“To begin with, she is nearly forty years old.”
Lucy at once thought of “Mrs. Morison,” but what she said was, “I think that is an advantage with me if she has been a good woman and—is sober.”
“A good woman? My love, she’s one of the unco’ guid! And she’s a total abstainer—always has been. But she is not what one can call a trained servant. She has not been in a situation for about twenty years.”
“What has she been doing?” Lucy asked.
“Keeping her father’s house and looking after him,” answered Mrs. Bray, “and now he’s dead. He had a little farm—a croft, I think they call it—over the hills and far away, somewhere in a Highland place, which, because it is not an island, is called the Black Isle.”
The quick, sympathetic old lady caught and understood an expression which flitted over Lucy’s face.
“Oh, this is all quite genuine,” she said; “that is its one clear advantage. She’s a friend of my poor Rachel’s—at least, Rachel has known all about her and ‘her folks’ for years and years. Her brother was piper in the same regiment with Rachel’s lover. And when Rachel went North to see that lover’s mother, after he had gone to India, she was in this woman’s house, and Rachel says that it was most beautifully kept, and that there were no people in the place more respected than these Gillespies.”
“One wonders why she left her native place and came so far away,” observed Lucy.
The old lady shook her head knowingly, and replied, “As poor Rachel says, ‘there are wheels within wheels.’ It seems there is a married brother with his wife living near the ‘croft,’ and I understand there was no love lost between this woman and her sister-in-law. There was some sort of love-affair mixed up in their animosity. Rachel put me to sleep one afternoon telling me about it, so you won’t expect me to remember details. And when the father died, the home had to be broken up anyhow, for the daughter had nothing to live on. I fancy she didn’t care to go to service within the range of the sister-in-law, ‘mistress in her own house.’ There’s a deal of human nature in man, my dear, and especially in woman. Rachel says her friend doesn’t want to go back, but if she doesn’t get a place soon, she’s getting so low spirited that she thinks she will,” continued Mrs. Bray. “You see she has, after all, only a servant’s recommendation—Rachel’s—and that wouldn’t mean much to many, but it may to you, who have known Rachel in my house for so many years, and who understand how faithful and good she is, poor, silly, sentimental thing.”
Lucy looked up quickly into her old friend’s face. “I would take your Rachel’s recommendation quite as soon as a ‘character’ from any mistress,” she said.