CHAPTER XIV.

_LAURA._

Thou art a dew-drop which the morn brings forth, Not framed to undergo unkindly shocks, Or to be trailed along the soiling earth-- A gem that glitters while it lives.

Margaret was at home. In a little village on the coast of Yorkshire, far from any town, not fashionable even in the season, and somewhat dull at all times, was the cottage to be found which she fondly looked upon as home. The village consisted of one street running up into the land, where butcher and baker and grocer, who all of them sold a medley of articles, displayed their small wares; a collection of fisher-huts on the coast, and some few respectable little houses, whitewashed and green-shuttered, which were only tenanted in the summer months. It was not even a particularly pretty place. Of course there was the sea, the grand wide ocean, stretching its interminable breadths away to the horizon, and it crept up upon yellow sands that were a perfect delight to the eye and to the feet, they were so bright and clean and smooth. But for this the scenery was somewhat monotonous; no mountains or hilly grounds were to be seen far or near, save, indeed, the few sand-cliffs that rose up gradually from the borders of the sea to a vast table-land of moor and meadow, stretching into the distance with scarcely a tree to break the line. A few huge boulders carved by time and water into fantastic shapes, a little scanty herbage on the sandhills, some stunted shrubs and trailing yellow flowers,--these were all that broke the monotony of sea and moor; in fact, it was a desolate place, but its desolation in no way resembled that of a city like London, the dreary monotony of a human desert. It was Nature's desolation, grand and weird, and, to the soul that could understand, full of ever-varied mystery and charm.

The sunrise over the moor when, itself purple with the rich tints of autumn coloring, it blushed into mistlike dreamy splendor; the mellower sunset over the ocean, and after the sunset the pale streaks of horizon-light and the broad ribbons of silvery moonbeams; the black mystery of a winter night, space above, space around, space infinite on every side; the clash and flash of foam-crowned waves shining through the darkness,--these were some of the charms this little seaside village possessed, these were what Margaret had missed in her miserable visit to great, lonely London. She slept at a hotel in York on the first night after leaving town. On the next day, partly by rail, partly by carriage, she reached her own home.

They did not expect her. She wondered plaintively as she drove in the little chaise, hired at the nearest station, along the low road that skirted the sea, whether her little Laura would be pleased to see her again--would have found the time long without her. Laura was not so dear to her mother as she might have been, but she was her only tie to life, the one creature who was dependent on her, to whom she was, in a certain sense, a necessity. In the course of that long drive Margaret began to reproach herself for having loved her child so little. Her heart yearned over the tiny creature whose fate was bound up with her own, fatherless, or worse than fatherless, in the tender dawning of life--mysteries around her that her poor little soul might perhaps already be trying to fathom, and trying in vain; for, as Margaret recalled with a sudden pang, it was not an ordinary child's soul that had looked at her once or twice out of Laura's dark, pensive eye. It was a soul upon which the shadow seemed to have fallen--the shadow that so early falls upon some, chilling their life in its first glad spring. Margaret had shrunk from looking into this mystery; she had answered the inquiring earnestness with which her little daughter had seemed to look into her sadness by sweetmeats, toys and diversions, and the child had gone back upon herself, dreaming her dreams alone.

Perhaps it is little known in the wise, busy world of grown-up people how keen and sensitive are the sympathies and feelings of a child, how easily the little soul can be driven in upon itself, and in some cases, rare it may be, how great the suffering that follows.

Margaret had a vague consciousness of all this, but there was something so bitter in her sadness that it shrank even from the light touch of her child, and then the dark, pensive eyes that sometimes looked so melancholy under their deep fringe veiled a memory--a memory that cut and wounded, and that in some moods she felt herself absolutely powerless to bear. So had another pair of eyes, dark too, and wistful and infinitely sad, looked out at her on a stormy night long ago--the night when her trouble had begun. Long ago--it looked long ago, yet as mortals reckon time perhaps it could only have been said to be short--one, two, three, four, long years. The remembrance of that strange sadness in her little daughter's face had brought Margaret to this again, as what did not? She reckoned the time and marvelled at its flight.

