“I wonder you don’t feel angry with me,” Eileen whispered.
“My dear, how should I?—though it hurts us to know that Jack is unhappy, we have lived long enough to see that sorrow is a great teacher and a great helper, and we believe that by and by he will be glad again, and bless the Hand that let the sorrow come.”
“How good you are!” Eileen breathed. “It helps me only to hear you talk.”
“I want very much to help you,” the little lady said sadly. “You are going away to a hard change, my child, and carrying more than one heavy cross with you. I wish I could bear something for you. But you must try not to brood, lest it injure your health and add to your mother’s sorrow; and you must try to be bright to help poor Paddy. London will be terrible to her, poor child I fancy I see her now straining her eyes to the horizon, dreaming of her dear mountains and loch.”
There was a short silence, and she said in a changed voice:
“But I have not finished my story yet. I have not told you what happened to Jane and Patrick. It was not until we came back to England, a year later, that I knew, and then it was a shock to me. I am afraid I was very selfish all through that year, or I should have drawn it from Jane sooner. It seems that Allan’s conduct made her very angry with the whole family, and while in Cairo nursing me she learnt a great deal about the world generally that she had never known before. Among other things she heard how wild Patrick and his brother had been, and she made up her mind she would have no more to do with anyone of the name of Quinn, for my sake. By a strange chance, Patrick’s regiment came to Cairo, and he sought her out at once and asked her to marry him. A very stormy scene followed, in which Jane vented her wrath against Allan upon poor Patrick and denounced the whole family. Then she accused him of drinking and betting, told him she believed no one of his name could keep faith, and sent him away.
“Poor Patrick; poor Jane—looking back now, I believe theirs was, after all, the saddest case. You see she loved him all the time, though she did not know how much until she had sent him away. And he loved her, too. For her sake he would have changed, and there was much good in him; only when she sent him away like that he just gave in and sank deeper, and not very long afterward he died of sunstroke in India. For a long time Jane never breathed a word concerning him, and then one day I found her accidentally with her head down on his photograph, and I made her tell me all.
“It was a strange mystery how one man’s perfidy should be permitted to spoil three lives, but it is good to think that what looks so mysterious to our dim eyes is perfectly clear to Him, and in the end we shall understand and be satisfied.
“That is all, dear! Now you know why sister and I have never married, yet are rich because we have known the deep wonder of Love. It is worth some sorrow to have that knowledge, and there is no life so barren, whatever else it holds, as the life that has not known a deep and true Love.”
She got up, and in the firelight it seemed to Eileen that some inner radiance lit up her sweet, lined face, reflecting a faint aureole round her silver hair.