“I don’t see that for my part,” cried Mrs. MacKell, feeling herself attacked, and responding with instant readiness. “Dear me! if I were in my mother’s position, to see all my children about me, all that remain, would aye be a joyful occasion, whatever was the cause; and what better could she do at her age than go up the loch to my sister Jean’s comfortable house, where she would be much made of, and have all her old friends about her? My mother has been a good mother. I have not a word to say against that; but she’s always been a proud woman, awfully proud, holding her head as high as the Duchess, and making everybody stand about. I’ll not say but what it has been very good for us, for we’ve never fallen among the common sort. But still, you know, unless where there’s siller that sort of thing cannot be kept up. Of course, I would like it better,” added Mrs. MacKell, “to have my mother near, where I could send the bairns—excuse me for using the words of the place.”
“Oh, I like the words,” said Edgar, with a laugh, which he could not quite restrain—better than the sentiments, he would have said.
“Where I could send any of my young folk that happened to be looking white, at any moment,” she went on; “far different from what I could do with Jean, who has the assurance to tell me she always invites her friends when she wants them, though her son has his dinner with us every Sunday of his life during the Session! Therefore it’s clear what my interest is. But you see, Mr. Edgar,” she continued, softening, “you have the ways of a rich man. You never think of the difficulties. Oh! Charles, is that you? I’m glad to see you looking so well; and how are things going in the East country? and how is your sister Marg’ret, and little Bell? If my young folk had known you were here, they would have wanted you away with them in the boat. But I must go ben and see my mother before all the folk come in. I suppose you are going to look over the farm, and the beasts, with the rest.”
The young doctor—upon whom as a man of his own age, and one more like the people he had been accustomed to than those he now found around him, Edgar had looked, with more interest than any of his other relations had called from him—came up to him now with a face overcast with care.
“May I speak to you about this painful subject,” he said, “before the others come in?”
“Why a painful subject?” asked Edgar, with a smile, which was half tremulous with feeling, and half indignant, too proud for sympathy.
“It may not be so to you,” said the young man. “She brought us up, every one of my family; but what can I do? I have a brother in Australia, too far off to help, and another a clerk in London. As for me, I have the charge of my eldest sister, who is a widow with a child. You don’t know what a hard fight it is for a young medical man struggling to make his way.”
“No, not yet,” said Edgar, with a smile.
“Not yet? How can you know? If I were to take my grandmother home with me, which I would do gladly, she would be far from everything that she knows and cares for—in a new place, among strangers. Her whole life would be broken up. And I could not take Jeanie,” the young man added, with a thrill of still greater pain in his voice. “There would be other dangers. What can we do? I cannot bear to think that she must leave this place. But I have so little power to help, and consequently so little voice in the matter.”
“I have not very much,” said Edgar; “but yet enough, I think, to decide this question. And so long as I have a shilling, she shall not be driven away from her home. On that I have made up my mind.”