“If I were only sure.”
Both were silent for a time.
“Would I be better able to give help or counsel to you or—to any one—if I were to hear what you could tell?”
Jean shook her head.
“Nothing can be done—at least not now,” said she sadly. “Weel then, dearie, dinna speak. Whiles troubles take shape and strength in the utterance and grow persistent, that might have died out or come to little in silence. If a time should come that you are sure that speaking would do any good, tell me then.”
“It would do no good now. And I am not sure that there is any thing to tell.”
There was a long silence between them. Jean was thinking of the “John Seaton” sailing away with her brother to the northern seas. Miss Jean was thinking of the “John Seaton” too, and of Willie Calderwood, with a sad heart.
“They were just a’ bairns thegither I thought, but I little kenned. And wae’s me! for my bonny Jean, gin she has to go through all that—and wae’s me! for her father as well. No’ that the pain and the trouble need be feared for them, so that they are brought through—and no unfilial bitterness left to sicken my bairn’s heart forever more; but I mustna speak, or let her speak. I think she hardly kens yet how it is with her, but she would ken at the first word; silence is best.”
And silence it was. But by and by more was said about the story of those two “for whom life was ended,” as Jean said sadly. She was not angry at her father’s part in the matter, as her aunt had feared she might be. It could not have been otherwise, looking at things as he looked at them, she acknowledged, and she grieved for him all the more, knowing that there must mingle much bitterness, perhaps remorse, with his sorrow for his son.
“If my mother had but lived!” she said sadly. “Ay, lassie! But He kens best who took her hence where we’ll a’ soon follow. We make muckle ado about our gains and our pains, our loves and our losses, forgetting that ‘our days are as a shadow, and there is no abiding.’”