"I sit on my creepie, and spin at my wheel,
And I think on the laddie that lo'ed me sae weel;
He had but ae sixpence, he brake it in twa,
And gied me the hauf o' t when he gaed awa'.
He said, think na lang lassie tho' I gang awa'.
I'll come and see you in spite o' them a'"
--Logie O Buchan.
"I am going to be ill," said Mary, with trembling lips, "I feel as if I
were walking into a great darkness, Maggie."
They were driving toward Drumloch in the early morning, and there was that
haunted, terrified look in her eyes, with which a soul apprehensive of
suffering and danger bespeaks the help and sympathy of those near to it.
Maggie had seen the look before; the little children dying upon her knees
had pierced her heart with it. She remembered it, even in the eyes of
strong men driven by a sense of duty or humanity into the jaws of death.
Mary took her hand and clung to it; and let her head fall helplessly upon
Maggie's breast. When they reached home, she had almost to be carried to
her room, and servants were sent off on fleet horses for medical aid.
"A bad case of inflammation of the lungs," was the doctor's verdict. "It
is likely to be a serious business, Miss Promoter, and Miss Campbell's
friends should be informed at once of her condition."
Mary would not be spoken to on the subject. "Her uncle," she said, "was
her only friend. In his last letter he had told her to send communications
to the Hotel Neva at Riga. It was uncertain when he would get there. And
what was the use of alarming him, when he was too far away to help her?"
Maggie perceived from the first moment of Mary's conviction of danger and
suffering, that the girl had flung herself upon her love and care. With
all her soul she accepted the charge. She would have held herself as
unworthy to live if she had had one moment's reluctance in the matter. In
strong physical anguish it is almost impossible to be generous and
self-forgetting, and Mary, in the first hours of acute, lacerating agony,
forgot all things but her ever-present need of relief. Early in the second
day the fever reached the brain, and her talk became incoherent. It
required all Maggie's firm strength and tender love to control the
suffering girl.
And it was nearly time for her tryst with Allan. On the twenty-ninth of
August he had bidden her farewell; two years from that day he had promised
to be in Pittenloch. She believed he would keep his promise; but how was
she to keep hers? Only by being recreant to every sentiment of honor,
gratitude and humanity. "And if I could be that false to Mary Campbell, I
wad weel deserve that Allan should be false to me," she said. She had
never read Carlyle, never heard of him, but she arrived at his famous
dictum, as millions of good men and women have done, by the simplest
process of conscientious thought: "I'll do the duty that lies close by my
hand and heart, and leave the rest to One wiser than I am."