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the caution came too late.
“I believe you are afraid of my cousin as well as Brenda is,” said the Udaller, gazing on her pale countenance; “if so, speak the word, and we will return back again as if we had the wind on our quarter, and were running fifteen knots by the line.”
“Do, for Heaven’s sake, sister, let us return!” said Brenda imploringly; “ you know — you remember — you must be well aware that Norna can do nought to help you.”
“It is but too true,” said Minna, in a subdued voice; “but I know not — she may answer a question — a question that only the miserable dare ask of the miserable.”
“Nay, my kinswoman is no miser,” answered the Udaller, who only heard the beginning of the word; “ a good income she has, both in Orkney and here, and many a fair lispund of butter is paid to her. But the poor have the best share of it, and shame fall the Zetlander who begrudges them; the rest she spends, I wot not how, in her journeys through the islands. But you will laugh to see her house, and Nick Strumpfer, whom she calls Pacolet — many folks think Nick is the devil; but he is flesh and blood, like any of us — his father lived in Graemsay. — I shall be glad to see Nick again.”
While the Udaller thus ran on, Brenda, who, in recompense for a less portion of imagination than her sister, was gifted with sound common sense, was debating with herself the probable effect of this visit on her sister’s health. She came finally tlj.the resolution of speaking with her father aside, upon the first occasion which their journey should afford. To him she determined to communicate the whole particulars of their nocturnal interview with Norna, — to which, among other agitating causes, she attributed the depression of Minna’s spirits, — and then make himself the judge whether he ought to persist in his visit to a person so singular, and expose his daughter to all the shock which her nerves might possibly receive from the interview.
Just as she had arrived at this conclusion her father, dashing the crumbs from his laced waistcoat with one hand, and receiving with the other a fourth cup of brandy and water, drank devoutly to the success of their voyage, and ordered all to be in readiness to set forward. Whilst they were saddling their ponies, Brenda, with some difficulty, contrived to make her father understand she wished to speak with him in private — no small surprise to the honest Udaller, who, though secret as the grave in the very few things where he considered secrecy as of importance, was so far from practising mystery in general, that his most important affairs were often discussed by him openly in presence of his whole family, servants included.
But far greater was his astonishment, when, remaining purposely with his daughter Brenda, a little in the wake, as he termed it, of the other riders, he heard the whole account of Norna’s visit to Burgh-Westra, and of the communication with which she had then astounded his daughters. For a long time he could utter nothing but interjections, and ended with a thousand curses on his kinswoman’s folly in telling his daughters such a history of horror.
“I have often heard,” said the Udaller, “ that she was quite mad, with all her wisdom, and all her knowledge of the seasons; and, by the bones of my namesake, the Martyr, I begin now to believe it most assuredly! I know no more how to steer than if I had lost my compass. Had I known this before we set out, I think I had remained at home; but now that we have come so far, and that Norna expects us”
“Expects us, father!” said Brenda; “ how can that be possible?”
“Why, that I know not — but she that can tell how the wind is to blow, can tell which way we are designing to ride. She must not be provoked; — perhaps she has done my family this ill for the words. I had with her about that lad Mordaunt Mertoun, and if so, she can undo it again; — and scy^ie shall, or I will know the cause wherefore. But I will try fair words first.”
Finding it thus settled that they were to go forward, Brenda endeavoured next to learn from her father whether Norna’s tale was founded in reality. He shook his head, groaned bitterly, and, in a few words, acknowledged that the whole, so far as concerned her intrigue with a stranger, and her father’s death, of which she became the accidental and most innocent cause, was a matter of sad and indisputable truth. “ For her infant,” he said, “ he could never, by any means, learn what became of it.”
“Her infant!” exclaimed Brenda; “she spoke not a word of her infant!”
“Then I wish my tongue had been blistered,” said the Udaller, “ when I told you of it! — I see that, young and old, a man has no better chance of keeping a secret from you women, than an eel to keep himself in his hold when he is sniggled with a loop of horsehair — sooner or later the fisher teases him out of his hole, when he has once the noose round his neck.”
“But the infant, my father,” said Brenda, still insisting on the particulars of this extraordinary story, “what became of it?”
“Carried off, I fancy, by the blackguard Vaughan,” answered the Udaller, with a gruff accent, which plainly betokened how weary he was of the subject.
“By Vaughan?” said Brenda, “the lover of poor Norna, doubtless! — what sort of man was he, father?”
“Why, much like other men, I fancy,” answered the Udaller; “I never saw him in my life. — He kept company with the Scottish families at Kirkwall; and I with the good old Norse folk — Ah! if Norna had dwelt always amongst her own kin, and not kept company with her Scottish acquaintance, she would have known nothing of Vaughan, and things might have been otherwise — But then I should have known nothing of your blessed mother, Brenda — and that,” he said, his large blue eyes shining with a tear, “ would have saved me a short joy and a long sorrow.”
“Norna could but ill have supplied my mother’s place to you, father, as a companion and a friend — that is, judging from all I have heard,” said Brenda, with some hesitation. But Magnus, softened by recollections of his beloved wife, answered her with more indulgence than she expected.
“I would have been content,” he said, “ to have wedded Norna at that time. It would have been the soldering of an old quarrel — the healing of an old sore. All our blood relations wished it, and, situated as I was, especially not having seen your blessed mother, I had little will to oppose their counsels. You must not judge of Norna or of me by such an appearance as we now present to you — She was young and beautiful, and I gamesome as a Highland buck, and little caring what haven I made for, having, as I thought, more than one under my lee. But Norna preferred this man Vaughan, and, as I told you before, it was, perhaps, the best kindness she could have done to me.”
“Ah, poor kinswoman!” said Brenda. “ But believe you, father, in the high powers which she claims — in the mysterious vision of the dwarf — in the”
She was interrupted in these questions by Magnus, to whom they were obviously displeasing.
“I believe, Brenda,” he said, “according to the belief of my forefathers — I pretend not to be a wiser man than they were in their time, — and they all believed that, in cases of great worldly distress, Providence opened the eyes of the mind, and afforded the sufferers a vision of futurity. It was but a trimming of the boat, with reverence,” — here he touched his hat reverentially; “and, after all the shifting of ballast, poor Norna is as heavily loaded in the bows as ever was an Orkneyman’s yawl at the dog-fishing — she has more than affliction enough on board to balance whatever gifts she may have had in the midst of her calamity. They are as painful to her, poor soul, as a crown of thorns would be to her brows, though it were the badge of the empire of Denmark. And do not you, Brenda, seek to be wiser than your fathers. Your sister Minna, before she was so ill, had as much reverence for whatever was produced in Norse, as if it had been in the Pope’s bull, which is all written in pure Latin.”
“Poor Norna!” repeated Brenda; “and her child — was it never recovered?”
“What do I know of her child? “ said the Udaller, more gruffly than before, “ except that she was very ill, both before and after the birth, though we kept her as merry as we could with pipe and harp, and so forth; — the child had come before its time into this bustling