The Clever Woman of the Family

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.