Warlock o Glenwarlock | Page 6

the
Warlocks aground, and leave the scrag end of a property and a history
without a man to take them up, and possibly bear them on to

redemption; for who could tell what life might be in the stock yet!
Anyhow, it would be better to leave an heir to take the remnant in
charge, and at least carry the name a generation farther, even should it
be into yet deeper poverty than hitherto. A Warlock could face his fate.
Thereupon, with a sense of the fitness of things not always manifested
on such occasions, he had paid his addresses to a woman of five and
thirty, the daughter of the last clergyman of the parish, and had by her
been accepted with little hesitation. She was a capable and brave
woman, and, fully informed of the state of his affairs, married him in
the hope of doing something to help him out of his difficulties. A few
pounds she had saved up, and a trifle her mother had left her, she
placed unreservedly at his disposal, and he in his abounding honesty
spent it on his creditors, bettering things for a time, and, which was of
much more consequence, greatly relieving his mind, and giving the life
in him a fresh start. His marriage was of infinitely more salvation to the
laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for
it set him growing again--and that is the only final path out of
oppression.
Whatever were the feelings with which he took his wife home, they
were at least those of a gentleman; and it were a good thing indeed, if,
at the end of five years, the love of most pairs who marry for love were
equal to that of Cosmo Warlock to his middle-aged wife; and now that
she was gone, his reverence for her memory was something surpassing.
From the day almost of his marriage the miseries of life lost half their
bitterness, nor had it returned at her death. Instinctively he felt that
outsiders, those even who respected him as an honest man, believed
that, somehow or other, they could only conjecture how, he must be to
blame for the circumstances he was in--either this, or providence did
not take care of the just man. Such was virtually the unuttered
conclusion of many, who nevertheless imagined they understood the
Book of Job, and who would have counted Warlock's rare honesty,
pride or fastidiousness or unjustifiable free-handedness. Hence they
came to think and speak of him as a poor creature, and soon the man,
through the keen sensitiveness of his nature, became aware of the fact.
But to his sense of the misprision of neighbours and friends, came the
faith and indignant confidence of his wife like the closing and binding
up and mollifying of a wound with ointment. The man was of a far

finer nature than any of those who thus judged him, of whom some
would doubtless have got out of their difficulties sooner than he--only
he was more honorable in debt than they were out of it. A woman of
strong sense, with an undeveloped stratum of poetry in the heart of it,
his wife was able to appreciate the finer elements of his nature; and she
let him see very plainly that she did. This was strength and a lifting up
of the head to the husband, who in his youth had been oppressed by the
positiveness, and in his manhood by the opposition, of his mother,
whom the neighbours regarded as a woman of strength and faculty.
And now, although, all his life since, he had had to fight the wolf as
constantly as ever, things, even after his wife's death, continued very
different from what they had been before he married her; his existence
looked a far more acceptable thing seen through the regard of his wife
than through that of his neighbours. They had been five years married
before she brought him an heir to his poverty, and she lived five years
more to train him--then, after a short illness, departed, and left the now
aging man virtually alone with his little child, coruscating spark of
fresh vitality amidst the ancient surroundings. This was the Cosmo who
now, somewhat sore at heart from the result of his cogitations, entered
the kitchen in search of his kind.
Another woman was sitting on a three-legged stool, just inside the door,
paring potatoes--throwing each, as she cut off what the old lady,
watching, judged a paring far too thick, into a bowl of water. She
looked nearly as old as her mistress, though she was really ten years
younger. She had come with the late mistress from her father's house,
and had always taken, and still took her