CHAPTER XXVIII.PLEASANT DAYS AND PLEASANT TEACHINGS.
The next morning Turner called, and I told him my mournful adventure. He seemed greatly interested, and, after listening very attentively, sunk into a train of thought, still holding me on his knee. At last he addressed Maria,
“This may prove a good thing for the child,” he said. “It is strange we never thought of it before. The curate’s daughter is just the companion for Zana, and as they teach her at home it is possible—but we will think more of it.”
Turner placed me on the floor as he spoke, and, taking Maria on one side, conversed with her for some time. Meanwhile I was eager to reach the parsonage once more—I felt that Cora would be expecting me—that I might even be wanted by the broken-hearted man, whose grief had filled my whole being with sympathy.
I ran up stairs, put on my bonnet and little black silk mantilla with its rich garniture of lace, and pulling Turner by the coat, gave him and Maria a hasty good morning.
“Wait,” said the kind old fellow, seizing my hand—“wait a bit, and I will go with you. All that I dread,” he continued, turning to Maria, “is the questions that he will naturally ask.”
“Oh, but you can evade them,” answered Maria.
“Yes, by telling all that I absolutely know, nothing more nor less, and that every servant at Greenhurst can confirm; I must stick to simple facts, no conjectures nor convictions without proof; no man has a right to ask them.”
I had gathered a basket of fruit that morning before the dew was off, and buried the glowing treasure beneath a quantity of jessamine and daphna blossoms, for some intuition told me that pure white flowers were most fitted for the house of mourning. With this precious little basket on my arm, I waited impatiently for Turner to start, if he was indeed going with me. But there were hesitation and reluctance in his manner, though at last he yielded to my importunity, and we set out.
It was a pleasant walk, and my enjoyment of its beauty was perfect. I had an object, something to fix my heart upon; the dreamy portion of my life was over; I began to know myself as a thinking, acting being.
We entered the parsonage. Mr. Clarke was in the parlor, sitting in the easy-chair exactly as I had left him the day before, with his silk robe on—and his eyes, heavy with grief, were bent upon the floor. Emboldened by the affection which had sprung up in my heart for this lone man, I went up to him as his own child might have done, and kissed the hand which fell languidly by his side.
He did not lift his eyes, but resting his hand on my head, whispered softly,
“Bless thee—bless thee, my poor orphan.”
He evidently mistook me for his own child.
“It is not little Cora, only me,” I said—“me and Mr. Turner.”
He looked up, saw Turner standing near the door, shook his head sadly, and dropped into the old position.
I swept the white blossoms, to one end of my basket and exposed the cherries underneath, red and glowing as if the sunshine that had ripened them were breaking back to the surface again.
“I picked them for you my ownself,” I said, holding up the basket—“for you and Cora.”
Poor man, his lips were white and parched; it is probable he had not tasted food all the previous day! With a patient, thoughtful smile he took a cluster of the cherries, and my heart rose as I saw how much the grateful fruit refreshed him.
“This is a strange little creature,” he said at last, addressing Turner. “She was with us yesterday; it seemed as if God had sent one of his cherubs. Truly of such is the kingdom of heaven!”
Dear old Turner, how his face began to work.
“She is a good girl—a very good girl. We’ve done all we could to spoil her like two old fools, her bonne and I; but somehow she’s too much for us; as for the spoiling, it isn’t to be done.”
I saw Cora through an open door, and laying a double handful of the cherries on her father’s robe, ran toward her. She looked pale, poor thing, and her sweet eyes were dull and heavy. She was in a little room that opened to the parlor, and, still in her long linen night-gown, and with her golden curls breaking from a tiny muslin cap, lay upon the cushions of a chintz sofa; for, it seems, she had refused to be taken entirely from her father, and he had spent his night in the easy-chair.
“Her head was aching terribly,” she said; “she had been awake some time, but papa was so still that it frightened her.She was afraid that he had gone to sleep like her mother, and never would wake up again.”
The quick sympathies of girlhood soon rendered us both more cheerful. She began to smile when her father’s voice reached us, and refreshed her sweet lips with my cherries, in childish forgetfulness of the sorrow that had rendered them so pale.
