Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/213

Rh 'aneth the toll-ro'd, ye ken. There ye'll get into the lythe (lee) wi' the bairnie, an' I'll be wi' ye in a quarter o' an hoor. It'll tak' me but five meenutes to gang hame. Stoat 'll pit up the mere, an' I'll be back — I can du't in ten meenutes."

"Eh! dinna hurry for me, Ma'colm: I'm no worth it," said Lizzy.

But Malcolm was already at full speed along the top of the dune.

"Lord preserve 's!" cried Lizzy when she saw him clear the brass swivel. "Sic a laad as that is! Eh, he maun hae a richt lass to lo'e him some day! It's a' ane to him, boat or beast. He wadna turn frae the deil himsel'. An' syne he's jist as saft 's a deuk's neck whan he speyks till a wuman or a bairn — ay, or an auld man aither."

And, full of trouble as it was about another, Lizzy's heart yet ached at the thought that she should be so unworthy of one like him.

 

the sands she saw him gain the turnpike road with a bound and a scramble. Crossing it, he entered the park by the sea-gate: she had to enter it by the tunnel that passed under the same road. She approached the grated door, unlocked it and looked in with a shudder. It was dark, the other end of it being obscured by trees and the roots of the hill on whose top stood the Temple of the Winds. Through the tunnel blew what seemed quite another wind — one of death — from regions beneath. She drew her shawl, one end of which was rolled about her baby, closer around them both ere she entered. Never before had she set foot within the place, and a strange horror of it filled her. She did not know that by that passage, on a certain lovely summer night, Lord Meikleham had issued to meet her on the sands under the moon. The sea was not terrible to her — she knew all its ways nearly as well as Malcolm knew the moods of Kelpie — but the earth and its ways were less known to her, and to turn her face toward it and enter by a little door into its bosom was like a visit to her grave. But she gathered her strength, entered with a shudder, passed in growing hope and final safety through it, and at the other end came out again into the light, only the cold of it seemed to cling to her still. But the day had grown colder: the clouds that, seen or unseen, ever haunt the winter sun, had at length caught and shrouded him, and through the gathering vapor he looked ghastly. The wind blew from the sea. The tide was going down. There was snow in the air. The thin, leafless trees were all bending away from the shore, and the wind went sighing, hissing, and almost wailing, through their bare boughs and budless twigs. There would be storm, she thought, ere the morning, but none of their people were out. Had there been — well, she had almost ceased to care about anything, and her own life was so little to her now that she had become less able to value that of other people. To this had the ignis fatuus of a false love brought her. She had dreamed heedlessly, to wake sorrowfully. But not until she heard he was going to be married had she come right awake, and now she could dream no more. Alas! alas! what claim had she upon him? How could she tell, since such he was, what poor girl like herself she might not have, robbed of her part in him? Yet even in the midst of her misery and despair it was some consolation to think that Malcolm was her friend.

Not knowing that he had already suffered from the blame of her fault, or the risk at which he met her, she would have gone toward the house to meet him the sooner, had not this been a part of the grounds where she knew Mr. Crathie tolerated no one without express leave given. The fisher-folk in particular must keep to the road by the other side of the burn, to which the sea-gate admitted them. Lizzy therefore lingered near the tunnel, afraid of being seen.

Mr. Crathie was a man who did well under authority, but upon the top of it was consequential, overbearing, and far more exacting than the marquis. Full of his employer's importance when he was present, and of his own when he was absent, he was yet, in the latter circumstance, so doubtful of its adequate recognition by those under him that he had grown very imperious, and resented with indignation the slightest breach of his orders. Hence he was in no great favor with the fishers. Now, all the day he had been fuming over Malcolm's behavior to him in the morning, and when he went home and learned that his wife had seen him upon Kelpie as if nothing had happened, he became furious, and in this possession of the devil was at the present moment wandering about the grounds, brooding on the words Malcolm had spoken. He could not get rid of them. They caused an acrid burning in 