For a very little more I could have cast myself after them.
The rest of the day I walked up and down raging. There were few
names so ill but what I gave her them in my own mind before the sun
went down. All that I had ever heard of Highland pride seemed
quite outdone; that a girl (scarce grown) should resent so trifling
an allusion, and that from her next friend, that she had near
wearied me with praising of! I had bitter, sharp, hard thoughts of
her, like an angry boy's. If I had kissed her indeed (I thought),
perhaps she would have taken it pretty well; and only because it
had been written down, and with a spice of jocularity, up she must
fuff in this ridiculous passion. It seemed to me there was a want
of penetration in the female sex, to make angels weep over the case
of the poor men.
We were side by side again at supper, and what a change was there!
She was like curdled milk to me; her face was like a wooden doll's;
I could have indifferently smitten her or grovelled at her feet,
but she gave me not the least occasion to do either. No sooner the
meal done than she betook herself to attend on Mrs. Gebbie, which I
think she had a little neglected heretofore. But she was to make
up for lost time, and in what remained of the passage was
extraordinary assiduous with the old lady, and on deck began to
make a great deal more than I thought wise of Captain Sang. Not
but what the Captain seemed a worthy, fatherly man; but I hated to
behold her in the least familiarity with anyone except myself.
Altogether, she was so quick to avoid me, and so constant to keep
herself surrounded with others, that I must watch a long while
before I could find my opportunity; and after it was found, I made
not much of it, as you are now to hear.
"I have no guess how I have offended," said I; "it should scarce be
beyond pardon, then. O, try if you can pardon me."
"I have no pardon to give," said she; and the words seemed to come
out of her throat like marbles. "I will be very much obliged for
all your friendships." And she made me an eighth part of a
curtsey.
But I had schooled myself beforehand to say more, and I was going
to say it too.
"There is one thing," said I. "If I have shocked your
particularity by the showing of that letter, it cannot touch Miss
Grant. She wrote not to you, but to a poor, common, ordinary lad,
who might have had more sense than show it. If you are to blame
me--"
"I will advise you to say no more about that girl, at all events!"
said Catriona. "It is her I will never look the road of, not if
she lay dying." She turned away from me, and suddenly back. "Will
you swear you will have no more to deal with her?" she cried.
"Indeed, and I will never be so unjust then," said I; "nor yet so
ungrateful."
And now it was I that turned away.
CHAPTER XXII--HELVOETSLUYS
The weather in the end considerably worsened; the wind sang in the
shrouds, the sea swelled higher, and the ship began to labour and
cry out among the billows. The song of the leadsman in the chains
was now scarce ceasing, for we thrid all the way among shoals.
About nine in the morning, in a burst of wintry sun between two
squalls of hail, I had my first look of Holland--a line of
windmills birling in the breeze. It was besides my first knowledge
of these daft-like contrivances, which gave me a near sense of
foreign travel and a new world and life. We came to an anchor
about half-past eleven, outside the harbour of Helvoetsluys, in a
place where the sea sometimes broke and the ship pitched
outrageously. You may be sure we were all on deck save Mrs.
Gebbie, some of us in cloaks, others mantled in the ship's
tarpaulins, all clinging on by ropes, and jesting the most like old
sailor-folk that we could imitate.
Presently a boat, that was backed like a partancrab, came gingerly
alongside, and the skipper of it hailed our master in the Dutch.