Читать книгу Gathered In - Catherine Helen Spence - Страница 5

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The look of those grave, tender eyes, the touch of that soft, beautiful hand, the half embrace in which he had been folded in his sorrow, dwelt in his grateful memory, all the more on account of his grandmother's attitude of antagonism.

On the following morning Kenneth was just strapping on his satchel preparatory to making a start for school, when he heard a well-known voice, and saw John Lindores, the wright, with Nelly in his hand, standing at the cottage door.

"Kenneth, my man, it's mair than time Nelly went regular to school now; she's turned eight this sax months. She's little for her age, an' timorsome; but I dootna she'll mak a braw scholer. Your poor mother said aye she was gleg at the uptak; and, thanks to her, she can read a bit, and when I can get her to mysel' she's the best o' company. But she's maistly throng wi' the little ones, and doesna get as muckle attention as she should hae; so I've put my foot down, and she's gang to schule. So as the bairn's timorsome, as I said before, I'll be muckle beholden to you if you'd see her safe to and from the schule--at any rate till she's used to the gait."

"I'll do that for her an' welcome," said Kenneth; "but ye ken I canna dae muckle for her in the schule, for I'll no be near her, and couldna keep the tawse off of her if I was."

"It's no the tawse Nelly dreads; it's the rough lads an lasses. She's been keepit sae muckle at hame minding the bairns that she's no acquent wi' only of them but yoursel'. But it's no doing Nelly justice to make a mere bairn-keeper o' her, and to lose her lair through being sae handy. Well, Nelly, good day to you; and you'll tell me at nicht how you fared at the schule. I'm aff to a day's work at the Place; they're having an addition to the servants' part o' the hoose. If it were otherwhere, they'd hae some ane frae Embro. Your mother aye had a kind word for my Nelly, so I can trust her wi' you. Dinna delay Kenneth, my lass; let's see how your feet can gang owre the lea;" and the father hastened off to his work when he had seen the youngsters set off on their way.

"But what will your mother do wanting you, Nelly?" said Kenneth, when they had fairly started.

"I dinna ken," said Nelly.

"Are you keen to gang to the schule, Nelly?"

"I dinna ken."

"An' it's no just the quarter either."

"Will the maister no take me then?" asked Nelly, doubtful if that would be a benefit or not.

"Ah! I daresay he'll no mind for that. The second-class are no sae far on but that ye'll catch up to them soon enough, and dinna mind aboot the tawse, the maister's never so hard on the lasses."

"Oh! I dinna mind about them. We've tawse at hame."

"And you're acquent with them, I'se warrant."

"Whiles--gey often, for if the bairn greets, mother thinks it is a' my wyte for no minding him right; and when she's throng wi' her work, hae's maist times greeting for her, and I canna soother him ony way. I used to think that if my father had only married your mother--as Auntie Jess says he wanted to--she would have been gude to me; but now you see she would hae been dead, and it would be all to do owre again. Only then ye would hae been a sort o' brether to me, and that would be good."

"Maybe aye, and maybe no. Laddies never care about their sisters, I think; but I aye liket you, Nelly, and I'll tell you what I've been thinking. Now that baith our mothers have been put away sae far frae us, and they canna gie us a word or even a look, we might help ane another, maybe."

"Oh, Kenneth, what could I do for you?" said Nelly eagerly.

"I think if ye mind upon me in your prayers it would do me good. Ye see, it's no sae easy to win to Heaven, even for auld folk like granny; and my mother, that never forgot to pray for me, has been taken away just like yours, and I see nothing clear but that I maun have living prayers forbye my ain and granny's, so if I mind upon you and say nicht and morning 'God keep Nelly Lindores safe and good and on the right road to Heaven,' ye'll do the same by me." And Kenneth felt he had put the case as plainly and strongly as its importance demanded.

"But would I have to say your very name like that?" said Nelly, to whom this familiar address to the Deity seemed a little profane.

"Oh, if you think the name it will do. He'll ken who you mean, as He kens a' thing; but what for would ye no mention Kenneth Oswald's name. I was christened Kenneth, and He forgets naething."

"Naebody puts names into prayers, Kenneth."

"But they do. There's Queen Victoria."

"Oh, but that is no a common name like yours and mine, Kenneth."

"No just," said Kenneth doubtfully, "and the other Sunday when that strange man preached that came from Dumfries, and he was praying for our minister, he didna say Mr. Lang, as you and me would do, but called him his dear brother, and I'm sure he's nae friend and no a drap's bluid o' connection to him. To my mind it would have been mair wiselike if he had called him Mr. Lang, and no evened himself to be brother to a gentleman that is auld enough to be his father."

"That's a' ye ken about it, Kenneth; but a minister maun ken better than you, and I'll just pray for you as you wish it, and call you my dear brother, and if she hears, she'll think it is Jamie--but as you say, God will ken. Oh! Kenneth, Jamie is a weary bairn--he's sae weighty and sae cross."

