YOUNG Gordon had gone, and silence had fallen over Miss Bethune’s room. It was a commonplace room enough, well-sized, for the house was old and solid, with three tall windows swathed in red rep curtains, partially softened but not extinguished by the white muslin ones which had been put up over them. Neither Miss Bethune nor her maid belonged to the decorative age. They had no principles as to furniture, but accepted what they had, with rather a preference than otherwise for heavy articles in mahogany, and things that were likely to last. They thought Mr. Mannering’s dainty furniture and his faded silken curtains were rather of the nature of trumpery. People could think so in these days, and in the locality of Bloomsbury, without being entirely abandoned in character, or given up to every vicious sentiment. Therefore, I cannot say, as I should be obliged to say now-a-days, in order to preserve any sympathy for Miss Bethune in the reader’s mind, that the room was pretty, and contained an indication of its mistress’s character in every carefully arranged corner. It was a room furnished by Mrs. Simcox, the landlady. It had been embellished, perhaps, by a warm hearthrug—not Persian, however, by any means—and made comfortable by a few easy chairs. There were a number of books about, and there was one glass full of wallflowers on the table, very sweet in sober colours—a flower that rather corresponds with the mahogany, and the old-fashioned indifference to ornament and love of use. You would have thought, had you looked into this room, which was full of spring sunshine, bringing out the golden tints in the wallflower, and reflected in the big mirror above the fireplace, that it was empty after young Gordon had gone. But it was not empty. It was occupied instead by a human heart, so overbursting with passionate hope, love, suspense, and anxiety, that it was a wonder the silence did not tinge, and the quiet atmosphere betray that strain and stress of feeling. Miss Bethune sat in the shadowed corner between the fireplace and the farther window, with the whiteness of the curtains blowing softly in her face as the air came in. That flutter dazzled the beholder, and made Gilchrist think when she entered that there was nobody there. The maid looked round, and then clasped her hands and said to herself softly: “She’ll be gane into her bedroom to greet there".
“And why should I greet, you foolish woman?” cried Miss Bethune from her corner, with a thrill in her voice which betrayed the commotion in her mind.
Gilchrist started so violently that the bundle of clean “things,” fresh and fragrant from the country cart which had brought home the washing, fell from her arms. “Oh, mem, if I had kent you were there.”
“My bonnie clean things!” cried Miss Bethune, “with the scent of the grass upon them—and now they’re all spoiled with the dust of Bloomsbury! Gather them up and carry them away, and then you can come back here.” She remained for a moment as quiet as before, after Gilchrist had hurried away; but any touch would have been sufficient to move her in her agitation, and presently she rose and began to pace about the room. “Gone to my room to greet there, is that what she thinks? Like Mary going to the grave to weep there. No, no, that’s not the truth. It’s the other way. I might be going to laugh, and to clap my hands, as they say in the Psalms. But laughing is not the first expression of joy. I would maybe be more like greeting, as she says. A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears, which is just a contradiction. And maybe, after all, she was right. I’ll go to my room and weep for thankfulness, and lightheartedness, and joy.”
“Oh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, coming in, “gang softly, gang softly! You’re more sure than any mortal person has a right to be.”
“Ye old unbeliever,” cried Miss Bethune, pausing in the midst of her sob. “What has mortality to do with evidence? It would be just as true if I were to die to-morrow, for that matter.”
“Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist again, “ye’re awfu’ easy to please in the way of evidence. What do you call evidence? A likeness ye think ye see, but I canna; and there’s naething in a likeness. Miss Dora is no more like her papaw than me, there is nothing to be lippened to in the like of that. And then the age—that would maybe be about the same, I grant ye that, so much as it comes to; and a name that is no’ the right name, but a kind of an approach to it.”
“You are a bonnie person,” cried Miss Bethune, “to take authority upon you about names, and never to think of the commonest old Scotch custom, that the son drops or turns the other way the name the father has taken to his own. I hope I know better! If nothing had ever happened, if the lad had been bred and trained at home, he would be Gordon, just as sure as he is Gordon now.”
“I’m no’ a person of quality, mem,” said Gilchrist, holding her ground. “I have never set up for being wan of the gentry: it would ill become me, being just John Gilchrist the smith’s daughter, and your servant-woman, that has served you this five and twenty years. But there are as many Gordons in Aberdeen as there are kirk steeples in this weary London town.”