As she pondered the little chaise progressed, with abundant clacking of the whip and plunges forward and vigorous shouts from the boy-driver, and scarcely a corresponding rate of speed, for Middlethorpe was an out-of-the-way village, and no very stately vehicle of the hired species would have been permitted, under some very large gratuity, to explore its wilds. Evening was beginning to fall before the outskirts of the village had been sighted, and between the jolting of the carriage, the energy of the driver and the haunting thoughts that tormented her, Margaret began to feel that any change would be a relief.

Her little cottage was rather out of the village. It lay at some little distance, near the edge of one of the sandhills. When they entered the village she stopped her driver and told him to take on her carpet-bag; she would do the remainder of the way on foot. The boy listened to her directions, nodded his head good-humoredly, and leaving her upon the sands, started off in the direction indicated--to a little white point at some distance reached by a road winding up through the village. Margaret proceeded leisurely along the coast toward a narrow path that led up the cliff to her cottage by a nearer way.

She gazed over the wide sea, for the gray which had been its abiding characteristic through the not very brilliant May day was blushing gradually into golden brightness under the magic touch of sunset, and Margaret paused in the full enjoyment of its rich coloring. Then, with the light still in her eyes, she looked landward on to the sandhills.

There was a little figure crouching under one of them, evidently that of a child, and a child in sorrow, for the face was hidden by a pair of tiny hands and the little frame was shaken with sobs. It looked like a blot in the dazzle the sunset radiance had cast over Margaret's sight. But the child was at her feet; her heart was moved for its little trouble. She stooped to ask about the sorrow, and with a sudden shock recognized in the weeping little one her own Laura. The child's dress was in disorder; the pretty, fair hair was uncovered by hat or bonnet and flying wildly over her face and neck; her cheeks were stained with tears which seemed to have been flowing abundantly; her little hands were red and sore.

She looked up, and a faint smile came into her weary little face as she recognized her mother. "I thought you were never coming back, mamma," she said in a voice so sad and low that it pierced her mother's heart. "I am glad you're come, because now perhaps I sha'n't always be naughty."

"Naughty! my little Laura naughty? Who says so?" The tears were in Margaret's eyes, and a passion of penitence and love was welling up in her heart. It was like the opening of a sealed-up fountain. All the sweet motherliness that untoward circumstances seemed to have stifled in Margaret's heart awoke suddenly at the sight of her daughter's sorrow. She kissed the little flushed face, smoothed back the disordered hair, and lulled the child to rest in her arms with the pretty baby-language that mothers know. And at first the little Laura looked surprised, then her tears ceased, she clasped her arms round her mother's neck, and into the dark, wide-open, pensive eyes there came a look of rest.

So they remained for a few moments--the mother and the child, with the soft, cool yellow sand around them and the westering seas before them; Margaret thinking only of these little clinging arms, of this sweet child-love--of the blessing that was still left her; the little one rejoicing, with the unreasonable delight of childhood, in the soft pressure of her mother's arms. She had always been given a morning and evening kiss, but this warm, protecting tenderness was, she could not tell why, something new to her.

She looked up languidly at last from her mother's breast where her head had been resting. "Jane says I've been very naughty, mamma," she murmured; "she whipped me for telling a story, but I know I didn't take the sugar."

Laura's tears began to break out afresh at the remembrance, but her little simple story had aroused her mother, and indignation began to mingle with sorrow in her heart. She started up: "_Who_ whipped you, Laura? Jane? How could she have dared to do such a thing? There! there! my sweet," for her vehemence had alarmed the child, "dry your eyes. Mamma will never leave her little darling again; no one else shall have anything to do with Laura."

