The peace of Adeline was soon after disturbed in another way. Glenmurray finding himself disposed to sleep in the middle of the day, his cough having kept him waking all night, Adeline took her usual walk, and returned by the church-yard. The bell was tolling; and as she passed she saw a funeral enter the church-yard, and instantly averted her head.
In so doing her eyes fell on a decent-looking woman, who with a sort of angry earnestness was watching the progress of the procession.
'Aye, there goes your body, you rogue!' she exclaimed indignantly, 'but I wonder where your soul is now?—where I would not be for something.'
Adeline was shocked, and gently observed, 'What crime did the person of whom you are speaking, that you should suppose his soul so painfully disposed of?'
'What crime?' returned the woman: 'crime enough, I think:—why, he ruined a poor girl here in the neighbourhood: and then, because he never chose to make a will, there is she lying-in of a little by-blow, with not a farthing of money to maintain her or the child, and the fellow's money is gone to the heir-at-law, scarce of kin to him, while his own flesh and blood is left to starve.'
Adeline shuddered:—if Glenmurray were to die, she and the child which she bore would, she knew, be beggars.
'Well, miss, or madam, belike, by the look of you,' continued the woman glancing her eye over Adeline's person, 'what say you? Don't you think the fellow's soul is where we should not like to be? However, he had his hell here too, to be sure! for, when speechless and unable to move his fingers, he seemed by signs to ask for pen and ink, and he looked in agonies; and there was the poor young woman crying over him, and holding in her arms the poor destitute baby, who would as he grew up be taught, he must think, to curse the wicked father who begot him, and the naughty mother who bore him!'
Adeline turned very sick, and was forced to seat herself on a tombstone. 'Curse the mother who bore him!' she inwardly repeated,—'and will my child curse me? Rather let me undergo the rites I have despised!' and instantly starting from her seat she ran down the road to her lodgings, resolving to propose to Glenmurray their immediate marriage.
'But is the possession of property, then,' she said to herself as she stopped to take breath, 'so supreme a good, that the want of it, through the means of his mother, should dispose a child to curse that mother?—No: my child shall be taught to consider nothing valuable but virtue, nothing disgraceful but vice.—Fool that I am! a bugbear frightened me; and to my foolish fears I was about to sacrifice my own principles, and the respectability of Glenmurray. No—Let his property go to the heir-at-law—let me be forced to labour to support my babe, when its father—' Here a flood of tears put an end to her soliloquy, and slowly and pensively she returned home.
But the conversation of the woman in the church-yard haunted her while waking, and continued to distress her in her dreams that night, and she was resolved to do all she could to relieve the situation of the poor destitute girl and child, in whose fate she might possibly see an anticipation of her own: and as soon as breakfast was over, and Glenmurray was engaged in his studies, she walked out to make the projected inquiries.