Part 7

"It was too dark to look at Nelly, or perhaps her white face, sad and frightened as I know it must have been, would have turned me from my purpose. She did not speak one word, and I struck off at a tearing pace through the woods.

"By the time I had reached Hal Somers's place, I began to get sobered down a little, and to feel somewhat uncomfortable about what I had done. I had to wait a few minutes before I could see him, but I did my errand briefly, and it was not more than an hour after I had left Nelly before I myself was at home. I found mother in the porch, looking out anxiously.

"'I'm so glad you've come, children,' she cried, when she heard my footsteps, and then, as I drew nearer, 'Why, Jack, where is Nelly?'"

"'Here, I suppose,' I answered, trying to face the music boldly. 'I left her about an hour ago in the woods, where the path branches off to go to Hal Somers's, and she had nothing to do but to come straight home.'

"'You left Nelly in the woods, an hour ago!' my mother cried, in a tone which made my heart stand still, and then turn over with a great leap. And then she sprang by me like some wild creature, and called through the darkness to my father to come with his lantern, quick, quick, for Nelly had been alone in the dark woods for an hour.

"Instantly, as it seemed to me, my father and my oldest brother were following mother along the woodland path, and I stole after them, feeling like a second Cain. It was but a very few minutes before we came up to Nelly, for there she was, just where I left her. She had sunk to the ground, and was half sitting there, her back leaning against a tree beside the path. The light from the lantern flashed on her face, a face white and set as death, but with the wide-open eyes glaring fearfully into the dark beyond.

"It was my mother who touched her first; and felt to see whether her heart had stopped beating.

"'Is she dead?' my father asked huskily.

"'I don't know. It seems to me I can feel the very faintest throb, but I cannot tell until we get her home. If she isn't dead, I am afraid she is worse,--frightened out of her senses, for ever.'

"Then father and William made preparations to carry her. I asked, timidly, if I could help. I think none of them had noticed before that I was there.

"'You!' my father said, with such concentrated scorn and wrath in his voice as I cannot describe; and then mother said, more mildly, but so sadly it was worse than any anger,--

"'No, I trusted her to you once. I supposed you loved her.'

"So I saw them move off, carrying her between them, and I followed after like an outcast, until it occurred to me that, at least, I could call a physician. So I flew by them like the wind, and off on the road to town. By some singular good fortune, if we ought not always to say Providence and never fortune, before I had gone forty rods I met Dr. Greene, who was coming in our direction to visit a patient. So I had him with me on the door-stone when they brought Nelly in.

"I did not dare to go into the room where they carried her; but I waited outside in an agony which punished me already for my sin. At last my mother had pity on me and looked out.

"'She is not dead, Jack,' she said, 'but she is still insensible, and until she is restored to consciousness there is no telling what the result will be.'

"Then an awful terror came over me, which I cannot put into words. What if she died, or what if she never had her reason again? Who in that house would ever bear to look at me? When Cain had murdered his brother he had to go forth alone,--what was left for me, another Cain, but to go also alone into the world?

"We lived nine miles away from a seaport town from which whaling vessels were continually starting, and it came into my mind that I might ship on board one for a three years' cruise; and, by the time it was over, the folks at home might have learned to forgive me for being in the world. So off through the night I hurried.

"How strangely our ways seem made ready for us, often, in the great moments, big with fate, of our lives! I found a whaler which was to sail in the early morning, a captain disappointed in one of his green hands, whose place I could have, and before I had been half an hour in the town my bargain was made, I had been fitted out with necessaries, and I went into a tavern to write a note to my mother.

"A strange, incoherent note it was; but it told her where I was gone and why, and begged her, whatever came, to forgive her boy, who loved her, and who might never see her again.

"Never mind about the long, long days, and weeks, and months which followed,--the empty hours of solemn nights and gusty days, during which I was face to face with my own soul.

"Of course before a week had gone by I was sorry enough for the rash step I had taken. It seemed to me I could not live for three years and not know what had become of Nelly. I would have gone barefoot to the ends of the earth to find out about her, but I could not walk the sea. I was growing so wild with grief and anxiety that I sometimes think I should have walked overboard some night, and so ended all my pain for this world, if Providence had not raised me up a friend in my need--only a common sailor, and a man whose strange history I never knew, but a gentleman and a scholar, in whose locker were Milton, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote.

"I had studied pretty well at school; and was rather forward than otherwise, for a boy of fourteen; and I have sometimes thought no course of study in any school would have been so much to me as was the entire absence of frivolous and worthless literature, and the constant companionship of these great minds. Besides these, I read daily in my pocket Testament; and I owed a great deal also to the instructions and explanations of the friend who was, as it has always seemed to me, God's especial gift to my needs.

