‘Are they not going away?’ asked Isabel in amaze.
‘Oh, aye, they’re going away; but think ye the world’s like Loch Diarmid, Isabel? They’ll soon tire o’ their preaching and their wandering among fremd folk. She’s a’ spirit and little flesh, my poor lamb. And her heart will fail her, and he’ll be sick o’t a’, and syne they’ll come cannily hame. And I’ll see my bairn at kirk and market, with her bairns about her—no a common body like me,’ said Janet, wiping her eyes with her apron, ‘but a leddy of Ardnamore.’
‘But she’ll break her heart,’ said Isabel.
‘I’m no feared for her heart,’ said the mother. ‘She’s a loving thing, though you wouldna think it. Her heart will turn to her husband when she has nane but him.’
This was Janet’s programme of the strange romance. Isabel, though she was not used to contrasts of this description, went down the hill in a maze of reflections, wondering over the difference. Ailie’s tragic purpose of going forth into the world to save it, her first step being upon her own heart, and all its maiden hopes; and her mother’s frightful, sceptical, middle-aged prescience of the effects of weariness and failure—the inevitable disappointment, the sickening of heart, the giving up of hope, the despairing flight homeward to seek peace at least and quietness—stood before her side by side like two pictures. Would the two enthusiasts content themselves with common life and comfort after their high dreams, or was there, after all, nothing in the dreams for which Ailie was making so awful a sacrifice? Isabel was too inexperienced to come to light on the subject; but Janet Macfarlane’s cheerful unbelief struck her with mingled horror and pain. She did not ask herself whether all that was beautiful and wonderful in the hopes and beliefs of beginning life was thus looked upon by the calm eyes of the elders as so much delusion to be dispersed by the winds and storms. But that suggestion of insecurity, unreality—and of the better-informed spectator, who realised and knew the downfall that was coming—appalled and terrified her. The sight of Mr. Lothian, who came out from the Mansegate as she passed, was, perhaps for the first time, a relief to Isabel. She was glad to have him come to her, to hear his sympathetic voice, to feel that there were people in the world who were not sceptical. ‘I have been seeing Ailie,’ she said, accounting half-apologetically for the little shiver of nervous excitement which she could not restrain.
‘And now you’ll come and see Miss Catherine,’ said Mr. Lothian. ‘You cannot help the one, but you can help the other, Isabel.’
‘Me help Miss Catherine? No, Mr. Lothian,’ said Isabel, with a little air of dignity. ‘She is never pleased, whatever I do. She would like me to pretend to be somebody else, and not myself.’
‘And I am so foolish,’ said the minister, with a smile, ‘as to like yourself best of all; and so does she, Isabel, if you saw her heart. You’ll come and see her with me.’
‘To please you,’ said the girl not meaning any coquetry, nor thinking of the tenderness with which words so unusually soft moved this man, who might have been her father. Even as she spoke her eye caught some passing figure in the distance, which was like that of the lover whom she fancied she had abjured; and her heart sprang up and began to beat furiously against her breast. She knew very well it was not Stapylton—but the merest vision that reminded her of him, how different was the feeling it awakened within her! She walked on leisurely by Mr. Lothian’s side, making him soft answers, which, in spite of all his better knowledge, filled him with a sweet intoxication. And all the time her object was to lead him artfully with all the youthful skill of which she was mistress to some allusion to her lover. ‘Are you glad to be alone?’ she said at last, stooping as she did so, to pluck off a thorny branch which had caught her dress. And he did not even perceive what that leading question meant, so wrapt was he in the delusion which—half-intentionally in her unconscious selfishness for her own purposes—she had been weaving round him.
‘I would not be glad to be alone if I could have the company I like best,’ said the deluded man; and so, deceiver and deceived, they went along the quiet rural way.