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Malcolm was not the only one who knew him: Lizzy Findlay, only daughter of the Partan, and the prettiest girl in the company, blushed crimson: she had danced with him at Lossie House, and he had said things to her, by way of polite attention, which he would never have said had she been of his own rank.
It was an additional pang that it was to Yusuf that he was thus to exhibit himself, no doubt in order that the merchant should carry a description of him to some likely purchaser. He could not comprehend the words that passed, but it was very bitter to be handled like a horse at a fair doubly so that he, a Hope of Burnside, should thus be treated by Partan Jeannie's son.
"She's a dooms clever wife, though; an' ane 'at ye may lippen till i' the w'y o' her ain callin'," said Meg Partan, whose temper had improved a little under the influence of the handsome youth's presence and cheery speech. "She'll not pe toubting it," responded Duncan; "put, ach! ta voman 'll be hafing a crim feesage and a fearsome eye!" Like all the blind, he spoke as if he saw perfectly.
His friends were jubilant as revellers. For Meg Partan, she ran from house to house like a maniac, laughing and crying. It was as if the whole Seaton had suddenly been translated. The men came crowding about Duncan, congratulating him and asking him a hundred questions.
"I daur him till't!" cried her mother, in the impotence and self despite of a mortifying blunder; "I'll raise the toon upon 'im." "What wad that du, mither?" returned Lizzy, in distress about her friends. "It wad but mak' ill waur." "An' wha are ye to oppen yer mou' sae wide to yer mither?" burst forth Meg Partan, glad of an object upon which the chagrin that consumed her might issue in flame.
"Faith na, a hantle o' braw folk hae leeved in James's Court in their time. I mind o' the Leddy Partan an' Mistress Girnigo, the king's jeweller's wife haein' a fair even-doon fecht a' aboot wha was to hae the pick o' the hooses on the stair. Winifred, ma lassie, come here an' sit doon!
In a few minutes they were on board, greeting their old friend with jubilation, but talking in a subdued tone, for they perceived by Malcolm's that the cutter bore their lady. Briefly the Partan communicated the state of the harbour, and recommended porting his helm, and running the Fisky ashore about opposite the brass swivel.
Those who admired Malcolm of whom there were not a few even in Vanity Fair called him the fisher-king: the wags called him the kingfisher, and laughed at the oddity of his taste in preferring what he called his duty to the pleasures of the season. But the marquis found even the hen-pecked Partan a nobler and more elevating presence than any strutting platitude of Bond street.
Such were not infrequent in that quarter, for one of the women who lived there was a termagant, and the door of her cottage was generally open. She was known as Meg Partan.
But her words smote the mother within the mother, and she turned and looked at her daughter with more of the woman and less of the Partan in her rugged countenance than had been visible there since the first week of her married life.
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