"Our voyage appeared destined, at first, to be a highly successful one; but just as we were nearly ready to return, we encountered a storm which strewed the sea with wrecks. We saw our vessel go down, but we were fortunate enough to escape in our boats; my friend and I, and two or three more, were with the second mate in his boat, and we were soon separated from the others. We made land on a fruitful island, peopled by savages who were not unfriendly; but it was many months before, at last, we got away in an East Indiaman, and while we were on the island my friend had died suddenly, leaving untold the story of his life.

"I will not enter into the particulars of my return home,--how from port to port and ship to ship I made my way, until, at length, after five years of absence, I sighted the well-known landmarks of the old town from whence I embarked.

"How familiar it all looked to me! I knew every field through which the homeward road led, and I walked the nine miles between the town and my father's farm in the night, as I had done before. It was three o'clock of a September morning when I reached the old place, and I had nearly two hours to wait before there were any signs of life about it. For now, after all these years, I had not the courage to summon them from their rest. How I passed those waiting hours, divided betwixt hope and fear, you can guess. I lived over in them all the torturing anxieties of the last five years. Was Nelly dead or alive? Should I ever see my mother again? What had changed, while the old house among the trees had stood so still?

"At last I heard a sound. A door opened, and my mother, who of old always used to be the first to move, looked out. Her hair was white, and her thin cheeks were pale; but I knew the kind eyes that looked forth to meet the morning, and should have known them despite any amount of change. I sprang forward to greet her.

"'Mother,' I said. She knew my voice and turned toward me trembling.

"'O Jack, Jack! I thought you were dead long ago. O my boy, my own boy!'

"And her arms were round my neck, her tender lips were kissing me; and so she drew me in, into peace, shelter, home.

"'And Nelly?' I asked, half afraid to call the name.

"'Nelly is well. Oh, if you had but waited to see. She was ill for awhile, but no serious harm came to her; and, instead, it was my own boy who went away to break my heart.'

"'And has come back to heal it,' I cried, growing bold and merry with my relief and joy.

"By this time the rest heard us, and came to the scene,--father, brothers, and last of all, Nelly; such a beautiful Nelly of sweet sixteen, ten times fairer and brighter than my brightest memories of her, and all ready to forgive me, and make much of me.

"_Then_ was when the chivalry began. _Then_ I was ready enough to fetch and carry for Miss Nelly of the dark eyes and the bright cheeks."

"Oh," said John, laughing, "then when a fellow is nineteen he can be chivalrous to his own sister?"

"Very likely he can," Uncle Jack answered, "but my experience doesn't prove it; for I began to be glad, very soon indeed, that Nelly was only my adopted sister, after all. It was a good while before I got my courage up to ask her whether she would trust herself to me on the long home stretch through life. Be sure that I promised her, if she would, that I'd never leave her in any dark places."

"And what did she say?"

"Oh! I mustn't tell her secrets. Go and ask her. There she comes, with her first grandchild in her arms. Her cheeks are not bright now, she says, but somehow they look to me just as they used to look; and I know her eyes are as dark and deep as ever; and though I call her 'mother,' with the rest of you, when you are all round, there is never a night that I don't say to her, before she goes to sleep, 'God bless you, Nelly!'"

NOBODY'S CHILD.

The summer sun was warm in the five-acre lot, and the east porch was cool and pleasant, so the owner of the lot lingered in the porch and talked awhile with his wife. He had married her only the April before, and to live with her and love her had not yet grown to be an old story. It would be her fault if it ever did grow to be one; for he was a tender, kindly man, this Marcus Grant, with a gentle and clinging nature, and a womanly need of loving.

His wife, though she was young and pretty, with bright eyes, and bright lips, and soft, waving hair, was harder than he, and colder, and more selfish. But she had given him all the heart she had, and in these early days she cared very much indeed about pleasing him, and keeping him satisfied with her; or, rather, making him continue to admire her, for quiet satisfaction on his part would not have been enough.

He had thrown himself down on the door-stone, and his head was leaning against her lap, as she sat on her low chair in the porch, and ran her fingers in and out of his thick chestnut hair, thinking to herself what a fortunate woman she was to be the wife of this manly, handsome fellow, whom so many girls wanted, and the mistress of his well-filled, comfortable house.

From this east porch where they sat they could see down the long line of dusty road that led to the church and the few houses clustered round it, which passed for a village. The farmhouse stood on the top of a high hill; and up this hill they now saw a woman toiling slowly. The summer sun burned fiercely down on her, the dust rose with every step in a choking cloud about her, but still she struggled on.

Little events are full of interest in country solitudes, and both Grant and his wife watched the wanderer with curiosity.

