“What by that? Do you, a woman of your age, ask me such a question? When a gentleman of good blood and family, as well as great wealth, goes walking and driving with a poor girl of no family at all, do you ask what by that? Nothing but disgrace and trouble can be looked for.”
“Speak for your own kin and side, Madame. And I should think a woman of your age—being at least twenty years older than myself—would know that true love never asks for a girl’s pedigree. And as for ‘disgrace,’ Sophy Traill will never call anything like ‘disgrace’ to herself. I will allow that Sophy is poor, but as for family, the Traills are of the best Norse strain. They were sea-fighters, hundreds of years before they were sea-fishers; and they had been ‘at home’ on the North Sea, and in all the lands about it, centuries before the like of the Braelands were thought or heard tell of.”
Mistress Kilgour was rapidly becoming angry, and Madame would have been wise to have noted the circumstance; but she herself was now past all prudence, and with an air of contempt she took out her jewelled watch, and beginning to slowly wind it, said:—
“My good woman, Sophy’s father was a common fisherman. We have no call to go back to the time when her people were pirates and sea-robbers.”
“I am my own woman, Madame. And I will take my oath I am not your woman, anyhow. And ‘common’ or uncommon, the fishermen of Fife call no man master but the Lord God Almighty, from whose hands they take their food, summer and winter. And I will make free to say, moreover, that if Braelands loves Sophy Traill and she loves him, worse might befall him than Sophy for a wife. For if God thinks fit to mate them, it is not Griselda Kilgour that will take upon herself to contradict the Will of Heaven.”
“Don’t talk rubbish, Mistress Kilgour. People who live in society have to regard what society thinks and says.”
“It is no ways obligatory, Madame, the voice of God and Nature has more weight, I’m thinking, and if God links two together, you will find it gey and hard to separate them.”
“I heard the girl was promised since her babyhood to a fisherman called Andrew Binnie.”
“For once you have heard the truth, Madame. But you know yourself that babyhood and womanhood are two different things; and the woman has just set at naught the baby. That is all.”
“No, it is not all. This Andrew Binnie is a man of great influence among the fishers, and my son cannot afford to make enemies among that class. It will be highly prejudicial to him.”