“And I am so delighted, Miss Craig, that I could almost take you into my arms,” said the lady; “but what ails ye, dear? You are as white as any snow I ever saw, whereas you ought to have been as blithe as a bridesmaid, for don’t you know that you have brought me home one of my marriage dresses? Come now, smile when I tell you that to-morrow is my wedding-day.”
“Wedding-day,” muttered Mysie, as she thought of the aforesaid utter impossibility of herself not being soon married to George Balgarnie, an impossibility not rendered less impossible by the resolution she had formed not to believe that within five minutes he had flown away from her.
“Yes, Miss Craig, and surely you must have heard who the gentleman is, for does not the town ring of it from the castle to the palace, from Kirk-o’-Field to the Calton?”
“I have not been out,” said Mysie.
“That accounts for it,” continued the lady; “and I am delighted at the reason, for wouldn’t it have been terrible to think that my marriage with George Balgarnie of Balgruddery was a thing of so small a note as not to be known everywhere?”
If Mysie Craig had appeared shortly before to Miss Gilroy paler than any snow her ladyship had ever seen, she must now have been as pale as some other kind of snow that nobody ever saw. The dreadful words had, indeed, produced the adequate effect—but not in the most common way, for we are to keep in view that it is not the most shrinking and sensitive natures that are always the readiest to faint; and there was, besides, the aforesaid conviction of impossibility which, grasping the mind by a certain force, deadened the ear to words implying the contrary. Mysie stood fixed to the spot, as if she were trying to realise some certainty she dared not think was possible, her lips apart, her eyes riveted on the face of the lady—mute as that kind of picture which a certain ancient calls a silent poem, and motionless as a figure of marble.
An attitude and appearance still more inexplicable to Anabella, perhaps irritating as an unlucky omen, and, therefore, not possessing any claim for sympathy—at least, it got none.
“Are you the Mysie Craig,” she cried, as she looked at the girl, “who used to chat to me about the dresses you brought, and the flowers on them? Ah, jealous and envious, is that it? But, you forget, George Balgarnie never could have made you his wife—a working needlewoman; he only fancied you as the plaything of an hour. He told me so himself when I charged him with having been seen in your company. So, Mysie, you may as well look cheerful. Your turn will come next, with some one in your own station.”
There are words which stimulate and confirm—there are others that seem to kill the nerve and take away the sense, nor can we ever tell the effect till we see it produced; and so we could not have told beforehand—nay, we would have looked for something quite opposite—that Mysie, shrinking and irritable as she was by nature, was saved from a faint, (which had for some moments been threatening her,) by the cruel insult which thus had been added to her misfortune. She had even power to have recourse to that strange device of some natures, that of “affecting to be not affected;” and, casting a glance at the fine lady, she turned and went away without uttering a single word. But who knows the pain of the conventional concealment of pain, except those who have experienced the agony of the trial? Even at the moment when she heard that George Balgarnie was to be married, and that she came to know that she had been for weeks sewing the marriage dress of his bride, she was carrying under her heart the living burden which was the fruit of her love for that man. Yet not the burden of shame and dishonour, as our story will show, for she was justified by the law of her country—yea, by certain words once written by an apostle to the Corinthians, all which may as yet appear a great mystery; but, as regards Mysie Craig’s agony, as she staggered down Miss Gilroy’s stairs on her way home, there could be no doubt or mystery whatever.
Nor, when she got home, was there any comfort there for the daughter who had been so undutiful as to depart from her mother’s precepts, and conceal from her not only her unfortunate connexion with a villain, but the condition into which that connexion had brought her. But she was, at least, saved from the pain of a part of the confession, for her mother had learned enough from Miss Allardice to satisfy her as to the cause of her daughter’s change from the happy creature she once was, singing in the long nights as she wrought unremittingly at her beautiful work, and the poor, sighing, pale, heart-broken thing she had been for months. Nor did she fail to see, with the quick eye of a mother, that as Mysie immediately on entering the house laid herself quietly on the bed, and sobbed in her great agony, that she had learned the terrible truth from Miss Gilroy that the robe she had embroidered was to deck the bride of her destroyer. Moreover, her discretion enabled her to perceive that this was not the time for explanation, for the hours of grief are sacred, and the heart must be left to do its work by opening the issues of Nature’s assuagement, or ceasing to beat. So the night passed, without question or answer; and the following day, that of the marriage, was one of silence, even as if death had touched the tongue that used to be the medium of cheerful words and tender sympathies—a strange contrast to the joy, if not revelry, in Advocate’s Close.