O, it is too much."
She kept looking at me with a hateful smile. "Coward!" said she.
"The word in your throat and in your father's!" I cried. "I have dared him this day already in your interest. I will dare him again, the nasty pole-cat; little I care which of us should fall! Come," said I, "back to the house with us; let us be done with it, let me be done with the whole Hieland crew of you! You will see what you think when I am dead."She shook her head at me with that same smile I could have struck her for.
"O, smile away!" I cried. "I have seen your bonny father smile on the wrong side this day. Not that I mean he was afraid, of course," Iadded hastily, "but he preferred the other way of it.""What is this?" she asked.
"When I offered to draw with him," said I.
"You offered to draw upon James More!" she cried.
"And I did so," said I, "and found him backward enough, or how would we be here?""There is a meaning upon this," said she. "What is it you are meaning?""He was to make you take me," I replied, "and I would not have it. Isaid you should be free, and I must speak with you alone; little Isupposed it would be such a speaking! 'AND WHAT IF I REFUSE?' said he.
- 'THEN IT MUST COME TO THE THROAT-CUTTING,' says I, 'FOR I WILL NOMORE HAVE A HUSBAND FORCED ON THAT YOUNG LADY, THAN WHAT I WOULD HAVE AWIFE FORCED UPON MYSELF.' These were my words, they were a friend's words; bonnily have I paid for them! Now you have refused me of your own clear free will, and there lives no father in the Highlands, or out of them, that can force on this marriage. I will see that your wishes are respected; I will make the same my business, as I have all through.
But I think you might have that decency as to affect some gratitude.
'Deed, and I thought you knew me better! I have not behaved quite well to you, but that was weakness. And to think me a coward, and such a coward as that - O, my lass, there was a stab for the last of it!""Davie, how would I guess?" she cried. "O, this is a dreadful business! Me and mine," - she gave a kind of a wretched cry at the word - "me and mine are not fit to speak to you. O, I could be kneeling down to you in the street, I could be kissing your hands for forgiveness!""I will keep the kisses I have got from you already," cried I. "I will keep the ones I wanted and that were something worth; I will not be kissed in penitence.""What can you be thinking of this miserable girl?" says she.
"What I am trying to tell you all this while!" said I, "that you had best leave me alone, whom you can make no more unhappy if you tried, and turn your attention to James More, your father, with whom you are like to have a queer pirn to wind.""O, that I must be going out into the world alone with such a man!" she cried, and seemed to catch herself in with a great effort. "But trouble yourself no more for that," said she. "He does not know what kind of nature is in my heart. He will pay me dear for this day of it;dear, dear, will he pay."
She turned, and began to go home and I to accompany her. At which she stopped.
"I will be going alone," she said. "It is alone I must be seeing him."Some little time I raged about the streets, and told myself I was the worst used lad in Christendom. Anger choked me; it was all very well for me to breathe deep; it seemed there was not air enough about Leyden to supply me, and I thought I would have burst like a man at the bottom of the sea. I stopped and laughed at myself at a street corner a minute together, laughing out loud, so that a passenger looked at me, which brought me to myself.
"Well," I thought, "I have been a gull and a ninny and a soft Tommy long enough. Time it was done. Here is a good lesson to have nothing to do with that accursed sex, that was the ruin of the man in the beginning and will be so to the end. God knows I was happy enough before ever I saw her; God knows I can be happy enough again when Ihave seen the last of her."
That seemed to me the chief affair: to see them go. I dwelled upon the idea fiercely; and presently slipped on, in a kind of malevolence, to consider how very poorly they were likely to fare when Davie Balfour was no longer by to be their milk-cow; at which, to my very own great surprise, the disposition of my mind turned bottom up. I was still angry; I still hated her; and yet I thought I owed it to myself that she should suffer nothing.
This carried me home again at once, where I found the mails drawn out and ready fastened by the door, and the father and daughter with every mark upon them of a recent disagreement. Catriona was like a wooden doll; James More breathed hard, his face was dotted with white spots, and his nose upon one side. As soon as I came in, the girl looked at him with a steady, clear, dark look that might have been followed by a blow. It was a hint that was more contemptuous than a command, and Iwas surprised to see James More accept it. It was plain he had had a master talking-to; and I could see there must be more of the devil in the girl than I had guessed, and more good humour about the man than Ihad given him the credit of.
He began, at least, calling me Mr. Balfour, and plainly speaking from a lesson; but he got not very far, for at the first pompous swell of his voice, Catriona cut in.