"But should na ye pray for Jamie too," said Kenneth musingly, "and may be he would na be sae cross."

"I'm sure it wad mak nae odds on him till he had gotten a' his teeth, whatever it micht do afterhand," said Nelly, with great simplicity. Kenneth pondered over this want of faith in the efficacy of prayer till they got close to the school. He bravely held the hand of the little girl till he had introduced her to the master, and seen her placed in the class of strangers, where she looked smaller than ever.

Fathers in John Lindores' class did not always take their children to school, and his wife had her hands too full of small ones of her own to care to go with her stepchild Nelly. Kenneth underwent a little rustic banter about taking up with a lassie, and also some cross-questioning as to who or what she was.

He only knew she was the daughter of their neighbour, the wright, by his first wife, and that her mother had died when she was a fortnight old. But the neighbours generally knew that the widower had first wished to fill up the vacant place in his heart and home by marrying Kenneth's own mother, who, John Lindores believed, would tend his neglected child with love, and who, feeling his own disadvantageous position, would probably be only too glad of a respectable marriage. But Isabel Oswald had steadily declined the offer, and thereby confirmed her mother's cherished idea that she considered herself the wife of Norman McDiarmid.

At first John Lindores thought that he had every right to a favourable answer, and that his promise never to reproach her with Kenneth's birth if she would be good to Nelly, ought to have pleaded for him; but his wishes strengthened by opposition, and Isabel's reiterated refusal made him fancy she was really above him in spite of all. The more he saw of her nice gentle ways, the scrupulous cleanliness and order in which she kept the cottage, her care and her ambition for her boy, her separation from the neighbours, first because they had looked down on her, but afterwards as that wore away, because she preferred keeping to herself,--the more desirable it seemed to him to secure such a mother for Nelly. Her skill in the finer kinds of needlework was rare in the village in which she lived, and she got pretty regular employment; it was believed that Kenneth was maintained by his father or his father's relatives, so that he could be no burden, and Nelly was so fond of his mother even as an infant, that there was everything in favour of the marriage, except Isabel's consent.

Mrs. Oswald pressed her daughter more sorely about this marriage than her desire to part with her could have warranted, for that she did not really wish; but she thought by this means she might extort some confession, some evidence as to her marriage with one much higher in the social scale. But Isabel said "no, it could not be," and would give no other answer.

"But, Isabel," urged her mother, "it would be a straightening of what has been crooked."

"That would never straighten it, mother; it would only make it worse."

"But, Isabel, when you was a young lass, and John Lindores was a strapping fellow, you would have been pleased and proud enough to have been evened to him."

"Aye, mother, true enough."

"And now you are owre proud to be evened to him, when it would lift off all the disgrace that has lain so heavy on us all."

"Mother, don't tempt me. With God's help, I'll bear my share of the disgrace. Oh! if I could only bear yours and Kenneth's too, but I cannot--I cannot."

"You cannot let John make an honest woman of you?"

"Not as John's wife, mother. I can make an honest woman of myself even in your eyes in time. God's eyes I have no fear of."

"Say you so, Isabel?" said her mother eagerly. "Then he was a black--hearted scoundrel, as I aye believed."

"Whisht, mother! I'm no blaming him, and ye needna. What I meant is this, that if a man or woman just repents, and turns from sin, and has got pardon, God looks as if it had never been. It takes long ere men or women do the same, but I must be patient, it will come in time."

"It wad come a' the sooner if ye were a gude wife to John Lindores, and a kind mother to his bit bairn, poor thing."

"Yes; if I were a good wife and mother--but I could not love John as he deserves to be loved; and if my heart is so full of my Kenneth that there is no room for another bairn in it, even if it were a bairn of my own, would I be really a right mother to Nelly, poor thing?"

"I'm sure you're muckle ta'en up wi' her as it is," said her mother.

"Kenneth is so fond of her, and it is good for him to think on some one less and weaker than himself."

"And what ails you at giving Kenneth the good o't, if good it is, for a permanence."

"I just cannot do it, mother. It's just there that my conscience pinches me. I cannot wrong John Lindores with half-hearted unwilling duty instead of love."

"Oh! Isabel, there you are, still craving and pining after a man that wronged you for his ain pleasure, and then whistled you down the wind. Did he keep mind o' you that you should set your heart dead against honest love and troth? What for should he no have done the same for your sake?"

"It was different with him, mother. His mother, his grandfather, their family affairs all pressed it on him, and you cannot judge how hard it was for him."

"But your mother, your friends, and your family affairs, too, as you ca' them, a' press it on you."