"Well, I never saw her before, that's certain," the husband said, after a long look as she drew nearer.

"Nor I," returned his wife. "But see, Mark, she has a baby in her arms. She's trying to keep the sun off it with that shawl; and, sure as you live, she is turning in here."

"Why, so she is;" and Grant rose to his feet.

"May I sit down in the shade and rest?" asked the stranger, drawing nigh. She spoke in a clear, silvery voice, which betrayed some of her secrets, since it was the voice of a lady, and also it was the utterance of despair, for its hopeless monotone was unvarying.

"Certainly," and Mrs. Grant rose and offered her own low chair, for clearly this was no common tramp.

"And might I trouble you for a glass of water?"

"I'll go for some fresh," Grant said, full of hospitable intent.

But before he got back with the water he heard his wife calling him, and hurrying forward at the sound, he found her holding the stranger's head, on her shoulder, and the baby, who was just opening sleepy eyes, in her arms.

"Quick, Mark, do something. I think she is dying. She must be sun-struck."

And so it proved. No one ever knew how far she had toiled in that intense heat, with the baby in her arms,--no one ever knew any thing more about her, for when the sun set, which had scorched and withered her life, she, too, was gone to unknown shores. She spoke only once after she asked for the glass of water, and that was just before she died. The baby, in another room, uttered a cry, and she tried to turn her head toward the sound.

"It is your baby," Mrs. Grant said, kindly, "but she is all right. What do you call her?"

The strangest change came over the dying face: it may have been only a foreshadowing of death, but it seemed more like a mortal agony of renunciation and of despair.

"Nothing," she said, as evenly and with as little change of inflection as if she were already a ghost; "nothing: she is nobody's child."

But in half an hour after that she was dead, and Mrs. Grant, who was very literal in her ideas, always thought that the stranger had not known what she said; but, she used to add, the child _was_ nobody's child, for all they should ever know about it.

After the mother was buried, she began to think it was time to dispose of this child, which was nobody's. She was not without heart, and she had worked diligently to fashion small garments enough to make the little creature comfortable; but now, she thought, her duty was done, and she wondered Mark said nothing about taking the baby to the alms-house.

At last, one evening, she herself proposed it. Her husband looked at her in mild surprise. He supposed all women loved babies by instinct, and he took it for granted that of course his wife wanted this one, only she probably thought he wouldn't like it round.

"Why, did you think I wouldn't let you keep it?" he asked quietly. "I think God has sent it to us, and we've really no right to turn it over to any one else, to say nothing of the pleasure it is to have the little bundle."

As I said, Mrs. Grant was still in a state of mind not to be satisfied without her husband's admiration. She would not have fallen short of his ideal of her for any thing; she would, at least, _seem_ all that he desired her to _be_. She was quick enough to understand that he _would_ think less of her if he saw her unwilling to keep the baby, so she smiled on him with what cheerfulness she could summon, and treated the matter as settled.

Thus the child, which was nobody's, grew up in the Grant household. She had been six months old, apparently, when she came there, and by midwinter she began to totter round on her little feet, and to say short words.

But no one ever taught her to say papa or mamma, those lovely first words of childhood. What had nobody's child to do with such names?

It might have seemed strange to most people that Julia Grant did not love this little thing, so thrown upon her mercy in its tender babyhood. But, despite theories, all women are not fond of children. Every woman is, perhaps, fond, in a blind, instinctive way, of her own; but the more heavenly love which takes all children in its arms and blesses them is not by any means universal.

The most powerful trait in Mrs. Grant's character was a silent, unobtrusive selfishness. The whole world revolved, to her thought, about _her_. Rains fell, dews dropped earthward, winds blew and suns shone for Julia Grant. She had consented with secret reluctance to keep the child, and from that moment a root of bitterness and jealousy had sprung up in her heart. If her husband had thought much of _her_ comfort, she used to say to herself, he would not have wanted to put all this care upon her.

She was quite ready, therefore, to be jealous, and to feel as if something was taken from her every time he tossed the little one in his arms, or called it a pet name; and after a while--not at once, for he was naturally the most unsuspicious of men--some instinct revealed this to him, and made him, lover of peace as he was, very chary of manifesting in his wife's presence any especial tenderness for the little stranger within his gates.

But summer and winter came and went, and with their sun and shade nobody's child grew on toward girlhood. She had a great deal of beauty, of a shadowy, delicate kind. She was seldom ill, but she was a very frail-looking child. The quick, changeful color in her cheeks, the depth of feeling in her dark eyes, the tremulous curves about her mouth, all indicated an organization of extreme sensitiveness; a nature to which love would be as the very breath of life, but which was too shrinking and timid ever to put forth any claims for it, or make any advances.

