In the Roar of the Sea. S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
would have taken them in.”
“Perhaps she was diffident of doing that,” said Uncle Zachie. “But really, on my word, it is no inconvenience to me. I have room in this house, and my maid, Jump, has not enough to do to attend on me.”
“When you are tired of them send them to me.”
“I am not likely to be tired of Judith, now that I have heard her play.”
“Judith—is that her name?”
“Yes—Judith.”
“Judith!” he repeated, and thrust his stick along the floor, meditatively. “Judith!” Then, after a pause, with his eyes on the ground, “Why did not your aunt speak to me! Why does she not love you?—she does not, I know. Why did she not go to see you when your father was alive! Why did you not come to the Glaze?”
“My dear papa did not wish me to go to your house,” said Judith, answering one of his many questions, the last, and perhaps the easiest to reply to.
“Why not?” he glanced up at her, then down on the floor again.
“Papa was not very pleased with Aunt Dunes—it was no fault on either side, only a misunderstanding,” said Judith.
“Why did he not let you come to my house to salute your aunt?”
Judith hesitated. He again looked up at her searchingly.
“If you really must know the truth, Captain Coppinger, papa thought your house was hardly one to which to send two children—it was said to harbor such wild folk.”
“And he did not know how fiercely and successfully you could defend yourself against wild folk,” said Coppinger, with a harsh laugh. “It is we wild men that must fear you, for you dash us about and bruise and break us when displeased with our ways. We are not so bad at the Glaze as we are painted, not by a half—here is my hand on it.”
Judith was still seated on the music-stool, her hands resting in her lap. Coppinger came toward her, walking stiffly, and extending his palm.
She looked down in her lap. What did this fierce, strange man, mean?
“Will you give me your hand?” he asked. “Is there peace between us?”
She was doubtful what to say. He remained, awaiting her answer.
“I really do not know what reply to make,” she said, after awhile. “Of course, so far as I’m concerned, it is peace. I have myself no quarrel with you, and you are good enough to say that you forgive me.”
“Then why not peace?”
Again she let him wait before answering. She was uneasy and unhappy. She wanted neither his goodwill nor his hostility.
“In all that affects me, I bear you no ill-will,” she said, in a low, tremulous voice; “but in that you were a grief to my dear, dear father, discouraging his heart, I cannot be forgetful, and so full of charity as to blot it out as though it had not been.”
“Then let it be a patched peace—a peace with evasions and reservations. Better that than none. Give me your hand.”
“On that understanding,” said Judith, and laid her hand in his. His iron fingers closed round it, and he drew her up from the stool on which she sat, drew her forward near the window, and thrust her in front of him. Then he raised her hand, held it by the wrist, and looked at it.
“It is very small, very weak,” he said, musingly.
Then there rushed over her mind the recollection of her last conversation with her father. He, too, had taken and looked at her hand, and had made the same remark.
Coppinger lowered her hand and his, and, looking at her, said:
“You are very wonderful to me.”
“I—why so?”
He did not answer, but let go his hold of her, and turned away to the door.
Judith saw that he was leaving, and she hastened to bring him his stick, and she opened the door for him.
“I thank you,” he said, turned, pointed his stick at her, and added, “It is peace—though a patched one.”
CHAPTER IX.
C. C.
Days ensued, not of rest to body, but of relaxation to mind. Judith’s overstrained nerves had now given them a period of numbness, a sleep of sensibility with occasional turnings and wakenings, in which they recovered their strength. She and Jamie were settled into their rooms at Mr. Menaida’s, and the hours were spent in going to and from the rectory removing their little treasures to the new home—if a temporary place of lodging could be called a home—and in arranging them there.
There were a good many farewells to be taken, and Judith marvelled sometimes at the insensibility with which she said them—farewells to a thousand nooks and corners of the house and garden, the shrubbery, and the glebe farm, all endeared by happy recollections, now having their brightness dashed with rain.
To Judith this was a first revelation of the mutability of things on earth. Hitherto, as a child, with a child’s eyes and a child’s confidence, she had regarded the rectory, the glebe, the contents of the house, the flowers in the garden, as belonging inalienably to her father and brother and herself. They belonged to them together. There was nothing that was her father’s that did not belong to Jamie and to her, nothing of her brother’s or her own that was not likewise the property of papa. There was no mine or thine in that little family of love—save only a few birthday presents given from one to the other, and these only special property by a playful concession. But now the dear father was gone, and every right seemed to dissolve. From the moment that he leaned back against the brick, lichen-stained wall, and sighed—and was dead, house and land had been snatched from them. And though the contents of the rectory, the books, and the furniture, and the china belonged to them, it was but for a little while; these things must be parted with also, turned into silver.
Not because the money was needed, but because Judith had no settled home, and no prospect of one. Therefore she must not encumber herself with many belongings. For a little while she would lodge with Mr. Menaida, but she could not live there forever; she must remove elsewhere, and she must consider, in the first place, that there was not room in Uncle Zachie’s cottage for accumulations of furniture, and that, in the next place, she would probably have to part with them on her next remove, even if she did retain them for a while.
If these things were to be parted with, it would be advisable to part with them at once. But to this determination Judith could not bring herself at first. Though she had put aside, to be kept, things too sacred to her, too much part of her past life, to be allowed to go into the sale, after a few days she relinquished even these. Those six delightful old colored prints, in frames, of a fox-hunt—how Jamie had laughed at them, and followed the incidents in them, and never wearied of them—must they go—perhaps for a song? It must be so. That work-table of her mother’s, of dark rosewood, with a crimson bag beneath it to contain wools and silks, one of the few remembrances she had of that mother whom she but dimly recalled—must that go?—what, and all those skeins in it of colored floss silk, and the piece of embroidery half finished? the work of her mother, broken off by death—that also? It must be so. And that rusty leather chair in which papa had sat, with one golden-headed child on each knee cuddled into his breast, with the flaps of his coat drawn over their heads, which listened to the tick-tick of his great watch, and to the tale of Little Snowflake, or Gracieuse and Percinet?—must that go also? It must be so.
Every day showed to Judith some fresh link that had to be broken. She could not bear to think that the mother’s work-table should be contended for at a vulgar auction, and struck down to a blousy farmer’s