Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years AgoOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
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Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Domestic fiction; Scotland -- Fiction
“Walk! it’s just hundreds of miles, and takes a week in the coach,”
cried Marg’ret. “Ye cannot walk, no to say ye would want money even
then, for I’m no supposing that you mean to beg your bread from door to
door. Without money ye canna go a step. I’ll not permit it. Have ye
anything of your ain?”
“I have the gold guinea my grandmother left me in her will; but I have
no more. How should I have any more?”
Marg’ret stood for a moment undecided, while Kirsteen waited a little
eager, a little expectant like a child. It did not occur to her to
deprecate help from Marg’ret as a more high-minded heroine might have
done. Marg’ret was a little Providence at Drumcarro. She had store of
everything that the children wanted, and had been their resource all
their lives. And Kirsteen had not realized the difference between money
and other indispensable things. She waited like a child, following
Marg’ret with her eyes until some expedient should be thought of. She
breathed a sigh of suspense yet expectation when Marg’ret hurried away
to her bedroom at the back of the house, seating herself again in the
big chair to wait, not impatiently, for the solution of the problem.
Marg’ret came back after a few minutes with a work-box in her hand. All
kinds of things had come out of that box in the experience of the
children at Drumcarro, things good and evil, little packets of powders
for childish maladies, sweeties to be taken after the nauseous mouthful,
needles and thimbles and scissors when these needful implements had all
been lost, as happened periodically, even a ribbon or a pair of gloves
in times of direst need. She began to turn over the well-remembered
contents--old buttons, hooks and eyes from old gowns long departed,
Marg’ret’s two brooches that formed all her jewellery wrapped up in
separate pieces of paper. “My sister Jean,” said Marg’ret with her head
bent over the box, “has often bidden me to come and see her in London
town. You ken why I couldna go. I couldna thole to leave you that are
leavin’ me without a tear. And she sent me what would do for my
chairges. It was never touched by me. It took me a great deal of trouble
to get Scotch notes for it, and here it is at the bottom of my box with
many an auld relic on the top of it--just a’ I’ll have of ye when ye’ve
got your will,” said Marg’ret, a tear dropping among the miscellaneous
articles in the box. She took from the bottom a little parcel in an old
letter, folded square and written closely to the very edge of the seal.
“Hae! take it! and ye maun just do with it what pleasures yoursel’,”
Marg’ret cried.
CHAPTER XVI.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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