Miss Bethune made an impatient gesture. “You’re a sagacious person, Gilchrist, altogether, and might be a ruling elder if you were but a man: but I think perhaps I know what’s in it as well as you do, and if I’m satisfied that a thing is, I will not yield my faith, as you might know by this time, neither to the Lord President himself, nor even to you.”
“Eh, bless me, mem, but I ken that weel!” cried Gilchrist; “and if I had thought you were taking it on that high line, never word would have come out of my mouth.”
“I am taking it on no high line—but I see what is for it as well as what is against it. I have kept my head clear,” said Miss Bethune. “On other occasions, I grant you, I may have let myself go: but in all this I have been like a judge, and refused to listen to the voice in my own heart. But it was there all the time, though I crushed it down. How can the like of you understand? You’ve never felt a baby’s cry go into the very marrow of your bones. I’ve set the evidence all out, and pled the cause before my own judgment, never listening one word to the voice in my heart.” Miss Bethune spoke with greater and greater vehemence, but here paused to calm herself. “The boy that was carried off would have been twenty-five on the eighteenth of next month (as well you know), and this boy is just on five and twenty, he told me with his own lips; and his father told him with his dying breath that he had a mother living. He had the grace to do that! Maybe,” said Miss Bethune, dropping her voice, which had again risen in excitement, “he was a true penitent when it came to that. I wish no other thing. Much harm and misery, God forgive him, has he wrought; but I wish no other thing. It would have done my heart good to think that his was touched and softened at the last, to his Maker at least, if no more.”
“Oh, mem, the one would go with the other, if what you think is true.”
“No,” said Miss Bethune, shutting her lips tight, “no, there’s no necessity. If it had been so what would have hindered him to give the boy chapter and verse? Her name is So-and-so, you will hear of her at such a place. But never that—never that, though it would have been so easy! Only that he had a mother living, a mother that the guardian man and the lad himself divined must have been a —— Do you not call that evidence?” cried Miss Bethune, with a harsh triumph. “Do you not divine our man in that? Oh, but I see him as clear as if he had signed his name.”
“Dear mem,” cried Gilchrist, with a “tchick, tchick,” of troubled sympathy and spectatorship, “you canna wish he had been a true penitent and yet think of him like that.”
“And who are you to lay down the law and say what I can do?” cried the lady. She added, with a wave of her hand and her head: “We’ll not argue that question: but if there ever was an action more like the man!—just to give the hint and clear his conscience, but leave the woman’s name to be torn to pieces by any dozen in the place! If that is not evidence, I don’t know what evidence is.”
Gilchrist could say nothing in reply. She shook her head, though whether in agreement or in dissidence it would have been difficult to tell, and folded hem upon hem on her apron, with her eyes fixed upon that, as if it had been the most important of work. “I was wanting to speak,” she said, “when you had a moment to listen to me, about two young folk.”
“What two young folk?” Miss Bethune’s eyes lighted up with a gleam of soft light, her face grew tender in every line. “But Dora is too young, she is far too young for anything of the kind,” she said.
“Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, with a mingling of astonishment, admiration, and pity, “can ye think of nothing but yon strange young man?”
“I am thinking of nothing but the bairn, the boy that was stolen away before he knew his right hand from his left, and now is come home.”
“Aweel, aweel,” said Gilchrist, “we will just have to put up with it, as we have put up with it before. And sooner or later her mind will come back to what’s reasonable and true. I was speaking not of the young gentleman, or of any like him, but of the two who were up in the attics that you were wanting to save, if save them ye can. They are just handless creatures, the one and the other; but the woman’s no’ an ill person, poor thing, and would do well if she knew the way. And a baby coming, and the man just a weirdless, feckless, ill man.”
“He cannot help it if he is ill, Gilchrist.”
“Maybe no’,” said Gilchrist cautiously. “I’m never just so sure of that; but, anyway, he’s a delicate creature, feared for everything, and for a Christian eye upon him, which is the worst of all; and wherefore we should take them upon our shoulders, folk that we have nothing to do with, a husband and wife, and the family that’s coming——”
“Oh, woman,” said her mistress, “if they have got just a step out of the safe way in the beginning, is that not reason the more for helping them back? And how can I ever know what straits he might have been put to, and his mother ignorant, and not able to help him?”
“Eh, but I’m thankful to hear you say that again!” Gilchrist cried.
