But between those two stood the yet scarce recognised tie which bound them together—the little deformed child.
CHAPTER X.
“Captain Rothesay?”
“My dear?”
Reader, did you ever notice the intense frigidity that can be expressed in a “my dear!” The coldest, cruellest husband we ever knew once impressed this fact on our childish fancy, by our always hearing him call his wife thus. Poor, pale, broken-hearted creature! He “my deared” her into her grave.
Captain Rothesay also used the epithet with a formality which was chilling enough in its way. He said it without lifting his eyes from the book, “Smith's Wealth of Nations,” which had become his usual evening's study now, whenever he was at home. That circumstance, rare enough to have been welcome, and yet it was not welcome, now subdued his wife and daughter into silence and quietness. Alas! that ever a presence which ought to be the sunshine of a household should enter only to cast a perpetual shade.
The firelight shone on the same trio which had formed the little after-dinner circle years ago at Stirling. But there was a change in all. The father and mother sat—not side by side, in that propinquity which is so sweet, when every breath, every touch of the beloved's garment gives pleasure; they sat one at each corner of the table, engrossed in their several occupations; reading with an uncommunicative eagerness, and sewing in unbroken silence. Each was entrenched within a chilling circle of thoughts and interests in which the other never entered. And now the only point of meeting between them was the once-banished child.
Little Olive was growing almost a woman now, but she was called “little Olive” still. She retained her diminutive stature, together with her girlish dress, but her face wore, as ever, its look of premature age. And as she sat between her father and mother, now helping the one in her delicate fancy-work, now arranging the lamp for the other's reading, continually in request by both, or when left quiet for a minute, watching both with anxious earnestness, there was quite enough in Olive's manner to show that she had entered on a woman's life of care, and had not learned a woman's wisdom one day too soon.
The captain's last “my dear” found his wife in the intricacies of a Berlin-wool pattern, so that she did not speak Again for several minutes, when she again appealed to “Captain Rothesay.” She rarely called him anything else now. Alas! the time of “Angus” and “Sybilla” was gone.