“Oh, it’s no her health I’m thinking of. She’s all that; but though Death is awful in a house, I’m no one that would put a dying creature to the door. It’s other things. We’re decent folk—and never have had a clash or a story about one of us, as long as I can mind. Am I right in keeping the like of her in my house?”
“But why the like of her?” said Marjory. “She seems to me a little saint.” She thought for the moment that the poor girl’s most innocent “doubts” had affected, perhaps, some one of Scotland’s rigidly orthodox critics, and that this was the result.
“Oh, dinna say it—dinna say that! I think so myself when I look at her, and when I hear her speak; but oh, mem, though she’s very good in words—the thing I cannot get over is—that bairn.”
“What bairn?” cried Marjory, aghast.
“Did they no tell you? I thought they would; for it’s no right to let a leddy come without hearing. It’s like deceiving a minister. Ay, mem, that’s just it. Poor thing, she has had a bairn.”
It would be impossible to tell the revulsion of feeling with which Marjory received this news. She gazed aghast at her questioner, she coloured as deeply as if she herself had been the guilty person, and finally she turned and fled homeward without reply. To such a question, what answer could be made.
“I cannot advise you, I cannot advise you!” she cried. She put her hands to her ears, that she might not hear more. She quickened her steps, stumbling over the grass. Was there then nothing in the world which could be accepted honestly, as pure and true, without horrors of questioning and investigation? When she had gone half the way, Marjory sank down on the turf, and covered her face with her hands, and wept bitter tears of grief and mortification. Her very heart was sick. After all her new friend was nothing to her—the chance acquaintance of an hour—a girl in a totally different sphere, where such sins were differently thought of; and yet, this new disappointment seemed somehow to chime in with the irritation of the previous night. Perhaps it was her nerves which were affected. Pain and shame, and a sensation of wounded and outraged feeling, such as she had never known before, overwhelmed her being. Was there nothing real—nothing reliable—nothing to be trusted in this whole miserable, sinful world?
CHAPTER VIII.
Marjory did not leave the house for some days. She was disgusted with everything. She had no heart to encounter the shining of the ceaseless sunshine out of doors, and the gay scenes upon the Links—gay yet sober, with a Northern brightness. They seemed to tantalise and mock her in the heaviness of her heart. And yet when she considered calmly (or tried to do so) she had so little foundation for this excessive and fantastic feeling. So far as Fanshawe went, she might never, she said to herself, see him again; and though of course she could not help having a certain feeling of friendship for him, considering the circumstances in which they had been drawn together, yet, after all, whether he was a good-for-nothing, or the most useful and admirable member of society, it mattered very little to Marjory. And in so far as respected this unknown girl, it mattered less still—it mattered absolutely nothing. Marjory knew, as all who know the peasant population of Scotland are compelled to admit, however reluctantly, that deviations of such a kind are unfortunately much too common, and in general much too leniently judged. Such painful incidents of rural life had come in her way before, and shocked and disturbed her without having this paralyzing and sickening effect. Why was it? Was it her nerves, her bodily health, one of those simple physical reasons which disagreeable philosophers represent as at the bottom of all our supposed moral sentiments? This was an explanation which Marjory hated and scorned, as was natural, and which vexed her already wounded mind all the more that she could not absolutely put it out of the question. It might be that suffering and exhaustion had given to events, which would have affected her little under other circumstances, a special power to sting. She had to account for her gloom to her uncle by a headache, that most plausible excuse for all unrevealable griefs, and she overcame Milly by a quick prayer for silence—
“Never mind me, dear,” she said. “I am worried; my head aches—don’t ask me any questions.”