“But he that quarrels with the gentry is a miserable man,” she went on. “Trouble came of it. The ford is as deep as the pool. Yet we got another cot and croft close by, on another laird’s land. It was but a one-roomed place with a stony field. But my father did nothing to it this time. Weak is the grasp of the downcast! He was an old man, and I think he left the soul of his soul in the other place where his children had been born and his wife had died. My father never spoke out about the hardship he’d had, but he went about, muttering, and though he had been a godly man, it was the sound o’ curses that I heard. One was, ‘May he die in the poors’ house.’ I knew he meant the laird. And just one week after father himself was taken away, his prayer came true,” she added in a strange, hissing tone, which sent a shiver over her listeners.
They all bent forward, eagerly attentive. A strange light in her eyes seemed to draw their souls towards hers.
“It came true!” she said. “The laird was visiting the poors’ house; they say he had just been calling something—I think it was a cup of tea—an ‘unnecessary luxury,’ when he was struck down in a fit, and there, on a pauper bed, he died quickly, and never saw face of his own folk again. All the strath was talking of it. But father did not live to see it,” she went on, “so it did him no good. And naught but false hearts and evil tongues had been with us in that last place, and I couldn’t bide there.”
She added that with strong excitement. Lucy remembered Mrs. Bray’s hint about the unhappy love affair and the hated sister-in-law.
“You must find it a great change from the heather hills to muddy London streets,” said Mrs. Challoner, hoping to divert Clementina’s moody mind into gentler channels.
“You can’t give luck to a luckless man,” she answered rather enigmatically. Just then, the white dawn brightened into a sunbeam, and the little group arose, feeling that though still early, it was time they should separate and begin the tasks of the ordinary day.
“She’s an uncanny creature, that,” whispered Tom to Lucy, as they left the kitchen. “Sometimes, while she was talking, I could not believe it was our Clementina. It was like another person taking possession of her.”
“I noticed that, too,” was Lucy’s whispered reply. “And her story about the curse was awful!”
“You don’t believe it was the curse which did the thing, do you?” asked Tom.
Lucy hesitated. “No,” she answered, “not as the curse. But without that curse and the general impression that it was deserved, nobody would have seen any significance in the laird’s dying where he did. Had he been a kindly, good man, it would have been felt that his Master took him to Himself while he was doing his Master’s business among the poor. We must not forget that some terrible curses stand recorded in the Bible, possibly to let the evil and unjust see the feelings which they stir, and the fate they are making for themselves, and how it will be interpreted.”