If Maggie had been a popular girl, the loyalty of the Pittenloch wives to
"their ain folk" would have been a sufficient protection against any
stranger's innuendoes; but there was no girl in Pittenloch less popular.
Maggie was unlike other girls; that was a sufficient reason for disfavor.
Society loves types, and resents the individual whom it cannot classify;
and this feeling is so common and natural that it runs through all our
lives and influences our opinion of things inanimate and irresponsible:
--the book of such inconvenient size or shape that it will not fit the
shelf in our book-case, how many an impatient toss it gets! The
incongruous garment which suits no other garment we have, and seems out of
place on every occasion, how we hate it! Although it may be of the finest
material and excellently well made.
So, though no one knew anything wrong of Maggie, and no one dared to say
anything wrong, how provoking was the girl! She did nothing like any one
else, and fitted into no social groove. She did not like the lads to joke
with her, she never joined the young lassies, who in pleasant weather sat
upon the beach, mending the nets. In the days when Maggie had nets to
mend, she mended them at home. It was true that her mother was a
confirmed invalid, confined entirely to her bed, for more than four years
before her death; and Maggie had been everything to the slowly dying
woman. But this reason for Maggie's seclusion was forgotten now, only the
facts remembered.
The very women who wondered, "what kind of a girl she must be never to go
to dances and merry makings;" knew that she had watched night and day by
her sick mother; knew that the whole household had trusted to Maggie from
her seventeenth year onward. Knew that it was Maggie that made all the
meals, and kept the house place clean, and took care of the men's
clothing, and helped to mend the nets, and who frequently after a day of
unceasing labor, sat through the stormy nights with the nervous, anxious
wife and mother, and watched for her the rising and setting of the
constellations, and the changes of the wind.
Before her mother had been a twelvemonth under "the cold blanket o' the
kirk yard grass," her father and brothers found rest among the clear cold
populous graves of the sea. Then came Allan Campbell into her life, and
his influence in the Promoter household had been to intensify the quiet
and order, which David and Maggie both distinctly approved. The habit of
being quiet became a second nature to the girl, every circumstance of the
last years of her life had separated her more and more from the girls of
her class and age. She was not to blame, but what then? People suffer
from circumstances, as well as from actual faults.