A RACE WITH DEATH
Without a word, but with disappointment in her heart that Steenie had
not answered them, Kirsty obeyed. But she went round through the
rickyard that she might have a moment’s thought with herself. Not a
hand was laid upon her out of the darkness, no faintest sound came to
her ears through the silently falling snow. But as she took her way
between two ricks, where was just room for her to pass, she felt--felt,
however, without the slightest sense of _material_ opposition, that she
could not go through. Endeavouring afterward to describe what rather
she was aware of than felt, she said the nearest she could come to it,
but it was not right, was to say that she seemed to encounter the ghost
of solidity. Certainly nothing seemed to touch her. She made no attempt
to overcome the resistance, and the moment she turned, knew herself
free to move in any other direction. But as the house was still her
goal, she tried another space between two of the ricks. There again she
found she could not pass. Making a third essay in yet another interval,
she was once more stopped in like fashion. With that came the
conviction that she was wanted elsewhere, and with it the thought of
the Horn. She turned her face from the house and made straight for the
hill, only that she took, as she had generally done with Steenie, the
easier and rather longer way.
The notion of the presence of Steenie, which had been with her all the
time, naturally suggested his house as the spot where she was wanted,
and thither she sped. But the moment she reached, almost before she
entered it, she felt as if it were utterly empty--as if it had not in
it even air enough to give her breath.
When a place seems to repel us, when we feel as if we could not live
there, what if the cause be that there are no souls in it making it
comfortable to the spiritual sense? That the _knowledge_ of such
presence would make most people uneasy, is no argument against the
fancy: truth itself, its intrinsic, essential, necessary trueness
unrecognised, must be repellent.
Kirsty did not remain a moment in Steenie’s house, but set her face to
go home by the shorter and rougher path leading over the earth-house
and across the little burn.
The night continued dark, with an occasional thinning of the obscurity
when some high current blew the clouds aside from a little nest of
stars. Just as Kirsty reached the descent to the burn, the snow ceased,
the clouds parted, and a faint worn moon appeared. She looked just like
a little old lady too thin and too tired to go on living more than a
night longer. But her waning life was yet potent over Kirsty, and her
strange, wasted beauty, dying to rise again, made her glad as she went
down the hill through the snow-crowned heather. The oppression which
came on her in Steenie’s house was gone entirely, and in the face of
the pale ancient moon her heart grew so light that she broke into a
silly song which, while they were yet children, she made for Steenie,
who was never tired of listening to it:
Willy, wally, woo!
Hame comes the coo--
Hummle, bummle, moo!--
Widin ower the Bogie,
Hame to fill the cogie!
Bonny hummle coo,
Wi’ her baggy fu’
O’ butter and o’ milk,
And cream as saft as silk,
A’ gethered frae the gerse
Intil her tassly purse,
To be oors, no hers,
Gudewillie, hummle coo!
Willy, wally, woo!
Moo, Hummlie, moo!
Singing this childish rime, dear to the slow-waking soul of Steenie,
she had come almost to the bottom of the hill, was just stepping over
the top of the weem, when something like a groan startled her. She
stopped and sent a keen-searching glance around. It came again, muffled
and dull. It must be from the earth-house! Somebody was there! It could
not be Steenie, for why should Steenie groan? But he might be calling
her, and the weem changing the character of the sound! Anyhow she must
be wanted! She dived in.
She could scarcely light the candle, for the trembling of her hand and
the beating of her heart. Slowly the flame grew, and the glimmer began
to spread. She stood speechless, and stared. Out of the darkness at her
feet grew the form, as it seemed, of Steenie, lying on his face, just
as when she found him there a year before. She dropped on her knees
beside him.
He was alive at least, for he moved! ‘Of coorse,’ thought Kirsty, ‘he’s
alive: he never was onything else!’ His face was turned from her, and
his arm was under it. The arm next her lay out on the stones, and she
took the ice-cold hand in hers: it was not Steenie’s! She took the
candle, and leaned across to see the face. God in heaven! there was the
mark of her whip: it was Francie Gordon! She tried to rouse him. She
could not; he was cold as ice, and seemed all but dead. But for the
groan she had heard she would have been sure he was dead. She blew out
the light, and, swift as her hands could move, took garment after
garment off, and laid it, warm from her live heart, over and under
him--all save one which she thought too thin to do him any good. Last
of all, she drew her stockings over his hands and arms, and, leaving
her shoes where Steenie’s had lain, darted out of the cave. At the
mouth of it she rose erect like one escaped from the tomb, and sped
in dim-gleaming whiteness over the snow, scarce to have been seen
against it. The moon was but a shred--a withered autumn leaf low fallen
toward the dim plain of the west. As she ran she would have seemed to
one of Steenie’s angels, out that night on the hill, a newly disembodied
ghost fleeing home. Swift and shadowless as the thought of her own brave
heart, she ran. Her sense of power and speed was glorious. She felt--not
thought--herself a human goddess, the daughter of the Eternal. Up
height and down hollow she flew, running her race with death, not an
open eye, save the eyes of her father and mother, within miles of her
in a world of sleep and snow and night. Nor did she slacken her pace as
she drew near the house, she only ran more softly. At last she threw
the door to the wall, and shot up the steep stair to her room, calling
her mother as she went.