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Does he not demand of me action according to what I know, not what I may chance at any moment to feel? God is my strength, and I will lay hold of that strength and use it, or I have none, and Kelpie may take me and welcome."
Did you know her?" "I did," said Captain Jeb, nodding. "She came down here once as a bit of a girl, dancing over the sands like a water kelpie. The old Captain didn't care much for women folks, but he was sot on her sure. Then she come down agin as a bride, purty and shy and sweet; but the old man warn't so pleased then, growled he didn't know what girls wanted to get married for, nohow.
Poor Davie began to cry at last, and I, getting more and more wicked, went on teasing him, until at length he burst into a howl of wrath and misery, whereupon the Kelpie, who had some tenderness for him, burst into the room, and boxed my ears soundly. I was in a fury of rage and revenge, and had I been near anything I could have caught up, something serious would have been the result.
One thing we all knew, that she would ostentatiously fill the canvas bag which he carried by his side, with any broken scraps she could gather, would give him as much milk to drink as he pleased, and would speak kind, almost coaxing, words to the poor natural words which sounded the stranger in our ears, that they were quite unused to like sounds from the lips of the Kelpie.
Malcolm only looked at his mistress. She moved on, and he followed. He was not so innocent in the affair as he had seemed. The expression of Liftore's face as he drew nearer to Florimel, was to him so hateful, that he interfered in a very literal fashion: Kelpie had been doing no more than he had made her until the earl struck her.
Hardly was Malcolm well into the close, however, when out rushed Annie, and, heedless of Kelpie's demonstrative repellence, reached up her hands like a child, caught him by the arm, while yet he was busied with his troublesome charge, drew him down towards her, and held him till, in spite of Kelpie, she had kissed him again and again. "Eh, Ma'colm! eh, my lord!" she said, "ye ha'e saved my faith.
It returned, heralded by frightful pains all over his body, which by and by subsiding, he sank again to the bottom of the black Lethe. Meantime Kelpie had got so wildly uproarious that Merton tossed her half a truss of hay, which she attacked like an enemy, and ran to the house to get somebody to call Malcolm.
Why, then, I asked myself, should I feel ashamed that, for five minutes, as I sat on the stair, Kelpie was a terror to me, and I felt as if I dared not go near her? I had almost reached the stable before I saw into it a little. Then I did see that if I had had nothing to do with my own courage, it was quite time I had something to do with it.
In Hyde Park Malcolm told his friend that he had sent for Kelpie. "She'll be the deid o' ye i' thae streets, as fu' o' wheels as the sea o' fish: twize I've been 'maist gr'un to poother o' my ro'd here," said Peter.
"I won'er he didna win up wi' ye than, Grizzie!" suggested Cosmo. "Guid kens hoo he didna; I won'er mysel'. But I trow I ran; an' I tak ye to witness I garred ye steik the door." "But they say," objected Cosmo, who could not fail to perceive from what Aggie said that there was something going on which it behooved him to know, "that the kelpie wons aye by some watter side."
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