“To you?” said the girl, with a blush of pleasure and surprise.
“Yes. I like new experiences. I am going to become an intermeddler now. I am going to arrange this affair, and become the negotiator between all the parties; and then, when I have secured the happiness of the whole of you, you will all set upon me and beat me with sticks, and thrust me out of your houses.”
“I do not think,” said Sheila, looking down, “that you need have much fear of that, Mr. Ingram.”
“Is the world going to alter because of me?”
“I would rather not have you try to do anything that is likely to get you into unhappiness,” she said.
“Oh, but that is absurd. You timid young folks can’t act for yourselves. You want agents and instruments that have got hardened by use. Fancy the condition of our ancestors, you know, before they had the sense to invent steel claws to tear their food in pieces—what could they do with their fingers? I am going to be your knife and fork, Sheila, and you’ll see what I shall carve out for you. All you’ve got to do is to keep your spirits up, and believe that nothing dreadful is going to take place merely because some day you will be asked to marry. You let things take their ordinary course. Keep your spirits up—don’t neglect your music or your dinner or your poor people down in Borvapost—and you’ll see it will all come right enough. In a year or two, or less than that, you will marry contentedly and happily, and your papa will drink a good glass of whisky at the wedding and make jokes about it, and everything will be as right as the mail. That’s my advice; see you attend to it.”
“You are very kind to me,” said the girl, in a low voice.
“But if you begin to cry, Sheila, then I throw up my duties. Do you hear? Now look: there goes Mr. Lavender down to the boat with a bundle of rugs, and I suppose you mean me to imperil my precious life by sailing about these rocky channels in the moonlight? Come along down to the shore; and mind you please your papa by singing ‘Love in thine eyes’ with Mr. Lavender, and if you would add to that ‘The Minute Gun at Sea,’ why, you know, I may as well have my little rewards for intermeddling now, as I shall have to suffer afterward.”
“Not through me,” said Sheila, in rather an uncertain voice; and then they went down to the Maighdean-mhara.