“Does papa look sad?”
“No,” said Lilie, “but when you look as if you would greet, then you grow like him; and Lawrie never greets, and yet he’s like him, too. What way is that?”
“And do they call you Miss Lilie at home?” said Anne, at once to evade the difficult question submitted to her, and to ascertain something of the worldly comforts of her banished brother. Mrs. Melder’s guess was no doubt correct: the box which had been sent to Lilie could come from no poor house.
“No papa, or mamma, or Lawrie, but the maids and English John, and Jose—for papa’s no like Robert Melder; he’s a rich gentleman.”
“And why did they send you here?” exclaimed Anne, more as expressing her own astonishment, than addressing the child.
“Lilie was very ill—had to lie in her bed—mamma thought I would die, and it was to get strong again. See,” Lilie disengaged herself from Anne, and ran away along the bank of the Oran, returning ruddy and breathless, “Lilie’s strong now.”
“And why did you not tell me this before?” said Anne.
“Lilie didna mind—Lilie didna ken how to speak;” and the child looked confused and bewildered. By means of her broken sentences, however, Anne made out that Lilie had been brought home by a Juana, a Spanish nurse, and had been accustomed to hear the servants in her father’s house speak the liquid foreign tongue, which she was already beginning to forget. That being suddenly brought into the rustic Scottish dwelling, and seeing, with the quick perception of a child, that its inhabitants were of the same rank as her former attendants, the child had naturally fancied that their language must also be, not the cultivated English, the speaking of which was an accomplishment, but the more ornate tongue which she had been accustomed to hear among their equals in her own country. Then Mrs. Melder’s dialect still further puzzled the lonely child, who, under the care of Juana, had spoken nothing but Spanish during the voyage, which she thought so long a one, so that the ideas of the little head became quite perplexed and ravelled; and it was not until she had mastered in a considerable degree this new Scottish tongue, that the more refined words learned from “mamma” began to steal once more into her childish memory.
But Anne’s attempted questioning, respecting the person who brought Lilie to the Mill, produced no satisfactory answer. The remembrance had become hazy already; and save for a general impression of discomfort—one of those vague indefinite times of childish suffering and unhappiness, which are by no means either light or trivial, howsoever we may think of them, when we are involved in more mature calamities, Lilie’s memory failed her. She could give no account of the interim, between her voyage under the government of Juana, and her transference to the rule of Mrs. Melder.
To Mrs. Catherine, Anne had said little of the Lilies—to Lewis nothing. Their connexion with Norman had nothing to do with the proof of his innocence, and though Christian Lilie’s strange words had occupied her own mind night and day since she heard them, she yet did not think it either necessary or prudent to make them a matter of conversation.