‘Pray, my darling, pray for help and grace from on high,’ continued the sweet, sad tones of the mother, as she drew her child’s fair head upon her lap, and passed her hand amid ‘the clustering ringlets rich and rare,’ while Beatrice sat rather unsympathetically by. ‘You will have me and your sisters to cheer you.’ Here the fair disconsolate looked distrustfully at Beatrice.
By degrees the half-mesmeric, instinctive influence of the loved mother’s pitying tones overcame the unwonted fit of unreason.
‘I will try and be good,’ she murmured, looking up with a soft light in her lovely eyes, ‘but you know I am a poor creature at best. You must bear with me, and I will help as much as I can, and try to keep from repining. But, oh, my home, my home, the dear old place where I was born. How dark and dreary do this long voyage and journey seem!’
‘Have we not a yet longer voyage, a more distant journey to make, my own one?’ whispered the mother, in accents soft as those with which in times gone by she had lulled the complaining babe. ‘We know not the time, nor the hour. Think! If we do not prepare ourselves by prayer and faith, how dark that departure will appear!’
‘You are always good and kind, always right, mother,’ said the girl, recovering her composure and assuming a more steadfast air. ‘Pray for me, that I may find strength; but do I not know that you pray for all of us incessantly? We ought—that is—I ought to be better than I am.’
Among the lesser trials which, at the time of his great sorrow, oppressed Howard Effingham, not the least was the necessity for parting with old servants and retainers. He was a man prone to become attached to attendants long used to his ways. Partly from kindly feeling, partly from indolence, he much disliked changing domestics or farm labourers. Accustomed to lean against a more readily available if not a stronger support than his own, he was, in most relations of life, more dependent than most men upon his confidential servants.
In this instance, therefore, he had taken it much to heart that his Scotch land-steward, a man of exceptional capacity and absolute personal fidelity, having a wife also, of rare excellence in her own department, should be torn from him by fate.
Backed up by his trusty Andrew, with his admirable wife, he felt as if he could have faced all ordinary colonial perils. While under Jeanie Cargill’s care, his wife and daughters might have defied the ills of any climate, and risked the absence of the whole College of Physicians.
Andrew Cargill was one of those individuals of strongly marked idiosyncrasy, a majority of whom appear to have been placed, by some mysterious arrangement of nature, on the north side of the Tweed. Originally the under-gardener at The Chase, he had risen slowly but irresistibly through the gradations of upper-gardener and under-bailiff to the limited order of land-steward required by a moderate property. He had been a newly-married man when he formed the resolution of testing the high wages of the Southron lairds. His family, as also his rate of wages, had increased. His expenses he had uniformly restricted, with the thoroughness of his economical forefathers. He despised all wasteful ways. He managed his master’s affairs, as committed to his charge, with more than the rigorous exactitude he was wont to apply to his own. Gaining authority, by the steady pressure of unrelaxing forecast habit of life, he was permitted a certain license as to advice and implied rebuke. Had Andrew Cargill been permitted to exercise the same control over the extra-rural affairs that he was wont to use over the farm-servants and the plough-teams, the tenants and the trespassers, the crops and the orchards, the under-gardeners and the pineries, no failure, financial or otherwise, would have occurred at The Chase.
When the dread disaster could no longer be concealed, it is questionable whether Mr. Effingham felt anything more acutely than the necessity which existed of explaining to this faithful follower the extent, or worse, the cause of his misfortune. He anticipated the unbroken silence, the incredulous expression, with which all attempts at favourable explanation would be received. Open condemnation, of course, was out of the question. But the mute reproach or guarded reference to his master’s inconceivable imbecility, which on this occasion might be more strongly accented than usual, would be hard to endure.