Heather and Snow | Page 4

Kirsty sure to come back to him,
but half wishing she would not. He rose at length to see whether she
was on the way, but no one was in sight. At once the place was aghast
with loneliness, as it must indeed have looked to anyone not at peace
with solitude. Having sent several ringing shouts, but in vain, after
Kirsty, he turned, and, in the descending light of an autumn afternoon,
set out on the rather long walk to his home, which was the wearier that
he had nothing pleasant at hand to think about.
Passing the farm where Kirsty lived, about two miles brought him to an

ancient turreted house on the top of a low hill, where his mother sat
expecting him, ready to tyrannize over him as usual, and none the less
ready that he was going to leave her within a week.
'Where have you been all day, Frank?' she said.
'I have been a long walk,' he answered.
'You've been to Corbyknowe!' she returned. 'I know it by your eyes. I
know by the very colour of them you're going to deceive me. Now don't
tell me you haven't been there. I shall not believe you.'
'I haven't been near the place, mother,' said Francis; but as he said it his
face glowed with a heat that did not come from the fire. He was not
naturally an untruthful boy, and what he said was correct, for he had
passed the house half a mile away; but his words gave, and were
intended to give the impression that he had not been that day with any
of the people of Corbyknowe. His mother objected to his visiting the
farmer, but he knew instinctively she would have objected yet more to
his spending half the day with Kirsty, whom she never mentioned, and
of whom she scarcely recognized the existence. Little as she loved her
son, Mrs. Gordon would have scorned to suspect him of preferring the
society of such a girl to her own. In truth, however, there were very few
of his acquaintance whose company Francis would not have chosen
rather than his mother's--except indeed he was ill, when she was
generally very good to him.
'Well, this once I shall believe you,' she answered, 'and I am glad to be
able. It is a painful thought to me, Frank, that son of mine should feel
the smallest attraction to low company. I have told you twenty times
that the man was nothing but a private in your father's regiment.'
'He was my father's friend!' answered the boy.
'He tells you so, I do not doubt,' returned his mother. 'He was not likely
to leave that mouldy old stone unturned.'
The mother sat, and the son stood before her, in a drawing-room whose

furniture of a hundred years old must once have looked very modern
and new-fangled under windows so narrow and high up, and within
walls so thick: without a fire it was always cold. The carpet was very
dingy, and the mirrors were much spotted; but the poverty of the room
was the respectable poverty of age: old furniture had become
fashionable just in time to save it from being metamorphosed by its
mistress into a show of gay meanness and costly ugliness. A good fire
of mingled peat and coal burned bright in the barrel-fronted steel grate,
and shone in the brass fender. The face of the boy continued to look
very red in the glow, but still its colour came more from within than
from without: he cherished the memory of his father, and did not love
his mother more than a little.
'He has told me a great deal more about my father than ever you did,
mother!' he answered.
'Well he may have!' she returned. 'Your father was not a young man
when I married him, and they had been together through I don't know
how many campaigns.'
'And you say he was not my father's friend!'
'Not his _friend_, Frank; his servant--what do they call them?--his
orderly, I dare say; certainly not his friend.'
'Any man may be another man's friend!'
'Not in the way you mean; not that his son should go and see him every
other day! A dog may be a man's good friend, and so was sergeant
Barclay your father's--very good friend that way, I don't doubt!'
'You said a moment ago he was but a private, and now you call him
sergeant Barclay!'
'Well, where's the difference?'
'To be made sergeant shows that he was not a common man. If he had
been, he would not have been set over others!'

'Of course he was then, and is now, a very respectable man. If he were
not I should never have let you