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The child looked earnestly in Olive's face. "What is heaven, and what is God?" Miss Rothesay's amazement was not unmingled with horror. Her own religious faith had dawned so imperceptibly at once an instinct and a lesson that there seemed something awful in this question of an utterly untaught mind. "My poor child," she said, "do you not know who is God? has no one told you?" "No one."
She hung over her mother with a deeper tenderness she looked out into the lovely autumn sunset with a keener sense of beauty and of joy. The sun was setting, the year was waning; but on Olive Rothesay's life had risen a new season and a new day.
Her father's business-papers she had already examined; these were only his private memoranda. But they were few, Captain Rothesay's thoughts never found vent in words; there were no data of any kind to mark the history of a life, which was almost as unknown to his wife and daughter as to any stranger. Of letters, she found very few; he was not a man who loved correspondence.
Rothesay's face "My child! how long you have been away. Did Mrs. Gwynne" "Hush, darling!" in a whisper "I have been at the Parsonage, and Mr. Gwynne has kindly brought me home. He is here now." Harold stood at a distance and bowed. Olive came to him, saying, in a low tone, "Take her hand, she cannot see you, she is blind." He started with surprise. "I did not know my mother told me nothing."
Rothesay's head. "Good brow Greek mouth, If, madam, you would favour me with taking off your cap. Thank you, Miss Olive. You understand me, I see. That will do the white drapery over the hair ah, divine! My 'Alcestis' to the life! Madam Mrs. Rothesay, your head is glorious; it shall go down to posterity in my picture."
It was a subject she could not bear to talk upon; perhaps because it rested often on Mrs. Rothesay's mind: and she herself had an instinctive apprehension that there was, after all, some truth in these fears concerning her mother's sight. She began quickly to talk of other matters. "Hark, mamma, there is Mr. Vanbrugh walking in his painting-room overhead.
And, beholding the pale, worn, but still graceful woman, who, with her sightless eyes cast down, clung to her sole stay her devoted child Mrs. Gwynne seemed deeply moved. There was even a sort of deprecatory hesitation in her manner, but it soon passed. She clasped the widow's hands, and spoke to her in a voice so sweet, so winning, that all pain vanished from Mrs. Rothesay's mind.
A misfortune that steals on year by year, slowly, inevitably, often comes with so light a footstep that we scarcely hear it. In this manner had come Mrs. Rothesay's blindness.
Rothesay's education that education of heart, and mind, and temper, which is essential to a woman's happiness, had to begin when it ought to have been completed at her marriage.
When Captain Rothesay's affairs were settled, the sole wreck of his wealth that remained to his widow and child was the small settlement from Mrs. Rothesay's fortune, on which she had lived at Stirling. So they were not left in actual poverty. Still, Olive and her mother were poor poor enough to make them desire to leave prying, gossiping Oldchurch, and settle in the solitude of some great town.
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