“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