Spring in a Shropshire Abbey. Gaskell Catherine Henrietta Milnes

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ terrible thing it would be if anything dreadful happened to Fräulein, and if you thought your wicked words had brought it about.”

      Bess’s composure by this time had quite broken down, she broke out into a passionate fit of tears.

      “Why don’t you beat me, why don’t you shake me, or do something?” she cried.

      “My poor little girl,” I answered, and I took her in my arms and prayed God that He would purify my little girl’s heart, and give her a pure white soul.

      At last Bess’s sobs grew less violent, and she lay quiet.

      “Do you feel better now?” I asked.

      “Yes,” came back from Bess; “for the curses, Mum Mum, seem to have gone out of the room and to be dying away. Before you came, the whole place seemed full of them, and eyes, great horrid eyes, seemed to be looking at me everywhere, and I couldn’t rest, do what I would.”

      “Now you can sleep,” I said with a smile, “and I will sit by you till all the evil spirits are gone, and guard you.”

      So I sat on without speaking, and held Bess’s hands till the dustman of children’s fancy came with his sandbags and threw the sand of kindly oblivion into my little maiden’s eyes, and she fell asleep. Then softly and as delicately as I could, I untwined the little network of fingers that had twined themselves so cunningly around mine, and gave little Bess a parting kiss as I glided out of the room.

      When I returned to the chapel hall I found a letter from Constance. In a postscript she told me that the idea of the quilt was taking form.

      “From ‘Gerard’s Herbal’ I have chosen,” she wrote, “the King’s Chalice, or Serins’ Cade; the Dalmatian Cap; the Guinny Hen; the Broad-leaved Saffron; Goat’s Rue, or the Herb of Grace; Ladies’ Smock; Golden Mouse-ear; Solomon’s Seal; Star of Bethlehem; Sops in Wine; Ales-hoof; Wolf’s Bane and Golden Rod. I give you all the old names. On a scroll I propose round the quilt or ‘bed hoddin,’ as Shropshire folks would call it, to work wise and beautiful words about sleep;” and her letter ended with an appeal to me, to help her, by finding some apt saws and quotations for this purpose. Of course I will; what a delightful excuse for looking through the poets, I said to myself.

      I looked at the old Dutch clock. Ten minutes, I said, before going to bed. Ten minutes, ten golden minutes, when it is not a duty to do anything, or a matter of reproach to be idle. The fire was dying softly down. I saw all faintly by the dim light of the lamp – the dark panelling, the two Turners, the old Bohemian bench, the stern outline of the altar, and outside the still night.

THE COMPANY OF SAINTS

      “Are you not afraid to sit by yourself?” a somewhat foolish friend once asked me. “I should be terribly alarmed of ghosts.”

      “Afraid of holy spirits?” I remember answering. “No crime is associated with Wenlock. There is only an atmosphere of prayer and saintliness there, a fragrance from holy lives rising up to God in perpetual intercession; surely such thoughts should make nobody uneasy or unhappy.”

      “I don’t know,” my friend had replied. “But lancet windows, I know, always make me creepy – and living in a church,” she added inconsequently, “would be almost as bad as having a house with a curse. I am sure I should always be dreaming of finding a walled-up skeleton, or something mediæval and uncomfortable.”

      At which we had both laughed, and I confessed that I liked being left to my angels and my prayers, and that it was good to believe that one had a soul, and that all the forces of God’s world were not comprised in steam, the Press, and electricity.

      Then, as I sat on, my mind reverted to the little child, sleeping, I hoped, peacefully upstairs. “Poor little impetuous Bess,” I said to myself, “I trust some day she will not break her heart against the bars of earth. She wills, and wants, so strongly when the fit is on her, and then afterwards, remorse, sorrow, and despair.”

      The child is the father of the man, and in my mind’s eye I saw my little maiden as she would be in womanhood – dark, passionate, devoted, generous, impulsive, with a golden heart, but self-willed and not easy to guide. Heaven grant her pathway may not lie across many briars, and that I may be able to protect, and water the flowers, in the garden of her soul.

      All education is a hard matter, and we parents are often like children groping in the dark. It takes all that mother and father can do, friends and contemporaries, and, after all, in Burbidge’s homely language, is often “a parlous and weedy job.” We so often give the wrong thing to our children, and, what is worse, the wrong thing out of love and affection. We so often, as Montaigne wrote, “stuff the memory and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.” We are too often knowing only in what makes present knowledge, “and not at all in what is past, no more than which is to come.” We do not think sufficiently of the development and growth of character. Above all, few fathers and mothers try simply to make their children good men and women, without which all is lost; for, as the great essayist said, “all other knowledge is hurtful to him or her who has not the science of goodness.”

      We must not be afraid of emotion, at least, not of right emotion; nor must we be shy of offering our highest tributes of admiration to honour, virtue, and real greatness. We must not be ashamed to mention honourable deeds, and we must teach our children that honourable failure is better than dishonourable success.

      Life is not all an armchair for youth to rest in, or a country of roast larks even for the youngest, and there are higher and better things even than having “a good time.” Such were the thoughts that flashed through my brain as I lighted my yellow Broseley-ware candlestick and went up the oak stairs to bed.

      The next day, as soon as I had finished breakfast, I got a message from our old gardener, Burbidge, to the effect that he wished to speak to me, and that at once.

BROTHER BEN IS “OVERLOOKED”

      I found the old man in the long lower passage of the monks.

      “What is it?” I asked. “Nothing wrong in the garden?”

      “Not so bad as that; but ’tis about my brother as I’ve come.”

      “Your brother, Burbidge?” I repeated. “I did not even know that you had one.”

      “Well,” replied Burbidge, “’tisn’t often as I speak of him, and ’tis twenty year agone since I’ve seen ’im, for when folks be hearty yer needn’t trot round the country like a setter to see ’em; but now as Benjamin is old and in danger, I think as I’d better have a day off, and go and see him.”

      “Where does he live?” I asked.

      “At Clun, just outside the town,” was Burbidge’s reply. “He’s been there these seventy year, and more. When he were quite a lad he lived at Bridgnorth, but over seventy year he have a-lived with Farmers Benson – first with Farmer James, then with his son Joshua, and lastly with his grandson, Farmer Caleb. Benjamin he have a-buried two wives and thirteen childer, and the berrial of the lot have a-come upon him like tempest in summer. But he have allus kept hale and hearty – till this year.”

      “Has Benjamin been able to work all these years?” I inquired.

      “Of course he ’ave,” replied Burbidge, scornfully. “Of course he did, till he war overlooked.”

      “Overlooked?” I said, and turned to Burbidge puzzled.

      After a pause, Burbidge, seeing that I did not realize the full importance of his СКАЧАТЬ