“Oh, mem, the one would go with the other, if what you think is true.”
“No,” said Miss Bethune, shutting her lips tight, “no, there’s no necessity. If it had been so what would have hindered him to give the boy chapter and verse? Her name is So-and-so, you will hear of her at such a place. But never that—never that, though it would have been so easy! Only that he had a mother living, a mother that the guardian man and the lad himself divined must have been a —— Do you not call that evidence?” cried Miss Bethune, with a harsh triumph. “Do you not divine our man in that? Oh, but I see him as clear as if he had signed his name.”
“Dear mem,” cried Gilchrist, with a “tchick, tchick,” of troubled sympathy and spectatorship, “you canna wish he had been a true penitent and yet think of him like that.”
“And who are you to lay down the law and say what I can do?” cried the lady. She added, with a wave of her hand and her head: “We’ll not argue that question: but if there ever was an action more like the man!—just to give the hint and clear his conscience, but leave the woman’s name to be torn to pieces by any dozen in the place! If that is not evidence, I don’t know what evidence is.”
Gilchrist could say nothing in reply. She shook her head, though whether in agreement or in dissidence it would have been difficult to tell, and folded hem upon hem on her apron, with her eyes fixed upon that, as if it had been the most important of work. “I was wanting to speak,” she said, “when you had a moment to listen to me, about two young folk.”
“What two young folk?” Miss Bethune’s eyes lighted up with a gleam of soft light, her face grew tender in every line. “But Dora is too young, she is far too young for anything of the kind,” she said.
“Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, with a mingling of astonishment, admiration, and pity, “can ye think of nothing but yon strange young man?”
“I am thinking of nothing but the bairn, the boy that was stolen away before he knew his right hand from his left, and now is come home.”
“Aweel, aweel,” said Gilchrist, “we will just have to put up with it, as we have put up with it before. And sooner or later her mind will come back to what’s reasonable and true. I was speaking not of the young gentleman, or of any like him, but of the two who were up in the attics that you were wanting to save, if save them ye can. They are just handless creatures, the one and the other; but the woman’s no’ an ill person, poor thing, and would do well if she knew the way. And a baby coming, and the man just a weirdless, feckless, ill man.”
“He cannot help it if he is ill, Gilchrist.”