Being a la.s.s of spirit, she quickly reasoned herself out of this foolishness, rose, washed, changed her stockings, put off her shawl for cap and ap.r.o.n, and--albeit in trepidation--presented herself once more at the door of Mrs. Johnstone"s garret.
"Please you, mistress," she managed to say, "I am Kirstie Maclachlan, the new maid from Wyliebank."
Mrs. Johnstone looked up and fixed her with a pair of eyes that (she declared) searched her through and through; but all she said was, "The minister tells me you can read."
"Yes, mistress."
"What books have you brought?"
Kirstie, to be sure, had two books in her bundle--a Bible and John Bunyan"s _Grace Abounding_, the both of them gifts from me.
Mrs. Johnstone commanded her to fetch the second and start reading at once; "for," she explained, not unkindly, "it will suit you best, belike, to begin with something familiar; and if I find you read well and pleasantly, we will get a book from the manse library."
So the girl found a stool in the corner, and, seating herself near the window, began to read by the waning light. She had, indeed, an agreeable voice, and I had taken pains to teach her. She read on and on, gathering courage, yet uncertain if Mrs. Johnstone approved; who said no word, but continued her spinning until darkness settled down on the garret and blurred the print on the page.
At last she looked up, and, much to Kirstie"s surprise, with a sigh.
"That will do, girl, you read very nicely. Run down and find your supper, and after that the sooner you get to bed the better. We rise early in this house. To-morrow I will put you in the way of your duties."
Downstairs Kirstie met the minister who had been taking a late stroll in the garden and now entered by the back-door. He halted under the lamp in the pa.s.sage. "Well," he asked, "what did she say?"
"She bade me get my supper and be early in the morning," Kirstie answered simply.
For some reason this seemed to relieve him. He hung up his hat and stood pulling at his fingers until the joints cracked, which was a trick with him. "She needs to be soothed," he said. "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. Johnstone sat there in the darkness she could not tell.
The next morning she entered on her duties, which were light enough.
Indeed, she soon suspected that her mistress had sought a companion rather than a servant, and at first had much to-do to find employment.
Soon, however, Mrs. Johnstone took her into confidence, and began to impart the mysteries of whitening and twisting the famous Balgarnock thread; and so by degrees, without much talk on either side, there grew a strange affection betwixt them. Sure, Kirstie must have been the first of her s.e.x to whom the strange woman showed any softness; and on her part the girl a.s.serts that she was attracted from the first by a sort of pity, without well knowing for what her pity was demanded. The minister went no farther with his confidences: he could see that Kirstie suited, and seemed resolved to let well alone. The wife never spoke of herself; and albeit, if Kirstie"s reading happened to touch on the sources of Christian consolation, she showed some eagerness in discussing them, it was done without any personal or particular reference. Yet, even in those days, Kirstie grew to feel that terror was in some way the secret of her mistress"s strangeness; that for the present the poor woman knew herself safe and protected from it, but also that there was ever a danger of that barrier falling--whatever it might be--and leaving her exposed to some enemy, from the thought of whom her soul shrank.
I do not know how Kirstie became convinced that, whoever or whatever the enemy might be, Mr. Johnstone was the phylactery. She herself could give no grounds for her conviction beyond his wife"s anxiety for his health and well-being. I myself never observed it in a woman, and if I had, should have set it down to ordinary wifely concern. But Kirstie a.s.sures me, first, that it was not ordinary, and, secondly, that it was not at all wifely--that Mrs. Johnstone"s care of her husband had less of the ministering unselfishness of a woman in love than of the eager concern of a gambler with his stake. The girl (I need not say) did not put it thus, yet this in effect was her report. And she added that this anxiety was fitful to a degree: at times the minister could hardly take a walk without being fussed over and forced to change his socks on his return; at others, and for days together, his wife would resign the care of him to Providence, or at any rate to Fate, and trouble herself not at all about his goings-out or his comings-in, nor whether he wore a great-coat or not, nor if he returned wet to the skin and neglected to change his wear.
Well, the girl was right, as was proved on the afternoon when Mr. Johnstone, taking his customary walk upon the Kilmarnock road, fell and burst a blood-vessel, and was borne home to the manse on a gate.
The two women were seated in the garret as usual when the crowd entered the garden; and with the first sound of the bearers" feet upon the path, which was of smooth pebbles compacted in lime, Mrs. Johnstone rose up, with a face of a sudden so grey and terrible that Kirstie dropped the book from her knee.
"It has come!" said the poor lady under her breath, and put out a hand as if feeling for some stick of furniture to lean against. "It has come!"
she repeated aloud, but still hoa.r.s.ely; and with that she turned to the la.s.s with a most piteous look, and "Oh, Kirstie, girl," she cried, "you won"t leave me? I have been kind to you--say you won"t leave me!"
