‘Weel, weel,’ said Jean, in her calm voice, ‘that’s what you’re ay thinking as soon as ye hae weans. What if everything should gang against ye? what if trouble should come in a moment, and leave a’ the rest, and strike yours? Ye mustna gie way to that, Isabel. What if the lift were to fa’ and smoor the laverocks? No, no, my bonnie woman! It’s no you nor me that can guard the bairn from whatever’s coming, but just God--if it’s His will.’
‘And if it were not His will?’ said Isabel, driven from despair to despair.
‘Then ye would have to submit,’ said Jean, didactic and almost solemn, ‘as you’ve done before. There’s nae striving against God.’
And then silence fell upon the little grey room, in which the fire flickered cheerfully, and the child slept, and Isabel’s heart beat. It had been beating so quietly up to this moment, and now what wild throbs it gave against her breast! Ah, yes! God’s will had to be submitted to, whatever it was--God’s will, which had carried Margaret, twenty years old, to her bed in the churchyard, and laid the minister in his blood beside her. ‘Oh,’ sighed Isabel, ‘to be with them! to have everything over that must happen! to rest and know that nothing could happen more!’
‘And mony folk would tell ye,’ said Jean, momentarily forgetting her compact with Miss Catherine, ‘that to run away as soon as ye hear of trouble was tempting Providence, as if God couldna smite in the steamboat or the coast, as well as in your ain house. No that I’m of that way of thinking,’ she added, hastily recollecting herself. ‘This change will do the bairn good, and it will do you good, and relieve your mind. Na, Isabel, ye must not take fancies into your head, or think that things are worse than they are. There’s little Margaret the picture of health.’
Isabel turned away, and threw herself down noiselessly on her knees by the side of her child’s cradle. The baby’s breathing was regular and soft; its hand was thrown up over its head, with the unconscious grace of infancy; its attitude full of ease and perfect repose.
She lay all the night through with her child breathing sweetly beside her, debating the question with herself--Should she remain, and put her fate into God’s hands, and perhaps propitiate Him by such an appearance of trust? She did not sleep, but lay in the rustling palpable darkness, sometimes fancying the child’s breathing grew hurried, sometimes that it stopped altogether, and looking all kinds of horrors in the face. She rose from her bed in the same uncertainty; and the day was cold, and Jean wavered, doubting whether such an uncertain and distant danger as that of the ‘English lad’s’ reappearance was sufficient inducement for the immediate sacrifice demanded of her.