Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago — John Shaqi
Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years AgoOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
General
Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Domestic fiction; Scotland -- Fiction
came again and again, with an interest in the patient which no one had
ever shown before. “If you could take her away into the sunshine--to a
brighter place, where she would see new faces and new scenes.” “Oh, but
how could I do that,” cried Anne, “when I have no place to take her to,
and my father would not let me if I had?” “Oh, Miss Anne, let me speak
to your father,” the young man pleaded. “You shall have a pleasant house
to bring your mother to, and love and service at her command, if you
will but listen to me.” Anne listened, nothing loth, and the young
doctor, with a confidence born of ignorance, afterwards asked for an
interview with Drumcarro. What happened was never known; the doctor
departed in great haste, pale with wrath, Mr. Douglas’s voice sounding
loud as the burn when in spate after him as he strode from the door; and
Anne’s cheeks were white and her eyes red for a week after. But at the
end of that week Anne disappeared and was no more seen. Marg’ret, who
had risen very early in the middle of the wintry dark, to see to some
great washing or other household work, found, as was whispered through
the house, a candle nickering down in the socket upon the hall-table,
and the house-door open. To blow out the last flickering flame, lest it
should die in the socket and so foreshadow the extinction of the race,
was Marg’ret’s first alarmed precaution; and then she shut the open
door, but whether she saw or heard anything more nobody ever knew. A
faint picture of this scene, the rising and falling of the dying light,
the cold wind blowing in from the door, the wild darkness of the winter
morning, with its belated stars in a frosty sky looking in, remained in
the imagination of the family surrounding the name of Anne, which from
that day was never pronounced in the house. Where she went or what
became of her was supposed by the young ones to be absolutely unknown.
But it is to be hoped that even Drumcarro, savage as he was, ascertained
the fate of his daughter even while he cursed her. It came to be
understood afterwards that she had married her doctor and was happy; but
that not for a long time, nor to the sisters thus taught by the
tremendous force of example what a dreadful thing it was to look at any
upstart doctor or minister or insignificant person without a pedigree or
pretensions like their own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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