The Story of the Chalk Line.
FOR the truth of the story I am now to relate I have the word of a godly minister of the Church of Scotland, whose father had been in the house in Burnet’s Close, and had seen the two females and examined “the chalk line” in the middle of the floor. I do not say this to conciliate your belief; for perhaps if this were my object, I should be nearer the attainment of it by asserting, as Mr Thackeray used to do when he wanted his readers to believe him, that there is not a word of truth in the whole affair. There is a certain species of fish in the Ganges which is never happy but when it is pushing up against the stream; and people, as civilisation goes on, find themselves so often cheated, that they go by contraries, just as the old sorcerers divined by reading backwards. But surely in this age of subtleties it is a pleasant thing to think that you are so much the object of an author’s care as that he would not only save you from thinking, but think for you; and so I proceed to tell you of the personages in Burnet’s Close, leading from the High Street to the Cowgate.
In a room of the second flat of the third tall tenement on your left hand as you descend lived Martha and Mary Jopp. They were, so far as I have been able to discover, the daughters of a writer of the name of Peter Jopp. You cannot be wrong in supposing that they had been once young, though, in regard to the aged, this is not always conceded by those who are buoyant with the spirit of youth. Yes, these aged maidens had not only been once young, they had been very fair and very comely. They had passed through the spring and summer flowers without treading upon the speckled serpent of the same colour. They had heard the song of love where there was no risk of the deceptions of the siren. They had been tempted; but they had resisted the temptation of some who could well have returned their affection. Nor was this the result of any want of natural sensibility; if it was not that they had too much of that quality, which, if it is the source of pleasure, is also that of pain—perhaps more of the latter than the former, though we dare not say so in this our time of angelic perfection.
To be a little more particular upon a peculiarity of our two ladies, which enters as rather a “loud colour” in the web of our story, there was a sufficient reason for their celibacy. They had a mother who, as the saying goes, was “a woman of price”—such a one as Solomon excepts from so many, that I am afraid to mention the number. She was a good Calvinist, without insisting too much for election and predestination. She was affectionate, without the weakness which so often belongs to doating mothers; and she possessed, along with the charm of universal kindness, a strength of mind which demanded respect without diminishing love. No wonder that her daughters loved her even to that extent that neither of the two could think of leaving her so long as she lived. An inclination this, or rather a resolution, which had been confirmed in them by certain experiences they had had of what their mother had suffered from having been deprived by death of an elder daughter, and by marriage of a younger; the latter of whom had gone with her husband, a Mr Darling, to Calcutta, under the patronage of Major Scott, the friend of Warren Hastings.
But there was another reason which kept the sisters from marrying—one which will, I suspect, be very slow to be believed; and that was, their love for each other. But I am resolute in urging it, because, in the first place, it is not absolutely against the experience of mankind; and, secondly, because, while it forms a part of the story as narrated to me, it is necessary as one of the two sides of a contrast, without which I could not answer for a certain effect in my picture. Certain, at least, it was that more than one external revolving body in the shape of lovers came within the sphere of their attraction for each other, and could produce no deflection in the lines of their mutual attachment. It was said that one of them had been jilted. I do not know; but the circumstance would explain a fact more certain that the sisters, in their then lively humour of young blood, used to sing a love-defiance song, which might have been both sport and earnest. My informant gave me the words. It is a kind of rough mosaic, with borrowed verses, yet worth recording:—
A farmer’s daughter fair am I,
As blithe as May-day morning,
And when my lover passes by,
I laugh at him wi’ scorning.
Ha! ha! ha! fal lal la!
Ha! ha! fal lal laldy!
There came a cock to our father’s flock,
And he wore a double kaim, O;
He flapt his wings, and fain would craw,
But craw he could craw nane, O.
A braw young man came courting me,
And swore his wife he’d make me;
But when he knew my pounds were few,
The rogue he did forsake me.
Gae whistle on your thumb, young man,
You left me wae and weary;
But, now I’ve got my heart again,
Gude faith, I’ll keep it cheery.
There’s world’s room for you to pass,
And room enough for Nan, O;
The deil may tak her on his back
Who dies for faithless man, O.
There’s still as good fish in the sea
As ever yet were taken;
I’ll spread my net and catch again,
Though I have been forsaken.
Ha! ha! ha! &c.
