Young Gordon had gone, and silence had fallen over Miss Bethune’s room.
It was a commonplace room enough, well-sized, for the house was old and
solid, with three tall windows swathed in red rep curtains, partially
softened but not extinguished by the white muslin ones which had been
put up over them. Neither Miss Bethune nor her maid belonged to the
decorative age. They had no principles as to furniture, but accepted
what they had, with rather a preference than otherwise for heavy
articles in mahogany, and things that were likely to last. They thought
Mr. Mannering’s dainty furniture and his faded silken curtains were
rather of the nature of trumpery. People could think so in these days,
and in the locality of Bloomsbury, without being entirely abandoned in
character, or given up to every vicious sentiment. Therefore, I cannot
say, as I should be obliged to say now-a-days, in order to preserve any
sympathy for Miss Bethune in the reader’s mind, that the room was
pretty, and contained an indication of its mistress’s character in every
carefully arranged corner. It was a room furnished by Mrs. Simcox, the
landlady. It had been embellished, perhaps, by a warm hearthrug--not
Persian, however, by any means--and made comfortable by a few easy
chairs. There were a number of books about, and there was one glass full
of wallflowers on the table, very sweet in sober colours--a flower that
rather corresponds with the mahogany, and the old-fashioned indifference
to ornament and love of use. You would have thought, had you looked into
this room, which was full of spring sunshine, bringing out the golden
tints in the wallflower, and reflected in the big mirror above the
fireplace, that it was empty after young Gordon had gone. But it was not
empty. It was occupied instead by a human heart, so overbursting with
passionate hope, love, suspense, and anxiety, that it was a wonder the
silence did not tinge, and the quiet atmosphere betray that strain and
stress of feeling. Miss Bethune sat in the shadowed corner between the
fireplace and the farther window, with the whiteness of the curtains
blowing softly in her face as the air came in. That flutter dazzled the
beholder, and made Gilchrist think when she entered that there was
nobody there. The maid looked round, and then clasped her hands and said
to herself softly: “She’ll be gane into her bedroom to greet there".
“And why should I greet, you foolish woman?” cried Miss Bethune from her
corner, with a thrill in her voice which betrayed the commotion in her
mind.
Gilchrist started so violently that the bundle of clean “things,” fresh
and fragrant from the country cart which had brought home the washing,
fell from her arms. “Oh, mem, if I had kent you were there.”
“My bonnie clean things!” cried Miss Bethune, “with the scent of the
grass upon them--and now they’re all spoiled with the dust of
Bloomsbury! Gather them up and carry them away, and then you can come
back here.” She remained for a moment as quiet as before, after
Gilchrist had hurried away; but any touch would have been sufficient to
move her in her agitation, and presently she rose and began to pace
about the room. “Gone to my room to greet there, is that what she
thinks? Like Mary going to the grave to weep there. No, no, that’s not
the truth. It’s the other way. I might be going to laugh, and to clap my
hands, as they say in the Psalms. But laughing is not the first
expression of joy. I would maybe be more like greeting, as she says. A
person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing,
nothing but the old way of tears, which is just a contradiction. And
maybe, after all, she was right. I’ll go to my room and weep for
thankfulness, and lightheartedness, and joy.”
“Oh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, coming in, “gang softly, gang softly! You’re
more sure than any mortal person has a right to be.”
“Ye old unbeliever,” cried Miss Bethune, pausing in the midst of her
sob. “What has mortality to do with evidence? It would be just as true
if I were to die to-morrow, for that matter.”
“Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist again, “ye’re awfu’ easy to please in the way
of evidence. What do you call evidence? A likeness ye think ye see, but
I canna; and there’s naething in a likeness. Miss Dora is no more like
her papaw than me, there is nothing to be lippened to in the like of
that. And then the age--that would maybe be about the same, I grant ye
that, so much as it comes to; and a name that is no’ the right name, but
a kind of an approach to it.”
“You are a bonnie person,” cried Miss Bethune, “to take authority upon
you about names, and never to think of the commonest old Scotch custom,
that the son drops or turns the other way the name the father has taken
to his own. I hope I know better! If nothing had ever happened, if the
lad had been bred and trained at home, he would be Gordon, just as sure
as he is Gordon now.”
“I’m no’ a person of quality, mem,” said Gilchrist, holding her ground.
“I have never set up for being wan of the gentry: it would ill become
me, being just John Gilchrist the smith’s daughter, and your
servant-woman, that has served you this five and twenty years. But there
are as many Gordons in Aberdeen as there are kirk steeples in this weary
London town.”
