“Then I’ll need the less excuse for being here,” said Nan, trying to find in the hard and unapproving visage any trace of the woman who in happier days used to be so kind a nurse.
“No excuse at all!” said old Elasaid. “If it’s your father’s wish you’re flying from, you need not come here.” She stepped within the house, pulled out the wattle door and between it and the fir post stuck a disapproving face.
“Go away! go away!” she cried harshly, “I have no room for a baggage of that kind.” Then she shut the door in their faces; they could hear the bar run to in the staples.
For a minute or two they stood aghast and silent, and Nan was plainly close on tears. But the humour of the thing struck her quick enough—sooner than Gilian saw it—and she broke into laughter, subdued so that it might not reach the woman righteous within, and her ear maybe at the door chink. It was not perhaps of the heartiest merriment, but it inspired her companion with respect for her spirit in a moment so trying. She was pale, partly with weariness, partly with distress at this unlooked-for reception; but her lips, red and luscious, smiled for his encouragement.
“Must we go back?” he asked, irresolute, as they made some slow steps away from the door.
“Back!” said Nan, her eyes flashing. “Am I mad? Are you speaking for yourself? If it must be back for you let me not be keeping you. After all you bargained for no more than to take me to old Elasaid’s, and now that I’m here and there’s none of the Elasaid I expected to meet me, I’ll make the rest of my way somewhere myself.” But her gaze upon that rolling and bleak moorland was far less confident than her words.
Gilian made no reply. He only looked at her reproaching for her bitterness, and humbly took up step by her side as she walked quickly away from the scene of the cold reception.
They had gone some distance when Elasaid opened her door again and came out to look after them. She saw a most touching helplessness in the manner of their uncertain walk across the heather, with no fixed mind as to which direction was the best, stopping and debating, moving now a little to the east, now a little to the west, but always further into the region of the lochs. She began to blame herself for her hastiness. She had expected that, face to face with her disapproval, the foolish young people would have gone back the road they came; but here they were going further than ever away from the father in whose interest she had loyally refused her hospitality. She cried loudly after them with a short-breathed Gaelic halloo, too much like an animal’s cry to attract their attention. Nan did not hear it at all; Gilian but dreamed it, as it were, and though he took it for the call of a moor-fowl, found it in his ready fancy alarmingly like the summons of an irate father. But now he dared betray no hesitancy; he did not even turn to look behind him.
Elasaid cried again, but still in vain. She concluded they were deliberately deaf to her, and “Let them go!” she said crabbedly, flaunting an eloquent arm to the winds, comforting herself with the thought that there was no other house in all that dreary country to give them the shelter she had denied.
The sun by this time was pouring into the moor from a sky without a speck of cloud. Compared with the brown and purple of the moor and the dull colour of Ben Bhreac—the mount away to the southeast—the heavens were uncommonly blue, paling gradual to their dip. In another hour than this distressed and perplexed one, our wanderers would have felt some jocund influence in a forenoon so benign and handsome.