“THEY’RE awfu’ grateful, Colin—I canna but say that for them,” said Mrs. Campbell; “and as anxious as if you were their own son. I’ll no undertake to say that I havena an unchristian feeling myself to Harry Frankland; but, when you’re a’ weel and strong, Colin,”—
“And what if I am never well and strong?” said the young man. His mother’s presence had subdued and silenced, at least, for a time, the wild questions in his heart. She had taken them upon herself, though he did not know it. So far human love can stretch its fellowship in the sufferings of its Master,—not to the extent of substitution, of salvation temporal or spiritual, but, at least, to a modified deliverance. She had soothed her son and eased him of his burden, but in so doing had taken it to herself. The eagle that had been gnawing his heart had gone to fix its talons in hers; but she carried it like the Spartan, under her mantle, and smiled while it rent her in twain.
“Whisht, whisht!” she said, in her martyrdom of composure and calm looks, and took her boy’s hand and held it between hers—God only could tell how fondly—with a firm, warm grasp that seemed to hold him fast to life. “Colin, my man, it’s a’ in God’s hands,” said the Mistress of Ramore; “whiles His ways are awfu’ mysterious. I’m no one that pretends to read them, or see a’thing plain, like some folk; but I canna think He ever makes a mistake or lets anything go by hazard. We’ll bide His time, Colin; and who can tell what mercy and goodness he may have in His hand?”
“Mercy and goodness, or, perhaps, the contrary,” said Colin. If he had not been a little comforted and eased in his heart, he would not have given utterance to words which he felt to be unchristian. But now, with his longing to be soothed and to accept the softening influence which surrounded him, came an impulse to speak,—to use words which were even more strong than his feelings. As for his mother, she was too thoughtful a woman, and had in her own heart too heavy a burden, to be shocked by what he said.
“Maybe what appears to us the contrary,” she said, “though that maun be but an appearance, like most things in this life. I’m no one to deny my ain heart, or make a show as if I understood the ways of the Lord, or could, aye, in my poor way, approve of them, if a mortal creature might daur to say so, Colin. There’s things He does that appear a’ wrang to me—I canna but say it. I’m no doubting His wisdom nor yet His love, but there’s mony a thing He does that I canna follow, nor see onything in but loss and misery. But oh, Colin, my bonnie man, that’s nae cause for doubting Him! He maun have His ain reasons, and they maun be better reasons than ours. If you’ll close your eyes, and try and get a sleep, I’ll take a breath of air to myself before night sets in. I was aye an awfu’ woman for the air; and eh, laddie! I think ye’ll be thankful to get back to Ramore after this dreary country, where there’s neither hill nor glen—though maybe it might be cauld for you in the spring, when there’s so much soft weather,” said the tender woman, smoothing his pillows, and bending over him with her anxious smile. “It minds me o’ the time when you were my baby, Colin, to get you into my hands again. They say a woman’s aye a queen in a sick room,” said the Mistress. Her smile was such that tears would have been less sad; and she was impatient to be gone—to leave her son’s bedside—because she felt herself at the furthest stretch of endurance, and knew that her strained powers must soon give way. Perhaps Colin, too, understood what it was that made his mother so anxious to leave him, for he turned his face to the waning evening light, and closed his eyes, and after a while seemed to sleep. When he had lain thus quietly for some time, the poor mother stole downstairs and out into the wintry twilight. Her heart was breaking in her tender bosom; her strength had been strained to the utmost bounds of possibility; and nature demanded at least the relief of tears.
Two days before the Mistress had been tranquil and content in her peaceful life at home. When Sir Thomas Frankland’s telegram came late at night, like a sudden thunderbolt into the quiet house, the Holy Loch was asleep and at rest, cradled in sweet darkness, and watched by fitful glances of that moon for which Colin and his friends had looked to guide them on the night of the accident; and no means of communicating with the world until the morning was possible to the inhabitants of Ramore. The anxious mother, whose eyes had not been visited with sleep through all the lingering winter night, set off by dawn to thread her weary unaccustomed way through all the mazes of the railways which were to convey her to Wodensbourne. She had neither servant nor friend to manage for her; and no fine lady, accustomed to the most careful guardianship, could be more unused to the responsibilities of travelling than Mrs. Campbell. When she arrived, it was to find her boy, her firstborn, stretched helpless upon his bed, to see the examination made by the great doctor from London, to hear his guarded statements, his feebly-expressed hopes, which conveyed only despair—and with that sudden arrow quivering in her heart to undertake the duties of a cheerful nurse—to keep smiling upon Colin, telling him the news of the parish, and the events of the countryside, as if her coming here had been a holiday. All this, put together—though so many women have borne it, and though the Mistress of Ramore was able to bear it, and more, for her boy’s sake—was a hard strain upon her. When she got downstairs into the air, the first thing she did was to sit down on the steps of the glass door which led into the terrace and cry bitterly and silently. She was alone among strangers, with scarcely even a friendly feature of familiar nature to give her a little confidence. The aspect of the great house, stretching its long wings and solemn front into the twilight, containing a whole community of people unknown to her, whose very voices were strange and sounded like a foreign tongue, completed the forlorn sense she had of absence from everything that could help or console; and when, in the restlessness of her musing, she got up and began to walk about upon that deserted terrace which Colin had paced so often, all Colin’s questions, all his doubts, rushed with double force and feminine passion into his mother’s mind.
