Jeanie had sense enough to take her at her word, and thus all the morning she had been alone, sitting with eyes fixed on Benvohrlan, often with a strange smile on her face, pondering and thinking. She had her stocking in her hands, and knitted on and on, weaving in her musing soul with the thread. When her daughters came in she received them very kindly with a wistful smile, looking up into their faces, wondering if the sight of the mother who bore them had any effect upon these women. Still more wistfully she looked at the men who followed. Many a volume has been written about the love of parents, the love of mothers, its enthusiasms of hope and fancy, its adorations of the unworthy, its agony for the lost; but I do not remember that anyone has ventured to touch upon a still more terrible view of the subject, the disappointment, for example, with which such a woman as I have attempted to set before the reader—a woman full of high aspirations, noble generosities, and perhaps an unwarrantable personal pride, all intensified by the homely circumstances of life around her—sometimes looks upon the absolutely commonplace people whom she has brought into the world. She, too, has had her dreams about them while they were children and all things seemed possible—while they were youths with still some grace and freshness of the morning veiling their unheroic outlines. But a woman of seventy can cherish no fond delusions about her middle-aged sons and daughters who are to all intents and purposes as old as she is. What a dismal sense of failure must come into such a woman’s heart while she looks at them! Perhaps this is one reason why grandfathers and grandmothers throw themselves so eagerly into the new generation, by means of which human nature can always go on deceiving itself. Heavens! what a difference between the ordinary man or woman at fifty, and that ideal creature which he, or she, appeared to the mother’s eyes at fifteen! The old people gaze and gaze to see our old features in us; and who can express the blank of that disappointment, the cruel mortification of those old hopes, which never find expression in any words?
Mrs. Murray, from the household place where she had ruled so long, where she had brought up upon her very life-blood like the pelican, those same commonplace people—where she had succoured the poor, and entertained strangers, and fed from her heart two generations—looked wistfully, half wonderingly at them as they all entered, and sat down round her, to decide what was to be done with her. Something of a divine despair, like that God Himself might have felt when the creation he had pronounced good, turned to evil—but with a more poignant thrill of human anguish in the fact of her own utter powerlessness to move to good or to evil those independent souls which once had seemed all hers, to influence as she would—swept through her like a sudden storm. But to show any outward sign of this was impossible. Theirs now was the upper hand; they were in the height of life, and she was old. “When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not;” she said these words to herself with a piteous patience and submission; but unheard by any soul,—unless, indeed, it was by those sympathisers in Heaven, who hear so much, yet make no sign that we can hear or see.
They came in quite cheerfully all of them, full of the many and diversified affairs which, for the moment, they were to make the sacrifice of laying aside to settle the fate of their mother, and held over her body, as it were, a pleasant little family palaver.
“The children have gone down the loch for a pic-nic; they would have come in to see Granny, but I said you would have no time for them to-day. The weather is just wonderful for this time of the year, or I never would have allowed such a thing.”
“It’s all very well for you town-folk to praise up a good day,” said Mr. Campbell, “which is no doubt pleasant when it comes to them that have no interest in the land—but a kind of an insult to us after all the soft weather that has ruined the corn. What’s the use of one good day except for your pic-nics and nonsense? nothing but to make the handful of wheat sprout the faster. And the glass is down again—We’ll have more rain the morn.”
“You’ll find it very dry in the East country, Chairles,” said Mrs. Campbell; “more pleasant for walking, but very stour and troublesome to keep a house clean, and a great want of water. Your sister Marg’ret was aye ill to please about the weather; but after a’ that’s come and gone, I hope she’s no so fanciful now?”
“You’ll be setting up a gig soon?” said James Murray, “or, perhaps, you’ve done it already? It’s expensive, but it’s a kind of necessity for a doctor.”
“Indeed I cannot see that; a strong young man like Charles that’s well able to walk! but some folk are always taking care of themselves,” said Mrs. MacKell. “In Glasgow, the richest men in the place think nothing of a walk, wet or dry—and my bairns, I assure you, are never spoiled with such luxuries.”
“A gig to a doctor is like a spade to a labouring man,” said Robert Campbell, sententiously; “that’s an expense that I approve. Keep you up appearances, Charles—that’s as long as you can do it out of your own pocket,” he said with a laugh, thrusting his hand deep into his own.
“I know where you could lay your hand on a very decent machine, cheaper, I answer for’t, than anything you’ll get in the East country,” said James.