“Not that I can ever have that fear now, for a finer young man, or a more sweet ingenuous look! But no credit to any of us, Gilchrist. I’m thankful to those kind people that have brought him up; but it will always be a pain in my heart that I have had nothing to do with the training of him, and will never be half so much to him as that—that lady, who is in herself a poor, weakly woman, if I may say such a word.”
“It is just a very strange thing,” said Gilchrist, “that yon lady is as much taken up about our Miss Dora as you are, mem, about the young lad.”
“Ah!” said Miss Bethune, with a nod of her head, “but in a different way. Her mother’s sister—very kind and very natural, but oh, how different! I am to contrive to take Dora to see her, for I fear she is not long for this world, Gilchrist. The young lad, as you call him, will soon have nobody to look to but——”
“Mem!” cried Gilchrist, drawing herself up, and looking her mistress sternly in the face.
Miss Bethune confronted her angrily for a moment, then coloured high, and flung down, as it were, her arms. “No, no!” she cried—“no, you are unjust to me, as you have been many times before. I am not glad of her illness, poor thing. God forbid it! I am not exulting, as you think, that she will be out of my way. Oh, Gilchrist, do you think so little of me—a woman you have known this long, long lifetime—as to believe that?”
“Eh, mem,” said Gilchrist, “when you and me begin to think ill of each other, the world will come to an end. We ken each ither far too well for that. Ye may scold me whiles when I little deserve it, and I put a thing upon you for a minnit that is nae blame of yours; but na, na, there is nae misjudging possible between you and me.”
It will be seen that Gilchrist was very cautious in the confession of faith just extorted. She was no flatterer. She knew of what her mistress was capable better than that mistress herself did, and had all her weaknesses on the tips of her fingers. But she had no intention of discouraging that faulty but well-beloved woman. She went on in indulgent, semi-maternal tones: “You’ve had a great deal to excite you and trouble you, and in my opinion it would do ye a great deal of good, and help ye to get back to your ordinary, if you would just put everything else away, and consider with me what was to be done for thae two feckless young folk. If the man is not put to do anything, he will be in more trouble than ever, or I’m no judge.”
“And it might have been him!” said Miss Bethune to herself—the habitual utterance which had inspired so many acts of charity. “I think you are maybe right, Gilchrist,” she added; “it will steady me, and do me good. Run downstairs and see if the doctor is in. He knows more about him than we do, and we’ll just have a good consultation and see what is the best to be done.”
The doctor was in, and came directly, and there was a very anxious consultation about the two young people, to whose apparently simple, commonplace mode of life there had come so sudden an interruption. Dr. Roland had done more harm than good by his action in the matter. He confessed that had he left things alone, and not terrified the young coward on the verge of crime, the catastrophe might perhaps, by more judicious ministrations, have been staved off. Terror of being found out is not always a preservative, it sometimes hurries on the act which it ought to prevent; and the young man who had been risking his soul in petty peculations which he might have made up for, fell over the precipice into a great one in sheer cowardice, when the doctor’s keen eye read him, and made him tremble. Dr. Roland took blame to himself. He argued that it was of no use trying to find Hesketh another situation. “He has no character, and no one will take him without a character: or if some Quixote did, on your word, Miss Bethune, or mine, who are very little to be trusted in such a case, the unfortunate wretch would do the same again. It’s not his fault, he cannot help himself. His grandfather, or perhaps a more distant relation——”
“Do not speak nonsense to me, doctor, for I will not listen to it,” said Miss Bethune. “When there’s a poor young wife in the case, and a baby coming, how dare you talk about the fool’s grandfather?”
“Mem and sir,” said Gilchrist, “if you would maybe listen for a moment to me. My mistress, she has little confidence in my sense, but I have seen mony a thing happen in my day, and twenty years’ meddlin’ and mellin’ with poor folk under her, that is always too ready with her siller, makes ye learn if ye were ever sae silly. Now, here is what I would propose. He’s maybe more feckless than anything worse. He will get no situation without a character, and it will not do for you—neither her nor you, sir, asking your pardon—to make yourselves caution for a silly gowk like yon. But set him up some place in a little shop of his ain. He’ll no cheat himsel’, and the wife she can keep an eye on him. If it’s in him to do weel, he’ll do weel, or at least we’ll see if he tries; and if no’, in that case ye’ll ken just what you will lose. That is what I would advise, if you would lippen to me, though I am not saying I am anything but a stupid person, and often told so,” Gilchrist said.
“It is not a bad idea, however,” said Dr. Roland.
“Neither it is. But the hussy, to revenge herself on me like that!” her mistress cried.