Mrs. Dorriman spoiled and petted her. Jean thought her perfection; the people liked her manner, which was both gentle and courteous to them; and when they discovered that she was a "giving" lady their respect and affection rose to enthusiasm. The few outsiders knew that she had faced a tragedy; and the death of her child, her husband's insanity, everything combined to surround her with the halo of suffering, which sets a woman apart from other women.
There was little in the surroundings of Inchbrae to draw out her sympathies. The people were not badly off, the crofter question had not cropped up, and the soil was fertile. Now and again a sick woman wanted soup and she got it, or a child was in need of some garment which gave occupation, but this was all.
Margaret was essentially a loveable woman, and had that air of dependence which (though frequently misleading enough) appeals so forcibly to the chivalrous side of mankind, and, with the claim it establishes, so often creates, an affection besides.
She was what people call sentimental, but not in the mis-used sense of that very ill-used word. Just as the commonest objects in life, a broken bough, a shallow pool, the faded leaf upon the grass, resolve themselves into pictures to the eye of an artist, so where the poetic faculty exists (more especially when it has been developed by suffering) all the various incidents of life, all the impulses and influences of personal life, become unwritten poems. Margaret had suffered terribly; the suffering was healing under the influence of time, but leaving a vivid imagination. She lived much over again, she dwelt morbidly upon her own shortcomings, and she began to be dangerously near an all-absorbing selfishness.
There was one pleasure that never palled upon her—the effect of natural beauty is so different upon different temperaments. The freshness of a sea-bound coast, the tints of grey and green, the harmony of all, is felt by some who recognise the quickened circulation, and call it health-giving; and so it is.
To a poet, however, this harmony of nature says something more—there is a deeper and fuller meaning in it all, whether the faculty of expression be given or not. Heaven and earth do not seem far apart when the soul is stirred to its very depths. The secret of those forces that carry awe when manifested in their grandest power, has a key-note, which, begun here, is carried upwards. Margaret had the power of expression, and her poems became to her the best and highest part of her life; she no longer cared to publish them; so much of herself was in them that she shrank from letting any one read them. She lived in a world of her own, a world full of beauty, but one in which self entered too much.
Grace's letter, with its violent expressions of remorse, and its incoherent account of having left Paul, broke in upon her self-absorbed feelings with rather a rude shock.
She knew Grace too well to doubt the despair of which her sister wrote, as though it and remorse henceforward were to be her portion; but she could not doubt her sincerity about the money; the cry was too natural, and Margaret's own sentiments were in such complete accordance with it.
It had been painful to her the ease with which Grace had accepted the money, and she felt thankful now that they had this point in common.
In her own mind the argument she had used seemed conclusive. "I vowed a vow I could not keep, and the benefit arising from a broken vow cannot justly be mine."