There were two other points in Maggie's character undoubtedly influencing
the social feelings which finally determined the girl's future--her great
beauty, and her quick temper. There were women in the village who
considered her rare and unmistakable beauty a kind of effrontery, at least
they resented it with the same angry disapproval. A girl with no "man" to
stand by her, ought not to look so provokingly radiant; nor, by the same
rule, ought she to have such positive likes and dislikes, or a tongue
always so ready to express them.
That very morning soon after leaving her aunt and the gossips around her,
she met upon the beach Mysie Raith and Kitty Cupar. Kitty looked queerly
at her and laughed, and instead of ignoring the petty insult, Maggie
stopped the girls. "What are you laughing at, Kitty Cupar?" she asked
indignantly.
"At naething," promptly replied the girl.
"What a born fool you must be to giggle at naething. Tak' tent, or you'll
be crying for naething, afore night."
Then she went onward, leaving the girls full of small spite and annoyance.
She was not far from her father's ill-fated boat. It always stood to
Maggie in the stead of his grave. David had told her not to go near it,
but she was in a perverse temper "and ill-luck, or waur ill-luck, I'm
going;" she said to herself. It showed many signs of its summer's
exposure; the seams were open, the paint peeling off, the name nearly
effaced. She sat down on the shingle and leaned against it.
"Oh Lizzie! Lizzie!" she whispered to the poor forlorn battered thing.
"You brought sair loss and sair change! Four hearts that loved me weel,
you flung to the bottom o' the sea; and there's nane to care for me as
they did. Davie is bound up in his diction'ries, and thinks little of
Maggie noo; and he is gane far awa'. He'll ne'er come back to me,
I'm feared; he'll ne'er come back! It is just anither wreck, Lizzie, for
a' you left is ta'en awa' this day."
It is a great grief to miss the beloved in all the home ways, but oh, how
that grief is intensified when people not beloved step into their places!
It made Maggie bitterly sorrowful to see Janet Caird in her father's
chair. What a mistake she had made! She had no idea she would feel so
resentfully to the one who was in her house because "they were not."
"It will be waur yet to see her reading his Bible," she thought, but she
lifted the big book and laid it before her aunt at the usual hour for the
evening prayer. "Na, na," said Janet, with an expression of
self-approbation, "I dinna approve o' women reading the Word aloud. It is
nae house without a man at the head o' it, and we canna hae exercises
without a man to gie us the sense o' them. We are twa lane women, we maun
be contented with the whisper o' a verse or twa to our ain hearts."