Thus life went on for months over Loch Diarmid. The minister’s dreadful
end had fallen into gentle forgetfulness. Another minister was now the
referee and head and butt of the parish, discussed in the smithy,
criticised ‘at the doors.’ And he and his wife had been asked to dinner
at the neighbouring country-houses, but not with so much success as had
attended the _début_ of Isabel--and had called upon Mrs. Lothian, ‘the
last minister’s widow,’ as the present female incumbent described her,
and had not known very well what to make of the girl in her close cap,
smiling over her baby--with her strange surroundings, and curious
nondescript position. Mrs. Russell, the new minister’s wife, asked with
a good deal of perplexity, ‘Is she a lady? I know she is a great friend
of Miss Catherine. But everybody knows Miss Catherine is very odd. Dined
at the Marquis’s in London, and went to the opera with Lady Mary! I can
scarcely believe that. How could Lady Mary, an unmarried girl, take
anybody to the opera? She does everything for that child herself--no
nurse, nor anything like a nurse; indeed, I am not sure there was any
servant at all. The woman I saw in the kitchen was her stepmother, I
hear. Naturally it is not very pleasant for us to have the widow of Mr.
Russell’s predecessor in such a position. Of course I would like to be
kind to her if I could, but---- And then the way the people speak of
her! For one that calls her Mrs. Lothian, there are half a dozen that
say just Isabel, or Isabel at the Glebe, or the Captain’s Isabel, or
some country name like that. I can tell you it’s very embarrassing for
me.’
This little statement, which was made to Mrs. Campbell of Maryburgh, the
nearest clergywoman of the district, and to Mrs. Diarmid of Ardgartan,
and even to the doctor’s wife in the parish, got into circulation
through the malice or amusement of these ladies, and roused a little
flutter of indignation on Loch Diarmid, where Isabel’s position was so
fully understood, and where she was known beyond all controversy to be a
lady born--whereas of Mrs. Russell herself nobody knew anything. But it
did not disturb the quiet at the Glebe, where Baby Margaret reigned
supreme, shutting out all the outer world with her small presence, her
quick coming smiles, the gradual ‘notice’ she took of the external world
to which she had come, her first recognition of the devoted vassals
about her. Her first little pearly tooth was a greater event than the
Reform Bill, which happened somewhere about that time; and it may well
be supposed that the first time the small princess visibly indicated her
knowledge and preference of her mother was more to Isabel than if the
Queen had called upon her, much less Lady Mary. The cottage was all
absorbed and wrapt up in the child for that first year of her existence.
On the whole, perhaps, it is no great testimony to the female
intelligence, that it can thus permit itself to be swallowed up in
adoring contemplation and tendance of a helpless, speechless infant,
with no intellectual existence at all.
‘I cannot understand you women,’ said the Dominie; ‘if she keeps content
it is more than I can fathom. No--if her heart had been dead like the
hearts of some--but her heart has never been right awakened; and if
there was any word, say of that English lad----’
‘Lord, preserve us!’ cried Miss Catherine, holding up her hands in
dismay; ‘you don’t mean to say, Mr. Galbraith, that we’re threatened
with him back.’
‘I say only what I hear,’ said the Dominie. ‘They were saying in John
Macwhirter’s last night that he had been seen looking at the beasts on
Smeaton’s farm; and he should be well known at Smeaton’s farm, if
anywhere. There’s a fine breed of cattle to be roupit.’
‘Oh, yes, I know all about that,’ said Miss Catherine, who had
endeavoured in vain to secure some of the cattle in question. ‘Archie
Smeaton’s a worldly-minded body, and ay hankering after more siller. But
to bring that lad back--the only man I have any fear of in the world!
No, no, it is you that makes me doubt poor Isabel. With her bairn in her
arms there’s no man in the world she would ever look at; we need not
fear that.’
The Dominie shook his head. ‘It may be nature,’ he said; ‘you should
know better than me--but at three-and-twenty, to give up all your life
to an infant, and never seek more in this world, is what I cannot
comprehend. If her heart was crushed and dead it might be so, but that
is not the case. I am not saying you are right or you are wrong, but
it’s very strange to me.’
‘And for one thing, she must not know,’ said Miss Catherine, with an
anxious look in her face; ‘neither you nor me will say a word to let her
know?’
The Dominie turned away with a grim smile. ‘If that is all your
certainty,’ he said, ‘there’s no such great difference between us.’ They
exchanged a few more anxious words, standing together half-way up the
ascent, and then Miss Catherine continued her walk towards the Glebe.
‘You have heard of something that vexes you,’ said Isabel, when, after
all due court had been paid to the little princess, Miss Catherine sat
wearily down and sank into a kind of abstraction; and then the old lady
roused herself up with a guilty start.
