“Marg’ret, it’s Anne.”
“I ken weel who it is, Dr. Dewar’s wife; you might just have let her bide with her bairns. What am I to do with her? It’s no her mother she’s thinking o’. The Laird will never thole her in the house. He’ll just take her with his foot like a bundle of claes, which is what she is, and put her to the door.”
“You will take care of her, Marg’ret,” said Kirsteen. There was some justice in Marg’ret’s description. Anne sat huddled up in a chair by the fire holding out her hands to it now and then, moaning a little. She had asked no question as they came in; perhaps she had heard the reply to Kirsteen’s anxious inquiry. She was cold no doubt and miserable, and beyond all afraid. When there was any sound in the house she drew herself together with a shudder. “You will just take care of her, Marg’ret; let her lie down upon your bed, and keep her warm, and when my father has gone to his bed—”
“You will not wait for that yoursel’?”
Kirsteen’s answer was to walk away. She went through the passage with her heart beating, and mounted the dark stair; there were few lights about the house, a solitary miserable candle at the top of the stair waving about in the wind that blew in from the open door, and another placed on a small table near the head of Mrs. Douglas’s bed. The invalid herself was quite in the dark shade with a curtain between her and this light. The whiteness of her worn face on the pillow betrayed where she was but little more. But by the bedside with the gleam of the candle upon her soft, beautiful hair, and her face, which Kirsteen thought was like the face of an angel, stood Jeanie, Jeanie woman-grown, the beauty that all her sisters had expected her to be, radiant in colour and expression. For the first moment the light that seemed to ray from Jeanie was the only thing that Kirsteen saw. It was what she had expected. It gave her almost a pang of sudden exquisite pleasure by her mother’s deathbed.
“Did ye hear somebody, Jeanie, coming up the stair?”
“It will be Merran, mother, with the things for the night.”
“It canna be Merran; I know one foot from another though I’m a little dull, just a little dull in my hearing. Look out and see if your sister’s come.”
“Do you mean Mary, mother?”
“No, I’m not meaning Mary. She’s the one of all my bairns most like me, folk say—the same coloured hair—not like your red heads—and Alexander he was aye a brown-haired laddie. Eh, to think that I will never see one of them again!—and I’m just quite content, not frettin’ at all. They’ll be taken care of—they’ll get wives of their own. When they get wives—or men either—there’s but little room for their mother. But I’m not heeding—I’m just not heeding. I’m quite content. Look out, Jeanie, and see if that was your sister at the door.”