The Beth Book. Grand Sarah

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СКАЧАТЬ mother coloured painfully.

      Her father muttered something about a noble nature.

      "And that was the child you never wanted at all!" slipped, with a ring of triumph, from Mrs. Caldwell unawares – an interesting example of the complexity of human feelings.

      Captain Caldwell soon went back to his duty – all too soon for his strength. The dreadful weather continued. Day after day he returned soaking from some distant station to the damp and discomfort of the house, and the ill-cooked, unappetising food, which he could hardly swallow. And to all this was added great anxiety about the future of his family. His boys were doing well at school by this time; but he was not satisfied with the way in which the little girls were being brought up. There was no order in their lives, no special time for anything; and he knew the importance of early discipline. He tried to discuss the subject with his wife, but she met his suggestions irritably.

      "There's time enough for that," she said. "I had no regular lessons till I was in my teens."

      "But what answered with you may be disastrous to these children," he ventured. "They are all unlike you in disposition, more especially Beth."

      "You spoil that child," Mrs. Caldwell protested. "And at any rate I can do no more. I am run off my feet."

      This was true, and Captain Caldwell let the subject drop. His patience was exemplary in those days. He suffered severely both mentally and physically, but never complained. The shadow was upon him, and he knew it, but he met his fate with fortitude. Whatever his faults, they were expiated in the estimation of all who saw him suffer now.

      Mrs. Caldwell never realised how ill he was, but still she was uneasy, and it was with intense relief that she welcomed a case of soups and other nourishing delicacies calculated to tempt the appetite, which arrived for him one day from one of his sisters in England.

      "This is just what you want, Henry," she said, with a brighter look in her face than he had seen there for months. "I shall soon have you yourself again now."

      Captain Caldwell's spirits also went up.

      In the evening they were all together in the sitting-room. Mrs. Caldwell was playing little songs for Mildred to sing, Baby Bernadine was playing with her bricks upon the floor, and Beth as usual was hanging about her father. He had shaken off his despondency, and was quite lively for the moment, walking up and down the room, and making merry remarks to his wife in Italian, at which she laughed a good deal.

      "Come, Beth, fetch 'Ingoldsby.' We shall just come to my favourite, and finish the book before you go to bed," he said.

      Beth brought the book, and then climbed up on his knee, and settled there happily, with her head on his shoulder.

      "As I laye a-thynkynge, the golden sun was sinking,

        O merrie sang that Bird as it glitter'd on her breast,

      With a thousand gorgeous dyes,

      While soaring to the skies,

      'Mid the stars she seem'd to rise,

      As to her nest;

      As I laye a-thynkynge, her meaning was exprest: —

      'Follow, follow me away,

      It boots not to delay,' —

      'Twas so she seemed to saye,

      'HERE IS REST!'"

      After he had read those last lines, there was a moment's silence, and then Beth burst into a tempest of tears. "O papa – papa! No, no, no!" she sobbed. "I couldn't bear it."

      "What is the matter with the child?" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, starting up.

      "'The vision and the faculty divine,' I think," her father answered. "Leave her to me."

      Beth was awake when Anne entered the nursery next morning to call the children.

      "Get up, and be good," Anne said. "Your pa's ill."

      Mrs. Caldwell came into the nursery immediately afterwards, very much agitated. She kissed Beth, and from that moment the child was calm; but there settled upon her pathetic little face a terrible look of age and anxiety.

      When she was dressed, she ran right into her father's room before any one could stop her. He was moaning – "O my head, my head! O my head, my head!" over and over again.

      "You mustn't stay here, little woman – not to-day," the doctor said. "It will make your father worse if you do."

      Beth stole from the room, and returned to the nursery. There, however, she could still hear her father moaning, and she could not bear it, so she took her prayer-book, by way of life-saving apparatus, and went down to the kitchen to "see" what the servants were thinking – her own significant expression. They were all strangely subdued. "Sit down, Miss Beth," Biddy said kindly. "Sit down in the window there wid your book if you want company. It's a sore heart you'll be having, or I'm much mistaken."

      Beth sat in the window the whole morning, reading prayers to herself, while she watched and waited. The doctor sent Riley down from the sick-room several times to fetch things, and each time Beth consulted his countenance anxiously for news, but asked no questions. Biddy tried to persuade her to eat, but the child could not touch anything.

      Late in the afternoon Riley came down in a hurry.

      "Is the master better, Pat?" Biddy demanded.

      "'Deed, thin, he isn't," Riley replied; "and the doctor's sending me off on the horse as hard as I can go for Dr. Jamieson."

      "Och, thin, if the doctor's sending you for Dr. Jamieson it's all up. He's niver sent for till the last. The Lord himself won't save him now."

      Beth shuffled over the leaves of her prayer-book hurriedly. She had been crying piteously to God in her heart for hours to save her father, and He had not heard; now she remembered that the servants said if you read the Lord's Prayer backwards it would raise the devil. Beth tried; but the invocation was unavailing. Before Riley could saddle the horse, a message was sent down to stop him; and then Anne came for Beth, and took her up to her father's room. The dreadful sounds had ceased at last, and there was a strange silence in the house. Mrs. Caldwell was sitting beside her husband's bed, rocking herself a little as if in pain, but shedding no tears. Mildred was standing with her arm round her mother's neck crying bitterly, while Baby Bernadine gazed at her father wonderingly.

      He was lying on his side with his arms folded. His eyes were shut, and there was a lovely look of relief upon his face.

      "I sent for you children," their mother said, "to see your father just as he died. You must never forget him."

      Ellis and Rickards, two of papa's men, were in the room, and Mrs. Ellis too, and the doctor, and Riley, and Biddy, and Anne; and there was a foot-bath, with steaming hot water in it, on the floor; some mustard on the table; and the fire burnt brightly. These details impressed themselves on Beth's mind involuntarily, as indeed did everything else connected with that time. It seemed to her afterwards as if she had seen everything and felt nothing for the moment – nothing but breathless excitement and interest. Her grief was entirely suspended.

      Mrs. Ellis and the doctor led mamma down to the sitting-room; they didn't seem to think that she could walk. And then Mrs. Ellis made her some tea, and stood there, and coaxed her to drink it, just as if mamma had been a child. Mrs. Caldwell sat on the big couch with her back to the window, and Mildred sat beside her, with her arm round her, crying all the time. Bernadine cried too, but it was because she was СКАЧАТЬ