‘Me!--no,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘what could I have that would vex
me?--except just one thing, Isabel, my dear, if you will promise not to
be frightened. There’s measles about. Jenny Spence’s second
youngest--the one that was the baby----’
‘But he’s better,’ said Isabel, breathless. ‘It was last month he was
ill.’
‘You can never say when they’re better,’ said Miss Catherine, solemnly;
‘and I heard they had it up at the toll on the Kilcranion road; and if
one of the Chalmers’ bairns has not the whooping-cough, my ears are not
to be trusted. But you must not be frightened. I was thinking if we were
to take a week or two at the Bridge of Allan----’
‘Oh, my darling!’ Isabel was saying, with her lips on her baby’s cheek,
whom she had seized out of its cradle in her panic. Miss Catherine’s
guilty heart smote her, but she was not a woman to be diverted by a mere
compunction from pursuing what she felt to be the safe way.
‘My dear, you promised me not to take any panic,’ she said; ‘there is no
occasion. You take your walks on the braes, and not through the village;
and Margaret has never been so far all her days as the toll-gate. But
just to keep you easy, and her clear of all danger, I think you and me,
Isabel, might go cannily away to the Bridge of Allan to-morrow. It would
do us both good.’
‘You would not say that, if you thought there was no danger,’ said
Isabel. ‘Oh, what would I do if anything happened to my darling? Should
I take her away to-night?’
‘There is no such hurry as that,’ said Miss Catherine; and then turned
to confront Jean Campbell, whom it was more difficult to blind, and with
whom it had been impossible to have any private communication. ‘We are
going off to the Bridge of Allan,’ she said, with a faint conciliatory
smile; ‘we are just making up our minds all at once. A change would do
Isabel good; and as for the child, babies are always the better for a
change of air.’
‘And there’s measles in the village, and whooping-cough,’ said Isabel,
pressing her baby to her heart.
‘No such thing,’ said Jean. ‘Measles!--Jenny Spence’s bairns had them,
but they’re all better a month ago; and there’s nae kink-cough I’ve
heard of atween this and Maryburgh. Na, if it’s for your pleasure,
that’s different. But eh! dinna tempt Providence by getting into a panic
when there’s nae trouble near.’
‘I think you’re wrong about the kink-cough,’ said Miss Catherine.
‘There’s one of Peter Chalmers’s boys----’
‘He’s had that cough as long as I can mind,’ said Jean. ‘Na, na, my
bonnie woman, dinna you be feared; there’s naething catching in the
parish but I’m sure to hear of it. Put down the bairn, and let her
sleep.’
‘Well, I am of a different opinion,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘and I’m
wearying for a change. I’ll take my maid, Marion, who is very
experienced about bairns, and we’ll start in the morning to-morrow with
the boat. I cannot stay, Isabel, my dear. Keep up a good heart, and the
fine air yonder will make you look like two roses, the baby and you.----
Lord preserve us, woman!’ said Miss Catherine, turning round upon Jean,
to whom she had made a sign to follow her, as soon as they were outside
the door, ‘could ye not see I had a reason? and was making you signs
enough to rouse a whole parish--if she had not been so taken up with the
bairn.’
‘Me!--how could I tell?’ said Jean, surprised; ‘and I couldna find it in
my heart to put her in such trouble, and it no true.’
‘Nonsense about putting her in trouble!’ said Miss Catherine,
energetically. ‘Perhaps you would like better to wring her heart, and
bring in another man to her, and turn all her peace to distress once
more.’
‘What man?’ asked Jean, seizing with instant penetration the point at
question.
‘Yon English lad!’
‘Eh, me!’ said Jean Campbell, ‘blessings on you for a quick thought, and
a quicker act. I heard he had been seen over the hill. I’ll swear it’s
the kink-cough!’ she added, under her breath; and so the bargain was
made.
It was the first night of pain Isabel had spent since her baby was born.
It seemed to her as if she ought to get up and fly away with her through
the darkness, to escape from so terrible a danger; and she went back a
hundred times to the cradle after the little Margaret had been disposed
of for the night to listen to her breathing, and look at her little
rosebud face, and touch her tiny fingers, and make sure she had not
caught anything.
‘The bairn’s as well as ever she was in her life,’ Jean said at last,
with a little impatience, as this process went on.
‘But you said there was whooping-cough about,’ said Isabel.
‘I said it might be,’ said Jean, ‘for anything I ken; but, eh, why do
you think our bairn should get it, and no other bairn a’ the country
round?’
‘Because she is all I have in the world,’ said Isabel, with a sudden
fall out of the soft content in which her life had been wrapped.