Miss Bethune made an impatient gesture. “You’re a sagacious person,
Gilchrist, altogether, and might be a ruling elder if you were but a
man: but I think perhaps I know what’s in it as well as you do, and if
I’m satisfied that a thing is, I will not yield my faith, as you might
know by this time, neither to the Lord President himself, nor even to
you.”
“Eh, bless me, mem, but I ken that weel!” cried Gilchrist; “and if I had
thought you were taking it on that high line, never word would have
come out of my mouth.”
“I am taking it on no high line--but I see what is for it as well as
what is against it. I have kept my head clear,” said Miss Bethune. “On
other occasions, I grant you, I may have let myself go: but in all this
I have been like a judge, and refused to listen to the voice in my own
heart. But it was there all the time, though I crushed it down. How can
the like of you understand? You’ve never felt a baby’s cry go into the
very marrow of your bones. I’ve set the evidence all out, and pled the
cause before my own judgment, never listening one word to the voice in
my heart.” Miss Bethune spoke with greater and greater vehemence, but
here paused to calm herself. “The boy that was carried off would have
been twenty-five on the eighteenth of next month (as well you know), and
this boy is just on five and twenty, he told me with his own lips; and
his father told him with his dying breath that he had a mother living.
He had the grace to do that! Maybe,” said Miss Bethune, dropping her
voice, which had again risen in excitement, “he was a true penitent when
it came to that. I wish no other thing. Much harm and misery, God
forgive him, has he wrought; but I wish no other thing. It would have
done my heart good to think that his was touched and softened at the
last, to his Maker at least, if no more.”
“Oh, mem, the one would go with the other, if what you think is true.”
“No,” said Miss Bethune, shutting her lips tight, “no, there’s no
necessity. If it had been so what would have hindered him to give the
boy chapter and verse? Her name is So-and-so, you will hear of her at
such a place. But never that--never that, though it would have been so
easy! Only that he had a mother living, a mother that the guardian man
and the lad himself divined must have been a ---- Do you not call that
evidence?” cried Miss Bethune, with a harsh triumph. “Do you not divine
our man in that? Oh, but I see him as clear as if he had signed his
name.”
“Dear mem,” cried Gilchrist, with a “tchick, tchick,” of troubled
sympathy and spectatorship, “you canna wish he had been a true penitent
and yet think of him like that.”
“And who are you to lay down the law and say what I can do?” cried the
lady. She added, with a wave of her hand and her head: “We’ll not argue
that question: but if there ever was an action more like the man!--just
to give the hint and clear his conscience, but leave the woman’s name to
be torn to pieces by any dozen in the place! If that is not evidence, I
don’t know what evidence is.”
Gilchrist could say nothing in reply. She shook her head, though whether
in agreement or in dissidence it would have been difficult to tell, and
folded hem upon hem on her apron, with her eyes fixed upon that, as if
it had been the most important of work. “I was wanting to speak,” she
said, “when you had a moment to listen to me, about two young folk.”
“What two young folk?” Miss Bethune’s eyes lighted up with a gleam of
soft light, her face grew tender in every line. “But Dora is too young,
she is far too young for anything of the kind,” she said.
“Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, with a mingling of astonishment, admiration,
and pity, “can ye think of nothing but yon strange young man?”
“I am thinking of nothing but the bairn, the boy that was stolen away
before he knew his right hand from his left, and now is come home.”
“Aweel, aweel,” said Gilchrist, “we will just have to put up with it, as
we have put up with it before. And sooner or later her mind will come
back to what’s reasonable and true. I was speaking not of the young
gentleman, or of any like him, but of the two who were up in the attics
that you were wanting to save, if save them ye can. They are just
handless creatures, the one and the other; but the woman’s no’ an ill
person, poor thing, and would do well if she knew the way. And a baby
coming, and the man just a weirdless, feckless, ill man.”
“He cannot help it if he is ill, Gilchrist.”
“Maybe no’,” said Gilchrist cautiously. “I’m never just so sure of that;
but, anyway, he’s a delicate creature, feared for everything, and for a
Christian eye upon him, which is the worst of all; and wherefore we
should take them upon our shoulders, folk that we have nothing to do
with, a husband and wife, and the family that’s coming----”
“Oh, woman,” said her mistress, “if they have got just a step out of
the safe way in the beginning, is that not reason the more for helping
them back? And how can I ever know what straits _he_ might have been put
to, and his mother ignorant, and not able to help him?”
“Eh, but I’m thankful to hear you say that again!” Gilchrist cried.
