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Poor cork upon a torrent, he tasted that night the sweets of omnipotence, and brooded like a deity over the strands of that intrigue which was to shatter him before the summer waned. Kirstie had many causes of distress. More and more as we grow old and yet more and more as we grow old and are women, frozen by the fear of age we come to rely on the voice as the single outlet of the soul.
They were all, and Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification of that tree there dangled a halter.
The emptiness and solitude of the great moors seemed to be concentrated there, and Kirstie pointed out by that figure of sunshine for the only inhabitant. His first sight of her was thus excruciatingly sad, like a glimpse of a world from which all light, comfort, and society were on the point of vanishing.
Are we leaving?" Kirstie stammered once; but the strong will of the woman mad though she might be was upon her, and by-and-by the girl began packing in no less haste than her mistress. "But will you not tell me, ma'am?" she entreated between her labours. "Not here! not here!" Mrs. Johnstone insisted. "Help me to get away from here!"
I think she could never forget that her birth had been on the wrong side of the blanket, and, supposing folks to be pitying her for it, sought to avoid them and their kindness. It was Kirstie, then, whom I ventured to commend to Mr.
"I suppose it will be business, sir," replied the housekeeper drily, measuring his distance off to him by an indicated curtsey. "But I can't imagine what business!" he reiterated. "I suppose it will be his business," retorted the austere Kirstie. He turned to her with that happy brightness that made the charm of his disposition, and broke into a peal of healthy and natural laughter.
With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have envied, she had that day in church considered and admitted the attractions of the younger Kirstie; and with the profound humanity and sentimentality of her nature, she had recognised the coming of fate. Not thus would she have chosen.
Yet, even in those days, Kirstie grew to feel that terror was in some way the secret of her mistress's strangeness; that for the present the poor woman knew herself safe and protected from it, but also that there was ever a danger of that barrier falling whatever it might be and leaving her exposed to some enemy, from the thought of whom her soul shrank.
She knew the foot at once and walked the faster. "If it's me he's wanting, he can run for it," she thought, smiling. Archie overtook her like a man whose mind was made up. "Miss Kirstie," he began. "Miss Christina, if you please, Mr. Weir," she interrupted. "I canna bear the contraction." "You forget it has a friendly sound for me. Your aunt is an old friend of mine, and a very good one.
Lord Hermiston sat in the saddle beholding her. Then he seemed to recover command upon himself. "Weel, it's something of the suddenest," said he. "But she was a dwaibly body from the first." And he rode home at a precipitate amble with Kirstie at his horse's heels. Dressed as she was for her last walk, they had laid the dead lady on her bed.
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