Laura's tears gave place to a smile of contentment. "Yes, mamma dear, it will be nice. I cried the day you went to London, a long time ago, and Jane said it was naughty, and she locked the door and left me by myself--oh, _such_ a long time! And she said you had gone away because I was tiresome, and you didn't love me one little bit; and I thought"--Laura wound her arms tightly round her mother's neck--"I thought perhaps you'd never come back, and I was always to stay with Jane. And oh, mamma, I was looking at the sea to-night--you know gardener's little boy fell in, and when he came out I saw him; he was white and quite cold, and they put him in the churchyard--and I thought it would be better to fall in like poor little Jimmy than to live with Jane."

"Poor little darling!" Margaret's tears were flowing fast. She rose from her seat, but she would not loosen the pressure of those tiny arms.

Laura put her hand up to her mother's face: "Mamma, _you're_ crying now. Is it about Jane? Poor mamma! never mind."

"Mamma is crying because they told her little daughter such dreadful things," said Margaret as quietly as she could. "Listen, my child: you must _never_ believe them. I love my Laura more than I can say. You are _all_ that is left me, dear. It was for you I went to London, that you might grow up wise and good, and learn like other little girls; and I was going to such a wretched, miserable place or I would have taken my child with me; but I will never leave her behind again, wherever I may go."

Perfectly satisfied and with a little sigh of full content, Laura put down her head again, and so they went back to the house, the child in her mother's arms.

Jane Rodgers met them on the threshold of the front door. She had looked forward to something like this when the boy had arrived with the carpet-bag, notifying that the mistress was to follow, and she blamed herself severely for her short-sightedness, which had arisen in this way.

She had been shrewd enough to see that although Mrs. Grey never neglected her daughter, yet there was none of that warm devotion which mothers so often cherish for an only child; in fact, that the very presence of her little one was sometimes a burden to her. The circumstances of her lodger being peculiar and utterly unknown, so far as she could learn, to any of her neighbors, Jane had come to certain conclusions not very creditable to her ordinary good sense or knowledge of human nature. When, therefore, for three weeks Mrs. Grey had remained absent from her daughter, although her rent was fully paid up, and amply sufficient had been left for the little Laura's maintenance, Jane Rodgers, acting on her previous supposition, had come to this conclusion: "The mother had left her child altogether. It would fall to her" (Jane Rodgers's) "lot to take care of her and bring her up."

Now, Jane was by no means a cruel woman. Had any one told her that even under such untoward circumstances she could have been absolutely unkind to any child of seven years old, she would have indignantly repelled the accusation. But Jane was a scrupulously conscientious woman (that is, she thought herself so); she was unmarried, and hard by nature. She had been a fine-looking girl in her youth--had been disappointed in love, and as a domestic servant had perhaps had her full share of the temptations incident to her position. She had preserved her respectability, saved her money, and some years before the time when my story opens had returned to her native village, the owner of a small furnished house. Her living she was given in return for the service she rendered, and the rent of the house was ample to keep her in clothes and pocket-money, with a small sum accumulating year by year at the savings bank.

Jane was a highly respectable person, and in this consisted her pride. How people could ever be brought into the world the wrong way, or how the hundred and one wicked actions so common in all societies, high and low, could ever come to be committed, she professed herself wholly unable to understand. _She_ had no sympathy for the tempted: her theory was, that if they suffered in consequence of error, so much the better--it served them right.

When, therefore, the little Laura was left on her hands--for Mrs. Grey had scarcely been gone a week before Jane had made up her mind that she would never return--a strict and stern course of education was begun. That evil was very specially rooted in the heart of her self-imposed charge was Jane's theory--that no indulgence should ever be permitted her was the fit corrective. Laura very naturally resented this treatment. She had been allowed to wander about as she liked; she had never in her life been struck, and seldom punished. When she found herself watched, corrected and snapped-up--her little sayings, that had been admired and thought clever, snubbed and reproved--Laura became first very angry, and then very miserable. The anger was punished by whipping and bed--such perfectly new experiences to the lonely child that her little heart throbbed with the agony of humiliation; the misery was treated as sulkiness, and at last poor little Laura began to think it was all true. As she plaintively said to her mother, she was always naughty.

Jane had done it in good faith. She thought she was acting well, taking a mother's part with the child--that when the evil in her heart had been rooted out by strict discipline, she might in spite of her pretty face and form, and the bad precedent of a mother whose antecedents were not precisely known, turn out a good woman and a useful member of society.