“I’m so glad you have come,” she said, leaving the sofa; and gathering up her night-gown till both rosy little feet were exposed upon the matting, she ran to a side door and looked out, calling, “Sarah Blake—Sarah Blake!”
A servant girl, plump and hearty, with little grey eyes, and cheeks red as the cherries in my basket, answered the summons. She looked upon me with apparent curiosity and evident kindness, and taking Cora in her arms, said, “so this is the strange little lady.”
“Isn’t she nice?” whispered Cora. “Isn’t she like a star?”
“Yes, she is a nice playmate; I’m glad you’ve found her, Miss Cora, only one would like to know just who she is.”
I sat down on the matting, as the door closed after them, and taking up the white flowers, began to weave them into a crown. It was an irresistible habit, that of sorting and combining any flowers that came within my reach. I often did this unconsciously, and with a sort of affectionate carefulness, for the rude handling of a blossom gave me pain. It seemed to me impossible that they did not suffer as a child might; so, with a light touch, I wove my garland thick and heavy with leaves and blossoms. I never felt lonely when flowers were my companions. They seemed to me like a beautiful alphabet which God had given, that I might fashion out with them the mystic language of my own heart.
The voices of Turner and the curate reached me from the next room. They were conversing in a low tone, but I could hear that the stricken man was shaking off the apathy of his grief. There was interest and depth in his tone. As they talked, the door, which had been but half on the latch, swung open a little, and I heard him say,
“It is a strange and touching history. Have you made any effort to learn how she came in this forlorn condition?”
“Every effort that a human being could make.”
“And you have literally no information beyond the morning when you took her from the door-step?”
“None whatever.”
“Cannot she herself remember enough to give some clue?”
“Illness must have driven everything from her memory. The mere effort to recollect seems to shake her very existence. I will never attempt it again.”
“Shemustbe of good birth,” said the curate, thoughtfully, “never did human face give more beautiful evidence of gentle blood.”
“I never doubted that,” answered Turner, quickly.
“Strange, very strange,” murmured the curate.
“Is there any hope that you will aid us, sir?” said Turner, who used few words at any time, and evidently found the prolonged deliberations of the curate annoying.
“How can you ask?” replied the curate, gently. “I thought that was settled long ago. Were she the poorest vagrant that ever craved alms, I would do my best to aid her. As it is, can I ever forget yesterday? Mr. Turner, we sometimesdofind angels in our path. This one we shall not entertain unawares, I know that she will prove a blessing to this desolated house.”
I dropped the flowers in my lap, and began to listen breathlessly. His beautiful faith in my future—his solemn trust in the good that was in me, fell like an inspiration upon my soul. From that hour my devotion to that good man and his daughter was a religious obligation—yes, a religious obligation before I knew what religion meant.
“Ah! ifshehad only been near to help us,” said the curate, and his eyes filled with those quiet, dewy tears with which God first waters a grief-stricken heart before he lets in the sunshine to which it has become unused—tears and sunshine that sometimes freshen the soul again with more than the brightness of childhood.
A strange thought came over me. I laid down the wreath and glided softly to the curate’s chair.
“They told us yesterday that she had gone to God,” I whispered, looking in his face with a sort of holy courage. “Is God so far off that she cannot help us?”
The curate gazed at me with a strange expression at first, then a beautiful smile parted his lips, and laying both hands on my head, he looked in my face still smiling, while his eyes slowly filled.
That moment little Cora came in. Her father reached forth his hand and drew her arm around my neck.
“Little children, love one another,” he said, and falling back in his chair, with the smile still upon his lips, he closed his eyes, but great tears forced themselves from under the lids and rolled slowly downward.
I drew back with the child, and with our arms interlinked we glided into the next room. I took up my crown of white blossoms, and, as if she read the thought in my bosom, Cora whispered, “Mamma, is it for her?” We stole through the parlor again, and went out. The curate sat with his eyes closed, and Turner had an elbow on each knee, with both hands supporting his forehead.
