He pushed me from the chamber as I had been a stranger intruding, and I went to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands lit by an enormous moon that rose over Cathkin Braes, and an immensity of stars. For the first time in all my life I realised the heedlessness of nature in human affairs the most momentous. For the moon swung up serene beyond expression; the stars winked merrily: a late bird glid among the bushes and perched momentarily on a bough of ash to pipe briefly almost with the passion of the spring. But not the heedlessness of nature influenced me so much as the barren prospect of the world that the moon and stars revealed. There was no one out there in those deep spaces of darkness I could claim as friend or familiar. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Only the beginnings of schemes came to me—schemes of concealment and disguise, of surrender even—but the last to be dismissed as soon as it occurred to me, for how could I leave this house the bitter bequest of a memory of the gallows-tree?
Only the beginnings, I say, for every scheme ran tilt against the obvious truth that I was not only without affection or regard out there, but without as much as a crown of money to purchase the semblance of either.
I could not have stood very long there when my father came out, his face like clay, and aged miraculously, and beckoned me to the parlour.
“Your mother—my wife,” said he, “is very ill, and I am sending for the doctor. The horse is yoking. There is another woman in Driepps who—God help her!—will be no better this night, but I wish in truth her case was ours, and that it was you who lay among the heather.”
He began pacing up and down the floor, his eyes bent, his hands continually wringing, his heart bursting, as it were, with sighs and the dry sobs of the utmost wretchedness. As for me, I must have been clean gyte (as the saying goes), for my attention was mostly taken up with the tassel of his nightcap that bobbed grotesquely on his brow. I had not seen it since, as a child, I used to share his room.
“What! what!” he cried at last piteously, “have ye never a word to say? Are ye dumb?” He ran at me and caught me by the collar of the coat and tried to shake me in an anger, but I felt it no more than I had been a stone.
“What did ye do it for? What in heaven's name did ye quarrel on?”
“It was—it was about a girl,” I said, reddening even at that momentous hour to speak of such a thing to him.
“A girl!” he repeated, tossing up his hands. “Keep us! Hoo lang are ye oot o' daidlies? Well! well!” he went on, subduing himself and prepared to listen. I wished the tassel had been any other colour than crimson, and hung fairer on the middle of his forehead; it seemed to fascinate me. And he, belike, forgot that I was there, for he thought, I knew, continually of his wife, and he would stop his feverish pacing on the floor, and hearken for a sound from the room where she was quartered with the maid. I made no answer.
“Well, well!” he cried again fiercely, turning upon me. “Out with it; out with the whole hellish transaction, man!”