“I would be the last to be denying it,” said I. “There is not your marrow in all Scotland.”
“Well, here you have the pick of the two at your hand, and must needs speak of the other,” said she. “This is never the way to please the ladies, Mr. Balfour.”
“But, mistress,” said I, “there are surely other things besides mere beauty.”
“By which I am to understand that I am no better than I should be, perhaps?” she asked.
“By which you will please understand that I am like the cock in the midden in the fable-book,” said I. “I see the braw jewel—and I like fine to see it too—but I have more need of the pickle corn.”
“Bravissimo!” she cried. “There is a word well said at last, and I will reward you for it with my story. That same night of your desertion I came late from a friend’s house—where I was excessively admired, whatever you may think of it—and what should I hear but that a lass in a tartan screen desired to speak with me? She had been there an hour or better, said the servant-lass, and she grat in to herself as she sat waiting. I went to her direct; she rose as I came in, and I knew her at a look. (’Grey Eyes!’ says I to myself, but was more wise than to let on.) You will be Miss Grant at last? she says, rising and looking at me hard and pitiful. Ay, it was true he said, you are bonny, at all events.—The way God made me, my dear, I said, but I would be geyan obliged if ye could tell me what brought you here at such a time of the night.—Lady, she said, we are kinsfolk, we are both come of the blood of the sons of Alpin.—My dear, I replied, I think no more of Alpin or his sons than what I do of a kale-stock. You have a better argument in these tears upon your bonny face. And at that I was so weak-minded as to kiss her, which is what you would like to do dearly, and I wager will never find the courage of. I say it was weak-minded of me, for I knew no more of her than the outside; but it was the wisest stroke I could have hit upon. She is a very staunch, brave nature, but I think she has been little used with tenderness; and at that caress (though to say the truth, it was but lightly given) her heart went out to me. I will never betray the secrets of my sex, Mr. Davie; I will never tell you the way she turned me round her thumb, because it is the same she will use to twist yourself. Ay, it is a fine lass! She is as clean as hill well-water.”
“She is e’en ’t!” I cried.
“Well, then, she told me her concerns,” pursued Miss Grant, “and in what a swither she was in about her papa, and what a taking about yourself, with very little cause, and in what a perplexity she had found herself after you was gone away. And then I minded at long last, says she, that we were kinswomen, and that Mr. David should have given you the name of the bonniest of the bonny, and I was thinking to myself, ‘If she is so bonny she will be good, at all events’; and I took up my foot-soles out of that. That was when I forgave yourself, Mr. Davie. When you was in my society, you seemed upon hot iron: by all marks, if ever I saw a young man that wanted to be gone, it was yourself, and I and my two sisters were the ladies you were so desirous to be gone from; and now it appeared you had given me some notice in the bygoing, and was so kind as to comment on my attractions! From that hour you may date our friendship, and I began to think with tenderness upon the Latin grammar.”
“You will have many hours to rally me in,” said I; “and I think besides you do yourself injustice. I think it was Catriona turned your heart in my direction. She is too simple to perceive as you do the stiffness of her friend.”
“I would not like to wager upon that, Mr. David,” said she. “The lasses have clear eyes. But at least she is your friend entirely, as I was to see. I carried her in to his lordship, my papa; and his Advocacy, being in a favourable stage of claret, was so good as to receive the pair of us. Here is Grey Eyes that you have been deaved with these days past, said I; she is come to prove that we spoke true, and I lay the prettiest lass in the three Lothians at your feet—making a papistical reservation of myself. She suited her action to my words: down she went upon her knees to him—I would not like to swear but he saw two of her, which doubtless made her appeal the more irresistible, for you are all a pack of Mahomedans—told him what had passed that night, and how she had withheld her father’s man from following of you, and what a case she was in about her father, and what a flutter for yourself; and begged with weeping for the lives of both of you (neither of which was in the slightest danger), till I vow I was proud of my sex because it was done so pretty, and ashamed for it because of the smallness of the occasion. She had not gone far, I assure you, before the Advocate was wholly sober, to see his inmost politics ravelled out by a young lass and discovered to the most unruly of his daughters. But we took him in hand, the pair of us, and brought that matter straight. Properly managed—and that means managed by me—there is no one to compare with my papa.”