“That is impossible,” rejoined the laird.
“I don’t know that,” insisted Fergus. “There is a foolish—a half-silly companion of his about the town. They call him Sir Gibbie Galbraith.”
“Jenny knows no such person.”
“Indeed she does. I have seen them together.”
“Oh! you mean the lad the minister adopted! the urchin he took off the streets!—Sir Gibbie Galbraith!” he repeated sneeringly, but as one reflecting. “—I do vaguely recall a slanderous rumour in which a certain female connection of the family was hinted at.—Yes! that’s where the nickname comes from.—And you think she keeps up a communication with the clown through him?”
“I don’t say that, sir. I merely think it possible she may see this Gibbie occasionally; and I know he worships the cow-boy: it is a positive feature of his foolishness, and I wish it were the worst.”
Therewith he told what he heard from Miss Kimble, and what he had seen for himself on the night when he watched Gibbie.
“Her very blood must be tainted!” said her father to himself, but added, “—from her mother’s side;” and his attacks upon her after this were at least diurnal. It was a relief to his feeling of having wronged her, to abuse her with justice. For a while she tried hard to convince him now that this, now that that notion of her conduct, or of Gibbie’s or Donal’s, was mistaken: he would listen to nothing she said, continually insisting that the only amends for her past was to marry according to his wishes; to give up superstition, and poetry, and cow-boys, and dumb rascals, and settle down into a respectable matron, a comfort to the gray hairs she was now bringing with sorrow to the grave. Then Ginevra became absolutely silent; he had taught her that any reply was but a new start for his objurgation, a knife wherewith to puncture a fresh gall-bladder of abuse. He stormed at her for her sullenness, but she persisted in her silence, sorely distressed to find how dead her heart seemed growing under his treatment of her: what would at one time have made her utterly miserable, now passed over her as one of the billows of a trouble that had to be borne, as one of the throbs of a headache, drawing from her scarcely a sigh. She did not understand that, her heaven being dark, she could see no individual cloud against it, that, her emotional nature untuned, discord itself had ceased to jar.
CHAPTER LVII.
A HIDING-PLACE FROM THE WIND.
Gibbie found everything at the Auld Hoose in complete order for his reception: Mistress Croale had been very diligent, and promised well for a housekeeper—looked well, too, in her black satin and lace, with her complexion, she justly flattered herself, not a little improved. She had a good meal ready for him, with every adjunct in proper style, during the preparation of which she had revelled in the thought that some day, when she had quite established her fitness for her new position, Sir Gibbie would certainly invite the minister and his lady to dine with him, when she, whom they were too proud to ask to partake of their cockie-leekie, would show them she knew both what a dinner ought to be, and how to preside at it; and the soup—it should be cockie-leekie.