“Rin, an’ fess her here than, for I’m
fleyed at yer sister, honest wuman, an’ little
Phemy. It wad blaud a’ thing gien I was
hurried to du something afore I kenned what.”
“I s’ ha’e her oot in a meenute,”
said Joseph, and scrambled up the cliff.
For a few minutes Malcolm stood alone in the dim starlight
of winter, looking out on the dusky sea, dark as his
own future, into which the wind now blowing behind
him would soon begin to carry him. He anticipated
its difficulties, but never thought of perils:
it was seldom anything oppressed him but the doubt
of what he ought to do. This was ever the cold
mist that swallowed the airy castles he built and
peopled with all the friends and acquaintances of his
youth. But the very first step towards action
is the death warrant of doubt, and the tide of Malcolm’s
being ran higher that night, as he stood thus alone
under the stars, than he had ever yet known it run.
With all his common sense, and the abundance of his
philosophy, which the much leisure belonging to certain
phases of his life had combined with the slow strength
of his intellect to render somewhat long winded in
utterance, there was yet room in Malcolm’s bonnet
for a bee above the ordinary size, and if it buzzed
a little too romantically for the taste of the nineteenth
century, about disguises and surprises and bounty
and plots and rescues and such like, something must
be pardoned to one whose experience had already been
so greatly out of the common, and whose nature was
far too childlike and poetic, and developed in far
too simple a surrounding of labour and success, difficulty
and conquest, danger and deliverance, not to have
more than the usual amount of what is called the romantic
in its composition.
The buzzing of his bee was for the present interrupted
by the return of Blue Peter with his wife. She
threw her arms round Malcolm’s neck, and burst
into tears.
“Hoots, my woman!” said her husband, “what
are ye greitin’ at?”
“Eh, Peter!” she answered, “I canna
help it. It’s jist like a deith. He’s
gauin’ to lea’ us a’, an’ gang
hame till ‘s ain, an’ I canna bide ’at
he sud grow strange-like to hiz ’at ha’e
kenned him sae lang.”
“It’ll be an ill day,” returned
Malcolm, “whan I grow strange to ony freen’.
I’ll ha’e to gang far down the laich (low)
ro’d afore that be poassible. I mayna aye
be able to du jist what ye wad like; but lippen ye
to me: I s’ be fair to ye. An’
noo I want Blue Peter to gang wi’ me, an’
help me to what I ha’e to du—gien
ye ha’e nae objection to lat him.”
“Na, nane ha’e I. I wad gang mysel’
gien I cud be ony use,” answered Mrs Mair; “but
women are i’ the gait whiles.”
“Weel, I’ll no even say thank ye; I’ll
be awin’ ye that as weel’s the lave.
But gien I dinna du weel, it winna be the fau’t
o’ ane or the ither o’ you twa freen’s.
Noo, Peter, we maun be aff.”
