A small thing touches a heart that is sore with trouble. When the good woman rose up—after patting the little feet, and approving loudly of the woolen stockings—she saw that Hilary's whole face was quivering with the effort to keep back her tears.
There are some woman of whom one feels by instinct that they were, as Miss Balquidder had once jokingly said of herself, specially meant to be mothers. And though, in its strange providence, Heaven often denies the maternity, it can not and does not mean to shut up the well-spring of that maternal passion—truly a passion to such women as these, almost as strong as the passion of love—but lets the stream, which might otherwise have blessed one child or one family, flow out wide and far, blessing wherever it goes.
In a tone that somehow touched every fibre of Hilary's heart, Miss
Balquidder said, placing her on a low chair beside her own.
"My dear, you are in trouble. I saw it a week or two ago, but did not like to speak. Couldn't you say it out, and let me help you? You need not be afraid. I never tell any thing, and every body tells every thing to me."
That was true. Added to this said mother-liness of hers, Miss Balquidder, possessed that faculty, which some people have in a remarkable degree, and some—very good people too—are totally deficient in, of attracting confidence. The secrets she had been trusted with, the romances she had been mixed up in, the Quixotic acts she had been called upon to perform during her long life, would have made a novel—or several novels—such as no novelist could dare to write, for the public would condemn them as impossible and unnatural. But all this experience—though happily it could never be put into a book—had given to the woman herself a view of human nature at once so large, lenient, and just, that she was the best person possible to hear the strange and pitiful story of young Ascott Leaf.
How it came out Hilary hardly knew; she seemed to have told very little, and yet Miss Balquidder guessed it all. It did not appear to surprise or shock her. She neither began to question nor preach; she only laid her hand, her large, motherly, protecting hand, on the bowed head, saying.
"How much you must have suffered, my poor bairn!"
The soft Scotch tone and word—the grave, quiet Scotch manner, implying more than it even expressed—was it wonderful if underlying as well as outside influences made Hilary completely give way?
Robert Lyon had had a mother, who died when he was seventeen, but of whom he kept the tenderest remembrance, often saying that of all the ladies he had met with in the world there was none equal to her—the strong, tender, womanly peasant woman—refined in mind and word and ways—though to the last day of her life she spoke broad Scotch, and did the work of her cottage with her own hands. It seems as if that mother—toward whom Hilary's fancy had clung, lovingly as a woman ought to cling, above all others, to the mother of the man she loves—were speaking to her now, comforting her and helping her—comfort and help that it would have been sweeter to receive from her than from any woman living.
A mere fancy; but in her state of long uncontrolled excitement it took such possession of her that Hilary fell on her knees and hid her face in Miss Balquidder's lap, sobbing aloud.