“Miss Jean, Miss Jean, I would rather see no more ferlies. I take you out and spend your time and give a great deal of trouble when all I want is to learn my work, and put to my hand.”
“Perhaps at the end--but to learn first,” said Kirsteen pausing with a deep passing colour, the colour of pride--“my trade.”
“Your trade! What would your father say, good gentleman, if he heard you say such words?--Or your mother, poor lady, that has so little health?”
“I’ve left both father and mother,” cried Kirsteen, “but not to come upon others--and ye cannot tear me from my purpose whatever may be said. There’s reasons why I will never go back to Drumcarro, till--I will tell you some day, I cannot now. But I’m here to work and not to be a cumberer of the ground. I want to learn to be a mantua-maker to support myself and help--other folk. Miss Jean, if you will not have me I’ll have to ask some other person. I cannot be idle any more.”
“Miss Kirsteen, there will be grand connections seeking you out and angry at me that let you have your will--and I will lose customers and make unfriends.”
“I have no grand connections,” said Kirsteen. “You see for yourself nobody has troubled their heads about me. I’m just as lone as the sparrow on the housetop. I’ve left my own folk and Marg’ret, and I have nobody but you in the world. Why should ye stop me? When my heart’s set upon it nobody can stop me,” Kirsteen cried, with a flash of her eyes like the flash in her father’s when his blood was up.
“Lord keep us! I can weel believe that to look at you,” said Miss Jean.
It followed as a matter of course that Kirsteen very soon accomplished her purpose. She took her place in the workroom to the great surprise and partial confusion of the workwomen who did not at first know how to teach the lady who had come among them, her qualities and position much magnified by Miss Jean. Some of them were disposed to be impertinent, some scornful, some to toady the young new comer, who, whatever she might be in herself, was undoubtedly Miss Brown’s favourite, and able to procure favours and exemptions for those who were her friends. The standing feud between Scotch and English, and the anger and jealousy with which the richer nation regarded the invasions of the poorer, had not yet fallen into the mild dislike which is all that can be said to subsist nowadays in the way of hostile feeling between the two countries. Fierce jests about the Scotch who came to make their fortune off their richer neighbours, about their clannishness and their canniness, and their poverty and their pride, and still lower and coarser jibes about other supposed peculiarities were then still as current as the popular crows of triumph over the French and other similar antipathies; and Kirsteen’s advent was attended by many comments of the kind from the sharp young Londoners to whom her accent and her slower speech, and her red hair and her ladyhood were all objects of derision.