“I think ye maun ken all that I could tell you—or mostly all.”
“I only ken—I mean I used to think that they—cared for one another—oh long ago, before my mother died. And since we came home, I have heard a word dropped now and then, by different folk—Marion Petrie, and her mother; and once Tibbie Cairnie said something about my father’s cursed pride, and his fine plans that would come to nothing. But it wasna till afterwards that I knew that it was Geordie she was thinking about Auntie Jean, I have had my thoughts, but I ken little. Was my father angry? But he must have been sorry for George when poor Elsie died. And was it because of Elsie that my brother went away?”
It was not an easy story to tell, and Miss Jean put it in as few words as possible, having her own reasons for telling it to Jean. She dwelt less upon her father’s anger at his son’s folly, than upon the heartbreak that his loss had brought him. But she made it clear that “poor bonny Elsie” was the cause of their estrangement, and that it would have been the same had Elsie lived and had George carried out his determination to marry her against his father’s will.
“If the poor foolish lad had only waited and had patience in the mean time, much sorrow might have been spared to all concerned. Your father might have given in—though I dinna think it; or as they were little more than bairns, they might have forgotten ane anither—though I dinna think that either. But if George had won to man’s estate, and had been doing a man’s work and getting a man’s wages, he would have had a better right to take his own way, and your father might have given in then. At least he must have been silent, and let the lad go his ain gait. I whiles weary myself thinking how it might have been.”
Jean sat without a word, but with a face that changed many times from white to red and from red to white as she listened; and when her aunt paused, and took up the work which in her earnestness she had allowed to fall on her lap, she sat silent still, quite unconscious of the uneasy glances that fell on her from time to time.
“It has made an old man of your father,” added Miss Jean in a little.
“Poor father! and poor Geordie! Ay, and poor Elsie! and nothing can change it now.”
Jean rose from the stool on which she had been sitting at her aunt’s feet, and walked restlessly about the room. By and by, she came and stood behind her aunt’s chair, leaning upon it.
“Aunt—there is something I would like to tell you. I wonder if I ought?”
“Ye maun judge, my dear.”