Without speaking a word, Cora and I turned an angle of the church and entered the grave-yard. It looked more cheerful than it had appeared the day before. Long glances of sunshine shot across it, and some stray birds had lost themselves in the cypress trees, and seemed trying to sing their way out.
We laid our garland down upon the bleak, new grave of Cora’s mother, just over the spot where we knew her cold heart was sleeping. Its faint perfume spread like an angel’s breath all over the grave, and we went softly away, feeling that she knew what we had done.
From that day my life was divided between the parsonage and the only home I had ever known. Turner had proved a more efficient consoler of the curate than a thousand sermons could have been. In the hour of his deepest grief, he hadopened a new channel for his affections as new means of usefulness. The overpowering anguish, that had almost swept him from the earth in twenty-four hours, never returned again. He would often say, looking upon us children with a peaceful smile,
“She is with God, and He is everywhere.”
None but a good man could have been so easily won from such a grief by the simple power to aid others, for his wife had been the most devoted and loving creature that the sun ever shone upon, and her death was sudden as the flash of lightning that darts from a summer cloud. A disease of the heart, insidious and unsuspected till the moment of her death, left her lifeless, in the morning, upon the pillow to which she had retired at night with trusting prayers and innocent smiles.
Thus I became the pupil of Mr. Clarke—the sister, nay, more than the sister of his child; and now, heart and mind, my whole nature began to expand. My profound ignorance of life was slowly enlightened. The history of my native land was no longer a sealed book. I began to comprehend the distinctions that existed in society—the principles of government, the glorious advantages which follow each step that nations take toward freedom. I confess it took me a long time to comprehend why one man should, without effort of his own, possess lands which stretched from horizon to horizon, like Lord Clare, while others, who toiled from sun to sun, could scarce secure the necessaries of existence; nor have I yet solved the question satisfactorily to my sense of right.
No life can be really monotonous in which taste is gratified and knowledge acquired; certainly not where the heart is allowed to put forth its natural affections and weave them around worthy objects.
Cora and I took our lessons together, but she had little of that eager thirst for knowledge which possessed me. Gentle, caressing and indolent, to escape her lessons was a relief, while I devoured mine, and found time for the gratification of a thousand fancies that she was ready to praise, but unwilling to share.
It is said that women of opposite natures are most likely to find sympathy with each other. I do not believe this, either in men or women. In order to perfect companionship, tastes, habits, intellectual aspirations, nay, even physical health must assimilate.
I believe no human being ever loved another more thoroughly than I loved Cora Clarke. To say that I would have given my life to save hers would be little, for life is not always the greatest sacrifice one human soul can make to another. But I would have yielded up any one of the great hopes of my existence, could the sacrifice have secured her happiness. But in less than three years I had outgrown Cora’s companionship. My love, though unbounded, had a sense of protection in it. It was the caressing attachment of a mother for her child, or an elder sister for her orphan charge.
Strange as it may seem, the companionship so essential to my character was found more thoroughly in the father than the child. He never wearied of teaching, and I never remember to have become tired of learning. My appreciation of all his arguments—and they were vast—was perfect. My love for him was more than that of a daughter for her parent.
From the time I first entered his house, I felt a conviction that, in some way, the love that I bore for these two persons would be brought into powerful action—that I should be called upon to support them in great troubles, and that my own destiny was in some mystical way bound up in them. Thus time passed happily enough, till I reached my eleventh year. Lord Clare was still abroad in the far east, it was said, and I had begun to think of him as one dwells upon the characters in a history. The name had become familiar now, and I ceased to feel any extraordinary interest in it such as had first impressed me.
Certainly I knew something of his history. Mr. Clarke had told me of the sudden and singular death which had overtaken Lady Clare on the night of her marriage, and of the great probability that the earl would never marry again, in whichcase his sister, and through her his nephew, the Etonian, would come in possession of the title and several large estates entailed with it.
One thing, I remember, interested me a good deal, for I was at the time informing myself regarding the hereditary privileges of the British nobility, and it was fixed upon my memory that this particular title, and its estates, descended alike to male or female heirs, as they happened to fall in succession, while a large property, acquired by Lord Clare’s marriage, might be disposed of by deed or will.