So the women put me to bed, while Angus brought the surgeon; then they forbade him the room, and attended to my wants; but all night long he paced the halls and heard my moans, and by daybreak I was stupefied. He waited a week, but they would not suffer him to see me, and then his leave of absence had expired.
One night I woke; I felt that the room was darkly rich with the star-lighted gloom, but I could see nothing, for all the soft, cool linen folds; and lying there half-conscious for a time, I seemed to feel some presence in the door-way there.
"Angus, is that you?" I asked.
"Oh, Ailie darling!" he cried, and came forward and fell on his knees by my side, and covered my hands with his tears.
"Poor Angus!" I said, in my muffled way, and I tried half to rise, and I was drawing away a hand that I might dash the tears off his face.
Then of a sudden it came over me in one great torrid flush, and I fell back without a word.
But at the moment, the little gray governess came in again from her errand, and he went. 'T was no use his waiting, though he lingered still a day or two in hopes to see me; but my head was still on my pillow. His time was more than up, he must to the ship, so he left me store of messages and flowers and glass-bred grapes, and was off.
Time wore away, I got about again, and all was as before, long ere the girls came back, or Miss Dunreddin. I went near no moors, I looked no more out of my window, I only sat on the stool by my bedside and kept my face hid in the valances; and the little gray governess would sit beside me and cheer me, and tell me it was not so bad when all was said, and beauty was but little worth, and years would efface much, that my hair was still as dark and soft, my eyes as shining, my——But all to what use? Where had flown the old Strathsay red from my cheek, where that smooth polish of brow, where——I, who had aye been the flower of the race, the pride of the name, could not now bide to brook my own glance in the glass.
But the worst of it all would be, I thought,—not recking the worse to come,—when the girls flocked back. How I dreaded it, how I sought to escape their mock and go home, poor fool! but the little gray governess saw them all first, I must believe, for there was not a quip or a look askance, and they treated me as bairns treat a lamb that has tint its mother. And so seeing I had lost my fair skin, I put myself to gain other things in its place, and worked hard at my stents, at my music, my books. I grew accustomed to things, and would forget there had been a change, and, being young, failed to miss the being bonny; and if I did not miss it, who should? and they all were so kind, that the last year of school was the happiest of the whole. Thus the time drew near my eighteenth summer, and Miss Dunreddin had heard of a ship bound our way from Glasgow, and we were to leave the town with all its rare old histories, and speed through nights and days of seafaring to St. Anne's by the water-side, to the old stone house with its windows overhanging the River of the Cross.
So the old brig slid lazily up the river, beneath the high and beauteous banks, and as between the puffs of wind we lay there in the mid-channel, the mate,—a dark, hawk-eyed man, at whom Effie liked well to toss a merry mock, and with whom, sometimes stealing up, she would pace the deck in hours of fair weather,—a man whose face was like a rock that once was smitten with sunshine, never since,—a sad man, with a wrathful lip even when he spoke us fair,—the mate handed me his glass and bade me look, while he went to the side and bent over there with Effie, gazing down into the sun-brown, idle current. And I pointed it,—and surely that was the old stone gable in its woodbines,—and surely, as we crept nearer, the broad bower-window opened before me,—and surely a lady sat there, a haughty woman with the clustered curls on her temple, her needle poised above the lace-work in the frame, and she gazing dreamily out, out at the water, the woods, the one ship wafting slowly up,—shrouds that had been filled with the airs of half a hemisphere, hull that had ere now been soaked in spicy suns and summers,—and all the glad tears gushed over my eyes and darkened me from seeing. So, as I said, Mrs. Strathsay sat in her broad bower-window looking down the harbor, and a ship was coming up, and Effie and I stood on its deck, our hearts full of yearning. Mine was, at least, I know. And I could but snatch the glass up, every breathing, as we went, and look, and drop it, for it seemed as if I must fly to what it brought so near, must fly to fling my arms about the fair neck bending there, to feel the caressing finger, to have that kiss imprint my cheek once more,—so seldom her lips touched us!