In the mean time she took the child into her own part of the house, cleaned out Mrs. Grey's apartments, and was ready to offer them in the summer time on moderate terms to that portion of the bathing public who might find Middlethorpe a desirable watering-place.

These being her plans and ideas, the arrival of the boy and carpet-bag on this May evening was somewhat disconcerting to Jane Rodgers. The child was out sulking. She was ready with a rod in pickle, as she would have said, to chastise her for running away without hat or bonnet after she had been ordered to her room; but Mrs. Grey, should she find her on the sands, might probably fail to take Jane's view of matters.

There would be time for revelations too, and Jane could scarcely explain to her lodger all the reasons that had moved her to the mode of treatment she had employed with her daughter in her absence. However, matters being so, it was best to put a bold face on them. Jane prided herself on her independence. Mrs. Grey was certainly a yearly lodger--a rare kind of article at the seaside, and especially at Middlethorpe; still, if she should choose to take offence she might go.

None of these latter reflections appeared in her face as she went forward to meet Mrs. Grey, white-capped and aproned, the very picture of quiet respectability.

"Glad to see you back, ma'am," she said respectfully, "and sorry you should find Miss Laura in such a plight. She run out when my back was turned. I was in such a fidget about putting on my bonnet to look after her, when--"

"That will do, Jane," said Margaret quietly. "Bring up our tea and pay the boy. When I have put Miss Laura to bed I will speak to you in the parlor."

"As you please, ma'am."

Jane turned away with a slight toss of the head, quite determined to let her lodger go. She was not a servant, she said to herself, to be treated in such a way. But the sight of her comfortable kitchen and the hour of delay brought calmer and more prudent thoughts to Jane's mind. Instinctively she recalled the fate of Mrs. Brown and Miss Simpson, two ladies of her calling, who, after trying in vain to make a living out of their houses, had been obliged finally to sell their furniture and take to service again; Mrs. Short, who let, indeed, in the summer, but generally to large families, and had her things knocked about in such a way that no charge for breakages could cover the necessary outlay which followed their departure; Mrs. Dodd, who had taken in unaware a lady recovering from the small-pox, and whose servant had taken the disease, thus necessitating a general turn-out and white-washing before her rooms could be considered habitable.

Whatever the antecedents or private history of _her_ lodger might be, Jane Rodgers could not but recognize that she lived a quiet life and gave wonderfully little trouble. Then, though she paid her rent monthly, she was in reality a yearly lodger; she had already taken Jane's house for more than a year, her rent having been all the time regularly paid. It would manifestly be a pity to give her up by any over-hastiness.

Jane resolved upon a compromise. She took up the tea, arranged the bedrooms scrupulously, and then sat down in her kitchen to await Mrs. Grey's summons.

Some time passed before it came, for Margaret would not leave her child that evening until she had seen her in the quiet, peaceful sleep that ought to come so readily at her age; and she noted with ever-increasing indignation that her little daughter was feverish and restless, that she started painfully now and then, and clung nervously to her hand.

Nothing calmed her like her mother's voice; so, after trying various other methods, Margaret sang to her in a low, sweet undertone some of the children's hymns she had taught her at different times.

It was long, long since Margaret had lifted her voice in song of any kind, and tears once or twice almost choked her utterance as the "Sweet Story of Old" and "Gentle Jesus" came falteringly from her pale lips.

She had sung them at her child's cradle with all the proud joy of a young mother happy and beloved. Now all was changed--she and her child were alone in the wide world. But the sweet old words were suggestive. As she sang the spirit of the lonely woman grew calmer and her voice faltered less.

_Then_--in that fair long ago--she had loved the words for their music, their sweet, pleasant harmony; now she loved them for themselves, for the healing rest they seemed to bring to her. Like the cool touch of a loving mother on the fevered brow of a sick little one were the words of these child-utterances to Margaret that evening. _She_ grew calmer and her daughter slept.