Before Kirstie well understood, her mistress"s arms were about her and the gaunt woman clinging to her body and trembling like a child. "You will save me, Kirstie? You will live here and not forsake me? There is n.o.body now but you!" she kept crying over and over.
The girl held her firmly with a grasp above the elbows to steady her and allay the trembling, and, albeit dazed herself, uttered what soothing words came first to her tongue. "Why, mistress, who thinks of leaving you? Not I, to be sure. But let me get you to bed, and in an hour you will be better of this fancy, for fancy it must be."
"He is dead, I tell you," Mrs. Johnstone insisted, "and they are bringing him home. Hark to the door--that was never your master"s knock--and the voices!"
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. The widow was not to be seen, and of Kirstie, who ever hid herself from the sight of strangers, I caught but a glimpse.
She did not follow the coffin, but remained upstairs (as I suppose) comforting her mistress. The other poor distracted servants, between tears and ignorance, made but a sorry business of entertaining the company, so that but half a dozen at most cared to return to the house, of whom I was not one.
The manse had to be vacated, and within a week or two I heard that Mrs.
Johnstone had sold a great part of her furniture, dismissed all her household but Kirstie, and retired to a small cottage a little further up the street and scarcely a stone"s-throw from the manse.
"She made," says Kirstie, "little show of mourning for her husband, nor for months afterwards did she return to the terror she had shown that day in the garret, yet I am sure that from the hour of his death she never knew peace of mind. She had fitted up a room in the cottage with her wheel and bleaching boards, and we spent all our time in reading or thread-making. At night my cot would be strewn in her bedroom, and we slept with a candle burning on the table between us; but once or twice I woke to see her laid on her side, or resting on her elbow, with her face towards me and her eyes fixed upon mine across the light. This used to frighten me, and she must have seen it, for always she would stammer that I need not be alarmed, and beg me to go to sleep again like a good child.
I soon came to see that, whatever her own terror might be, she had the utmost dread of my catching it, and that her hope lay in keeping me cheerful. Since I had nothing on my mind at that time, and knew of no cause for fear, I used to sleep soundly enough; but I begin to think that my mistress slept scarcely at all. I cannot remember once waking without finding her awake and her eyes watching me as I say.
"She herself would not set foot outside the cottage for weeks together, and if by chance we did take a walk it would be towards sunset, when the fields were empty and the folk mostly gathered on the green at the far end of the village. There was a footpath led across these fields at the back of the cottage, and here at such an hour she would sometimes consent to take the air, leaning on my arm; but if any wayfarer happened to come along the path I used to draw her aside into the field, where we made believe to be gathering of wild flowers. She had a dislike of meeting strangers and a horror of being followed; the sound of footsteps on the path behind us would drive her near crazy."
I think "twas this frequent pretence of theirs to be searching for wild flowers which brought the suspicion of witchcraft upon them among the population of Givens. The story of the woman"s youth was remembered against her, if obscurely. Folks knew that she had once been afflicted or possessed by an evil spirit, and from this "twas a short step to accuse her of gathering herbs at nightfall for the instruction of Kirstie in the black art. In the end the rumour drove them from Givens, and in this manner.
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. More and more as her mistress clung to her she grew to cling to her mistress; it seemed as if they two were in partnership against the world, and the part of protector which she played so watchfully and courageously for her years took its revenge upon her. For what makes a child so engaging as his trust in the fellow-creatures he meets and his willingness to expect the best of them? To Kirstie, yet but a little way past childhood, all men and women were possible enemies, to be suspected and shunned. She took her walk dutifully because Mrs. Johnstone commanded it, and because shops must be visited and groceries purchased; but it was penance to her, and she would walk a mile about to avoid a knot of gossips or to wile the time away until a shop emptied.
But one day in the long main street she was fairly caught by a mob of boys hunting and hooting after a negro man. They paid no heed to Kirstie, who shrank into a doorway as he pa.s.sed down the causeway--a seaman, belike, trudging to Irvine or Saltcoats. He seemed by his gait to be more than half drunk, and by the way he shook his stick back at the boys and cursed them; but they would not be shaken off, and in the end he took refuge in the "Leaping Fish," where his tormentors gathered about the doorway and continued their booing until the landlord came forth and dispersed them.
By this time Kirstie had bolted from the doorway and run home.
She said nothing of her adventure to Mrs. Johnstone; but in the dusk of the evening a riot began in the street a little way below the cottage.
The black seaman had been drinking all day, and on leaving the "Leaping Fish," had fallen into a savage quarrel with a drover.
