Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/39

24 how late we all sat round the fire that night, Aunt Rachel, Cousin Lucy, and I. It was such a cold wild night, and such a tumult was going on out of doors, as made the pleasant cheerful warmth within seem doubly pleasant and cheerful.

My aunt had been left a widow some years since, with two children, a son and a daughter; my cousin Lucy, and Arthur, who was now in a government office in London. I had lived my childish years away, knowing no other home than my aunt’s pretty cottage at Ashwood, no mother’s face but hers. I had been given to her when my parents left England for India, when I was little more than four years old; it was there my mother died soon after their arrival, leaving my poor father desolate in a strange land. And now, after twelve years of Indian service, he had come back to live in the old Hall at Riverbank, a lovely spot, which had belonged to our family for many generations past.

To that sweet home, one golden June day, he had brought my gentle mother, a pretty bride of seventeen; and there, about a year after, I, their only child, was born. Being so young when I left it, I had of course little or no recollection of the place, nor do I remember having any desire to see it again. You call this strange and unnatural; perhaps it was, but then our home at Ashwood was very retired indeed, a sunny nook in a quiet comer of this busy moving world. Beyond the rector and his wife, we had very few neighbours. Lucy and I had only each other to play with while Arthur was away at school; and when he returned for the holidays, we were happy indeed.

So quietly and peacefully the narrow, waveless stream of our life flowed on, and we were happy and content; not knowing any other, we cared not to have it widened. I do not think this circumscribed life of ours did any real harm to Lucy; with me it was otherwise. I suffered, where she escaped untouched; for we were very different, very unlike each other.

Hers was a frank, sympathetic, trusting nature, that easily attached itself. You could not help loving her if you tried. She would creep into your heart like a little bird, and there make a green little nest for herself, even before you were aware. My disposition, on the contrary, was shy, reserved, and cold; or, rather, my affections were not easily stirred into warmth. I was slow to open my heart, and I opened it only to a few; but for them I had a kind of passionate worship, that would have considered no sacrifice too great, no self-renunciation too impossible. But, ah! at Ashwood my love had never been put to a severer test than the little daily efforts to please my gentle aunt and cousins. Beyond them I wanted no one else; I never cared to make friends. Even my father’s name, that name which above all others, should have had a sacred shrine in my heart (I say it now in all the anguish of a sorrowful shame burning at my breast), had little power to kindle any emotion there. And so, when one day the news had come to us that he was going to marry again (a widow lady, with an only daughter a little older than myself) it did not please or trouble me. I received it calmly and quietly, as something I had little concern in. But when, a little later, a letter came telling of their arrival in England, and that now he had returned home he wished to have his child again, I felt as if a heavy blow had fallen upon my heart, and only yielded as to a cruel necessity. Dreadful to me was the thought of leaving my aunt and cousins, of changing my calm, unruffled life at Ashwood for a new existence among strangers, for they were all more or less strangers to me.

And so, as I said before, we three sat round the fire very late that night. We heard the clock in the hall strike the hour of midnight, and still we never moved. I think each of us in her secret heart dreaded to be the first to break up that last home conference. Lucy, with an expression of touching sadness in her sweet face, sat looking into the fire far more gently and submissively than I into my future life; whilst dear, kind, Aunt Rachel would now and then try to cheer us by some pleasant, hope-assuring word, though I could see that her own eyes were growing dim while she spoke. And so at last we said good night, once more and for the last time; and once more Cousin Lucy and I lay down to sleep, side by side, in the two little French beds with rosebud curtains, in that same dear room we had called the nursery long ago. Before the sun went down again we were many long miles apart. The old life was gone; and Aunt Rachel’s fond, earnest blessing, and Lucy’s tearful embrace, were all that remained to me of the happy home days that would never come back.

Well, I arrived at the old house at Riverbank, that house which had been my mother’s home for nearly all her married life; yet my heart refused to recognise it as my own. My father met me in the hall and said, “Heffie, you are quite a woman; I am glad, very glad, to have my child again.” And my stepmother greeted me kindly, affectionately; and Agnes took my hand and said (with her eyes looking kindly into mine), “shall we be sisters?”