“I wonder if Clementina would notice the strange-looking letter,” said Miss Latimer. “I’m always afraid of something stirring her superstitions and making her take flight to her Highland hills on the score that ‘Babylon’ is too terrible a place to stay in.”
That was all. It was but a nine minutes’ wonder. Yet they remembered it afterwards.
Early in December there came a letter from Mrs. Grant in Peterhead. Lucy and the captain’s wife had kept up a slight correspondence during their husbands’ absence on the _Slains Castle_. Each had always written to apprise the other of any news she had received. Once or twice, indeed, when unexpected opportunities for ship’s letters had arisen, the busy captain had contented himself with sending a message to his wife _viâ_ his passenger’s home epistle. Mrs. Grant had always promptly and cordially acknowledged these curtesies on Lucy’s part. But she was not naturally a letter-writing woman. Her missives were always of the briefest, and never until now had she taken the initiative.
Mrs. Grant’s letter seemed, on the face of it, both as cheerful and as brief as usual. She “supposed Lucy had heard nothing lately, as she knew she would have let her know if she had.” “Sailing vessels are often out of their reckoning for weeks and weeks,” she added. She dropped a word of congratulation that Lucy’s own welcoming day was assuredly near at hand now, and of half-comic self-condolence that hers was so much farther off. “In my case, too, one suspense is no sooner over than another begins,” she wrote. “But that’s the lot of the sailor’s wife, and I know it was all in my bargain when I took the captain.”
There certainly seemed nothing in that letter to alarm Lucy, and she marvelled at a strange uneasiness which she felt stirring within her. Was she intuitively aware of some anxiety on the part of Mrs. Grant, which she had studiously kept out of her words? Lucy wrote a prompt reply, saying that she had heard nothing yet, but was daily looking for tidings. She tried to make her letter cheerful, and wondered whether Mrs. Grant, in her turn, would read anything between the lines.
Lucy scarcely liked to think of the approaching Christmas Day. If Charlie had returned, it would be a day of supreme joy; if timely sea news came in, it would be one of gladdest thanksgiving. But if——! There Lucy paused, and turned aside as from a great mist advancing to enfold her. Yet she must make her little plans to be fit for the fulfilment of her hope. Not to do so, would seem like creating an omen of prolonged separation and anxiety. So she and Miss Latimer sent out a Christmas bidding to Mr. Somerset, Lucy saying with pathetic playfulness that under the circumstances she scarcely knew whether she ought to issue her invitations in her own name only or with Charlie’s joined thereto. “For he may be among us on that day yet,” she added. Writing down her hope seemed to make it more tangible.