"To be frank with you, Pitcairn," I answered, "I don"t; and it"s not for your lost case I groan, but for what is likely to come to me because of it."
Nor was I mistaken. Just at the gloaming time, while there was still a little of the yellow hanging in the west, I saw the figure of a woman with a baby in her arms outlined clear against the sky on the top of the hill, and by her side trotted the little creature who had all my heart, leading her home.
"There," said I to Pitcairn, pointing to them, "that"s what your inadequacy at the law has cost me. There are three more people whom Nancy has fetched home for me to support."
"I wonder at ye sometimes, Jock Stair," he cried at this, "I wonder at ye!--for in many ways ye seem an intelligent man--that ye can let a small girl-child have her way with you as ye do."
The outer door closed as he spoke, and I heard the patter of little feet.
"She"s not being raised right. She"ll be a creature of no breeding. Ye should take her----"
At this the door opened and Nancy came in. At the sight of Pitcairn she stopped on her way toward me, and her black brows came together in an ecstasy of rage. Putting her little body directly in front of him she looked him full in the eye.
"Devil!" she said, and walked out of the room, leaving us standing staring at each other, speechless, and I noted with glee that, on one occasion at least, I saw Hugh Pitcairn abashed.
This occurrence in the court did not pa.s.s in the town unnoticed, for Bishop Ames, of St. Margaret"s, on the following Sunday preached from the text: "And a little child shall lead them," telling the story from the pulpit; while the Sentinel of the next week spoke of Nancy with flattery and tenderness. The publicity given to the affair alarmed me in no small degree, and I reasoned with myself that a child who had such fearlessness and such disrespect for established ways was a problem which somebody wiser than myself should have the handling of.
There were three other occurrences which fell about this time which brought this thought still more vividly to my mind, the first of these bringing the knowledge that she had no religion. Entering the hall one morning I met the little creature coming from the stairway, dragging an enormous book behind her as though it were a go-cart. She had put a stout string through the middle of the volume, and with this pa.s.sed round her waist was making her way with it toward the library.
"Jock," she said, backing at sight of me and sitting down upon the great volume as though it were a footstool, "did you ever read a book called Old Testament?"
"Not so much as I should," I answered, realizing with a strange jolt of mind that it was the Bible she was dragging after her.
"I got it in the attic," she said, as she climbed upon my knee, "and I thought at first it was a joke-book. And after I thought it was a fairy-book; but as I go on, _there seems more to it_."
And the second of these episodes was as disconcerting:
The dwarfed boy was Nancy"s peculiar care among the Burnside people, and the question as to why he was made "crookit," as she called it, was one which I had never been able to answer to her satisfaction.
Coming in one day with a little bunch of violets for me, she stopped before leaving the room, and said, as though telling me a funny secret:
"Jamie Henderlin took Nancy"s money."
"What?" I cried.
"Yes," she said, "took it out of the little bag when he thought I was not looking."
"What did you do?" I inquired.
"I?" she turned away shyly, "I made out that I didn"t see him."
"But, Nancy," I said, "that was not really kind. As he grows older he will steal."
"Take," she interrupted firmly.
"He will take from other people."
"He is a dwarf, Jock," she said, with a sweet irrelevance, which had its logic, however, in her kind heart.
"That doesn"t make it right."
"He wanted it more than I did," she went on; "I don"t need it----"
"That doesn"t excuse him, either."
"Perhaps," she said, "if you and I, mine Jock, were made as he is we might do something worse than he has done. _People laugh at him!_ He mayn"t be right. I"m not saying that he is right; but I _am_ saying that _I_ am not going to hurt his feelings. The Lord has done that enough already."
And the third one, never told by Mrs. Opie, and a fortunate thing it was for us, had to do with her skill in the use of a pen. She was still a very little child, lying on a rug by the fire, reading out of the Bible, as I sat at the desk looking over some accounts which would not come right. There was the matter of a draft for five pounds, with my own name to it, which I had certainly no remembrance of ever having signed.
"What"s the matter, Jock?" said Nancy, seeing my knit brow.
"They won"t come right, Little Flower," I answered.
She came over to me and looked at the accounts.
"Nancy made one just like Jock"s," she said.
"What?" I cried, with consternation.
"Nancy--made--one--just--like--Jock"s," she repeated. "A poor lady who was very sick," she explained, "was by here one day you had gone. I made one for her."
"Nancy," I said, taking her on my knee, "do you know that it is a crime to sign another person"s name without his leave?"
"How crime?"
"Well, it"s the thing people get locked in jails for----"
She laughed out loud and lay back on my arm at this.
"It"s all mine, isn"t it?" she asked.
I had told this so often that I couldn"t gainsay it.
"_Wrong to write Sandy"s name, not wrong to write Jock"s_," she crooned in a sort of song; and this was as far as I got with her concerning it.
I told Sandy these three tales, and he roared with glee.
"Her morals are all tail first," he said, "though very sound! But she"ll have us in the poor farm and herself in jail if she keeps this up."
CHAPTER VII
I TAKE NANCY"S EDUCATION IN HAND
Father Michel, Sandy, and Hugh Pitcairn were the only ones who knew enough of the child to make their advices on the subject of an education for her of any value, and it was the priest whom I consulted first.