A better medicine, I suspect, than an action of damages. But to continue. The sisters read the same books, took the same walks, wrought at the same work as steadfastly and lovingly as they worshipped the same mother, and revered the memory of the same father—a remark this last which helps us on to a point of our story; for the father had been dead for some years, leaving the mother a competent annuity, besides a residue, which would afford at least so much to the daughters as would tocher them to a kind of independence, though not to a husband with much hope of being benefited in a money point of view by marriage. But the time came—as what time does not come, even to those who think in the heyday of their happiness it will never come—when there would be a change, when the charm of this threefold relation should cease. The mother died, and with her the annuity; and the attraction she had exercised over the daughters had just drawn them so far past the point of the shaking of the blossoms of youth and beauty and hope, that their affection for each other stood now no chance of being broken by even one of those moral comets that burn up more incombustible bodies than old spinsters with very small competences.
And so, with bleared eyes of uncontrollable grief, and no hope, and a trifle of twenty pounds a-year each to be paid them by Mr David Ross, writer, their father’s agent, our two spinsters took up their solitary residence in the foresaid room in the second flat of the big tenement in Burnet’s Close to which I have alluded. Even at the first moment of their retreat they seem to have shaken off with the blossoms, which, in the human plant no less than in the vegetable one, alone contain the beauties and sweets of life—the stem being, alas, only at best the custodier of an acid—much of their interest in the busy, gossipping, scandalising, hating, and loving Edinburgh; but so far this resistance to the charms of the outer world only served to make them live even more and more to each other. And then, had they not the sweet though melancholy solace of that Calvinistic tenet which imparted such mildness and equanimity to the face of their beloved mother—even that mysterious scroll which contains the ordination and predestination of all things which shall ever come to pass? Yes; but even this solace was modified by the regret that the portrait of that mother, painted by no unskilful hand—a pupil of George Jameson’s—was not, as it ought to have been, in that room hanging over the mantelpiece; the more by reason that that picture had been surreptitiously taken away by their sister Margaret when she sailed with her husband, Mr Darling, to India. And would they not have it back? Mr Ross might tell them when he was there on a certain evening.
“You have as good a right to it,” said the man of the law, “as your sister; for I believe it was never given to her by your mother.”
“No more it ever was,” said Martha; “for did not our mother write herself for it, but it never came; and she was to have got herself painted again, but death came at the predestinated hour, and took away her life, and with it all our happiness in this world.”
“Not all your happiness, Miss Martha,” rejoined the agent; “for have you not your mutual affection left?—ay, and even your love for her who is only removed to a distance—even among blessed spirits?—from whence she is at this moment looking down upon you to bless that love which you bear to each other, and which, I trust, will never decay.”
“I hope not,” said Mary, calmly; “but I remember how, when the evil spirit took hold of us, and made us fretful and discontented with each other, she calmed our rebellious spirits by a look so justly reproving, and yet so mild and heavenly-like, that for very love of her we would dote on each other the more. And now I think if we had that picture, with the same eye as if still fixed on us, we would be secured against all fretfulness; for O sir, we are all weak and wilful. Will you write for it, Mr Ross? It would hang so well up there over the fire, where, you see, there is an old nail, which seems to have been left by the former tenant for the very purpose.”
“I will,” replied Mr Ross; “but I may as well tell you I have little chance of success, for Margaret, I suspect, would nearly as soon part with her life. Nor do I wonder at it; for the countenance of your mother as there represented seems so far above that of ordinary mortals, both in beauty and benignity, that methinks,”—and here Mr Ross smiled in his own grave way,—“if I ever felt inclined to put down six-and-eightpence against a client in place of three-and-fourpence, that look of hers would bring back my sense of honesty. You know I have Mrs Ross over the mantelpiece of my business room; and though she never approached your mother in that peculiar expression, which your father used to say to me, in a half-jocular way, humanised him into that wonderful being, a conscientious writer, yet I have been benefited in the same way by the mild light of my Agnes’s eyes.”
And Mr Ross stopped, in consequence of feeling a small tendency to a thickening in the throat, which he seldom felt except when he had a cold.
“And you will write Margaret, then?” resumed Martha.
“That I will,” said he; “but I do not say may Heaven bless my effort, because you know Heaven has made up its mind on that and all other subjects long ago.”
“Even from the foundations of the earth,” sighed Mary.
“Even so,” rejoined Mr Ross as he departed, leaving the sisters to their small supper of a Newhaven haddock, each half of which was sweetened to the receiver by the consciousness that the other was being partaken of by her sister. And thereafter, having said their prayers, they retired to the same bed, to fall asleep in each other’s arms, without a regret that said arms were not a little more sinewy, or that their faces did not wear beards, and to dream of their mother.