As she pursued her uncertain way, her eye was attracted by the lights in the windows. One of them was large and low, and so close upon the terrace that she could not help seeing the interior, and what was passing there. Harry Frankland was standing by the fire with his cousin. The long billiard-table behind them, and the cue which Miss Matty still held in her hand, did not enlighten Mrs. Campbell as to what they had been doing. Matty had laid her disengaged hand on her cousin’s shoulder, and was looking up, as if pleading for something, into his face; and the fire-light which gleamed upon them both, gave colour and brightness to the two young faces, which seemed to the sorrowful woman outside to be glowing with health and love and happiness. When Mrs. Campbell looked upon this scene her heart cried out in her breast. It was Colin’s question that came to her lips as she hurried past in the cold and the gathering darkness—“Why? Oh God! why?” Her son struck to the earth in the bloom of his young life—rooted up like a young tree, or a silly flower—and this youth, this other woman’s son, taking the happiness which should have been for Colin. Why was it? The poor woman called in her misery upon the heavens and the earth to answer her. One deprived of all, another possessed of everything that soul of man could desire; one heart smitten and rent asunder, and another filled to overflowing with safety and happiness.
As she went on in her haste, without knowing where she went, another window caught the Mistress’s eye. It was the nursery window where all the little ones were holding high carnival. Little boys and little girls, the younger branches of the large happy family, with again the light gleaming rosy over their childish faces. One of them was having her toilette made for presentation in the drawing-room, and at sight of her another blow, keen and poignant, went to Mrs. Campbell’s heart. Just such a child had been the little maiden, the little daughter who once made sunshine in the homely house of Ramore. It came upon the poor mother in the darkness to think what that child would have been to her now had she lived—how her woman child would have suffered with her, wept with her, helped to bear the burden of her woe. Her heart yearned and longed in her new grief over the little one who had been gone so many years. She turned away hastily from the bright window and the gay group and sank down upon her knees on the ground with a sob that came from her heart—“Why? oh why?” God had His reasons, but what were they? The agony of loss, in which there seemed no possible gain; the bitterness of suffering, without knowing any reason for it, overpowered her. The contrast of her own trouble with the happiness, the full possession, the universal prosperity and comfort which she saw, struck her sharply with something which was not envy of her neighbour, but the appeal of an amazed anguish to God. “The ways of the Lord are not equal,” she was saying in her soul. Was it, as Nature suggested, with natural groans, because He loved her less—or, as the minister said, because He loved her more, that God sent upon her those pangs, and demanded from her those sacrifices? Thus she cried out of the depths, not knowing what she said. “If I had but had my Jeanie!” the poor woman moaned to herself, with a vision of a consoling angel, a daughter, another dearer, fairer self, who would have helped to bear all her burdens. But God had not afforded her that comfort, the dearest consolation to a woman. When she had wept out those few bitter tears, that are all of which the heart is capable when it is no longer young, she gathered herself up out of the darkness and prepared to go back again to Colin’s bedside. Though she had received no answer to her question—though neither God Himself nor His angels, nor any celestial creature, had gleamed through the everlasting veil, and given her a glimpse of that Divine meaning which it is so hard to read—there was a certain relief in the question itself, and in the tears that had been wrung out of her heart. And so it was that, when Matty Frankland came lightly out of the billiard-room, on her way to dress for dinner, Mrs. Campbell, whom she met coming in from the terrace, did not appear to her to bear a different aspect from that which the Mistress of Ramore had borne in other days.
Matty did not lose a minute in making her advances to Colin’s mother. She was, indeed, extremely sorry, and had even been conscious of a passing thought similar to that which had struggled passionately into being, both in Colin’s mind and in his mother’s—a passing sense of wonder why Harry, who was good for nothing in particular, should have been saved, and Colin, who was what Miss Matty called “so very clever,” should have been the sufferer. Such a doubt, had it gone deep enough—had it become an outcry of the soul, as it was with the others—would have made an infidel of that little woman of the world. She ran to Mrs. Campbell, and took her hand, and led her into the billiard-room, the door of which stood open. “Oh, dear Mrs. Campbell, come and tell me about him,” she said; and, as it had been the conjunction of a little real feeling with her habitual wiles that brought Colin under her influence, the same thing moved his mother at least to tolerate the inquiry. She drew away her hand with some impatience from the little enchantress, but her tender heart smote her when she saw an involuntary tear in Matty’s eye. Perhaps, after all, it was less her fault than her misfortune; and the Mistress followed the girl into the room with less dislike, and more toleration, than she could have supposed possible. It might be, after all, the older people—to whom worldliness came by nature, as she was disposed to think—who were to blame.
