Wee Wifie. Rosa Nouchette Carey
by this time; have you ever remembered that either frost, or rain, or fog have kept me in-doors a single day when duty called me out;” and here she folded her cloak round her, and prepared to leave the shop.
“It’s ill tempting Providence, neighbor,” remarked the other woman, who had been standing silently by and now put in her word, for she was an innocent country body with a garrulous tongue; “it’s ill tempting Providence, for ‘the wind and the sea obey Him.’ I had a son myself some fourteen years next Michaelmas,” continued the simple creature, “as brave and bonny a lad as ever blessed a mother’s eyes, and that feared naught; but the snow-drift that swept over the Cumberland Fells found him stumbling and wandering, poor Willie, from the right way, and froze his dear heart dead.”
The lady advanced a few steps, and then stopped as though seized by a sudden impulse, and looked wistfully in the other woman’s face.
“God help you,” she said, very softly; “and was this boy of yours a good son?”
Perhaps in the whole of her simple, sorrowful life Elsie Deans had never seen anything more pathetic than that white face from which the gray hair was so tightly strained, and those anxious questionings. “And was this boy of yours,” she said, “a good son?”
“A better never breathed,” faltered poor Elsie, as she drew her hand across her eyes; “he was my only bairn, was Willie.”
“Why do you weep then?” returned Mrs. Trafford in her sad voice; “do you not know that there are mothers in the heart of this great city who would that their sons had never been born, or that they had seen them die in their infancy. ‘He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,’ ” she continued to herself; then aloud, and with a strange flickering smile that scarcely lighted up the pale face, “Good-night to you—happy mother whose son perished on the Cumberland Fells, for you will soon meet him again. Good-night, Mrs. Watkins;” and with this abrupt adieu she went quickly out of the shop and was lost in the surrounding fog.
“A fine figure of a woman,” ejaculated Elsie, shaking her old head with a puzzled look on her wrinkled face; “a fine, grand figure of a woman, but surely an ‘innocent,’ neighbor?”
“An innocent!” repeated Mrs. Watkins with an indignant snort; “an innocent! Mrs. Deans; why should such an idea enter your head? A shrewder and a brighter woman than my lodger, Mrs. Trafford, never breathed, though folks do say she has had a deal of trouble in her life—but there, it is none of my business; I never meddle in the affairs of my neighbors. I am not of the sort who let their tongue run away with them,” finished Mrs. Watkins with a virtuous toss of her head.
CHAPTER VII.
NEA.
She was gay, tender, petulant and susceptible. All her feelings were quick and ardent; and having never experienced contradiction or restraint, she was little practiced in self-control; nothing but the native goodness of her heart kept her from running continually into error.—Washington Irving.
If Mrs. Trafford had been questioned about her past life, she would have replied in patriarchal language that few and evil had been her days, and yet no life had ever opened with more promise than hers.
Many years, nearly a quarter of a century, before the gray-haired weary woman had stood in Mrs. Watkins’s shop, a young girl in a white dress, with a face as radiant as the spring morning itself, leaned over the balcony of Belgrave House to wave good-bye to her father as he rode away eastward.
Those who knew Nea Huntingdon in those early days say that she was wonderfully beautiful.
There was a picture of her in the Royal Academy, a dark-haired girl in a velvet dress, sitting under a marble column with a blaze of oriental scarves at her feet, and a Scotch deerhound beside her, and both face and figure were well-nigh faultless. Nea had lost her mother in her childhood, and she lived alone with her father in the great house that stood at the corner of the square, with its flower-laden balconies and many windows facing the setting sun.
Nea was her father’s only child, and all his hopes were centered upon her.
Mr. Huntingdon was an ambitious man; he was more, he was a profound egotist. In his character pride, the love of power, the desire for wealth, were evenly balanced and made subservient to a most indomitable will. Those who knew him well said he was a hard self-sufficient man, one who never forgot an injury or forgave it.
He had been the creator of his own fortunes; as a lad he had come to London with the traditional shilling in his pocket, and had worked his way to wealth, and was now one of the richest merchant princes in the metropolis.
He had married a young heiress, and by her help had gained entrance into society, but she had died a dissatisfied, unhappy woman, who had never gained her husband’s heart or won his confidence. In Mr. Huntingdon’s self-engrossed nature there was no room for tenderness; he had loved his handsome young wife in a cool temperate fashion, but she had never influenced him, never really comprehended him; his iron will, hidden under a show of courtesy, had repressed her from the beginning of their married life. Perhaps her chief sin in his eyes had been that she had not given him a son; he had accepted his little daughter ungraciously, and for the first few years of her young life he had grievously neglected her.
No mother; left by herself in that great house, with nurses to spoil her and servants to wait on her, the little creature grew up wayward and self-willed; her caprices indulged, her faults and follies laughed at or glossed over by careless governesses.
Nea very seldom saw her father in those days; society claimed him when his business was over, and he was seldom at home. Sometimes Nea, playing in the square garden under the acacias, would look up and see a somber dark face watching her over the railings, but he would seldom call her to him; but, strange to say, the child worshiped him.
When he rode away in the morning a beautiful little face would be peeping at him through the geraniums on the balcony, a little dimpled hand would wave confidingly. “Good-bye, papa,” she would say in her shrill little voice, but he never heard her; he knew nothing, and cared little, about the lonely child-life that was lived out in the spacious nurseries of Belgrave House.
But, thank Heaven, childhood is seldom unhappy.
Nea laughed and played with the other children in the square garden; she drove out with her governess in the grand open carriage, where her tiny figure seemed almost lost. Nea remembered driving with her mother in that same carriage—a fair tired face had looked down on her smiling.
“Mamma, is not Belgrave House the Palace Beautiful? look how its windows are shining like gold,” she had said once.
“It is not the Palace Beautiful to me, Nea,” replied her mother, quietly. Nea always remembered that sad little speech, and the tears that had come into her mother’s eyes. What did it all mean? she wondered; why were the tears so often in her mother’s eyes? why did not papa drive with them sometimes? It was all a mystery to Nea.
Nea knew nothing about her mother’s heart-loneliness and repressed sympathies; with a child’s beautiful faith she thought all fathers were like that. When Colonel Hambleton played with his little daughters in the square garden, Nea watched them curiously, but without any painful comparison. “My papa is always busy, Nora,” she said, loftily, to one of the little girls who asked why Mr. Huntingdon never came too; “he rides on his beautiful horse down to the city, nurse says. He has his ships to look after, you know, and sometimes he is very tired.”
“Papa is never too tired to play with me and Janie,” returned Nora, with a wise nod of her head; “he says it rests him so nicely.”
Somehow Nea went home not quite so happily that day; a dim consciousness that things were different, that it never rested papa to play with her, oppressed her childish brain; and that evening Nea moped in her splendid nursery, and would not be consoled by her toys or even her birds