“Oh, Jean, give him back to me. I did not mean to make him cry; the tears will come sometimes, and I can not keep them back. I will try to be good—I will, indeed.”
But baby Hugh had no wish to go back to his mother; he was crowing and pulling Jean’s flaxen hair, and would not heed Fay’s sad little blandishments.
“The bairns are like auld folks,” remarked Jean, triumphant at her success, and eager to point a moral; “they can not bide what is not bright. There is a time for everything, as Solomon says, ‘a time to mourn and a time to dance;’ but there is never a time for a bairn to be sair-hearted; neither nature nor Solomon would hold with that, as Master Fergus would say. Ech, sirs! but he is a fine preacher, is Master Fergus.”
Fay took Jean’s reproof very humbly. She shed no more tears when her baby was in her arms. It was touching to see how she strove to banish her grief, that the baby smiles might not be dimmed. Jean would nod her head with grim approval over her pile of finely ironed things as she heard Fay singing in a low sweet voice, and the baby’s delighted coos answering her. A lump used to come in Jean’s throat, and a suspicious moisture to her keen blue eyes, as she would open the door in the twilight and see the child-mother kneeling down beside the old-fashioned cradle, singing him to sleep. “He likes the songs about the angels best,” Fay would say, looking up wistfully in Jean’s face. “I sing him all my pretty songs, only not the sad ones. I am sure he loves me to do it.”
“May be the bairn does not know his mither apart from the women angels,” muttered Jean, in a gruff aside, as she laid down her pile of dainty linen. Jean knew more than any one else; she could have told her mistress, if she chose, that it was odd that all Mrs. St. Clair’s linen was marked “F. Redmond.” But she kept her own counsel.
Jean would not have lifted a finger to restore Fay to her husband. The blunt Scotch handmaiden could not abide men—“a puir-hearted, feckless lot,” as she was wont to say. Of course the old master and Mr. Fergus were exceptions to this. Jean worshiped her master; and though she held the doctrine of original sin, would never have owned that Mr. Fergus had a fault. But to the rest of mankind she was suspiciously uncharitable. “To think he drove her from him—the puir bit lammie,” she would say; “and yet the law can’t have the hanging of him. Redmond, indeed! but he won’t own to any such name. It is lucky the old mistress is not ower sharp-sighted—but there, such an idea would never get into her head.”
Fay’s secret was quite safe with Jean, and, as the weeks and months went on, a feeling of utter security came over her. She hardly knew how time passed. There were hours when she did not always feel unhappy. The truth was, she was for a long time utterly benumbed by pain; a total collapse of mind and body had ensued on her flight from her home. She had suffered too much for her age and strength. Sir Hugh’s alarming illness, and her suspense and terror, had been followed by the shock of hearing from his own lips of his love and engagement to Margaret; and, before she could rally her forces to bear this new blow, her baby had been born.
Fay used to wonder sometimes at her own languid indifference. “Am I really able to live without Hugh?” she would say to herself. “I thought it must have killed me long ago, knowing that he does not love me; but somehow I do not feel able to think of it all; and when I go to bed I fall asleep.”
Fay was mercifully unconscious of her own heart-break, though the look in her eyes often made Mrs. Duncan weep. When she grew a little stronger her old restlessness returned, and she went beyond the garden and the orchard. She never wandered about the village, people seemed to stare at her so; but her favorite haunt was the falls. There was a steep little path by a wicket-gate that led to a covered rustic bench, where Fay could see the falls above her shooting down like a silver streak from under the single graceful arch of the road-way; not falling sheer down, but broken by many a ledge and bowlder of black rock, where in summer-time the spray beat on the long delicate fronds of ferns.
Fay remembered how she used to stroll through the under-wood and gather the slender blue and white harebells that came peeping out of the green moss, or hunted for the waxy blossoms of the bell-heather; how lovely the place had looked then, with the rowans or witchens, as they called them—the mountain ash of the south, drooping over the water, laden heavily with clusters of coral-like berries, sometimes tinging the snowy foam with a faint rose-tint, and fringed in the background with larch and silver birch; the whole mass of luxuriant foliage nearly shutting out the little strip of sky which gleamed pearly blue through a delicate network of leaves.