CHAPTER XIII.
‘O, coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’
‘O, coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’
‘O, coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’
‘For you, miss,’ says she, handing the basket to Susan.
Susan turns crimson. That basket! She knows it well.
‘For me?’ stammers she.
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Who’—nervously—‘who brought it?’
‘A boy, miss.’ For an instant Susan’s heart feels relief, but for an instant only.
‘Whose boy?’ falters she.
‘I don’t know, miss. He came an’ wint in a flash like. I hope, miss, as there isn’t anythin’ desthructive in it,’ says Jane, whose misfortunes of the morning have raised inher a pessimistic spirit. ‘They do say thim moonlighters are goin’ about agin.’
‘Do you mean to say the—the messenger said nothing?’
‘No, miss, except that it was for you. That was all, miss; and I’m not deaf, though I wish I was before I heard all that was said to me this mornin’ about an ould cup that——’ Here she lifts her apron and sniffs vigorously behind it.
‘Oh, it can’t be for me,’ says Susan, with decision; ‘take it away, Jane. There has been some mistake, of course. Take it away at once. Do you hear? The—the boy will probably call for it again in a little time.’
‘I don’t think he will, miss; he looked like a runaway,’ says Jane.
‘Good heavens! how interesting,’ says Mr. Fitzgerald, breaking at last into the charmed silence that has held them all since the advent of Jane and the mysterious basket. ‘Who can this unknown admirer be? No doubt it contains roses’—staring at the basket—‘or heliotropes—heliotrope in the language offlowers means devotion! Susan, are you above a peep?’
‘Yes, I am,’ says Susan hastily.
‘I am not,’ says Betty, springing forward and pulling open the cover. ‘Oh, I say, cherries! and such beauties, too! Susan, you are in luck!’
‘And so are we,’ says Fitzgerald, putting a hand lightly over her shoulder and drawing up a bunch of the pretty fruit between his fingers.
‘Oh, I think we ought not to eat them—I do indeed,’ says Susan, in a small agony. There can be no doubt now about the fact that the thief, repentant and struck to the very soul by her eloquent pleadings, had sought to redeem himself in her eyes by sending the stolen cherries to her. Whether with a view of giving her the pleasure of eating them, or with the higher desire of proving to her that he hadn’t devoured them, must, she feels and hopes (because to meet him again would be very unpleasant to her), for ever remain unknown.
‘Poor fellow!’ thinks she, regarding the cherries with mixed emotions that are not altogether devoid of admiration for her own hitherto unimagined powers of persuasion; ‘he was certainly and sincerely penitent. One could see that.’ She feels quite an uplifting of her soul. Perhaps, who knows? she has been born as a worthy successor to Mrs. Fry, or some of those good people! But then, after all, it is, undoubtedly, to Mr. Crosby he should have made restitution, not to her. It is, however, difficult to restore Irish cherries—a rather perishable commodity—to an owner who happens to be at the moment in the middle of Africa, or America, or China, for all she knows.
‘Not eat them!’ says Betty indignantly. ‘Why, what else are you going to do with them—make them into jam?’
‘They are not mine—I’m sure they are not mine,’ says Susan. ‘Who, for instance, could have sent them?’
Here Jacky makes a movement.
‘Jacky, you know nothing!’ cries Susan,turning indignant, warning eyes upon him; whereupon Jacky, remembering his promise, subsides once again into dismal silence.
‘Jacky, I smell a conspiracy,’ says Dominick, who has caught the look between them; ‘and you are the head-centre. Speak, boy, whilst yet there is time!’
‘I’ve nothing to say,’ says Jacky sulkily; he is naturally of a somewhat morose disposition, and now feels positively ill at not being able to divulge the delightful story of which these glowing cherries are the result.
‘Susan, I do believe you have at last got an admirer,’ says Carew, in the complimentary tone of the orthodox brother, who never can understand why on earth any fellow can admire his sister. ‘Come! out with it; he seems a sensible fellow, any way. Flowers are awful rot, but there’s something in cherries.’