Two or three decent fellows stopped the fight and pulled him off; but they had done better by following up their kindness and seeing him out of the village, for he was now planted with his back to a railing, brandishing his stick and furiously challenging the whole mob. So far as concerned him the mischief ended by his overbalancing to aim a vicious blow at an urchin, and crashing down upon the kerb, where he lay and groaned, while the blood flowed from an ugly cut across the eyebrow.
For a while the crowd stood about him in some dismay. A few were for carrying him back to the public-house; but at some evil prompting a voice cried out, "Take him to the widow Johnstone"s! A witch should know how to deal with her sib, the black man." I believe so G.o.dless a jest would never have been played, had not the cottage stood handy and (as one may say) closer than their better thoughts. But certain it is that they hoisted the poor creature and bore him into Mrs. Johnstone"s garden, and began to fling handfuls of gravel at the upper windows, where a light was burning.
At the noise of it against the pane Mrs. Johnstone, who was bending over the bedroom fire and heating milk for her supper, let the pan fall from her hand. For the moment Kirstie thought she would swoon. But helping her to a seat in the armchair, the brave la.s.s bade her be comforted--it could be naught but some roystering drunkard--and herself went downstairs and unbarred the door. At the sight of her--so frail a girl--quietly confronting them with a demand to know their business, the crowd fell back a step or two, and in that s.p.a.ce of time by G.o.d"s providence arrived Peter Lawler, the constable, a very religious man, who gave the ringleaders some advice and warning they were not likely to forget. Being by this made heartily ashamed of themselves, they obeyed his order to pick up the man from the doorstep, where he lay at Kirstie"s feet, and carry him back to the "Leaping Fish;" and so slunk out of the garden.
When all were gone Kirstie closed and bolted the door and returned upstairs to her mistress, whom she found sitting in her chair and listening intently.
"Who was it?" she demanded.
"Oh, nothing to trouble us, ma"am; but just a poor wandering blackamoor I met in the street to-day. The people, it seems, were bringing him here by mistake."
"A blackamoor!" cried Mrs. Johnstone, gasping. "A blackamoor!"
Now Kirstie was for running downstairs again to fetch some milk in place of what was spilt, but at the sound of the woman"s voice she faced about.
"Pick together the silver, Kirstie, and fetch me my bonnet!" At first Mrs. Johnstone began to totter about the room without aim, but presently fell to choosing this and that of her small possessions and tossing them into the seat of the armchair in a nervous hurry which seemed to gather with her strength. "Quick, la.s.s! Did he see you? . . . ah, but that would not tell him. What like was he?" She pulled herself together and her voice quavered across the room. "La.s.s, la.s.s, you will not forsake me?
Do not speir now, but do all that I say. You promised--you did promise!"
All this while she was working in a fever of haste, pulling even the quilt from the bed and anon tossing it aside as too burdensome. She was past all control. "Do not speir of me," she kept repeating.
"What, ma"am? Are we leaving?" Kirstie stammered once; but the strong will of the woman--mad though she might be--was upon her, and by-and-by the girl began packing in no less haste than her mistress. "But will you not tell me, ma"am?" she entreated between her labours.
"Not here! not here!" Mrs. Johnstone insisted. "Help me to get away from here!"
It was two in the morning when the women unlatched the door of the cottage and crept forth across the threshold--and across the stain of blood which lay thereon, only they could not see it. They took the footpath, each with a heavy bundle beneath her arm, and turning their backs on Givens walked resolutely forward for three miles to the cross-roads where the Glasgow coach would be due to pa.s.s in the dawn. Upon the green there beside the sign-post Kirstie believes that she slept while Mrs. Johnstone kept guard over the bundles; but she remembers little until she found herself, as if by magic, on the coach-top and dozing on a seat behind the driver.
From Glasgow, after a day"s halt, they took another coach to Edinburgh, and there found lodgings in a pair of attics high aloft in one of the great houses, or lands, which lie off Parliament Square to the north.
The building--a warren you might call it--had six stories fronting the square, the uppermost far overhanging, and Kirstie affirms that her window, pierced in the very eaves, stood higher than the roof of St.
Giles" Church.
Hither in due course a carrier"s cart conveyed Mrs. Johnstone"s sticks of furniture, and here for fifteen months the two women lay as close as two needles in a bottle of hay. The house stood upon a ridge, and at the back of it a dozen double flights of stairs dived into courts and cellars far below the level of the front. 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 pa.s.sed on her way, beginning with a wine store in the bas.e.m.e.nt, 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.
The most of Kirstie"s business was with Mr. John Seton, the agent, to whom she carried the thread spun by her mistress in the attic, and from whom she received the moneys and accounts of profits. Once or twice, at their first coming, Mrs. Johnstone had descended for a walk in the streets; but by this time the unhappy lady had it fixed in her mind that she was being watched and followed, and shook with apprehension at every corner.