A Noble Life | Page 2

So it ought to be. Who
but the messenger of God should know best how to communicate His
awful will, as expressed in great visitations of Calamity? In this case no
one could have been more suited for his solemn office than Mr.

Cardross. He went up to the Castle door, as he had done to that of many
a cottage bearing the same solemn message of sudden death, to which
there could be but one answer--"Thy will be done."
But the particulars of that terrible interview, in which he had to tell the
countess what already her own eyes had witnessed--though they
refused to believe the truth--the minister never repeated to any creature
except his wife. And afterward, during the four weeks that Lady
Cairnforth survived her husband, he was the only person, beyond her
necessary attendants, who saw her until she died.
The day after her death he was suddenly summoned to the castle by Mr.
Menteith, an Edinburg writer to the signet, and confidential agent, or
factor, as the office called in Scotland, to the late earl.
"They'll be sending for you to baptize the child. It's early--but the pair
bit thing may be delicate, and they may want it done at once, before Mr.
Menteith returns to Edinburg."
"Maybe so, Helen; so do not expect me back till you see me."
Thus saying, the minister quitted his sunshiny manse garden, where he
was working peacefully among his raspberry-bushes, with his wife
looking on, and walked, in meditative mood, through the Cairnforth
woods, now blue with hyacinths in their bosky shadows, and in every
nook and corner starred with great clusters of yellow primroses, which
in this part of the country grow profusely, even down to within a few
feet of high-water mark, on the tidal shores of the lochs. Their large,
round, smiling faces, so irresistibly suggestive of baby smiles at sight
of them, and baby fingers clutching at them, touched the heart of the
good minister, who had left two small creatures of his own--a "bit
girlie" of five, and a two-year-old boy--playing on his grass-plot at
home with some toys of the countess's giving: she had always been
exceedingly kind to the Manse children.
He thought of her, lying dead; and then of her poor little motherless and
fatherless baby, whom, if she had any consciousness in her death-hour,
it must have been a sore pang to her to leave behind. And the tears

gathered again and again in the good man's eyes, shutting out from his
vision all the beauty of the spring.
He reached the grand Italian portico, built by some former earl with a
taste for that style, and yet harmonizing well with the smooth lawn,
bounded by a circle of magnificent trees, through which came glimpses
of the glittering loch. The great doors used almost always to stand open,
and the windows were rarely closed--the countess like sunshine and
fresh air, but now all was shut up and silent, and not a soul was to be
seen about the place.
Mr. Cardross sighed, and walked round to the other side of the castle,
where was my lady's flower-garden, or what was to be made into one.
Then he entered by French windows, from a terrace overlooking it, my
lord's library, also incomplete. For the earl, who was by no means a
bookish man, had only built that room since his marriage, to please his
wife, whom perhaps he loved all the better that she was so exceedingly
unlike himself. Now both were away--their short dream of married life
ended, their plans and hopes crumbled into dust. As yet, no external
changes had been made, the other solemn changes having come so
suddenly. Gardeners still worked in the parterres, and masons and
carpenters still, in a quiet and lazy manner, went on completing the
beautiful room; but there was no one to order them--no one watched
their work. Except for workmen, the place seemed so deserted that Mr.
Cardross wandered through the house for some time before he found a
single servant to direct him to the person of whom he was in search.
Mr. Menteith sat alone in a little room filled with guns and fishing rods,
and ornamented with stag's heads, stuffed birds, and hunting relics of
all sorts, which had been called, not too appropriately, the earl's
"study." He was a little, dried-up man, about fifty years old, of sharp
but not unkindly aspect. When the minister entered, he looked up from
the mass of papers which he seemed to have been trying to reduce into
some kind of order--apparently the late earl's private papers, which had
been untouched since his death, for there was a sad and serious shadow
over what otherwise have been rather a humorous face.
"Welcome,