“Not that I can ever have that fear now, for a finer young man, or a
more sweet ingenuous look! But no credit to any of us, Gilchrist. I’m
thankful to those kind people that have brought him up; but it will
always be a pain in my heart that I have had nothing to do with the
training of him, and will never be half so much to him as that--that
lady, who is in herself a poor, weakly woman, if I may say such a word.”
“It is just a very strange thing,” said Gilchrist, “that yon lady is as
much taken up about our Miss Dora as you are, mem, about the young lad.”
“Ah!” said Miss Bethune, with a nod of her head, “but in a different
way. Her mother’s sister--very kind and very natural, but oh, how
different! I am to contrive to take Dora to see her, for I fear she is
not long for this world, Gilchrist. The young lad, as you call him, will
soon have nobody to look to but----”
“Mem!” cried Gilchrist, drawing herself up, and looking her mistress
sternly in the face.
Miss Bethune confronted her angrily for a moment, then coloured high,
and flung down, as it were, her arms. “No, no!” she cried--“no, you are
unjust to me, as you have been many times before. I am not glad of her
illness, poor thing. God forbid it! I am not exulting, as you think,
that she will be out of my way. Oh, Gilchrist, do you think so little of
me--a woman you have known this long, long lifetime--as to believe
that?”
“Eh, mem,” said Gilchrist, “when you and me begin to think ill of each
other, the world will come to an end. We ken each ither far too well for
that. Ye may scold me whiles when I little deserve it, and I put a thing
upon you for a minnit that is nae blame of yours; but na, na, there is
nae misjudging possible between you and me.”
It will be seen that Gilchrist was very cautious in the confession of
faith just extorted. She was no flatterer. She knew of what her mistress
was capable better than that mistress herself did, and had all her
weaknesses on the tips of her fingers. But she had no intention of
discouraging that faulty but well-beloved woman. She went on in
indulgent, semi-maternal tones: “You’ve had a great deal to excite you
and trouble you, and in my opinion it would do ye a great deal of good,
and help ye to get back to your ordinary, if you would just put
everything else away, and consider with me what was to be done for thae
two feckless young folk. If the man is not put to do anything, he will
be in more trouble than ever, or I’m no judge.”
“And it might have been him!” said Miss Bethune to herself--the habitual
utterance which had inspired so many acts of charity. “I think you are
maybe right, Gilchrist,” she added; “it will steady me, and do me good.
Run downstairs and see if the doctor is in. He knows more about him than
we do, and we’ll just have a good consultation and see what is the best
to be done.”
The doctor was in, and came directly, and there was a very anxious
consultation about the two young people, to whose apparently simple,
commonplace mode of life there had come so sudden an interruption. Dr.
Roland had done more harm than good by his action in the matter. He
confessed that had he left things alone, and not terrified the young
coward on the verge of crime, the catastrophe might perhaps, by more
judicious ministrations, have been staved off. Terror of being found out
is not always a preservative, it sometimes hurries on the act which it
ought to prevent; and the young man who had been risking his soul in
petty peculations which he might have made up for, fell over the
precipice into a great one in sheer cowardice, when the doctor’s keen
eye read him, and made him tremble. Dr. Roland took blame to himself. He
argued that it was of no use trying to find Hesketh another situation.
“He has no character, and no one will take him without a character: or
if some Quixote did, on your word, Miss Bethune, or mine, who are very
little to be trusted in such a case, the unfortunate wretch would do the
same again. It’s not his fault, he cannot help himself. His grandfather,
or perhaps a more distant relation----”
“Do not speak nonsense to me, doctor, for I will not listen to it,” said
Miss Bethune. “When there’s a poor young wife in the case, and a baby
coming, how dare you talk about the fool’s grandfather?”
“Mem and sir,” said Gilchrist, “if you would maybe listen for a moment
to me. My mistress, she has little confidence in my sense, but I have
seen mony a thing happen in my day, and twenty years’ meddlin’ and
mellin’ with poor folk under her, that is always too ready with her
siller, makes ye learn if ye were ever sae silly. Now, here is what I
would propose. He’s maybe more feckless than anything worse. He will get
no situation without a character, and it will not do for you--neither
her nor you, sir, asking your pardon--to make yourselves caution for a
silly gowk like yon. But set him up some place in a little shop of his
ain. He’ll no cheat himsel’, and the wife she can keep an eye on him. If
it’s in him to do weel, he’ll do weel, or at least we’ll see if he
tries; and if no’, in that case ye’ll ken just what you will lose. That
is what I would advise, if you would lippen to me, though I am not
saying I am anything but a stupid person, and often told so,” Gilchrist
said.
“It is not a bad idea, however,” said Dr. Roland.
“Neither it is. But the hussy, to revenge herself on me like that!” her
mistress cried.