The miller’s testimony corroborated Jean’s. ‘The wife’ had cried upon him, as he was sitting down to his supper, to come and listen to the screams from the brae; and Andrew being no coward, and having bowels of compassion, notwithstanding his gloomy view of religious matters, rushed down immediately with his wife and ‘the laddie.’ He heard a rustling in the wood as he passed, but took no notice, not connecting it, he said, with the accident, and found the minister insensible, and scarcely breathing. He had had a bad fall from his horse, which of itself Andrew thought must have been enough to injure him seriously; and there was besides the fatal blow on the forehead, which had smashed the skull, and extinguished all consciousness and possibility of life. The testimony of the doctor was the only other important point in the evidence. He could not decide whether the other injuries might not have been fatal. That they were very serious, there was no doubt; but it was the blow which had killed Mr. Lothian. As to the man who did it, however, no information could be gathered. He was to Jean but ‘a black shadow’ in the darkness. She could not even tell what was his height, or dress, or anything about him.
The world of Loch Diarmid was thus utterly at sea, both as to the murderer and as to the motive for the crime. The minister had no enemies; for, to be sure, there was a difference between uttering a spiteful comment on his conduct in the smithy or ‘at the doors,’ and murdering him in a lonely road under cover of night. The general explanation of the torn ruffle was, that the murderer dimly perceived some ornament on his victim’s breast, and snatched at it before he was scared by Jean’s cries, which left him no time for further investigation. The poor little brooch, with its setting of pearls, and the two curls of hair intertwined, attained notoriety in the papers, being described elaborately over and over again, in case it should be offered anywhere for sale. But no clue to the murderer was obtained in this way. Then the excitement died out; and ‘at the doors,’ and on the way to church, and in the smithy, and everywhere else where the parish resorted, all thoughts and criticisms began to centre in the presentee.
But while this gradual softening process acted upon the parish at large, the Manse was left like a desolate island in the midst of all the life and sunshine. All at once, mysteriously, as by a stroke of magic, the light had vanished from it; a sort of dumb horror wrapt the house, abstracting it from the community of which it had been for so long a cheerful centre. Grass began to grow on the path from the gate to the door. Except Miss Catherine and Jean Campbell, who went and came daily, and messengers with inquiries after Mrs. Lothian, which naturally grew less and less frequent as time went on, nobody visited the house of mourning. Not that there was any lack of popular sympathy for the young widow. There was not a lady in the county who did not make her appearance at the Manse gates, to offer social consolation, or, at least, condolences. But Isabel saw nobody. She was stunned.
Thus the winter closed in again upon the hills, wrapping the closed Manse in all its mists and clouds. While the parish was contending hotly about the presentee, Isabel shut herself up in her house, which was still hers until his appointment should be settled, like the ghost of what she had been. One of the maids was already dismissed, in preparation for the final breaking up. The gardener had gone some time before. And only the sorrowful young mistress, with her widow’s cap on her brown curls, and desolation in her heart, and old Kirstin, who had been the minister’s housekeeper in old days, dwelt alone in the mournful Manse.
CHAPTER XXXII
It was a long time after this—almost Christmas—when Isabel’s baby was born. Even the Glebe Cottage put on a different aspect with the coming of the new life. The grey parlour, which was so full of memories, the room in which Margaret had died, in which Isabel had been married, and which under other circumstances would have been an awful place to return to, in the renewed and deepened gloom, was all a flutter now with the white robes, the baby-paraphernalia, all the scraps of lace and heaps of muslin in which young mothers find so much delight. The place was metamorphosed and knew itself no longer. It was the centre of a hundred sweet consultations, such gossiping, in the true sense of the word, as renews the female soul. Even Miss Catherine was transfigured by the new event. ‘I have gotten a grandchild in my old age,’ she said with tears and smiles as she carried little Margaret into the parlour where one of Mr. Lothian’s old friends stood waiting by the white-covered table to baptise the fatherless child. It was one of many scenes which were heart-breaking in their pathos to the bystanders, but did not somehow bear the same aspect to the principal actor in them. The old clergyman who performed the ceremony broke down in the midst of it. He was a grandfather himself, and had not hesitated a year ago to make many a kindly joke upon Lothian’s infatuation. But the sight of his old comrade’s child, which would have been the crown of his joy, and which he had not even been permitted to know of, was more than the good man could bear. And the Dominie, who was standing by, turned quite round and leaned his grey head upon the wall, and could not suppress the groan which came out of his heart. And Miss Catherine and all the women wept aloud. But Isabel, with her child in her arms, smiled in the midst of all their tears. Her eyes were wet, which made them all the brighter. The excitement of the moment in her weak condition had quickened all the tints of lily and rose in her soft cheeks—the golden life-gleam in her brown hair shone out under her cap like a concealed crown. And she smiled upon them all with a certain wonder at their emotion, facing life and fate and all that could come out of the unknown, tranquil with her treasure in her arms.
‘Poor thing!’ the Dominie said; ‘poor thing!’ laying one hand on the mother’s young head, and looking down from his great height upon the child, his harsh face all working with emotion. He had hard ado not to weep like the women, and to keep down the climbing sorrow which choked him, in his throat.
‘Why poor thing?’ said Isabel softly, looking up to him, ‘why poor thing? She has me.’
‘And you are but a bairn yourself,’ said the Dominie, with his broken groan.
‘I am her mother,’ said Isabel, ‘who had I but Margaret? and Margaret was only my sister. And I am young and strong. She has me!’