“Ay, just sae soon. I askit Him to let me bide while ye came hame. I ay thocht I wad fain see ye ance mair—my Miss Flora’s lad’s lassie. He’s gi’en me a’ that ever I askit Him—but ane thing, an’ that was the vara desire o’ my heart.”
“You mean,” said Flora, gently, “you wanted Ronald to come home?”
“Ay, I wanted him to come hame frae the far country!” said old Mirren with a sigh. “I’d ha’e likit weel to see him come hame to Abbotscliff—vara weel. But I longed mickle mair to see him come hame to the Father’s house. It’s no for his auld minnie to see that. But if it’s for the Lord to see some ither day, I’m content. And He has gi’en me sae monie things that I ne’er askit Him wi’ ane half the longing that I did for that, I dinna think He’ll say me nay the now.”
“Is He with you, Mirren dear?”
I could not imagine how Flora thought Mirren was to know that. But she answered, with a light in those bright eyes,—
“Ay, my doo. ‘His left haun is under my heid, and His richt haun doth embrace me.’”
I sat and listened in wonder. It all sounded so strange. Yet Flora seemed to understand. And I had such an unpleasant sense of being outside, and not understanding, as I never felt before, and I did not like it a bit. I knew quite well that if Father had been there, he would have said it was all stuff and cant. But I did not feel so sure of my Aunt Kezia. And suppose it were not cant, but was something unutterably real,—something that I ought to know, and must know some day, if I were ever to get to Heaven! I did not like it. I felt that I was among a new sort of people—people who lived, as it were, in a different place from me—a sort of whom I had never seen one before (that did not come from Abbotscliff) except my Aunt Kezia, and there were differences between her and them. My Uncle Drummond and Flora, and Mr Keith, and this old Mirren, and I thought Helen Raeburn and Mr Cameron, all belonged this new sort of people. The one who did not seem to belong them was Angus. Yet I did not like Angus nearly so well as the rest. And yet he belonged my sort of people. It was a puzzle altogether, and not a pleasant puzzle. And how anybody was to get out of the one set into the other set, I could not tell at all.
Stop! I did know one other person at Brocklebank who belonged this new sort of people. It was Ephraim Hebblethwaite. He was not, I thought—well, I don’t know how to put it—he did not seem so far on the road as the others; only he was on that road, and not on this road. And then it struck me, too, whether old Elspie, and perhaps Sam, were not on the road as well. I ran over in my mind, as I was walking back to the manse with Flora, who was very silent, all the people I knew; and I could not think of one other who might be on Flora’s road. Father and my sisters, Esther Langridge, the Catteralls, the Bracewells, Cecilia—oh dear, no!—Mr Digby, Mr Bagnall (yet they were parsons), Mr Parmenter—no, not one. At all the four I named last, my mind gave a sort of jump as if it were quite astonished to be asked the question. But where did the roads lead? Flora and her sort, I felt quite sure, were going to Heaven. Then where were Angus and I and all the rest going?
And I did not like the answer at all.
But I felt that the two roads led in opposite ways, and they could not both go to one place.