“Must I write it myself?” Margaret said; and it came across her with a wave of blushing that she did not write at all nicely—not so well as she ought. “And what am I to say? I don’t know what to say.” Then she gave another glance at the window, which showed the night drawing near, the darkness increasing every moment, with that noiseless, breathless pleasure which the night seems to take in getting dark when we are far from home. She got up with a sudden, hasty impulse. “Oh, if you please, Mrs. Glen, if you will be as quick as ever you can! for I must run all the way.”
“That will I, my darlin’ lady,” said the delighted mother. It was she who had the whole doing of it, and the pride of having suggested it. Rob stood by, quite pale, his eyes blazing with excitement, his mind half paralyzed with trouble and terror, hope to have, reluctance to take, fear of something unmanly, something dishonorable, intensified by the eagerness of expectation, with which he looked for what was to come. He stood “like a stock stane,” his mother said afterward, his lips parted, his eyes staring, in her way as she rushed to the desk at the other side of the room to find what was wanted. “You eedeeot!” she said, as she pushed him aside, in an angry undertone. Had he not the sense even to help in what was all for his own advantage? Margaret pulled off her black glove and took the pen in her hand. She knew she would write it very badly, very unevenly—not even in a straight line; but if she had to do it before she could run home, it was better to get it over.
“Oh, but I never wrote anything before,” she said; “Mrs. Glen, what must I say?”
“Nor me. I never wrote the like of that before,” cried Mrs. Glen; “and there’s Rob even—too happy to help us.” She had meant to use another word to describe his spasm of irresolution and apprehension, but remembered in time that he must not be contemned in Margaret’s eyes. “It will be just this, my bonnie dear: ‘I, Margaret Leslie, give my word before God and man, to marry Robert Glen as soon as I come of age. So help me God. Amen.’”
“Don’t put that,” cried Rob, making a hasty step toward her. “Don’t let her put that.” But then he turned away in such passion and transport of shame, satisfaction, horror, and disgust as no words could tell, and covered his face with his hands.
“Not that last,” said Margaret, stumbling, in her eagerness, over the words, and glad to leave out whatever she could. “Oh, it is very badly-written. I never could write well. Mrs. Glen, will that do?”
“And now your bonnie name here,” said the originator of the scheme, scarcely able to restrain her triumph. And as Margaret, with a trembling hand, crossed the last t, and put a blot for a dot over the i, in her distracted signature, she received a resounding kiss upon her cheek which was as the report of a pistol to her. She gave a little cry of terror, and threw down the pen, and turned away. “Oh, good-bye!” she cried, “good-bye. I must not stay another moment. I must run all the way.”
Rob did not say a word—he hurried after her, with long strides, keeping up with her as she flew along, in her fright, by the hedge-row. “Oh, they must have missed me by this time. They will be wondering where I have been,” she said, breathless. Rob set his teeth in the dark. Never in his life had he been so humiliated. Though she had pledged herself to him, she was not thinking of him; and in all the experiences of his life he had never yet known this supreme mortification. He had been loved where he had wooed. The other girls whom Rob had addressed had forgotten everything for him. He half hated her, though he loved her, and felt a fierce eagerness to have her—to make her his altogether—to snatch her from the great people who looked down upon him—to make himself master of her fate. But this furious kind of love was only the excitement of the moment. At the bottom of his heart he was fond of Margaret (as he had been of other Margarets before). He could not bear the idea of losing her, of parting from her like this, in wild haste, without any of the lingering caresses of parting.
“Is this how you are going away from me, Margaret,” he cried, “flying—as if you were glad to part, not sorry, when we don’t know when we may meet again?”
“Oh, it is not that I am glad; it is only that they will wonder—they will not know where I have been.”