There are times in life when every man feels as if his sympathies were
extinct. This arises from various causes; sometimes from vicissitudes
of fortune; sometimes from the sense of ingratitude, which, like the
canker in the rose, destroys the germ of all kindness and charity;
often from disappointments in affairs of the heart, which leave it
incapable of ever again loving; but the most common cause is the
consciousness of having committed wrong, when the feelings recoil
inward, and, by some curious mystery in the nature of our selfishness,
instead of prompting atonement, irritate us to repeat and to persevere
in our injustice.
Into one of these temporary trances Claud had fallen when his wife
left him; and he continued sitting, with his eyes riveted on the
ground, insensible to all the actual state of life, contemplating the
circumstances and condition of his children, as if he had no interest
in their fate, nor could be affected by any thing in their fortunes.
In this fit of apathy and abstraction, he was roused by the sound of
some one approaching; and on looking up, and turning his eyes towards
the path which led from the house to the bench where he was then
sitting, he saw Walter coming.
There was something unwonted in the appearance and gestures of Walter,
which soon interested the old man. At one moment he rushed forward
several steps, with a strange wildness of air. He would then stop and
wring his hands, gaze upward as if he wondered at some extraordinary
phenomenon in the sky; but seeing nothing, he dropped his hands, and,
at his ordinary pace, came slowly up the hill.
When he arrived within a few paces of the bench, he halted and
looked with such an open and innocent sadness that even the heart
of his father, which so shortly before was as inert to humanity as
case-hardened iron, throbbed with pity, and was melted to a degree of
softness and compassion, almost entirely new to its sensibilities.
‘What’s the matter wi’ thee, Watty?’ said he, with unusual kindliness.
The poor natural, however, made no reply,--but continued to gaze at him
with the same inexpressible simplicity of grief.
‘Hast t’ou lost ony thing, Watty?’--‘I dinna ken,’ was the answer,
followed by a burst of tears.
‘Surely something dreadfu’ has befallen the lad,’ said Claud to
himself, alarmed at the astonishment of sorrow with which his
faculties seemed to be bound up.
‘Can t’ou no tell me what has happened, Watty?’
In about the space of half a minute, Walter moved his eyes slowly
round, as if he saw and followed something which filled him with awe
and dread. He then suddenly checked himself, and said, ‘It’s naething;
she’s no there.’
‘Sit down beside me, Watty,’ exclaimed his father, alarmed; ‘sit down
beside me, and compose thysel.’
Walter did as he was bidden, and stretching out his feet, hung forward
in such a posture of extreme listlessness and helpless despondency,
that all power of action appeared to be withdrawn.
Claud rose, and believing he was only under the influence of some of
those silly passions to which he was occasionally subject, moved to go
away, when he looked up, and said,--
‘Father, Betty Bodle’s dead!--My Betty Bodle’s dead!’
‘Dead!’ said Claud, thunderstruck.
‘Aye, father, she’s dead! My Betty Bodle’s dead!’
‘Dost t’ou ken what t’ou’s saying?’ But Walter, without attending to
the question, repeated, with an accent of tenderness still more simple
and touching,--
‘My Betty Bodle’s dead! She’s awa up aboon the skies, yon’er, and left
me a wee wee baby;’ in saying which, he again burst into tears, and
rising hastily from the bench, ran wildly back towards the Divethill
House, whither he was followed by the old man, where the disastrous
intelligence was confirmed, that she had died in giving birth to a
daughter.
Deep and secret as Claud kept his feelings from the eyes of the world,
this was a misfortune which he was ill prepared to withstand. For
although in the first shock he betrayed no emotion, it was soon evident
that it had shattered some of the firmest intents and purposes of his
mind. That he regretted the premature death of a beautiful young woman
in such interesting circumstances, was natural to him as a man; but
he felt the event more as a personal disappointment, and thought it
was accompanied with something so like retribution, that he inwardly
trembled as if he had been chastised by some visible arm of Providence.
For he could not disguise to himself that a female heir was a
contingency he had not contemplated; that, by the catastrophe which had
happened to the mother, the excambio of the Plealands for the Divethill
would be rendered of no avail; and that, unless Walter married again,
and had a son, the re-united Kittlestonheugh property must again be
disjoined, as the Divethill would necessarily become the inheritance of
the daughter.
The vexation of this was, however, alleviated, when he reflected on
the pliancy of Walter’s character, and he comforted himself with the
idea that, as soon as a reasonable sacrifice of time had been made to
decorum, he would be able to induce the natural to marry again. Shall
we venture to say, it also occurred in the cogitations of his sordid
ambition, that, as the infant was prematurely born, and was feeble and
infirm, he entertained some hope it might die, and not interfere with
the entailed destination of the general estate? But if, in hazarding
this harsh supposition, we do him any injustice, it is certain that
he began to think there was something in the current of human affairs
over which he could acquire no control, and that, although, in pursuing
so steadily the single purpose of recovering his family inheritance,
his endeavours had, till this period, proved eminently successful,
he yet saw, with dismay, that, from the moment other interests came
to be blended with those which he considered so peculiarly his own,
other causes also came into operation, and turned, in spite of all
his hedging and prudence, the whole issue of his labours awry. He
perceived that human power was set at naught by the natural course of
things, and nothing produced a more painful conviction of the wrong
he had committed against his first-born, than the frustration of his
wishes by the misfortune which had befallen Walter. His reflections
were also embittered from another source; by his parsimony he foresaw
that, in the course of a few years, he would have been able, from his
own funds, to have redeemed the Divethill without having had recourse
to the excambio; and that the whole of the Kittlestonheugh might thus
have been his own conquest, and, as such, without violating any of the
usages of society, he might have commenced the entail with Charles.
In a word, the death of Walter’s wife and the birth of the daughter
disturbed all his schemes, and rent from roof to foundation the
castles which he had been so long and so arduously building. But it is
necessary that we should return to poor Walter, on whom the loss of his
beloved Betty Bodle acted with the incitement of a new impulse, and
produced a change of character that rendered him a far less tractable
instrument than his father expected to find.