And it would have been well if affairs in Burnet’s Close had continued to go on as smoothly as we have here indicated. Nor did there seem any reason why they should not. The sisters had a sufficiency to live on; they had no evil passions to disturb the equanimity of their thoughts; they were religious, and resigned to the predestinated; they were among “the elect,” that is, orthodoxically, they elected to think so, which is the same thing. They had their house in order, and could afford to have Peggy Fergusson to clean out the room occasionally, and to go the few messages that their few wants required. But Time is a sower as well as a reaper; and he casts about with an equally ready hand the seeds of opinions and imaginations, the germs of feelings and the spores of mildewed hopes: some for the young, some for the old, but all inferring change from what was yesterday to what is to-day; from what is to-day to what will be to-morrow. As the days passed into years, they appeared to get shorter and shorter—a process with all of us, which no theory can explain, if it is not against all theory; for if time is generated by ideas, it should appear to go more slowly the more slowly those ideas arise and pass, and yet the practical effect of the working is the very reverse. But whatever were the changes that were taking place in the habits and feelings of the two sisters, they were altogether unconscious of them. The indisposition to go out and mix with their friends was gradually increasing, as they felt, without being aware of the feeling, that they had less and less in common with the ways of the world; and the seldomer they went out, the seldomer their friends came to see them, nor when they did come, did they receive any encouragement to repeat the visit.
In all this I do not consider that I am describing human nature in the aspect in which we generally see it; for we more often find in those who are advancing into age a felt necessity for enlivenment, were it for nothing else than to relieve them from solitary musings and the perilous stuff of old memories; but here, as it will by and by be seen, I have not to do with ordinary human nature. These sisters were fated to be strange, and to do strange things. The indisposition to go out degenerated in the course of some years into a love of total seclusion. They never passed the threshold of their room; and as time went on, their friends gradually renounced their efforts to get either of them to change a purpose to which they seemed to have attained by the sympathy of two natures exactly similar. They probably knew nothing of the words of the poet, nor would they have cared for them:—
“The world careth not a whit
For him who careth not for it:
One only duty and one right,
That he be buried out of sight.”
But amidst this strange asceticism the one still remained to the other as a dear, loving, and beloved sister; and if all the world should be nothing to them, they would still be all the world to each other. The seclusion had lasted five years since the death of the mother, and still no decay of their mutual attachment could be observed.
It is here that commences the wonderful part of my story,—so wonderful, indeed, that if I had not had at second-hand the testimony of an eye-witness, confirmed by the traditions of the Close, I could scarcely have ventured the recital I here offer; not that I consider the facts as unnatural, but that the causes which change love into hatred, and superinduce the latter often in a direct ratio to the former, lie so deep, and are altogether so mysterious, that we cannot understand the meaning of their being there, and far less how they came to be there. Some strange and unaccountable change came over these hitherto loving sisters, not only at the same time, but without its having ever been ascertained that there was any physical or moral reason for it. It began to show itself in small catches and sharper rejoinders; minim points not discernible by their former love became subjects of difference. Then the number of these increased where the points of contact were, as one might say, infinite. They assert that nature resents too close an affinity of affection; nor is this altogether theory, for we see every day friendships which are so close as to merge identities flare up into terrible hatreds; and we have scriptural authority for the wrath of brothers. A plain man would get out of the difficulty in a plain way. Those sisters had become discontented because they had rejected that natural food of the mind which is derived from an intercourse with the world; and who does not know that discontent always finds a peg somewhere whereon to hang a grievance. Where you have many people about you, you have a greater choice of these pegs; if you are cooped up in a room with only one human being within your vision, you are limited; but the pegs must be got, and are got, till the whole of the one object, a miserable scapegoat, is covered with them.
Probably the plain man is right. I leave him to the philosopher, and keep to my safe duty as a narrator.
The spirit of fault-finding once begun, waxed stronger and stronger upon the food it generated by its own powers of production. Almost everything either of them did appeared to be wrong in the eyes of the other; and though for a time they tried to repress the sharp feelings, which were wonders even to themselves, yet the check would come, the taunt would follow, and the flash of the eye—an organ once so expressive of love—succeeded within the passing minute. People who merely meet may be supposed to seek for objects of disagreement. In the room in Burnet’s Close the occasions were the very actions of natural life; the movements of the body, the words of the mouth, the glances of the eye, the thoughts of the mind, the misconstrued feelings of the heart. Nor could they, as in most cases people who disagree may, get away from each other. The repulsion which they felt towards a world which offered them only reminiscences of past joys, was as a wall enclosing the arena where these gladiatorial displays of feeling went on from day to day, scarcely even interrupted by the holy Sabbath any more than if they had come within the excepted category of necessity and mercy.
