“Oh mercy! to myself I said,
If Lucy should be dead!”
The thought was natural enough, so far as Isabell was concerned, but it filled Marjory with remorse as she hurried forward. If Isabell were to die before, one way or other, this matter was cleared up!—it was but too likely she would; but the thought seemed to lend wings to Marjory’s feet.
In the little cottage chamber, however, which she thought so still, there was pain enough to demonstrate life, could she but have known. It was a dark little room at all times, for though there were two windows, these windows were little casements composed of very small and very dim panes of greenish glass—one in the front of the house towards the sea, and the other to the back. A smouldering fire burned in the grate, at which stood Isabell’s mother in her white mutch, making tea for her invalid. Isabell herself lay in the box, or press-bed, fitted into the wall, which is universal in such cottages. From the airless wooden enclosure her pale face looked out strangely, most unlike, in its pathetic beauty, to everything about. The mother’s back was turned, but between the fire and the bed sat Agnes, her ruddy, comely countenance overcast with vexation and care. She was doing nothing, her head was thrown back listlessly, and her hands laid in her lap. They were brown hands, bearing the traces of toil, and their idleness had a certain pathos in it. She sat, too, almost in the middle of the room, as if she had thrown herself down by chance, not knowing, or not caring where. As the mother went and came she stumbled over Agnes’s foot, or her chair, and uttered a little querulous exclamation: “Canna you sit in a corner? canna ye get something to do?” she said. “I canna bide to see a woman doing naething; take John’s stockings, if you’ll do nothing else.”
“I have nae heart for stockings, or anything else!” said Agnes with a sigh.
“Eh, woman! if I had been like that how could I have brought you all up?” said the mother. “Seven of a family, and no a penny nor a penny’s worth in the world. Do ye think I hadna often a sair heart? and many a time darena sit down, for fear I should be ower tired to rise again. What are your bits of trouble to that?”
“Do you call yon a bit trouble?” said Agnes, pointing to her sister’s bed. The mother’s countenance darkened; she turned towards the fire again, turning her back on her sick daughter. “I dinna call that trouble at all,” she said; “that’s sin and shame.”
“Eh, mother, ye’re hard, hard! will ye never believe it—not even since you’ve seen Miss—her man’s sister. Will ye no believe her, even now?”
“Dinna speak to me of her man,” said the old woman indignantly, pouring the boiling water upon the tea with a certain vindictive movement. All this conversation was carried on in an undernote, that Isabell might not hear. “Her man has been a bonnie man to her; whatever was his meaning; he’s brought her naething but misery and shame. What had she to do, giving ear to ane o’ thae gentlemen with their false tongues? Gentlemen! I wouldna give an honest man for ten gentlemen—and so it’s seen. Give her her tea; I havena the heart to look at her white face,” said the mother, turning away; she went and sat down noiselessly in the room, and put up her apron to her eyes. How many different kinds of suffering were shut up there together, all separate, and keeping themselves apart!
The tea was made in silence—the one cordial of poor women’s lives—and then the little group subsided once more into their places.
“Have you any word from John?” said the mother, this time loud enough for all to hear.