“O, yes!” replied Brenda, framing her answer as she thought would best please her sister; “I see a very slight scratch; nay, now you draw on the stocking, I can see nothing.”
“You do indeed see nothing,” answered Minna, somewhat wildly; “but the time will soon come that all—ay, all—will be seen and known.”
So saying, she hastily completed her dress, and led the way to breakfast, where she assumed her place amongst the guests; but with a countenance so pale and haggard, and manners and speech so altered and so bewildered, that it excited the attention of the whole company, and the utmost anxiety on the part of her father Magnus Troil. Many and various were the conjectures of the guests, concerning a distemperature which seemed rather mental than corporeal. Some hinted that the maiden had been struck with an evil eye, and something they muttered about Norna of the Fitful-head; some talked of the departure of Captain Cleveland, and murmured, “it was a shame for a young lady to take on so after a landlouper, of whom no one knew any thing;” and this contemptuous epithet was in particular bestowed on the Captain by Mistress Baby Yellowley, while she was in the act of wrapping round her old skinny neck the very handsome owerlay (as she called it) wherewith the said Captain had presented her. The old Lady Glowrowrum had a system of her own, which she hinted to Mistress Yellowley, after thanking God that her own connexion with the Burgh-Westra family was by the lass’s mother, who was a canny Scotswoman, like herself.
“For, as to these Troils, you see, Dame Yellowley, for as high as they hold their heads, they say that ken,” (winking sagaciously,) “that there is a bee in their bonnet;—that Norna, as they call her, for it’s not her right name neither, is at whiles far beside her right mind,—and they that ken the cause, say the Fowd was some gate or other linked in with it, for he will never hear an ill word of her. But I was in Scotland then, or I might have kend the real cause, as weel as other folk. At ony rate there is a kind of wildness in the blood. Ye ken very weel daft folk dinna bide to be contradicted; and I’ll say that for the Fowd—he likes to be contradicted as ill as ony man in Zetland. But it shall never be said that I said ony ill of the house that I am sae nearly connected wi’. Only ye will mind, dame, it is through the Sinclairs that we are akin, not through the Troils,—and the Sinclairs are kend far and wide for a wise generation, dame.—But I see there is the stirrup-cup coming round.”
“I wonder,” said Mistress Baby to her brother, as soon as the Lady Glowrowrum turned from her, “what gars that muckle wife dame, dame, dame, that gate at me? She might ken the blude of the Clinkscales is as gude as ony Glowrowrum’s amang them.”
The guests, meanwhile, were fast taking their departure, scarcely noticed by Magnus, who was so much engrossed with Minna’s indisposition, that, contrary to his hospitable wont, he suffered them to go away unsaluted. And thus concluded, amidst anxiety and illness, the festival of Saint John, as celebrated on that season at the house of Burgh-Westra; adding another caution to that of the Emperor of Ethiopia,—with how little security man can reckon upon the days which he destines to happiness.
[12] I cannot suppress the pride of saying, that these lines have been beautifully set to original music, by Mrs. Arkwright, of Derbyshire.
[13] The celebrated Sortes Virgilianæ were resorted to by Charles I. and his courtiers, as a mode of prying into futurity.