“Her infant!” exclaimed Brenda; “she spoke not a word of her infant!”
“Then I wish my tongue had been blistered,” said the Udaller, “when I told you of it!—I see that, young and old, a man has no better chance of keeping a secret from you women, than an eel to keep himself in his hold when he is sniggled with a loop of horse-hair—sooner or later the fisher teazes him out of his hole, when he has once the noose round his neck.”
“But the infant, my father,” said Brenda, still insisting on the particulars of this extraordinary story, “what became of it?”
“Carried off, I fancy, by the blackguard Vaughan,” answered the Udaller, with a gruff accent, which plainly betokened how weary he was of the subject.
“By Vaughan?” said Brenda, “the lover of poor Norna, doubtless!—what sort of man was he, father?”
“Why, much like other men, I fancy,” answered the Udaller; “I never saw him in my life.—He kept company with the Scottish families at Kirkwall; and I with the good old Norse folk—Ah! if Norna had dwelt always amongst her own kin, and not kept company with her Scottish acquaintance, she would have known nothing of Vaughan, and things might have been otherwise—But then I should have known nothing of your blessed mother, Brenda—and that,” he said, his large blue eyes shining with a tear, “would have saved me a short joy and a long sorrow.”
“Norna could but ill have supplied my mother’s place to you, father, as a companion and a friend—that is, judging from all I have heard,” said Brenda, with some hesitation. But Magnus, softened by recollections of his beloved wife, answered her with more indulgence than she expected.
“I would have been content,” he said, “to have wedded Norna at that time. It would have been the soldering of an old quarrel—the healing of an old sore. All our blood relations wished it, and, situated as I was, especially not having seen your blessed mother, I had little will to oppose their counsels. You must not judge of Norna or of me by such an appearance as we now present to you—She was young and beautiful, and I gamesome as a Highland buck, and little caring what haven I made for, having, as I thought, more than one under my lee. But Norna preferred this man Vaughan, and, as I told you before, it was, perhaps, the best kindness she could have done to me.”
“Ah, poor kinswoman!” said Brenda. “But believe you, father, in the high powers which she claims—in the mysterious vision of the dwarf—in the”——
She was interrupted in these questions by Magnus, to whom they were obviously displeasing.