“You know what I mean, Lily,” he said, looking at her with a determined steadiness of gaze. “What is the life of an infant like that? It is like a new-lighted candle that every breath can blow out. Oh! blame me, blame me; I will not say a word. Tell me it was the night journey, the plunge into the cold, after the warm bosom of his mother. I thought it was the only thing I could do, but I will not say a word if you tell me I was to blame. Anyhow, whosever blame it was, the baby, poor little thing——”
“You mean he is dead!” said Lily, with a great cry.
He thought she had fainted: they all were in the way of thinking she had fainted when all her life went from her, except pain, which is the strongest life of all. Every thing was black before Lily’s eyes; her heart leaped with a wild movement and then seemed to die and become still in her breast; her lips dropped apart, as if the last breath had passed there with that cry. Ronald thought she had fainted for the first moment, and then he thought she had died. He sprang up with anguish in his heart; he had done it, braving all the risks, knowing her weakness, yet Beenie, rushing in at the sound of Lily’s cry, with all her battery of remedies, forgave him whatever he might have done at the sight of his face. “I have killed her! I have killed her!” he cried; “it is my fault!”
“Oh, sir, you should mind how weak she is!” cried Beenie, bringing forth her essences, her salts, her aromatic vinegar. Their words came faintly to Lily’s brain. She struggled up again from the sofa, on which she had fallen back, beating the air with her hands, as if to find and clutch at something that would give her strength. “My baby is dead!” she cried, stumbling over the words. “My baby, my baby is dead, my baby is dead!” It seemed as if the wail had become mechanical in the completeness of her downfall and misery, body and soul.
“Oh, sir!” cried Beenie again. She looked at him once more with another light in her eyes. She was but a simple woman, but to such there comes at times a kind of divination. But Ronald’s look was fixed upon Lily, his eyes were touched with moisture, the deepest pain was in his face. Could it be that a man could look like that and yet lie?
“Say nothing to her!” she cried almost with authority; “let her get her breath. But tell you me, sir, when was it that this came about? I heard you tell her to blame you if she pleased. What for were you to blame? Tell me that I may explain after. Mr. Lumsden, she has a right to ken. When did it happen and what was the cause? For all so little as a bairn is, it’s no without a cause when the darlings die.”
“You take too much upon you, Beenie,” he said. “You have no right to demand explanations. And yet, why should not I give them?” he said, with a tone of resignation. “I fear the poor little thing never got the better of that night journey. What could I do? I could not stay there to face Sir Robert on his first arrival. I could not leave Lily to bear the brunt. I had but little time to think, but what was there else to do? I felt even that to snatch him away at a stroke would be better for her than a lingering parting with him, and the anticipation of it. There was every cause. Beenie, you’re a reasonable woman.”
“I will not say, sir,” said Beenie, “that it was without reason; me and Katrin have said as much as that between ourselves, seeing a’ that had gone before.”
“Seeing all that had gone before,” Ronald repeated with readiness. “But Providence,” he added, “turns all our wisest plans sometimes to nought. I know nothing about children——”
“But Marg’ret kent weel about children!”