‘Betty, when I fall in love with you I’ll present you with a course of goodies,’ says Dominick, regarding that damsel with an encouraging eye.
‘I have no admirers, as you all know,’ says Susan, her pale and lovely face a little heightened in colour. She is thinking with horror of what would have happened if that poor awful thief had brought them in person. But, of course, he was afraid.
‘Perhaps Lady Millbank sent them,’ suggests Betty, after a violent discussion with Fitzgerald on the head of his last remark. ‘I saw her in town yesterday.’
‘So did I,’ says Carew. ‘Like a sack—not tied in the middle.’
Susan feels almost inclined in the emergencies of the moment to say ‘Perhaps so,’ and let it stand at that, but conscience forbids her.
‘She would have sent a footman and her card,’ says she dejectedly. ‘No’—decidedly, and preparing to close up the basket—‘they are not meant for me, and even if they were, I could not accept them, unless I knew where they came from.’
‘Do you mean that you are not going to give us some?’ says Betty, rising, not onlyfiguratively, but actually, to the occasion, and standing over Susan. ‘I never heard anything so mean in all my life.’
‘Susan,’ says Fitzgerald mildly but firmly, ‘if you think to escape alive from this spot with these cherries, let me at once warn you of a sense of impending danger.’
‘Oh, I say, Susan, don’t be a fool!’ says Carew, turning his lazy length upon the grass, a manœuvre that brings him much closer to Susan and the cherries.
‘It’s a beastly shame!’ says Jacky, in a growl. And at this little Tom, as if moved to the very soul, or stomach, sets up a piteous howl.
Susan, with all the ‘young martyr’ air about her, looks sternly round. No; she will not give in, and it’s perfectly disgusting of them to think so much of eating things. Her glance finishes at Jacky, who is scowling and threatening her with the fellest of all fell eyes, and then descends at last on Bonnie—Bonnie, who is lying in her arms, his pretty, thin, patient little face against hershoulder. Poor little Bonnie! darling little Bonnie! who has said nothing—not a word—but whose gentle eyes are now resting on the fruit; Bonnie, whose appetite is always miserable—so difficult to please. Susan, seeing that silent, wistful glance, feels her heart sink within her.
Must she—must she deny him, her poor little delicate boy, her best beloved of all the many that she loves? Oh, she must! she will be firm. These cherries really are not hers. Even for Bonnie she——
The child stirs in her arms and sighs, the faintest, gentlest little sigh—only one who loved him could have heard it; but with that little sigh went out all Susan’s stern resolutions. Almost unconsciously her hand goes towards the basket that holds the cherries. Slowly, slowly at first, as if held back; but as it nears the glowing fruit it makes a rush, as it were, dives into it, and in a second more Bonnie’s thin little paws are filled with a huge and crimson bunch of the sweet cherries.
Alas for Susan’s principles! They haveall vanished away like snow in the sun, beneath two little pain-filled eyes.
Alas for Susan’s principles again! As Bonnie’s white little face lights up as he catches the pretty fruit, and bites one of them in two with his sharp childish teeth, and as after that he lifts the other half of it to Susan’s mouth, and presses it against her closed but smiling lips, she does not refuse him. She opens her lips, and, against all her beliefs, lets the stolen thing glide between them. The happy laughter of the child as she takes the fruit is nectar to her, and in a little joyous way she hugs him to her, catching him against her breast; and though she does not know it, her one thought is this: ‘Let all things go so long as this one is happy.’
And certainly Bonnie for the moment is happy with his cherries. But the cherry he gave her is the first and only one out of her basket that passes between her lips. And that is self-denial, I can tell you from experience, for a girl of eighteen.
