Yet human feelings could not utterly be suppressed; and there were many times, when at night-time she buried her face on the now lonely pillow, and stretched out her arms into the empty darkness, crying, “My mother, oh my mother!” But then strong love came between Olive and her agony, whispering, that wherever her spirit abided, the mother could not forget her child.
Olive looked very calm now, as she sat with Mrs. Gwynne in the bay-window of the little drawing-room at the Parsonage, engaged in some light work, with Ailie reading a lesson at her knee. It was a lesson too, taken from that lore—at once the most simple and most divine—the Gospels of the New Testament.
“I thought my son would prove himself right in all his opinions,” observed Mrs. Gwynne, when the lesson was over and the child had run away. “I knew he would allow Ailie to learn everything at the right time.”
Olive made no answer. Her thoughts turned to the day—now some months back—when, stung by the disobedience and falsehood that lay hid in a young mind which knew no higher law than a human parent's command, Harold had come to her for counsel She remembered his almost despairing words, “Teach the child as you will—true or false—I care not; so that she becomes like yourself, and is saved from those doubts which rack her father's soul.”
Harold Gwynne was not singular in this. Scarcely ever was there an unbeliever who desired to see his own scepticism reflected in his child.
Mrs. Gwynne continued—“I don't think I can ever sufficiently thank you, my dear Miss Rothesay.”
“Say Olive, as you generally do.”
For her Christian name sounded so sweet and homelike from Harold's mother; especially now.
“Olive, then! My dear, how good you are to take Ailie so entirely under your care and teaching. But for that, we must have sent her to some school from home, and, I will not conceal from you, that would have been a great sacrifice, even in a worldly point of view, since our income is much diminished by my son's having been obliged to resign his duties altogether, and take a curate. But tell me, do you think Harold looks any better! What an anxious summer this has been!”
And Olive, hearing the heavy sigh of the mother, whose whole existence was bound up in her son, felt that there was something holy even in that deceit, or rather concealment, wherein she herself was now a sorely-tried sharer. “You must not be too anxious,” she said; “you know that there is nothing dangerous in Mr. Gwynne's state of health, only his brain has been overworked.”