According to my information, which descended to the minutest particulars, this domestic disease went on for years, without any other alteration than changes consistent with the laws of bodily ailment. There were exasperations which, expending themselves in gratuitous vituperations, receded into silent sullennesses, which lasted for days. If it happened that no grievance could be discovered by the microscopic vision, there was recourse to the grievance of yesterday, which was called up to occupy the greedy vacuum; and then the changes of aspect, of which, to the jaundiced eye, it was capable, were rung upon it till they were physically wearied of the strife: while the weariness only lasted till a renewed energy became ripe for another onset. But however high the exasperation ever reached, they never came to any violence. All the energy expended lay in the tongue, and the eye, and the contorted muscles of irascible expression. It might have been doubted whether, if any third party interfered, the one would not have defended the other; but only to retain her as valuable property for the onset of her peculiar privilege. And what is not less strange, their religion, which was still maintained with the old Calvinistic dogmatism, in place of overcoming the domestic demon, became subjected to it, and changed its aspect according to the wish. Though incapable of inflicting any bodily pain upon each other, they felt no compunction in fostering the opinion that, while each was among the elect and predestinated to everlasting glory, the other was in the scroll of the reprobate, and ordained to eternal punishment in the brimstone fires, and the howling horrors of the pit which is so peculiarly constituted as to have no bottom. Each would read her Bible in her own chair, and shoot against the other glances of triumph as she figured herself in heaven looking down upon the torments of her sister in hell. And all this while neither could have with her own hands inflicted the scratch of a pin upon the body of the other. It was enough that each could lacerate the feelings of the other as a vent to the exasperation which embittered her own heart.
Still more remarkable, there were none of these reconciliations that among relations often make amends for strife, and maintain the equipoise so insisted upon by nature. We all know how these ameliorations work in the married life and among lovers. In these cases the anger seems to become the fuel of love. Not so with our sisters. The worm was a never-dying one. But even in this desperate case there was not wanting evidence of nature’s efforts towards an amelioration. It was true they could not separate; they were objects necessary to each other; nay, even if Mr Ross, who witnessed the working of the domestic evil, had contrived to get them into separate rooms—a proposal which was indeed made, and morbidly resisted—they would have pursued each other in imagination with perhaps even more misery than that which they inflicted on each other.
At length they came to a scheme of their own, so peculiar that it has formed the incident of that story which has made it live in Edinburgh through many years, and even to this day. The plan was, that they should draw in the middle of the floor a distinct line of chalk, which should be a boundary between them, over which neither the one nor the other would ever set her foot. To make this plan workable, it was necessary that the two ends of the room should be each self-contained as regarded the necessary articles of household plenishing; and this, by the aid of Mr Ross and Peggy Fergusson, was duly accomplished. One of these articles was a big ha’ Bible for Martha, to stand against that retained by Mary—in explanation of which I may inform the English reader that the old Calvinists had nearly as much faith in the size of their Bibles as in their contents. Nor was the strength of their faith altogether irrespective of the kind of cover, and the manner in which it was clasped. There was a great virtue in good strong calfskin—sometimes with the rough hair upon it; and if the clasps were of silver or gold, the volume had a peculiar merit. It was necessary, therefore, that Martha’s Bible should be as big as Mary’s; and the latter having been adorned by old Peter Jopp with silver clasps, so the former was equally orthodox in this respect.
And so the chalk line was drawn. The only difficulty regarded the fire; but this was got over by some ingenuity on the part of Peggy and a workman, whereby the grate was altered so as to hold two cranes; and so minute were the engineers, that the end of the chalk line came up to the hearth, dividing it exactly into two halves; so that each crane could be got at without overstepping the mark. This arrangement lasted through eleven years; and if to that period we add the five years of prior strife, this domestic war endured for sixteen years; nor, according to the report of Mr Ross and Peggy, with that of the good many curious visitors who contrived through various excuses to get a view of the domestic arrangement, was that magic line which thus separated two hearts once so loving ever transgressed; nay, it seemed to become a point of honour in the two maidens. They might read their Bibles on either side of it, and send their mute anathemas across it, so as to reach the unhappy non-elect; but not a foot of either ever trod upon the mark. The foot of time might dull it, but the ready hand of either revived the line of demarcation, even as the feelings were kept alive in undying vividness; all which may easily enough be conceived; it contravenes no law of nature; but I fairly admit that I must draw a strong bill on the credulity of poor modern haters of the Armenian kind, when I state what was on all hands acknowledged, that after the chalk truce—that is, for eleven years—the residents of this room, divided so against itself, never interchanged a word with each other. I freely admit that all traditions become incrusted by the marvellous. We do not reject port wine because it has undergone a certain process. Yes; but we do not swallow the crust, which is only deposited sugar. So be it; and you are welcome to your advantage, provided you admit that the raciness you admire is the consequence of the deposit; and so, in my case, you may reject the eleven years’ silence of Martha and Mary Jopp, yet you cannot get quit of the tang of the reported marvel. For my own part, I am a little sceptical myself; but then I cannot prove the negative of a popular statement; and I rather doubt if there are many religions in the world which are founded on anything better than this defiance.
