‘My bonnie woman!’ said Jean, coming in, ‘you mustna sit there and think. Ye’ve been real brave, and kept up your heart wonderful; but you mustna think, for her sake as well as your ain.’
‘I am not thinking,’ said Isabel, softly, and for the moment there sprung up in her a certain wonder at her own insensibility. Was she really insensible, unfeeling? She was not moved as they expected her to be. Things that she was encouraged to be brave for, as ‘a trial,’ proved no trial to her. Was it that her heart had sunk into coldness? And yet was it not full of love that ran over and filled every crevice of her being, for the baby on her knee?
‘Tell me, was this your feeling when they were born?’ she said, with a little movement of her head towards the other part of the house in which Jean’s children were; ‘that nothing mattered any more—that you could bear everything and forget what it was to grieve, and work and toil and never tire—was that your feeling, too?’
‘Eh, I canna mind what was my feeling,’ said Jean, shaking her head, ‘except that I was awfu’ glad it was over. But your father was living, Isabel, and I had no need to take that thought—and besides, I was different from you.’
‘Ah, my father was living!’ said Isabel, with a little gasp, stopped short by the words, although even then she did not apply them to herself with any feeling that her case was harder than that of her stepmother. If it was harder it was sweeter, too, for her child was all her own.
‘Awfu’ different from you,’ said Jean; ‘ye can sit still and put a’ your bit fancies together, you lady-things that are above common folk; but what I was thinking was, how to get weel and be stirring about the house to keep a’ right for the Captain, and Margaret, and you. My weans were what I loved best, I’ll no deny it—but they werena my first thought; I had to think of him, first and the house, and how to please ye a’; and syne took the wee thing to my breast for a comfort. There was ay the work that came first—and maybe when a’s done it is the best way.’
‘You think I’m idle,’ said Isabel, with a faint blush, ‘but you shall see how different it will be. I was thinking we might build something on to the cottage—another room, or perhaps two. We have plenty now; and by the time she grows up——’
‘Oh, Isabel, ye’re like a bairn with a new doll: let the poor infant take a grip of her life before you think of the time when she’ll be grown up. Ye’ll be for a man to her next.’
‘Oh, no, no man,’ said Isabel, with a little shiver; ‘what should my baby want with a man? She’ll be mine as I am hers—my only one, all I have in the world.’
‘You’re little better than two weans together,’ said Jean, looking pitifully down upon the mother and child and drying her eyes. Two-and-twenty, that was the girl’s age, with half a century of life still before her, all its stormier, harder part, the heat of the day and the burden. Could she go through the world as she thought, with no wakening of other feelings in her heart—altogether wrapt in this motherly virginal passion for her child? ‘She’ll be but a young woman still, when the bairn is twenty,’ said Jean to herself from the eminence of her own more advanced age. Such a thing was possible as that the heart thus thrown into one strain should never diverge, nor throb to any other touch. It was possible. But the woman in her experience sighed over it, and dried her eyes with her apron, and softly shook her head.