for a moment in an ecstasy, mere beauty satisfying her as it does a child. But human nature, even in a child, soon wants something more, and in Margaret the demand came very quickly. She forgot the loveliness all at once, and remembered the something that was wanted, the blank that required filling up. She turned aside into a by-way, along the edge of a cornfield, with a sigh. The corn was not high, as it was but June, and when she turned her face away from the sunset, the world paled all at once all around her.
Margaret went on more slowly, unconscious why. She went on hanging her young head till she came to a brook at the end of the field, over which there was but a plank for a bridge. The brook (she called it a burn) ran between two fields, and on one side of it grew an old ash-tree, its trunk lost among the bushes of the hedge. Here a post, which had been driven into the ground to support the homely bridge, made a kind of seat upon which the wayfarer might pause and look at the homely yet pretty Kirkton, with its old church on the brae. Margaret herself had intended to rest upon this seat. But when she was half-way across the plank, a sudden sound so startled her that she lost her footing; and though she saved herself from plunging into the burn altogether by a despairing grasp at the bushes, yet she got her foot fast imbedded in the damp bank, and there stuck, to her infinite embarrassment and disgust. Some one started from the seat at the sound of the suppressed cry she gave, and rushed to the rescue. It was, need it be said, a young man? yet not exactly of heroic guise.
Margaret, crimson to the hair, and feeling herself the most gawky, the most awkward, the most foolish of distressed damsels, her ungloved hand all torn and pricked with the thorns of the branch which she had caught at, her foot held fast in the tenacious clay, did not know what kind of hoyden, what rude village girl, red and blowzy, she must have looked to the stranger. She looked a nymph out of the poetic woods, a creature out of the poets, a celestial vision to him. He sprang forward, his heart beating, to offer his hand and his assistance. Was it his fault? He feared it was his fault; he had startled her, moving just when she was in the act of crossing the plank. He made her a thousand apologies. It was all his doing; he hoped she would forgive him. He expended himself so in apologies that Margaret felt it necessary to apologize too.
“It was me that was silly,” she said. “Generally, I never mind a sudden sound. What should it matter? Nobody would do me harm, and there’s no wild beasts, that I should be so silly. Oh, it’s nothing; and it was all my fault.”
“You are the queen in your own country. There should be nothing in your path to startle you.”
“Oh no, I’m not the queen,” said Margaret, laughing. “I have to take my chance like other folk. You are a stranger here,” she said, with friendly innocence. The fact that she was, if not the queen, as she said, yet at least a princess, the first young lady hereabouts, and known to everybody as such, made her friendly and made her bold. Supremacy has many agreeable accessories. The young man, who had taken off his hat and held it in his hand, half in respect, half in awkwardness, here blushed more deeply than she had done when she saw him first.