Towards the end of the eleventh year a new incident arose to change perhaps the tenor of this strange drama. Martha Darling, a daughter of the sister Margaret who went to India, was sent home to Mr Ross to be educated in Scotland, where she was to remain till the homecoming of her parents, who had become rich on the spoils of Cheyte Sing, or the Begums of Oude, or some other unfortunate Indian victim. The girl was generous, and full of young life; and Mr Ross became hopeful that by introducing her to her aunts some instinctive feelings might be called up in the breasts of the sisters which would break up the old congelation. He told her the story of the chalk line, and got a scream of a laugh for an answer, with the threat that she would force her aunts to embrace, and weep, and be friends. Next day the visit was made, and, designedly, without any intimation that the niece had arrived in Scotland. On opening the door, Mr Ross found the two ladies in that position in which he had so often before found them, each sitting stiffly on her own side of the chalk line, and looking out of her window into the close—for, as I should have stated before, the room was supplied by two windows.
“Your niece from India—only arrived yesterday.”
No more time for prologue, for the girl flew forward, and taking her elder aunt round the neck, hugged her very lovingly after the Anglo-Indian fashion, and thereafter, making a spring over the line of chalk, she ran to Aunt Mary, and performed the same operation upon her, but with no emolliating result; the old petrefactions, which had become harder by the passage of every wave of time, were not to be dissolved or softened by the sparkling rill from the green sunny mountains. They looked strangely only because they looked unnaturally; but that was no reason why Martha the younger should change her nature, and so she rattled away, every now and then casting her eye, with a laugh, at the line of chalk.
“If I had you only in India,” she went on, “where the natives, when they drink bang, dance such strange dances, you would laugh so. Shall I show you?”
And without waiting for an answer, she began to make very pretty but somewhat irregular revolving movements on the floor, whereby in a short time, by the rapid motion of her small feet, she contrived to efface the line of chalk.
“Now you can hardly see it,” she proceeded with shortened breath; “and now, the nasty thing being gone, you are to cross and shake hands, and kiss each other.”
But the good-natured girl’s efforts were useless. The sisters sat as stiff in their chairs as if they had been the figures in a pagoda irresponsive to the dance of the worshippers. Even the confident will-power of youth, which under-estimates all difficulties, was staggered by the resistance offered to its efforts, and the young Martha was obliged to leave without attaining an object over which she had been dreaming the preceding night. Next morning the chalk line was renewed, the still air of the room in Burnet’s Close had recovered its quietude from the oscillation produced by the young girl’s laugh, and the demon of obstinacy sat enshrined in its niche which it had occupied for so many years; nor had the after visits of the younger Martha had any better effect towards the object that lay nearest to her generous heart. And now a month had passed; a particular morning rose—not marked by an asterisk in the calendar, and yet remarkable for opening with the thickest gray dawn that had been observed for a time. And here you may already see I am getting among the mists, where old Dame Mystery, with her undefined lines, is ready to assume the forms forecast by brooding fancy. The gloom in the old room still hung thick, as the two maiden ladies moved slowly about, so like automatons, each preparing her cup of tea. So sternly had custom occupied the place of primary nature, that it would now have appeared more strange and out of joint for them to speak than to be silent. And so, as the minutes passed, the gray mist of the morning gave way to the struggling rays of the sun, and now there was something to be seen—nay, something that could not be unseen. Nor this the less by token that the eyes of both our Martha and Mary were fixed as if by a spell upon that part of the wall over the mantelpiece. There was hanging bodily, in the old frame, and radiant with the old light, the real picture of their mother, for the possession of which they had sighed for sixteen years. We may easily conceive that it could not fail of an effect, even as free from the connexion of any mystery as to how it came to be there. But the question, if put by either to herself or her neighbour, could not be answered in any way consistently with natural causes, for neither of them had been out of the room—nay, neither had been in a condition which could have been taken advantage of by any one who wished by a trick to take them by surprise. Then how catching the superstitious when it plays into the hand of our fears! As they looked with spell-bound eyes on that apparition, and read once more the expression in that blessed countenance that spoke peace and love,—reproof enough to