It befell
one day when we were at this practice, that we came on a discourse
of friends and friendship, and I think now that we were sailing
near the wind. We said what a fine thing friendship was, and how
little we had guessed of it, and how it made life a new thing, and
a thousand covered things of the same kind that will have been
said, since the foundation of the world, by young folk in the same
predicament. Then we remarked upon the strangeness of that
circumstance, that friends came together in the beginning as if
they were there for the first time, and yet each had been alive a
good while, losing time with other people.
"It is not much that I have done," said she, "and I could be
telling you the five-fifths of it in two-three words. It is only a
girl I am, and what can befall a girl, at all events? But I went
with the clan in the year '45. The men marched with swords and
fire-locks, and some of them in brigades in the same set of tartan;
they were not backward at the marching, I can tell you. And there
were gentlemen from the Low Country, with their tenants mounted and
trumpets to sound, and there was a grant skirling of war-pipes. I
rode on a little Highland horse on the right hand of my father,
James More, and of Glengyle himself. And here is one fine thing
that I remember, that Glengyle kissed me in the face, because (says
he) 'my kinswoman, you are the only lady of the clan that has come
out,' and me a little maid of maybe twelve years old! I saw Prince
Charlie too, and the blue eyes of him; he was pretty indeed! I had
his hand to kiss in front of the army. O, well, these were the
good days, but it is all like a dream that I have seen and then
awakened. It went what way you very well know; and these were the
worst days of all, when the red-coat soldiers were out, and my
father and uncles lay in the hill, and I was to be carrying them
their meat in the middle night, or at the short sight of day when
the cocks crow. Yes, I have walked in the night, many's the time,
and my heart great in me for terror of the darkness. It is a
strange thing I will never have been meddled with by a bogle; but
they say a maid goes safe. Next there was my uncle's marriage, and
that was a dreadful affair beyond all. Jean Kay was that woman's
name; and she had me in the room with her that night at Inversnaid,
the night we took her from her friends in the old, ancient manner.
She would and she wouldn't; she was for marrying Rob the one
minute, and the next she would be for none of him. I will never
have seen such a feckless creature of a woman; surely all there was
of her would tell her ay or no. Well, she was a widow; and I can
never be thinking a widow a good woman."
"Catriona!" says I, "how do you make out that?"
"I do not know," said she; "I am only telling you the seeming in my
heart. And then to marry a new man! Fy! But that was her; and
she was married again upon my Uncle Robin, and went with him awhile
to kirk and market; and then wearied, or else her friends got
claught of her and talked her round, or maybe she turned ashamed;
at the least of it, she ran away, and went back to her own folk,
and said we had held her in the lake, and I will never tell you all
what. I have never thought much of any females since that day.
And so in the end my father, James More, came to be cast in prison,
and you know the rest of it an well as me."
"And through all you had no friends?" said I.
"No," said she; "I have been pretty chief with two-three lasses on
the braes, but not to call it friends."
"Well, mine is a plain tale," said I. "I never had a friend to my
name till I met in with you."
"And that brave Mr. Stewart?" she asked.
"O, yes, I was forgetting him," I said. "But he in a man, and that
in very different."
"I would think so," said she. "O, yes, it is quite different."
"And then there was one other," said I.