I knew where we were now; yet I would not lie to her either. “I gave them all without afterthought,” I said, “as I supposed that you would read them. I see no harm in any.”
“I will be differently made,” said she. “I thank God I am differently made. It was not a fit letter to be shown me. It was not fit to be written.”
“I think you are speaking of your own friend, Barbara Grant?” said I.
“There will not be anything as bitter as to lose a fancied friend,” said she, quoting my own expression.
“I think it is sometimes the friendship that was fancied!” I cried. “What kind of justice do you call this, to blame me for some words that a tomfool of a madcap lass has written down upon a piece of paper? You know yourself with what respect I have behaved - and would do always.”
“Yet you would show me that same letter!” says she. “I want no such friends. I can be doing very well, Mr. Balfour, without her - or you.”
“This is your fine gratitude!” says I.
“I am very much obliged to you,” said she. “I will be asking you to take away your - letters.” She seemed to choke upon the word, so that it sounded like an oath.
“You shall never ask twice,” said I; picked up that bundle, walked a little way forward and cast them as far as possible into the sea. 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. Thence Captain Sang turned, very troubled-like, to Catriona; and the rest of us crowding about, the nature of the difficulty was made plain to all. The Rose was bound to the port of Rotterdam, whither the other passengers were in a great impatience to arrive, in view of a conveyance due to leave that very evening in the direction of the Upper Germany. This, with the present half-gale of wind, the captain (if no time were lost) declared himself still capable to save. Now James More had trysted in Helvoet with his daughter, and the captain had engaged to call before the port and place her (according to the custom) in a shore boat. There was the boat, to be sure, and here was Catriona ready: but both our master and the patroon of the boat scrupled at the risk, and the first was in no humour to delay.
“Your father,” said he, “would be gey an little pleased if we was to break a leg to ye, Miss Drummond, let- a-be drowning of you. Take my way of it,” says he, “and come on-by with the rest of us here to Rotterdam. Ye can get a passage down the Maes in a sailing scoot as far as to the Brill, and thence on again, by a place in a rattel- waggon, back to Helvoet.”
But Catriona would hear of no change. She looked white-like as she beheld the bursting of the sprays, the green seas that sometimes poured upon the fore-castle, and the perpetual bounding and swooping of the boat among the billows; but she stood firmly by her father’s orders. “My father, James More, will have arranged it so,” was her first word and her last. I thought it very idle and indeed wanton in the girl to be so literal and stand opposite to so much kind advice; but the fact is she had a very good reason, if she would have told us. Sailing scoots and rattel-waggons are excellent things; only the use of them must first be paid for, and all she was possessed of in the world was just two shillings and a penny halfpenny sterling. So it fell out that captain and passengers, not knowing of her destitution - and she being too proud to tell them - spoke in vain.
“But you ken nae French and nae Dutch neither,” said one.
“It is very true,” says she, “but since the year ‘46 there are so many of the honest Scotch abroad that I will be doing very well. I thank you.”
There was a pretty country simplicity in this that made some laugh, others looked the more sorry, and Mr. Gebbie fall outright in a passion. I believe he knew it was his duty (his wife having accepted charge of the girl) to have gone ashore with her and seen her safe: nothing would have induced him to have done so, since it must have involved the lose of his conveyance; and I think he made it up to his conscience by the loudness of his voice. At least he broke out upon Captain Sang, raging and saying the thing was a disgrace; that it was mere death to try to leave the ship, and at any event we could not cast down an innocent maid in a boatful of nasty Holland fishers, and leave her to her fate. I was thinking something of the same; took the mate upon one side, arranged with him to send on my chests by track-scoot to an address I had in Leyden, and stood up and signalled to the fishers.
“I will go ashore with the young lady, Captain Sang,” said I. “It is all one what way I go to Leyden;” and leaped at the same time into the boat, which I managed not so elegantly but what I fell with two of the fishers in the bilge.
From the boat the business appeared yet more precarious than from the ship, she stood so high over us, swung down so swift, and menaced us so perpetually with her plunging and passaging upon the anchor cable. I began to think I had made a fool’s bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona should be got on board to me,
