“It’s John and me,” said Agnes breaking in, “that can do best for the bairn.”
“And who will love him best?” said the old mother, “you will have bairns of your ain. You will push him by and make no account of him. He will have the orphan’s fate. He will eat the bread of tears, he will have to bide in his corner, and haud his tongue, and walk wary, wary, lest worst should befall him.”
Here Isabell turned with a cry to the unconscious infant at her side. They pierced her gentle soul with a hundred poisoned arrows without meaning it. Poor people do not build up foolish pictures of possible recovery round their dying up to the last moment, as some of us do. They never throw any sort of doubt upon that certain and near approaching termination. Not even a charitable suggestion that she might live to watch her child’s growth was made by any one; nor did Isabell expect it. Perhaps on the whole this was the most real kindness, and it was the only treatment she had ever been used to; but yet in her delicate soul, she felt the want of tenderness without knowing how it was.
Meanwhile Marjory sat by bewildered, and listened to this dispute in confusion. She tried to interrupt them more than once, but their eager voices were too much for her. The strife was a generous strife in its way; but was it possible that they did not know if his mother’s marriage was proved what the child must become at once? She interposed at last as calmly as she could.
“If all the proof is obtained that will be necessary,” she said, “if the marriage is proved, and everybody satisfied” (at these words Isabell turned round, took her hand and kissed it gratefully, while her mother retreated to the furthest corner, persistently shaking her head, and uttering sighs that were deep enough to be groans), “then I think our family will have to be consulted. It is not quite so simple as you think. There will be something also for us to do.”
The old woman came back from her corner of the room, and Isabell turned wistful, smiling, beaming upon the speaker.
“Oh,” she said, “it was what I aye hoped, but I daredna ask. My wee man will not have the hard life we’ve all been born to? Oh, I’m joyful, joyful of that! not for the money, Miss Heriot; but if you knew the difference of him and you, folk that have been gently nurtured as they say in books, from the like of us; gently nurtured, that’s what I would like—learned to speak soft, and think of others’ feelings, and move quiet and be like him and you. Without money that cannot be; if he’s to be brought up to work for his living like the rest, that cannot be.”
“If you mean the rest of my bairns, Isabell,” said her mother, hotly, “your wean will be real well off if he’s like them. An honest working man may look any gentleman in the face. I’ve aye trained ye up to that.”
“Ay, mother,” said Isabell, “that’s very true; but a gentleman’s son is no like a ploughman’s son; and oh, if my boy might be like his father! They’ll no let me speak of his father; but Miss Heriot, I may to you.”
“Yes,” said Marjory, faintly. A fastidious cloud had come over her again. Tom, poor Tom, had not been to her an ideal being; it seemed to her that his education, and the result of it, might both be improved in a new human creature. But poor Isabell thought differently; a new world opened before her eyes, which were full of tears, grateful tears, made sweet by an unexpected and unlooked for gladness.