She looked at me with a pitying air. “Do you really believe that?” she said. “And don’t you feel the world poor, poor,”--her voice suspended itself a moment on that little national peculiarity, the repetition which gives force--“when, instead of being a good guardian, a kind soul, it is only a vulgar echo, a thing that is nothing?” The water shone in her eyes when she lingered in the slight chant of her speech upon the _good_ and _kind_, but dried up and they shone upon me with defiance when she scorned the vulgar, the material. Then she added, with a low voice touched with awe, “And who was it, Mr. Temple, that came to you, that gave you that warning?”
“I have asked myself the question, Miss Campbell.”
“Yes, and you have answered it too. Who else? It is that that makes my heart fail,” she said.
“If,” said I, “we find your brother, as I hope we shall, well and happy”--
Her countenance changed. “In that case--God grant it! oh, God grant it!--you may say what you please, Mr. Temple.” Then after a moment she said quickly, “What is that the French say about the unforeseen being always the thing that happens? In that case”--But she did not tell me what it was that she had foreseen.
To have Charlotte there, altogether a thing so far beyond hope, travelling with me, perhaps to owe something to me, and certainly without any doubt to find myself woven in with the web of her life, was so unexpected and so delightful that I could not perhaps be so deeply affected by their troubles as I might have been otherwise. If it was pain to them, it was good to me--I could not but feel the heart rise in my breast, notwithstanding the pathos there was in the old man’s feebleness, in the broken sleep into which he fell, and the unprotected openness of his slumbering countenance, all revealed in the pain, the anxiety, the irritation of his misery under the wavering lamp. And yet by moments the pity of it would touch me in spite of myself. An old man, a good man, whose life had been full of kindness done to others--I had seen that and heard of it on all sides. He had given every kind of aid to his dependants. At the “works,” to be an orphan was to be the child of the master; and all round him in the country his hand was ever ready--his heart, like his door, always open. And yet this man, who had done so much for others, this was his reward. His own firstborn, the apple of his eye!--I did not know, in so many words, what they feared, but it was not disease or death--it was evil in some shape or other--vice, perhaps crime. God help us all! if justice had been the rule in this world, he must have been defended from every harm by the most spotless, the most devoted of children; his own good deeds would have been returned to him in gratitude and blessing; he would have been the happy man of the Psalms, unashamed in the gates. Alas! and now his grey hairs, his white head was bent low.