"Are you weary of me, mother?" said Isabel affectionately. "Am I not more help and comfort to you and my father now just as I am than I could be as the wife of John Lindores, or of any man on the earth, even his, my Kenneth's father's? Let me abide with you; let me work for you; tend you in sickness and in health, and if I am taken away I can leave you Kenneth to be all your own, to have no one coming between you and him, not even your own friend John Lindores."

What Isabel said was true enough, as even Mrs. Oswald was forced to acknowledge. In no way could the daughter have been of more service and a greater comfort to her parents than she was, and if only the bitter drop could be taken out of the cup, which flavoured it in the midst of all to the mother's taste, she would have rejoiced in the undivided, unremitting devotion of Isabel. If the latter herself tasted the same, she made no wry faces over it, but pursued her own way quietly, and that way was not in the direction of John Lindores. Wearied out and provoked by her repeated refusals, John turned his eyes on a good-looking lass, who had never been at service, but at what is called the "outwork" in the fields. Jeanie Maunders was not so hard to win--or at all unwilling to be set down as the wife of the village wright or carpenter, which was promotion to a distinctly higher grade in life. There was no doubt a child in the way, but only one. She had no more hard rough work, and she came into possession of a cow, which had been the pride of Nelly's mother's heart, and which Mrs. Oswald or Isabel had milked for the widower from the time of her death. She did not mean to be unkind to little Nelly--indeed, she was rather proud of her, until claimants of her own came thick and fast to fill her hands and heart.

There was one person however, to whom she had a great dislike, and that was Isabel Oswald. Every one knew that John courted her, and that she had refused him time after time. Although Jeanie had reaped all the benefits of this refusal, she never could forgive the "upsettingness" of a creature like that turning up her nose at "her man". And she was full, not only of petty spite, but was apt to indulge in serious backbiting.

The excessive reticence of all the Oswalds as to their own private affairs--at least as to that part of them which the world most wished to know--was provoking to a woman of Jeanie's turn of mind. No one knew who Kenneth's father was, not even John Lindores, who had been at one time very anxious to find out. Isabel was too meek, and her father and mother too much aggrieved to reveal anything. It had all taken place at a distance--there was no visitor ever came to see Isabel, no suspicious-looking letters coming through the village Post-Office that Jeanie could find out, and she could only surmise that things must be worse than only an ordinary "misfortune" when all was kept so dark. Poor Nelly's love of going to the Oswald's cottage as soon as she could toddle to play with Kenneth, or to ask for a "piece" or a drink of milk, was altogether insufferable to her stepmother, and indeed her first acquaintance with the leathern strap, familiarly called the tawse, arose from this inveterate habit; but even the tawse could not prevent the little feet from finding their way in when there was any possibility.

The Saturday afternoon's excursions were a grievance, but John Lindores, who felt for the little girl's life of drudgery, had interposed his authority to sanction them--first, if she had been a good girl, and latterly whether she was reported good or not; and Nelly had grieved over the sickness and death of Kenneth's mother as if she had been her very own.

Mrs. Lindores' heart was softened by the death of her rival, whose ways John could no longer compare with hers, and she yielded with better grace than her wont to the proposal that Nelly should go to the school under Kenneth's charge. John thought he was doing the best he could for the lassie; he was scarcely aware how much he was doing for the boy. Nothing could have comforted the desolate heart like the companionship of one younger and feebler than himself, whose brightest memories were associated with the mother he had lost. As they walked together to and from school, every flower and bush and bud gave them subjects for talk about her, and what she had said about them all. When Nelly found her lessons puzzle her she came to Kenneth to "hearken her," as she called it, and looked on his explanations and ideas concerning them as the very words of wisdom. To her Kenneth was almost a man, and quite a hero. She rejoiced in being put under his care and in being admitted into his confidence. On her return from school on that eventful first day her stepmother's grumbling about being deprived of her services was unheeded in the thought of that prayer that must be said at night--that no one would know the meaning of but herself and Kenneth and the far-away Father of all.

Her father was late home that night. She would have liked to have got him his supper and sat beside him, but there was that weary Jamie to walk about till he went to sleep in the other room; but her father found her out there.

"And how did my lassie get on at the schule?" he asked.

"Oh, middlin'," said Nelly. "I think I'll like it fine when I get used to it, but I hae lots to learn ere I win up to Kenneth."

"And he was gude till ye, Nelly," said the father in a low voice.

"Oh! father, he was real gude. He faced the maister for me, and we had such a bonnie time going to the schule, and comin' back too."

"Poor laddie," said John Lindores, "you behove to be gude till him, Nelly; it's a sair loss he's had."

"What can I do," said Nelly; "a wee thing like me."

John thought a minute. "Deed! no very muckle, Nelly; but ye can mind him in your prayers--naebody kens what powers for gude may be in them."

Nelly was so delighted she nearly dropped Jamie in her joy. Her father, too, thought her prayers might help Kenneth--her dear father--who knew mostly everything.