Jean did not know of the revolution which that moment made. She saw the
brown eyes open wide and flash in the soft, domestic light, but had no
insight to perceive how Isabel had suddenly stumbled, as it were,
against the limits of her lot, and woke up to see that her happiness was
as a flower on the edge of a precipice, that all her life was
concentrated in this one blossom, against which nature itself, and the
winds and the rains, and the summer heats and the autumn chill, were
ready to rise up. Most mothers have gone through that same sudden gleam
of imagination, and beheld Heaven and earth contending against the child
in whose frail ship of life all their venture of happiness was embarked.
Isabel saw herself standing as on the brink of a more dreadful
destruction than she had ever dreamt of, and her very soul failed within
her. It could not last. Before any new influence came in, the Dominie’s
words had proved themselves, though in a sense different from anything
he understood.
‘Oh, if harm were to come to her!’ cried Isabel, with a sudden, low,
stifled cry.
‘Weel, weel,’ said Jean, in her calm voice, ‘that’s what you’re ay
thinking as soon as ye hae weans. What if everything should gang against
ye? what if trouble should come in a moment, and leave a’ the rest, and
strike yours? Ye mustna gie way to that, Isabel. What if the lift were
to fa’ and smoor the laverocks? No, no, my bonnie woman! It’s no you nor
me that can guard the bairn from whatever’s coming, but just God--if
it’s His will.’
‘And if it were not His will?’ said Isabel, driven from despair to
despair.
‘Then ye would have to submit,’ said Jean, didactic and almost solemn,
‘as you’ve done before. There’s nae striving against God.’
And then silence fell upon the little grey room, in which the fire
flickered cheerfully, and the child slept, and Isabel’s heart beat. It
had been beating so quietly up to this moment, and now what wild throbs
it gave against her breast! Ah, yes! God’s will had to be submitted to,
whatever it was--God’s will, which had carried Margaret, twenty years
old, to her bed in the churchyard, and laid the minister in his blood
beside her. ‘Oh,’ sighed Isabel, ‘to be with them! to have everything
over that must happen! to rest and know that nothing could happen more!’
‘And mony folk would tell ye,’ said Jean, momentarily forgetting her
compact with Miss Catherine, ‘that to run away as soon as ye hear of
trouble was tempting Providence, as if God couldna smite in the
steamboat or the coast, as well as in your ain house. No that I’m of
that way of thinking,’ she added, hastily recollecting herself. ‘This
change will do the bairn good, and it will do you good, and relieve your
mind. Na, Isabel, ye must not take fancies into your head, or think that
things are worse than they are. There’s little Margaret the picture of
health.’
Isabel turned away, and threw herself down noiselessly on her knees by
the side of her child’s cradle. The baby’s breathing was regular and
soft; its hand was thrown up over its head, with the unconscious grace
of infancy; its attitude full of ease and perfect repose.
She lay all the night through with her child breathing sweetly beside
her, debating the question with herself--Should she remain, and put her
fate into God’s hands, and perhaps propitiate Him by such an appearance
of trust? She did not sleep, but lay in the rustling palpable darkness,
sometimes fancying the child’s breathing grew hurried, sometimes that it
stopped altogether, and looking all kinds of horrors in the face. She
rose from her bed in the same uncertainty; and the day was cold, and
Jean wavered, doubting whether such an uncertain and distant danger as
that of the ‘English lad’s’ reappearance was sufficient inducement for
the immediate sacrifice demanded of her.
‘I doubt it’s an east wind,’ Jean said, as she went into Isabel’s room
to call her; ‘I doubt it’s tempting Providence;’ and went about all her
arrangements languidly, with no goodwill in them. ‘I’ll put in all her
warm winter things,’ she said, as she packed the box for them; ‘ye maun
take awfu’ care of cold. Travelling is ay dangerous, and at _her_ age,
the bonnie lamb!’
‘Oh, tell me,’ said Isabel, suddenly throwing her arms round her
stepmother’s neck. ‘I am distracted, thinking one thing and another.
Should I go, or should I stay----?’
Jean paused. She was put on her honour. It was hard to part with the
baby, and allow old Marion, Miss Catherine’s maid, to get her hands upon
it. But she had given her word. And then ‘another man’ was something too
frightful to be contemplated; and Isabel was young, and had once loved
Stapylton, or thought she loved him. It was hard upon her stepmother to
be obliged to decide; but she did so magnanimously for Isabel’s good.
‘It’s no so cold as I thought,’ she said. ‘The wind’s only in the north.
It’s no a warm wind, but it’s no dangerous, like the east; and if you
keep her well and keep her warm, and no trust too much to Marion, who
knows nothing about bairns, no doubt a change of air would do her good.’
And after a while Miss Catherine’s carriage came to the door, and took
the mother and the child away.