“It is my mother he is thinking of, as well as his son. Oh! I wish I hadna spoken?”
She sat down in a misery of doubt and longing, not sure whether she were glad or sorry that he had given her no chance to say more. How little and light her own anxieties looked in the presence of her father’s sorrow! The silence and self-restraint, which day after day kept all token of suffering out of sight, made it all the more painful and pitiful to see when it would have its way! Miss Jean, his sister, had seen him more than once moved from his silent acceptance of pain and loss, but his daughter had never seen this, and she was greatly startled, and sat sick at heart with the thought that there was no help for his trouble.
For even if she were to tell him now that her brother had gone to sea in the “John Seaton,” there would hardly be comfort in that; for it was more than time that the ship were in port, and though no one openly acknowledged that there was cause for anxiety, in secret many feared that all might not be well with her. No, she must not tell him. The new suspense would be more than he could bear, Jean thought; and she must wait, and bear her burden a little longer alone.
The tears that she could not keep back, did not lighten her heart as a girl’s tears are supposed to do, and though she checked them, with the thought that she must not let their traces be seen in the house, they came in a flood when she found her sister’s arms clasped about her neck and her face hidden on her breast. But she struggled against her emotion for her sister’s sake, and kissed and congratulated her, and then comforted her as their mother might have done. And May smiled again in a little while—indeed what cause had she to cry at all, she asked herself, for surely there never was a happier girl than she.
And they both looked bright enough when they came down to dinner, and so did their father. Jean wondered and asked herself whether the sight of his moved face and the sound of his breaking voice, had not come to her in a dream.
He only came in at the last moment, and if he guessed from May’s shy looks that something had happened to her, he took no notice, and every thing went on as usual, though a little effort was needed against the silence which fell on them now and then.
Of course after dinner, the girls went to the parlour and young Corbett went with them; and when, by and by, their father and Mr Manners came in to get some tea, Jean knew that May’s fate was decided, as far as her father’s consent to her marriage could decide it.
Pretty May blushed and dimpled and cried a little when her father came and kissed her and “clappet” her softly on her shoulder, and in rather an uncertain voice bade “God bless her.”
Then Mr Manners brought her to Jean. “Will you give me your sister?” said he gravely. “Since she seems to have given herself to you, I may as well,” said Jean kissing her sister and keeping back the tears that were wonderfully ready to-night.
“And remember your first word was a promise to stand my friend.”