Misunderstood. Florence Montgomery
remain absorbed in thought, and he was soon skipping along the road in front of his father and uncle, and kicking up clouds of dust with his best Sunday boots.
At the park gates they found Miles and Virginie. The latter joined the other servants in the road, and the two little brothers walked on together.
"Did the clergyman take any of my texts to-day for his sermon?" asked the younger one eagerly, as he took hold of Humphrey's hand. (Miles was learning the beatitudes, and asked the question regularly every Sunday.)
"No, not one of them. He got a text out of the very last bit of the whole Bible—'The Revelation.'"
"That must be the bit Virginie never will read to me. She says I should not understand it. Do you understand the Revelations, Humphie?"
"Yes," returned Humphrey, promptly.
"Virginie doesn't," said Miles rather puzzled, "and she says very few grown-up people do."
"Virginie is French," retorted Humphrey, "and the Revelations are written in English. Of course she can't understand them as well as I do. There goes a rabbit. Let's run after it."
And Miles, perfectly satisfied with the explanation, followed his brother, panting into the fern.
In the afternoon the gentlemen went again to church, and as Virginie was at liberty to do the same, the children were left under the care of the housemaid.
Humphrey was learning a hymn, and, for once in his life, giving his whole attention to his task.
Miles, sitting on the housemaid's lap, was turning over the leaves of the "Peep of Day," and gleaning his ideas of sacred characters from the illustrations of that well-known work. He stopped in great amazement before the representation of Lazarus rising from the tomb, and demanded an explanation.
Jane, who had an idea that everything connected with death should be most carefully concealed from children, answered evasively that it was nothing, and tried to turn over the page, but boys are not so easily baulked.
Had Miles been a girl, he would probably have been satisfied to pass over the picture without further inquiry; girls' minds take a very superficial grasp of a subject; they are content to get at the shell of knowledge, and to leave the kernel untasted. Being a boy, Miles raised his large, grave eyes to Jane's face with an inquiring expression.
"Why don't you tell me?" he asked, laying a detaining hand on the leaf; "I want to know all about it. What is that great hole? and why is the man all sewed up in white?"
Jane, driven into a corner, admitted that the hole was a grave.
"But, lor! master Miles," added she, "you don't know nothing about them things, and if you want to know you must ask your pa!"
"Of course I know people die," said Miles, simply, "because my mamma's dead; so you're quite wrong, Jane, to say I don't understand those sort of things. I know all about it. When people die they are packed up in a box and put into the ground, and then if they've been good, God will come some day and unpack them."
Humphrey had joined the group just in time to hear the end of the explanation, and he met Jane's eye and smile with all the conscious superiority of his three years advance in religious knowledge.
"If mother were here, Miles," he whispered, "she would explain to you much better than that. There was something she used to tell me about our dead body being like a seed, that is, put into the ground, but will turn into a beautiful flower some day. Only I can't remember it quite like she said it," he added, sighing, "I wish I could."
"Oh, Humphie!" said little Miles eagerly, holding up the book, "can you remember what she used to say about this picture?"
But Humphrey taxed his memory in vain. It was all so dim, so confused, he could not remember sufficiently clearly to tell the story, so Jane was called upon to read it.
Now Jane left out her h's, and did not mind her stops, so the beautiful story of the raising of Lazarus must have lost much of its charm; but still the children listened with attention, for those who have nothing better must put up with what they have. Poor little opening minds, depending thus early on the instructions of an ignorant housemaid! forced to forego, in the first budding of youth, those lessons in Divine truth that came so lovingly, and withal so forcibly, from the lips of a tender mother; those lessons which linger on the heart of the full-grown man long after the lips that pronounced them are silenced for ever.
Depend upon it, association has a great power, and those passages in the Bible which bring to children most clearly the image of their mother, are those which, in after life, are loved and valued most.
And surely those childish memories owe something of their charm to the recollection of the quiet, well-modulated reading, the clear, refined enunciation; the repose of the attitude in the sofa or chair, the white hand that held the book, with, it may be, the flashing of the diamond ring in the light, as the fingers turned over the pages!
Even as I write, I see rising from the darkness before me a vision of a mother and a child. I see the soft eyes meeting those of the little listener on the stool, at her knee. I see the earnestness pervading every line of the beautiful face. I almost hear the tones of the gentle voice, which, while reducing the mysteries of Divine truth to the level of the baby comprehension, carry with them the unmistakable impress of her own belief in the things of which she is telling: the certainty that the love and trust she is describing are no mere abstract truths to her, but that they are life of her life, and breath of her breath!
And I see the child's eyes glow and expand under her earnestness, as the little mind catches a refraction of her enthusiasm. Is this a picture or is it a reality? Have I brought up to any one a dimly-remembered vision? Or is it purely idealistic and fanciful?
I do not know; and even as I gaze, the picture has melted into the darkness from which I conjured it, and I see it no more!
"Boys," sounded Sir Everard's voice at the bottom of the nursery stairs, "your uncle and I are going out for a walk. No one need come with us who would rather not."
There could be but one answer to such an appeal, and a rush and scamper ensued.
It was the usual Sunday afternoon routine, the stables and the farm, and then across the meadows to inspect the hayricks, and through the corn-fields to a certain gate that commanded the finest view on the estate.
"If only this weather lasts another fortnight," said Sir Everard, as his eyes wandered over golden fields, "I think we shall have a good harvest, eh, Charlie?"
"I am sure we shall," came from Humphrey, who always had an opinion on every subject, and never lost an opportunity of obtruding it on public attention; "we shall have such a lot of corn we shan't know what to do with it."
"Well, I have never found that to be the case yet," said his father; "but if the first part of your prediction prove true, we will have a Harvest Home and a dance, and you and Miles shall lead off, 'Up the middle and down again,' with the prettiest little girls you can find in the village."
"I know who I shall dance with," said Humphrey, balancing himself on the top of the gate, "but she's not a little girl, she's quite old, nearly twenty I daresay, and she's not pretty either. I don't care to dance with little girls, its babyish."
"Who is the happy lady, Humphrey?" asked Uncle Charlie.
"She is not a lady at all," said Humphrey, indignantly, "she's Dolly, the laundry maid, and wears pattens and turned up sleeves, and her arms are as red as her cheeks. Dolly's not the least like a lady."
"Except on Sundays," put in little Miles, "because then she's got her sleeves down, and is very smart. I saw Dolly going to church this morning, with boots all covered with little white buttons."
"That does not make her a lady," said the elder boy contemptuously. "It is no use trying to explain to you, Miles, what a lady is because you never see any."
"Not Mrs. Jones, the steward's wife?" suggested Miles