‘I hope not, my dear,’ said Miss Catherine, giving back the child into her arms. ‘I suppose it is coming out into the world for the first time, and seeing—strangers; and coming to a new place. I would not wonder, for my part; but you have ay been so good, and so reasonable and patient—since she came.’
‘And so I shall be,’ said Isabel, hastily drying her eyes; ‘as long as she is well, oh, what can harm me? I want nothing but my lamb.’ And then she began, with a thousand caresses, to undress the little weary creature, kissing its round limbs and dimples with a kind of passion. Miss Catherine sat looking on somewhat grimly, not understanding this outbreak of feeling more than the other, but unable in any way to connect either Isabel’s tears or her demonstrations of maternal adoration with that unlucky encounter in the boat. She did not understand, and she could not sympathise, but sat looking on with that grim air of observation and criticism which winds an excited mind up to almost delirium. Isabel finished her task under those severe, yet kindly eyes, growing more and more agitated and nervous. She was in the state so common to women, when tears are the only practicable utterance. Tears, meaningless words in Margaret’s ear, who could soothe but not understand, and such quietness as she might have had in her own house, would have composed her after the shock she had received; but Miss Catherine’s steady presence, restraining the tears and compelling a certain amount of external self-control, prolonged the inward pain, and the evening passed like a painful dream.
‘It cannot be the recollections of the place,’ said Miss Catherine to her maid, when Isabel had escaped to her room, ‘for I cannot recollect that the poor minister was ever here; and it cannot be any fright about the bairn. There’s neither measles nor whooping-cough that we know of in this place.’
‘And neither was there at home,’ said Marion. ‘Oh, mem, it’s no for me to be the judge—but it’s like flying in the very face of Providence and tempting God.’
‘I was not asking your advice on the subject,’ said Miss Catherine, sharply. She was not, indeed, in the way of asking anyone’s advice. But anger towards her old maid was impossible, and the next moment she had again begun to discuss the troublesome matter, talking not so much with Marion as aloud with herself.
‘It’s near a year now,’ she said; ‘poor thing! it would have been hard for her to have been at that quiet Glebe with nothing to take off her thoughts the very time it happened. The change will make it pass easier; the measles and the rest was but an excuse to get her away.’
‘And do you think, mem, she was that fond of the minister?’ said Marion, with respectful scepticism.
‘She was his wife, woman.’ said her mistress, indignantly; what would you have more?’
‘But, ah, far more like his daughter,’ said Marion. ‘Nae doubt it was an awfu’ end; but when it’s no just heart’s love—— Do ye think there could be onything in the meeting with yon young English lad to-day?’
‘What do you mean by anything?’ said Miss Catherine, sharply.