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For it must not be supposed that the quarrel rested with the wife and did not take in the husband also or with the gardener's sister, and did not speedily include the gardener himself. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie's presence.
Poor Archie stood dumbfounded. She had moved some steps away from him before he recovered the gift of articulate speech. "Kirstie!" he cried. "O, Kirstie woman!" There was in his voice a ring of appeal, a clang of mere astonishment that showed the schoolmaster was vanquished. She turned round on him. "What do ye Kirstie me for?" she retorted. "What have ye to do wi' me!
For that is the mark of the Scot of all classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott.
It was by these a journey in themselves that Kirstie sometimes made exit and entrance when she had business at the shops, and she has counted up to me a list, which seemed without end, of the offices, workshops, and tenements she passed on her way, beginning with a wine store in the basement, mounting to perruquiers' and law-stationers' shops, and so up past bookbinders', felt-maker's, painters', die-sinkers', milliners' workrooms, to landings on which, as the roof was neared, the tenants herded closer and yet closer in meaner and yet meaner poverty.
"I think he'll have been trying to say what you have been thinking." "No, I never heard it," he said. "Repeat it to me, can you?" "It's nothing wanting the tune," said Kirstie. "Then sing it me," said he. "On the Lord's Day? That would never do, Mr. Weir!"
Though the widow so seldom showed herself abroad, in her care for Kirstie's cheerfulness she persuaded the girl to take a short walk every morning through the village. In truth Kirstie hated it.
She was still clinging about Kirstie when the cook came panting up the stairs and into the room with a white face; for it was true, and the minister had breathed his last between the garden gate and his house door. As I have said, I rode over from Wyliebank four days later to read the burial service.
It must have been so for Kirstie at any time when the occasion chanced; but it so fell out that she was deprived of this delight in the hour when she had most need of it, when she had most to say, most to ask, and when she trembled to recognise her sovereignty not merely in abeyance but annulled.
"If you read much with her, you must come to me to choose the books; yet she must think she has chosen them herself. We must manage that somehow. The great thing is to keep her mind soothed." Kirstie did not understand. A few minutes later as she went up the stairs to her room the door opposite still remained open. All was dark within, but whether or not Mrs.
Kirstie had wilfully closed the eye of thought; she would not argue even with herself; gallant, desperate little heart, she had accepted the command of that supreme attraction like the call of fate, and marched blindfold on her doom.
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