‘What man?’ asked Jean, seizing with instant penetration the point at question.
‘Eh, me!’ said Jean Campbell, ‘blessings on you for a quick thought, and a quicker act. I heard he had been seen over the hill. I’ll swear it’s the kink-cough!’ she added, under her breath; and so the bargain was made.
It was the first night of pain Isabel had spent since her baby was born. It seemed to her as if she ought to get up and fly away with her through the darkness, to escape from so terrible a danger; and she went back a hundred times to the cradle after the little Margaret had been disposed of for the night to listen to her breathing, and look at her little rosebud face, and touch her tiny fingers, and make sure she had not caught anything.
‘The bairn’s as well as ever she was in her life,’ Jean said at last, with a little impatience, as this process went on.
‘But you said there was whooping-cough about,’ said Isabel.
‘I said it might be,’ said Jean, ‘for anything I ken; but, eh, why do you think our bairn should get it, and no other bairn a’ the country round?’
‘Because she is all I have in the world,’ said Isabel, with a sudden fall out of the soft content in which her life had been wrapped.
Jean did not know of the revolution which that moment made. She saw the brown eyes open wide and flash in the soft, domestic light, but had no insight to perceive how Isabel had suddenly stumbled, as it were, against the limits of her lot, and woke up to see that her happiness was as a flower on the edge of a precipice, that all her life was concentrated in this one blossom, against which nature itself, and the winds and the rains, and the summer heats and the autumn chill, were ready to rise up. Most mothers have gone through that same sudden gleam of imagination, and beheld Heaven and earth contending against the child in whose frail ship of life all their venture of happiness was embarked. Isabel saw herself standing as on the brink of a more dreadful destruction than she had ever dreamt of, and her very soul failed within her. It could not last. Before any new influence came in, the Dominie’s words had proved themselves, though in a sense different from anything he understood.
‘Oh, if harm were to come to her!’ cried Isabel, with a sudden, low, stifled cry.