those who for so many long years had disobeyed her injunctions to treat each other as sisters, and love each other even as she loved them and they her,—they never doubted but that some unseen hand placed that picture there for the end of chastening their rebellious hearts, and bringing them back to that love which was enjoined even by Him whom they worshipped as the very God of Love. It seemed as if they shook as they gazed, and each one at intervals sought with a furtive glance the face of the other. A charm was working among the old half-dead nerves that for years had quivered with the passions of the devil. The revived feelings of that olden time, when that mild loving mother was the centre of their affections and bond of love between themselves, were in a tumult below the hard crust of mutual hatred, that was breaking under the touch of the finger of God; they were both of the elect, since God took the trouble to chide them and recall them to their duty and their obedience. The relentings in the hard faces, the rising tears in the eyes of both, the tremors in the hands, all spoke eloquently to each other; nor did they speak in vain; they rose as if by sympathy. “O Martha!” “O Mary!” No more; the words were enough, and the two sisters were locked in the arms of each other, drawing long sighs, and sobbing convulsively.
A scene all this which, being apt to precipitate one of my disposition into the gushing vein, I must leave. I shall be on somewhat safer ground as I proceed to say what truth and probability equally require, that the paroxysm being over, and the two having begun, even as they had done of old, to make and sugar each other’s tea, to butter each other’s bread, and even to break each other’s egg, or bone each other’s small haddock—most delightful tricks of love, which selfishness knows nothing of, and cannot compensate by any means within its power,—they gradually began to doubt whether some kindly hand of flesh was not concerned in producing the phenomenon of the picture. They had both been sound asleep till nine o’clock, and Peggy Fergusson had in the gray dawn been in the room doing her duty to the fire. But what although the Indian elf, who had likely brought the picture home with her from India, had been put up by Mr Ross to a little deception, and had slipt in in the wake of Peggy, and hung it on the nail which had been so generously left by the old tenant? nay, these spinsters, apart from the delusion produced by the demon of obstinacy, were sensible women; and in the pleasant talk that now flowed like limpid water down a very pretty valley with flowers on either side they came to the conclusion, with—Oh, wonder!—a laugh fighting for utterance among the dry muscles, that the fact was just so as we have stated it. What then. Was not the effect admirable—yea, delectable?
A conclusion this which derived no little confirmation from the fact that the young Anglo-Indian came bouncing into the room about eleven o’clock, crying, in her spirited way, “Ah, I see it is all right,” and yet never saying a word of the said picture; but, indeed, the fairy had some work to do other than of revealing the secrets of Titania to her victims, for she straightway set to work with a wet cloth to eradicate every trace of that devil-invented line of chalk which had so long kept asunder good amiable spirits. Nor was she contented with even this, for to satisfy her impish whims, she got her now changed aunts, nothing loth, to cross and recross the place of the now defaced line, till all notion of the division was taken out of their minds.
It is a pleasant thing for me to have authority to say that this miraculous change was not destined to be merely temporary. The flow from the once secluded fountains of feeling continued its stream—nay, it seemed as if the two old maidens could not love each other enough, and they had been often heard to confess that one hour of pure nature was worth all the sixteen years of factitious opposition to her dictates. So true it is that, let us deplore as we may the many ills of life, we shall never diminish them by damming up the fountains of feeling and driving the emotions back upon the heart. Then fortune favours those who are true to nature, who is the mother of fortune, and all other occult agencies. The nabob and his wife came home the next year, and set up a great establishment in our old city. The spinsters were gradually drawn out again into that world which they had so foolishly left—we use the word deliberately, for hermits carry with them into their cells a worse world than they leave behind, however unsteady, however cruel, and however vain, that may at times seem to be;—nay, we can say with a good conscience that our two sisters became the very darlings of a flock of young nephews and nieces; sometimes danced in a reel of ancient maidens; gadded gaily about; sipt their scandal, and helped like good citizens to spread the sweet poison; and passed many years as happily as can be the fortune of those who are contented to live according to the laws of nature.
Ballantyne & Company, Printers, Edinburgh.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.