Olive | Page 5

pleasure, she bent over the infant; then took it up, awkwardly and comically enough, as though it were a toy she was afraid of breaking, and rocked it to and fro on her breast.
Elspie started up. "Tak' tent, tak' tent! ye'll hurt it, maybe, the puir wee----Oh, what was I gaun to say!"
"Don't trouble yourself," said the young mother, with a charming assumption of matronly dignity; "I shall hold the baby safe. I know all about it."
And she really did succeed in lulling the child to sleep; which was no sooner accomplished than she recommenced her pleasant musical chatter, partly addressed to her nurse, but chiefly the unconscious overflow of a simple nature, which could not conceal a single thought.
"I wonder what I shall call her--the darling! We must not wait until her papa comes home. She can't be 'baby' for three years. I shall have to decide on her name myself. Oh, what a pity! I, who never could decide anything. Poor dear Angus! he does all--he had even to fix the wedding-day!" And her musical laugh--another rare charm that she possessed--caused Elspie to look round with mingled pity and affection.
"Come, nurse, you can help me, I know. I am puzzling my poor head for a name to give this young lady here. It must be a very pretty one. I wonder what Angus would like? A family name, perhaps, after one of those old Rothesays that you and he make so much of."
"Oh, Mrs. Rothesay! And are ye no proud o' your husband's family?"
"Yes, very proud; especially as I have none of my own. He took me--an orphan, without a single tie in the wide world--he took me into his warm loving arms"--here herm voice faltered, and a sweet womanly tenderness softened her eyes. "God bless my noble husband! I am proud of him, and of his people, and of all his race. So come," she added, her childish manner reviving, "tell me of the remarkable women in the Rothesay family for the last five hundred years--you know all about them, Elspie. Surely we'll find one to be a namesake for my baby."
Elspie--pleased and important--began eagerly to relate long traditions about the Lady Christina Rothesay, who was a witch, and a great friend of "Maister Michael Scott," and how, with spells, she caused her seven step-sons to pine away and die; also the lady Isobel, who let her lover down from her bower-window with the long strings of her golden hair, and how her brother found and slew him;--whence she laid a curse on all the line who had golden hair, and such never prospered, but died unmarried and young.
"I hope the curse has passed away now," gaily said the young mother, "and that the latest scion will not be a golden-tressed damsel. Yet look here"--and she touched the soft down beneath her infant's cap, which might, by a considerable exercise of imagination, be called hair--"it is yellow, you see, Elspie! But I'll not believe your tradition. My child shall be both beautiful and beloved."
Smitten with a sudden pang, poor Elspie cried, "Oh, my leddy, dinna think o' the future. Dinna!"---- and she stopped, confused.
"Really, how strange you are. But go on. We'll have no more Christinas nor Isobels."
Hurriedly, Elspie continued to relate the histories: of noble Jean Rothesay, who died by an arrow aimed at her husband's heart; and Alison, her sister, the beauty of James the Fifth's reckless court, who was "no gude;" and Mistress Katharine Rothesay, who hid two of the "Prince's" soldiers after Culloden, and stood with a pair of pistols before their bolted door.
"Nay, I'll have none of these--they frighten me," said Sybilla, "I wonder I ever had courage to marry the descendant of such awful women. No! my sweet innocent! you shall not be christened after them," she continued, stroking the baby cheek with her soft finger. "You shall not be like them at all, except in their beauty. And they were all handsome--were they, Elspie?"
"Ne'er a ane o' the Rothesay line, man or woman, that wasna fair to see."
"Then so will my baby be!--like her father, I hope--or just a little like her mother, who is not so very ugly, either; at least, Angus says not." And Mrs. Rothesay drew up her tiny figure, patted one dainty hand--the wedded one--with its fairy fellow; then--touched perhaps with a passing melancholy that he who most prized her beauty, and for whose sake she most prized it herself, was far away--she leaned back and sighed.
However, in a few minutes, she cried out, her words showing how light and wandering was the reverie, "Elspie, I have a thought! The baby shall be christened Olive!"
"It's a strange, heathen name, Mrs. Rothesay."
"Not at all. Listen how I chanced to think of it. This very morning, just before