‘I am dying,’ said Ailie, softly, with a smile which lit up her face. ‘Eh, and when I think upon Margaret! She will be my sister where I’m going. Tell Isabel that. Life has been a burden and a trouble, though I thought it was so good. Tell Isabel. It has been hard on her, too.’
‘Oh, how hard!’ Miss Catherine said to herself, with an involuntary tear, as she went into the inner room. ‘Two young creatures, still so young, one overwhelmed in the conflict, and about to die and escape from it; the other fated, perhaps, to remain and live and bear the scars and the brand of it for years. Was it not well with Margaret, who, of all the penalties of living, had only death to bear? The old lady bent over Isabel in her bed, and kissed her forehead with unusual emotion. ‘Can you see Ailie, my dear?’ she asked, and a little gleam of eagerness came into the sufferer’s eyes. Miss Catherine ushered the visitors into the room, but would not stay to listen to the strange conversation that passed between them. It was not that she was wanting in curiosity, but that the pity of it was too much for even her strong nerves. She returned to the parlour with a flood of impatient tears coming to her eyes. They had been to blame. Ailie had married for—what? This severe judge said for ambition—a man incomprehensible to her, whom she did not, and could not love, and who sought her only in the madness of disappointment and grief. Such was the common-sense view of the matter, and the end was, as might have been expected, misery and despair. And Isabel; Isabel had done worse than Ailie. She had sinned against her womanhood—her dead husband, her living child. She had loved, she had taken her own way, and misery was the result. Miss Catherine, looking back into her own experience, could remember a time when she too had wanted her own way, and had given it up proudly, and sacrificed her heart. Was she the better for it? This long calm of hers, or Isabel’s brief fever—which was the least like that vision of joy and strength which the imagination calls life? A few hot tears fell from her old eyes. It was hard to pronounce any judgment, even now.
Ailie tottered to Isabel’s bedside, supported by her mother’s arm. ‘Since you canna come to me, I have come to you,’ she said. ‘Isabel, I’ve come to tell ye I am reconciled in my mind. He sent me over word before he died that yon was no message from the Lord; it was his own mad will, and no my God that said it. We’ve sinned, and we’re punished; but His word stands fast. Eh, but I’m content!’
‘Oh, Ailie,’ said Isabel, looking wistfully from the bed, ‘I cannot follow what you say.’
‘Never mind, it will come back some time,’ said Ailie; ‘and I’m come to bless you, Isabel Diarmid. I was uplifted in my mind, and deceived myself, but you, a simple lass, spoke the truth. Ye were right when ye bid me not to wed, and ye were right when ye bid me say farewell to him that came back nae mair. He perished with the sword, as I said; and now I’m going after him, and to Margaret. Margaret will be my sister. O Isabel, rouse up in your mind! Give me a word to say to Margaret; I’m going to her now.’
The tears came in a flood to Isabel’s eyes. All this time they had burned with fever, neither sleep nor tears coming to refresh them. ‘O my Margaret!’ she cried; and then Jean interposed in terror, not aware how great a relief to the patient’s brain was this outburst of tears.
‘She canna bear it,’ said Jean. ‘O Ailie, my woman, come away.’
‘Jean,’ said old Janet, fiercely turning upon her, ‘that’s no a way to speak to Mrs. Diarmid of Ardnamore.’
Thus the tragic and the trifling met together as everywhere. Ailie took no notice of either. She stooped over the bed, and kissed, as she had never done before, the face of the woman who had been so strangely connected with her life.