‘The time will never come,’ said Isabel, hastily. ‘I have had my share of life. I am not like a young lass now.’
‘My bonnie lamb!’ said Jean, with a tender smile, letting her hand rest on the downcast head. It was that last touch of self-pity which broke down Isabel’s reserve. She turned suddenly round, and throwing her arms round her stepmother wept and sobbed on her homely bosom. She clung to her as to her last support, and Jean received her in her motherly arms. Her heart had warmed to the wayward Isabel, all through her faulty youth with a love less reverent, but more familiar than that she had given to Margaret. And now a common grief united them as they had never been united before. She held the girl close, repeating over and over those soft names of homely kindness.
‘My lamb!’ she said, ‘my bonnie Bell! my bonnie woman!’ and bent down her head over her, not with the lavish caress of a lighter nature, but with a strong sustaining pressure. When the sobs grew fainter, and exhaustion mercifully dulled the pain, it was she who smoothed her hair, and dried her wet cheeks, and gave her such comfort as she could bear.
‘Come ben beside the bairns,’ Jean said, drying the tears from her own eyes, ‘and leave this room that is so full of a’ that’s passed. There’s a cheery fire, and the wee things’ faces are aye a comfort. That was her thought: and I’ll make you your cup of tea, and we’ll do our best to bear the burden for her sake.’
There was a cheery fire, as Jean had said, and Isabel was cold with that chill of grief which penetrates into the very heart. The blaze and the warmth gave her a little forlorn consolation; and so after awhile did the sound of voices other than her own, and the care and service that surrounded her.
Jean attended her to her room when it was time for rest, as she would have done had Isabel been her own child, and gave her one of those rare shy kisses, of which the homely Scotch matron was half-ashamed in her intense reticence and self-control. ‘Try and sleep, my lamb,’ she said, ‘I’ll come back and put out the candle.’ And then she returned to her kitchen, to shut her shutters, and put the ‘gathering coal’ upon the fire, and make all snug for the night. When she had ended her silent labours, Jean took her moment of indulgence also, sitting down to think in the elbow-chair, by the side of the dark heaped-up smouldering fire.
‘Na, na,’ she said to herself, ‘I maunna trust to that. If Margaret had set it apart out of her share—but I’m no reflecting upon Margaret. It was a’ the first wife’s siller, and it’s Isabel’s by right; and I dinna doubt her bit warm hasty heart. But if she were to marry that English lad, me and mine would be little to her after; and if she was to marry anybody else—even the minister—he would be for thinking of his ain first, and maybe a family coming. It would be real natural. Na, na! I maunna trust to Isabel; and, maybe, after a’ it’s best for the laddie,’ she said to herself, with a sigh. ‘If the root o’ the matter’s in him, he’ll fight his way to it; and if it’s no, he’ll never try; and when a’ ‘s said and done, maybe that’s the best.’
But it was with a sigh she rose from that moment of reflection and stole back to remove the candle, and saw with affectionate pleasure that Isabel, worn out, had already dropped to sleep. ‘The poor bairn!’ Jean said, in her tenderness, and clambered up to the attic beside her children, with that sense of being the protector and sole guardian of so much helplessness, which fills the heart of a solitary woman with such softness and such strength.
CHAPTER XVI
The next step in Isabel’s solitary new life was the visit of Miss Catherine, whose entrance Jean permitted a few days earlier than decorum properly allowed.