Ailie raised her head and looked at him, wondering beyond expression to find herself so admonished. ‘I’ve nae duties but to follow God’s will,’ she said; ‘to follow Him to the end of the earth. Oh, if I could but open the way of the Lord to you and the like of you. Nature’s but a poor handmaid of His grace, no a mistress nor a guide. Oh, man, with your grey head, that should ken what God’s service is, how can you speak of nature to me?’
‘And what if it were that you wanted to consider above all else?’ said the minister, laying his kind hand on her shoulder. Ailie put him aside without a word. A little shudder seemed to run through her at his touch. If it was her ecstasy that was coming upon her, or if it was merely a movement of the nature which she defied, Mr. Lothian could not tell; but she passed him thus, taking no further notice, and glided across the road like a ghost to the heathery braes which stretched away into the distance.
‘As if it were but an every-day,’ said her mother, who appeared in the passage behind, ready to pour out a flood of troubles into the minister’s ear. The Sabbath-day was a more rigorous institution in Scotland then than now, and the inhabitants of the surrounding cottages, most of whom would have considered a Sunday walk, which was not a work of necessity, to be something like a crime, looked on perturbed, and not knowing what to make of it, when Ailie, thus driven by the intensity of her feelings, sought solitude and counsel on the hill.
‘There’s Ailie away across the braes,’ cried a weary young prisoner in one of the neighbours’ houses. ‘It canna be a sin. Oh, let me go too!’
‘Are ye a prophet of the Lord like Ailie?’ said the mother with fierce contempt. The Holy Maid was above those laws which weighed so rigorously upon ‘common folk.’
CHAPTER XXII
Ailie went forth, not to seek counsel of flesh and blood, but to lay, as she would have said, her ‘burden before the Lord.’ Her eyes were bent upon the ground, for her heart was heavy; her mind was full of a wandering chaos of thoughts, through which she sought in vain for anything which she could take as an indication of the will of God.
The braes lay lonely under the faint occasional glimpses of a watery sun. It was Sabbath all over the silent country; something exceptionally still marked the exceptional day. The little steamer that fumed and fretted up the Loch every afternoon about this hour was of course invisible, and so were the boats which for use or pleasure dotted the water on week-days, and added one characteristic sound to the usual noises. The people going home from church had all disappeared. Nothing moved except the blue smoke from the cottage-roofs, and sometimes a shy rabbit or invisible wild creature among the high heather. And yet by and by even Ailie, absorbed as she was, became aware that she was not the only wanderer on the hill-side. Under the birch-tree, someone sat crouched together, whose heart was full, like her own, of many thoughts. There was but one creature on the Loch who was likely to seek such a hermitage. Perhaps had Ailie’s thoughts been at their usual strain she would never have remarked her companion; but earthly things had come in to confuse the current of her imagination; and a certain sense of companionship, and even of possible help, came to her. ‘She’s but a simple thing,’ was her first idea, and then, ‘She’s Margret’s sister,’ the young enthusiast added to herself. Ah, blessed Margaret! maiden Margaret! whom Ailie had striven to keep out of that quiet, sheltering grave and to deliver to all those cares of life which for the first time had now come upon herself. She drew close to Margaret’s sister with a faint throb of expectation. ‘Am I to judge whence the word may come?’ she said to herself. ‘Is it not out of the mouths of babes and sucklings that He perfects praise?’
Isabel had not yet made her appearance at church to her stepmother’s infinite distress, though it was one of the unalterable etiquettes of rural life ‘after a death.’ The wilful girl had declared with tears that she could not bear it. ‘With everybody looking, and looking, and all the folk going past, that used to stop and say, How is she? It would break my heart,’ said Isabel. And she had stolen out to the braes when Jean and the children returned from church, feeling the silence a consolation to her.
At that moment she was more absorbed in her thoughts than Ailie, being hopeless and expecting no consolation or deliverance; and when the rustle of the heather caught her ear, and looking up she saw Ailie’s slender figure standing over her, a movement of impatience woke in Isabel’s mind. Nobody could give her any comfort, could they not then leave her alone? It was all she asked. To be left to brood over the ending of her early, lonely life and all her dreams. This was all that now remained to her. To others, life renewed itself, changed its fashions, put forth new blossoms, extended, full of light and hope, into the future; but hers was over. Could they not have the charity to leave her at least alone?