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.”