"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.
I said you should be free, and I must speak with you alone; little
I supposed 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 NO MORE HAVE A HUSBAND FORCED ON THAT YOUNG LADY, THAN WHAT I
WOULD HAVE A WIFE 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 I have 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.