"If you will be cross," said she, "I must be making pretty
manners at you, Davie. I will be very obedient, as I should be
when every stitch upon all there is of me belongs to you. But you
will not be very cross either, because now I have not anyone else."
This struck me hard, and I made haste, in a kind of penitence, to
blot out all the good effect of my last speech. In this direction
progress was more easy, being down hill; she led me forward,
smiling; at the sight of her, in the brightness of the fire and
with her pretty becks and looks, my heart was altogether melted.
We made our meal with infinite mirth and tenderness; and the two
seemed to be commingled into one, so that our very laughter sounded
like a kindness.
In the midst of which I awoke to better recollections, made a lame
word of excuse, and set myself boorishly to my studies. It was a
substantial, instructive book that I had bought, by the late Dr.
Heineccius, in which I was to do a great deal reading these next
few days, and often very glad that I had no one to question me of
what I read. Methought she bit her lip at me a little, and that
cut me. Indeed it left her wholly solitary, the more as she was
very little of a reader, and had never a book. But what was I to
do?
So the rest of the evening flowed by almost without speech.
I could have beat myself. I could not lie in my bed that night for
rage and repentance, but walked to and fro on my bare feet till I
was nearly perished, for the chimney was gone out and the frost
keen. The thought of her in the next room, the thought that she
might even hear me as I walked, the remembrance of my churlishness
and that I must continue to practise the same ungrateful course or
be dishonoured, put me beside my reason. I stood like a man
between Scylla and Charybdis: WHAT MUST SHE THINK OF ME? was my
one thought that softened me continually into weakness. WHAT IS TO
BECOME OF US? the other which steeled me again to resolution. This
was my first night of wakefulness and divided counsels, of which I
was now to pass many, pacing like a madman, sometimes weeping like
a childish boy, sometimes praying (I fain would hope) like a
Christian.
But prayer is not very difficult, and the hitch comes in practice.
In her presence, and above all if I allowed any beginning of
familiarity, I found I had very little command of what should
follow. But to sit all day in the same room with her, and feign to
be engaged upon Heineccius, surpassed my strength. So that I fell
instead upon the expedient of absenting myself so much as I was
able; taking out classes and sitting there regularly, often with
small attention, the test of which I found the other day in a note-
book of that period, where I had left off to follow an edifying
lecture and actually scribbled in my book some very ill verses,
though the Latinity is rather better than I thought that I could
ever have compassed. The evil of this course was unhappily near as
great as its advantage. I had the less time of trial, but I
believe, while the time lasted, I was tried the more extremely.
For she being so much left to solitude, she came to greet my return
with an increasing fervour that came nigh to overmaster me. These
friendly offers I must barbarously cast back; and my rejection
sometimes wounded her so cruelly that I must unbend and seek to
make it up to her in kindness. So that our time passed in ups and
downs, tiffs and disappointments, upon the which I could almost say
(if it may be said with reverence) that I was crucified.
The base of my trouble was Catriona's extraordinary innocence, at
which I was not so much surprised as filled with pity and
admiration. She seemed to have no thought of our position, no
sense of my struggles; welcomed any mark of my weakness with
responsive joy; and when I was drove again to my retrenchments, did
not always dissemble her chagrin.