“My bonnie Lily! but that I did, with all my heart!”
“That you, a good woman, would go away out into the world with an ill man, knowing he was an ill man, and thinking that you could turn him and mend him! Oh, Helen, Helen! take him to your heart, that is pure as snow, knowing he was an ill man?”
“Lily, you are very young—you are little more than a bairn. What are our small degrees of good and ill—or rather of ill and worse—before our Maker? Do you think he judges as we judge? They say my poor Alick is wild, and well I wot he is wild, and has taken many, many a wrong step on the road. Oh, if you think it presumptuous of me to believe I could have held him fast so that he should not fall, that would be more true! But, Lily, if ye were long in this countryside, you would see it with your own e’en. The women long ago were not so feared as we were. They just married the lad they liked, and if he were wild, forgave him; and I’ve known goodwives that have just pushed them through—oh, just pushed them through!—till they came to old age with honor on their heads and a fine family about them, that would have sunk into the miry pit and the horrible clay if the woman had not had the heart to do it. I am not saying I had not the heart,” said Helen, with a melancholy shake of her head, “but I was young and knew nothing, and the moment passed away.”
“It can never be right,” cried Lily, “to run such a dreadful risk! Oh, if they cannot guide themselves, who are we that we should guide them? I am not like you, Helen. I know for myself I could guide no man.”
No! well she knew that! Not so much as for the taking of a little house—not so much as the simplest duty as ever lay in a man’s road. Helen was not so clever as Lily, she had no such pretensions in any way; every thing—blood and breeding, and the habit of carrying out her own projects and holding her head high—was in the favor of the younger. But Lily had no such confidence as Helen. She did not believe in any influence she could exert. Her opinion, her entreaties, were of no use. They did not move Ronald. He dismissed them with a kiss and a smile. “I could guide no man,” she repeated with a bitter conviction in her heart.
“It would, maybe, not be a perfect life,” said Helen; “far from that; there would be many an ill moment. The goodwife has her cross to carry, and it’s not light; but, oh, Lily, better that than ruin to the man, and a lonely life, with little use in it, to her; and there is aye the hope of the bairns that will do better another day.”
“The bairns,” said Lily, “that would be the worst of all. An ill man’s bairns—to carry on the poison in the blood.”
“You are a hard judge,” said Helen, pausing to look at her, “for one so young; but it’s because you are so young, my bonnie dear. We are all ill men and women, too. There’s a line of poetry that comes into my head, though it’s a light thing for such a heavy subject, and I cannot mind it exact to a word. It says we were all forfeit once, but he that might have best took the advantage found out the remedy. It is bonnier than that, and it is just the truth. The Lord said: ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Ye will mind that at least, Lily.”
“I mind them both,” cried Lily, piqued to have her knowledge doubted, “but yet——”
“And you must not speak of my poor Alick as an ill man. Oh, if I could but let you see how little he is an ill man! His heart is just as innocent as a bairn’s in some things, I’m not saying in all things. He is wild, poor lad, the Lord forgive him! He does a foolish thing, and then he thinks after that he shouldn’t have done it. If I were there, I would make him think first, I would think for him; and then, if the thing was done, there would be me to try to mend it and him, too. But why should I speak as if that was in my power?” cried Helen, with a sudden soft momentary rush of tears, “for I cannot, I cannot, go with Alick and leave my father! I will have to stand by and see my poor lad go out again without a friend by his side into the terrible, terrible world.”