After this there is a general raid upon thebasket, Betty and Fitzgerald being quite conspicuous in their efforts to secure the largest cherries, whilst Jacky runs them very hard. And Susan, afraid lest the supply should fail before Bonnie gets a handsome share, pulls him to her and fills his little hands. But her own hands? Never! Stern is her youthful virtue. Those stolen cherries! No, no, she could not touch them, and, besides, to watch Bonnie’s delight in them is enough for her.
Bonnie! It seems such a sad critique upon the little fragile child racked with rheumatism and so sadly disabled by it.
In happier days, when he was, in truth, the bonniest little being of them all, his poor mother—now mercifully in heaven—had given him the dear pet name. And of course it had clung to him through all the ills that followed.
The beginning was so simple, so easy to be described. A wet day when the child had escaped from home and had been forgotten until the early dinner reminded them of him. There were so many to remember, and theyall ran so loosely here and there, that up to that hour no one had missed him. His mother was dead. The keynote of course lay there. She was dead and lying in her grave for a year or more, and the young things who tried to take her place, when they had asked a question or two, never thought of Bonnie again. Carew, the eldest boy, then only twelve, did not appear at dinner either, and it was naturally and carelessly supposed that Bonnie was with him.
Alas for little Bonnie! Late that night he was discovered and brought home, saturated to the skin, and almost lifeless. Asleep he had been found beneath the shade of a big beech-tree; and sleep eternal he would have known indeed had he not been discovered before morning by the frightened people from the Vicarage, who, when night set in, had gone hunting for him far and near. The Rector himself, roused from his notes and papers by Susan’s terrors, had joined in the search; but it was Susan who found him, tired, exhausted (after a ramblein which he had lost himself, poor little soul!), and wet through from the rain that had fallen incessantly since three o’clock in the afternoon.
It was Susan who carried him home, staggering sometimes beneath the weight, but strong in the very misery of her fear. When at last home was reached, it was Susan who undressed him, and lay awake the long night through with him, holding him in her warm arms to heat his shivering little body. And, indeed, when the morning came he seemed nothing the worse for his exposure.
But towards the evening he began to shiver again, and next day he was lying prone, racked with all the pangs of rheumatic fever. They twisted and tore his little frame, and though at the last the doctor pulled him through, and he rose again from his bed, it was but as a shadow of his former merry self—a stricken child, a cripple for life.
Poor Susan—then thirteen—took it sorely to heart. Her mother in heaven—had she looked down that night when Bonnie layunder the dripping tree, and seen her pretty lamb alone, deserted?—the mother who had left him to Susan to look after and care for. She had seemed to think more of Bonnie in her dying moments than of the baby who had brought death to her with his own life. Susan had been left in charge, as it were—sweet Susan, who was barely twelve, and who, with her soft, shy ways and lovely face, should have been left in charge herself to someone capable of guiding her tender footsteps across earth’s thorny paths.
Her remorse dwelt with her always, and became a burden to her, and made havoc of her colour for many a day. Of course she grew out of all that—youth, thank God, is always growing—and at last, after many days, joy came to her again, and all the glorious colour of life, and all the sweetness of it. But she never lost a little pulsing grief that came to her every now and then, telling her how she ought to have seen that Bonnie had not wandered so far afield.
Oh, if only he could be made strong andwell again. This was the heart of the sad song that she often sang for herself alone, when time was given her in her busy life.
She had dreamed dreams of how it would be with the little lad if he could have been sent abroad. She had heard of certain baths, and of wonderful cures worked by them. If he could go abroad to one of them he might recover. But such baths were as far out of her reach as heaven itself. It seemed hard to Susan, to whom life was still a riddle. And she reproached herself always, and always mourned that there would never come a time when Bonnie would be strong again, as he was when his mother left him, and when she might meet that dear mother in heaven without fear of reproaches.
All this lay in the background of Susan’s life, and now, as years grew, seldom came to the front. But the child was ever her first thought and her dearest delight, and the fact that he was not as his brothers were was the one little blot on the happiness of her young life.