Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
That's all in this pocket. But I think there's more in the
other. Oh, mercy, there's nothing at all except this pair of woollen
gloves I had forgotten. Not another thing. And no wonder. There's a hole
in it the size of an egg. Now, if that isn't vexatious. I had some real
nice things in that pocket. A wee ammonite, I remember. Och, well, it
can't be helped. I'm afraid you've seen nothing very thrilling after
all."
"Oh yes, I have," said Yaverland.
"Indeed you've not. Yet certainly you're looking tickled to death. No
wonder Scotch comedians have such a success when they go among the
English if they're all as easily amused as you."
"Your pockets are like a boy's," he said. "In a way, you're awfully like
a boy."
"I wish I was," she answered bitterly. "But I'm a girl, and I've nothing
before me. No going to sea for me as there was for you." But they were
nearly at the bridge now, and she was changed to a gay child because
she loved this spot. She ran forward, crying, "Is it not beautiful?
Look, you didn't think there was this grand loch stretching away there!
And look how the firs stand at the water's edge. The day Rachael and I
came there was a clump of bell-heather just on that point of rock. A
bonny pinky red it was. And look how Bavelaw Avenue marches up the hill!
Is it not just fine?"
Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he
perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than
anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as
bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.
He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice,
and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety,
represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing
for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody
fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and
swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her
soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this
country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like
her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that
stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was
fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills
around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with
some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and
utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a
glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the
very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into
shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue
that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the
hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not
unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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