Working in earnest at his visitation sermon, she was drawn up into the
real principles and bearings of the controversy, and Mr. Clare failed
not to give full time and patience to pick out all her difficulties,
removing scruples at troubling him, by declaring that it was good for
his own purpose to unwind every tangle even if he did not use every
thread. It was wonderful how many puzzles were absolutely intangible,
not even tangled threads, but a sort of nebulous matter that dispersed
itself on investigation. And after all, unwilling as she would have
been to own it, a woman's tone of thought is commonly moulded by the
masculine intellect, which, under one form or another, becomes the
master of her soul. Those opinions, once made her own, may be acted
and improved upon, often carried to lengths never thought of by their
inspirer, or held with noble constancy and perseverance even when he
himself may have fallen from them, but from some living medium they are
almost always adopted, and thus, happily for herself, a woman's efforts
at scepticism are but blind faith in her chosen leader, or, at the
utmost, in the spirit of the age. And Rachel having been more than
usually removed from the immediate influence of superior man, had been
affected by the more feeble and distant power, a leading that appeared
to her the light of her independent mind; but it was not in the nature
of things that, from her husband and his uncle, her character should
not receive that tincture for which it had so long waited, strong
and thorough in proportion to her nature, not rapid in receiving
impressions, but steadfast and uncompromising in retaining and working
on them when once accepted, a nature that Alick Keith had discerned and
valued amid its worst errors far more than mere attractiveness, of which
his sister had perhaps made him weary and distrustful. Nor, indeed,
under the force of the present influences, was attractiveness wanting,
and she suited Alick's peculiarities far better than many a more
charming person would have done, and his uncle, knowing her only by her
clear mellow voice, her consideration, helpfulness, and desire to think
and do rightly, never understood the doubtful amazement now and then
expressed in talking of Alick's choice. One great bond between Rachel
and Mr. Clare was affection for the little babe, who continued to be
Rachel's special charge, and was a great deal dearer to her already than
all the seven Temples put together. She studied all the books on infant
management that she could obtain, constantly listened for his voice,
and filled her letters to her mother with questions and details on his
health, and descriptions of his small person. Alick was amused whenever
he glanced at his strong-minded woman's correspondence, and now and then
used to divert himself with rousing her into emphatic declarations of
her preference of this delicate little being to "great, stout, coarse
creatures that people call fine children." In fact, Alick's sensitive
tenderness towards his sister's motherless child took the form of
avoiding the sight of it, and being ironical when it was discussed; but
with Mr. Clare, Rachel was sure of sympathy, ever since the afternoon
when he had said how the sounds upstairs reminded him of his own little
daughter; and sitting under the yew-tree, he had told Rachel all the
long stored-up memories of the little life that had been closed a few
days after he had first heard himself called papa by the baby lips. He
had described all these events calmly, and not without smiles, and had
said how his own blindness had made him feel thankful that he had safely
laid his little Una on her mother's bosom under the church's shade; but
when Rachel spoke of this conversation to her husband, she learnt that
it was the first time that he had ever talked of those buried hopes. He
had often spoken of his wife, but though always fond of children, few
who had not read little Una's name beneath her mother's cross, knew that
he was a childless father. And yet it was beautiful to see the pleasure
he took in the touch of Bessie's infant, and how skilfully and tenderly
he would hold it, so that Rachel in full faith averred that the little
Alexander was never so happy as with him. The chief alarms came from
Mrs Comyn Menteith, who used to descend on the Rectory like a whirlwind,
when the Colonel had politely expelled her from her father's room at
Timber End. Possessed with the idea of Rachel's being very dull at
Bishopsworthy, she sedulously enlivened her with melancholy prognostics
as to the life, limbs, and senses of the young heir, who would never
live, poor little darling, even with the utmost care of herself and her
nurse, and it was very perverse of papa and the doctors still to keep
him from her--poor little darling--not that it mattered, for he was
certain not to thrive, wherever he was, and the Gowanbrae family would
end with Uncle Colin and the glassblower's daughter; a disaster on
which she met with such condolence from Alick (N. B. the next heir)
that Rachel was once reduced to the depths of genuine despair by the
conviction that his opinion of his nephew's life was equally desponding;
and another time was very angry with him for not defending Ermine's
gentility. She had not entirely learnt what Alick's assent might mean.