“And he has good reason!” said Dougal, his shaggy brows meeting each other over two fiery sparks of red eyes. “’Od, if I had had my will, many’s the time, I would have kickit him out o’ the house!”
Dougal’s words were but as a muttering—the growl of a tempest—but the two people blocking the door, meeting him with sudden astonishment and a quick-rising fury of indignation which matched his own, wrought Ronald’s passion to a climax; he seized up his hat, which was on the table, and pushed past them, sending the solid figures to right and left. “That’s enough. I have nothing more to say to you!” he said.
It was Katrin that caught him by the arm. “Maister Lumsden,” she said, “ye’ll just satisfy me first! Is it because of what we did for you—takin’ ye in, makin’ ye maister and mair, keepin’ your secret, helpin’ a’ your plans—that you’re now turnin’ us out of our daily bread, out o’ our hame, out o’ your doors?”
“Cheating your master in every particular,” said Ronald, “as you will me, no doubt, whenever you have a chance. Yes; that is one of my reasons. What did you say?”
He raised the cane in his hand. The movement was involuntary, as if to strike at the excited and threatening countenance of Dougal behind. They were huddled in a little crowd on the top of the winding stair. Ronald had turned round, on his way out, at Katrin’s appeal, and stood with his back to the stair, close upon the upper step. “What did you say?” he cried again sharply. Dougal’s utterances were never clear. He said something again, in which “Go-d!” was the only articulate word, and made a large step forward, thrusting his wife violently out of the way.
It all happened in a moment, before they could draw breath. Roland, it is to be supposed, made a hasty, involuntary step backward before this threatening, furious figure, with his arm still lifted, and the cane in it ready to strike, but lost his footing, and thus plunged headforemost down the deep well of the spiral stair.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Lily was very reluctant to let Helen go. She kept her on pretence of the child, who had to be exhibited and adored. A great event annihilates time. It seemed already to Lily that the infant had never been out of her arms, that he had always found his natural refuge pressed close to her, with his little head against her breast. She had at first, with natural but unreasonable feeling, ordered Margaret out of her sight, she who had been the instrument of so much suffering to her; but the woman had defended herself with justice. “It is me that have done every thing for him all this time,” she said. “It is me that have trained him up to look for his mammaw. Eh, it would have been easy to train the darlin’ to look to nobody but me in the world; but I have just made it his daily thought that he was to come to his mammaw, and summer and winter and night and day I have thought of nothing but that bairn.” Lily had yielded to that appeal, and Beenie had already made Margaret welcome. They sat in the little outer room, already established in all the old habits of their life, sitting opposite to each other, with their needle-work, and all its little paraphernalia of workboxes and reels of thread, brought out as if there had never been any interruption of their life, and the faint, half-whispered sound of their conversation making a subdued accompaniment; while Lily, with her child on her knee, pausing every moment to talk to him, to admire him, to respond to the countless little baby appeals to her attention, appeared to Helen an image of that perfect happiness which is more completely associated to women with the possession of a child than with any other circumstance in the world. Helen did not know, except in the vaguest manner, of any thing that lay below. She divined that there might be grievances between the two who had been so long parted. But Helen herself would have forgiven Ronald on the first demand. His sins would have been to her simply sins, to be forgiven, not a character with which her own was in the most painful opposition. She would have entered into no such question. Lily detained her as long as possible, enquiring into all her purposes, which it was far too late to attempt to shake. Helen, in her rustic simplicity and complete ignorance of the world, was going to America, to its most distant and rudest part, the unsettled and dubious regions of the West, the backwoods, as they were then called, which might have been in another planet for any thing this innocent Pilgrim knew of them, and, indeed, at that time, unless to those who had made it a special study, those outskirts of civilization were known scarcely to any. “There will aye be conveyances of some kind. I can ride upon a horse if it comes to that,” Helen said, with her tranquil smile. “And no doubt he will come to meet me, which will make it all easy.”
“And that is the whole of your confidence!” cried Lily.
“No, no! my confidence is in God, that knows every thing; and, Lily, you should bless his name that has brought you out of all your trouble, and given you that darlin’, God bless him, and a good man to stand by you, and your settled home. Oh, if I can but get Alick to come back, to settle, to work my bittie of land, and live an honest, quiet life like our forbears”—the tears stood for a moment in Helen’s eyes—“but I will think of you, a happy woman, my bonnie Lily, and it will keep my heart.”