Heather and Snow

The beginning of the winter had been open and warm, and very little snow had fallen. This was much in Phemy’s favour, and by the new year she was quite well. But, notwithstandin...

Between Corbyknowe and the Horn, on whose sides David Barclay had a right of pasturage for the few sheep to which Steenie and Snootie were the shepherds, was a small glen, throu...

Phemy went seldom to the castle, but the young laird and she met pretty often: there was solitude enough in that country for an army of lovers. Once or twice Gordon, at Phemy’s...

Steenie seemed always to experience a strange sort of terror while waiting for anyone to come out of the weem, into which he never entered; and it was his repugnance to the plac...

The region was like a waste place in the troubled land of dreams--a spot so waste that the dreamer struggles to rouse himself from his dream, finding it too dreary to dream on....

One day there was a market at a town some eight or nine miles off, and thither, for lack of anything else to do, Francis had gone to display himself and his pony, which he was r...

It was now midsummer, and Francis Gordon was well, though thin and looking rather delicate. Kirsty and he had walked together to the top of the Horn, and there sat, in the heart...

He had eaten nothing since the morning, and felt like one in a calm ethereal dream as he walked home to Weelset in the soft dusk of an evening that would never be night, but die...

It was the last week in November when the doctor came himself to take Phemy home to her father. The day was bright and blue, with a thin carpet of snow on the ground, beneath wh...

They held a long consultation that night as to what they must do. Plainly the first and most important thing was to rid Francis of the delusion that he had disgraced himself in...

‘They tak to me, the craturs! It was themsels learnt me to ride!’ answered Kirsty, as she took a riding whip from the wall, and went out of the kitchen.

She sat for some time at the foot of the hill, motionless as itself, save for her hands. The sun shone on in silence, and the blue butterflies which haunted the little bush of b...

During the first winter which Francis spent at college, his mother was in England, and remained there all the next summer and winter. When at last she came home, she was even le...

Poor little Phemy was in bed, and had cried herself asleep. Kirsty was more tired than she had ever been before. She went to bed at once, but, for a long time, not to sleep.

In a minute or so the door opened, and Steenie coming one step into the kitchen, stood and stared with such a face of concern that Kirsty was obliged to speak. I do not believe...

Upon neighbouring stones, earth-fast, like two islands of an archipelago, in an ocean of heather, sat a boy and a girl, the girl knitting, or, as she would have called it, _weav...

The sleeping youth began at length to stir: it was more than an hour before he quite woke up. Then all at once he started to his feet with his eyes wide open, putting back from...

My narrative must now go a little way back in time, and a long way from the region of heather and snow, to India in the year of the mutiny. The regiment in which Francis Gordon...

It was a long, low building, with a narrow paving in front from end to end, of stones cast up by the plough. Its walls, but one story high, rough-cast and white-washed, shone di...

Through respect for the memory of his father, he had just received from the East India Company a commission in his father’s regiment; and having in about six weeks to pass the s...

It was again midsummer, and just a year since they parted on the Horn, when Francis appeared at Corbyknowe, and found Kirsty in the kitchen. She received him as if nothing had e...

The summer following Gordon’s first session at college, castle Weelset and Corbyknowe saw nothing of him. No one missed him much, and but for his father’s sake no one would have...

Kirsty woke suddenly out of a deep, dreamless sleep. A white face was bending over her--Steenie’s--whiter than ever Kirsty had seen it. He was panting, and his eyes were huge. S...

‘He cam to me o’ the Hornside, whaur I sat weyvin my stockin, ower the bog on ’s powny--a richt bonny thing, and clever--a new ane he’s gotten frae ’s mither. And it’s no the fi...

Francie’s anger had died down a good deal by the time he reached home. He was, as his father’s friend had just said, by no means a bad sort of fellow, only he was full of himsel...

She sat at the communion-table in her own parish-church, with many others, none of whom she knew. A man with piercing eyes went along the table, examining the faces of all to se...

Two hours or so earlier, David, perceiving some Assuagement in the storm, and his host having offered to go at once to the doctor and the schoolmaster, had taken his mare, and m...

One morning, Kirsty sitting beside him, Francis started to his elbow as if to get up, then seeing her, lay down again with his eyes fixed upon her. She glanced at him now and th...

When David came in to supper, he said nothing, expecting Kirsty every moment to appear. Marion was the first to ask what had become of her. David answered she had left him in th...

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 th...

When Mrs. Gordon came to herself, she thought to behave as if nothing had happened, and rang the bell to order her carriage. The maid informed her that the coachman had driven a...

Things went on in the same way for four years more, the only visible change being that Kirsty seldomer went about bare-footed. She was now between two and three and twenty. Her...

‘Lassie,’ said David, ‘you and me and yer mither, we hae naething left but be better bairns, and gang the fester to the bonny man!--Whaur’s what’s left o’ the laddie, Kirsty?’

Francis lay for some time, thinking 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...

Things were going from bad to worse at castle Weelset. Whether Mrs. Gordon had disgusted her friends or got tired of them, I do not know, but she remained at home, seldom had a...

David Barclay got up the moment Kirsty was out of the room, dressed himself in haste, swallowed a glass of whisky, saddled the gray mare, gave her a feed of oats, which she ate...

When he arrived, there was no light in the house: all had gone to rest. Unwilling to disturb the father and mother, he rode quietly to the back of the house, where Kirsty’s room...

‘She rides to please her horse now, but she’ll have him as quiet as yours before long,’ rejoined her son, both a little angry and a little amused at her being called a hoiden wh...

There was at Corbyknowe a young, well-bred horse which David had himself reared: Kirsty had been teaching him to carry a lady. For her hostess in Edinburgh, discovering that she...

In the meantime the mother of the family, not herself at the moment in danger, began to suffer the most. It dismayed her to find, when she came down, that Steenie had, as she th...

There was no difference of feeling betwixt the father and mother in regard to this devotion of Kirsty’s very being to her Steenie; but the mother in especial was content with it...

It was quite dark, and round her swept as it were a whirlpool of snow. The swift flakes struck at her eyes and ears like a swarm of vicious flies. In such a wind, the blows of t...

One night in the month of January, when the snow was falling thick, but the air, because of the cloud-blankets overhead, was not piercing, Kirsty went out to the workshop to tel...

Mrs. Gordon manages the house and her reward is to sit at the head of the table. But she pays Kirsty infinitely more for the privilege than any but Kirsty can know, in the form...

‘Weel, it’s no a God’s-innocent but a deil’s-gowk I’ll hae to luik efter noo, and I maun come hame ilka possible chance to get hertenin frae you and my father, or I winna be abl...