“Oh, Mrs. Campbell, I am so sorry; I cannot tell you how sorry I am,” cried Matty—- and she spoke only the truth, and had real tears in her eyes—“to think that he should save my cousin again, and suffer so for his goodness. Don’t be angry with us—though, indeed, I should not wonder if you could not bear our very name—I am sure I could not, if I were you.”
“Na, God forbid,” said the Mistress. She was but half-satisfied of the reality of the young lady’s professions, and this suspicion, so unusual to her, gave dignity to her speech. “It wasna you nor ony mortal person, but his own heart that moved my Colin. You could do an awfu’ deal,” said Colin’s mother, looking with a woman’s look of disapproving admiration on Matty’s pretty face, “but you couldna move my son like his ain generous will. He never was one to think of his ain—comfort—” continued Mrs. Campbell with a little shudder, for something in her throat prevented her from saying his life—“when a fellow creature was in danger. It was his ain heart that was to blame—if anything was to blame—and not you.”
And the homely woman’s eyes went beyond her questioner with that same look which in Colin had so often baffled Miss Matty, showing that the higher spirit had gone past the lesser into its own element, where only its equals could follow. The girl was awed for the moment and humbled. Not for her poor sake, not for Harry Frankland, who was of no great account to anybody out of his immediate family—but because of his own nature, which would not permit him to see another perish, had Colin suffered. This thought, imperfectly as she understood it, stopped the voluble sympathy, pity and distress on Matty’s lips. She no longer knew what to say, and, after an awkward pause, could only stammer over her old common-places. “Oh, dear Mrs. Campbell, I am so sorry; I would give anything in the world to make him well again; and I only hope you won’t be angry with us,” said Matty, with a suppressed sob, which was partly fright and partly feeling. The Mistress came to herself at the sound of the girl’s voice.
“I’m no angry,” she said—“God forbid; though I might have something to say to you if my heart could speak. The like of you whiles do mair harm in this world, Miss Frankland, than greater sinners. I’m no saying you kent what you were doing; but, if it had not been for you, my Colin would never have come near this place. You beguiled my son with your pleasant words and your bonnie face. He had nae mair need to come here to be tutor to yon bit crooked callant,” said the Mistress, with involuntary bitterness, “than Maister Frankland himself. But he thought to be near you, that had beguiled him and made him give mair heed to your fables than to anything that was true in life. I’m no blaming my Colin,” said the Mistress, with an unconscious elevation of her head; “he never had kent onything but truth a’ his days, and, if he wasna to believe in a woman that smiled on him and enticed him to her, what was he to believe in at his years? Nor I’m no to call angry at you,” said Colin’s mother, looking from the elevation of age and nature upon Miss Matty, who drooped instinctively, and became conscious what a trifling little soul she was. “We a’ act according to our ain nature, and you wasna capable of perceiving what harm you could do; but, if you should ever encounter again one that was true himself and believed in you——”
Here Matty, who had never been destitute of feeling, and who, in her heart, was fond of Colin in her way, and had a kind of understanding of him, so far as she could go, fell into such an outburst of natural tears as disarmed the Mistress, who faltered and stopped short, and had hard ado to retain some appearance of severity in sight of this weeping, for which she was not prepared. Colin’s mother understood truth, and in an abhorring, indignant, resentful way, believed that there was falsehood in the world. But how truth and falsehood were mingled—how the impulses of nature might have a little room to work even under the fictions of art or the falseness of society—was a knowledge unimagined by the simple woman. She began to think she had done Matty injustice when she saw her tears.
“Oh, Mrs. Campbell, I know how good he is! I—I never knew any one like him. How could I help——? But, indeed—indeed, I never meant any harm!” cried Matty, ingeniously taking advantage of the truth of her own feelings, so far as they went, to disarm her unconscious and singleminded judge. The Mistress looked at her with puzzled, but pitiful eyes.
“It would be poor comfort to him to say you never meant it,” she said; and in the pause that followed Matty had begun to recollect that it was a long time since the dressing-bell rang, though she still had her face hid on the table, and the tears were not dried from her cheeks. “And things may turn out more merciful than they look like,” said the Mistress, with a sigh and a wistful smile. Perhaps it occurred to her that the gratitude of the Franklands might go so far as to bestow upon Colin the woman he loved. “I’ll no keep you longer,” she continued, laying her tender hand for a moment on Matty’s head. “God bless you for every kind thought you ever had to my Colin. He’s weel worthy of them all,” said the wistful mother.
Matty, who did not know what to say, and who, under this touch, felt her own artifice, and was for a moment disgusted with herself, sprang up in a little agony of shame and remorse, and kissed Mrs. Campbell as she went away. And Colin’s mother went back to her son’s room to find him asleep, and sat down by his side, to ponder in herself whether this and that might not still be possible. Love and happiness were physicians in whom the simple woman had a confidence unbounded. If they came smiling hand in hand to Colin’s pillow, who could tell what miracle of gladness might yet fall from the tender heavens?