For ten years she was the only little one in the Grant household. Their affairs prospered, they grew richer every year, as if nobody's child had brought a blessing with her; but it was a constant source of bitterness to Mrs. Grant that they were laying up for strangers, or perhaps for this waif, whom no one else claimed, and who seemed likely to remain in their house for ever, like some noiseless, unwelcome shadow.

But at last, when the child had been for ten years her unwelcome housemate, to Mrs. Grant herself was given a little baby girl, God's messenger of love, as I think every child must be, to every mother. Never had baby a warmer welcome. The preparations made for her were worthy of a little queen, and she opened her eyes on a world of love and of summer.

But perhaps no one, not even her mother, lavished upon her such a passion of devotion as the poor little waif, nobody's child, who had never in her life before had any one whom she dared to caress. Perhaps her devotion to baby touched Mrs. Grant's heart; at any rate she saw that she could trust the little one to her without fear, and so nobody's child became a self-constituted but most faithful nurse and body-guard to this other child, whom loving hearts were so proud and glad to own.

And little Rose--for so they named the summer baby--clung to her young nurse with a fond tenacity, very exacting and wearing, indeed, but unutterably sweet to the shy girl whom no one else loved. She began to feel that she was of some use,--even she had her own name and place in the world; and this reminds me that I have not yet told you her name. She had been christened Annette soon after she came under the Grant roof, but little Rose called her "Nanty," and this odd title was the very first word that small person ever spoke. She was a lovely baby, one of the rosy, fat, dimpled, laughing kind, and so thoroughly healthy that she seldom cried, except when "Nanty" disappeared for a moment from her sight. The touch of her baby fingers seemed to make Marcus Grant and his wife both young again. Day by day some line of care faded out of their faces, which time had begun to harden. The mother smiled, as she had never smiled before, on her baby; and here, at last, was an object on which the father's great, loving heart could lavish itself, unblamed, and unquestioned.

Rose was a year and a half old, when one cold winter night her father and mother were persuaded to go to a house warming, a mile away. Mrs. Grant was seldom willing to leave her baby, but this gay company was to assemble at the new house of one of her best friends, and she took a fancy to be present.

"'Nanty' will be just as careful of Rose, to do her justice, as I should," she said; "and I think it's only neighborly to go."

Her husband, always sociable in his nature, assented readily enough; and eight o'clock saw them well tucked in under the buffalo robes of their sleigh, and started for the scene of festivities.

"Nanty," for her part, was well content. Rose was already asleep, her little cheek, pink as the heart of one of her namesake flowers, resting on one dimpled hand, while the other was tossed above her head, as we have all seen babies sleep. The maid-of-all-work went off early to her bed in the next chamber, and the man, who had a family of his own not far away, took his departure, and then "Nanty" raked up the fire, and crept softly into bed beside little Rose.

It was nearly midnight when she woke, roused from her slumber by a light, a vivid, red light, brighter than day. In one moment she realized her position. The house was on fire, and the flames were already far advanced.

She sprang to the door and opened it, but it was only to be met and driven back by a sheet of fire. There was no hope of escape that way. Rose was her only thought. If she could save the child, she did not care for herself.

She opened the chamber window. The leap seemed desperate to her timid gaze, but the snow underneath the window might break the fall. Then she thought of something better. She caught the blankets from the bed, and rolled Rose in them hurriedly, then dragged off the feather-bed, by an effort of uttermost strength, and forced it through the window; and then, reaching out as far as she could, she dropped Rose, closely wrapped in the blankets, upon the bed, and sprang herself from another window, lest she might fall upon the child.

For her there was no bed underneath, and no wrapping of soft woollens. Heavily she fell to the ground, and a violent shock, followed by deadly pain, told her that she had broken her arm. She thanked God, in that breathless moment, that it was not her leg, for somehow she must move Rose to a place of safety, out of reach, at least, of falling timbers. How she did it she never could have told, but in thirty seconds Rose and the bed were out of the yard and across the street, and then she sank down beside her charge, utterly unconscious.

Mr. and Mrs. Grant were driving home after the festival when they caught the gleam of a wild, strange light in the direction of their own home.

"The house is on fire!" Mrs. Grant cried, with white lips.

"Rose!" the father answered hoarsely, and whipped his horse into a run. A quarter of a mile away from home they met the maid.

"Master, mistress," she screamed after them, "the house is on fire, and I'm going for help."

They did not stop for questions. Had "Nanty" also forsaken little Rose?

But they found "Nanty" at her post, though at first they thought she was dead. The mother pulled away the blankets from the little bundle beside her, and Baby Rose rubbed her chubby hands into her sleepy eyes.

"Where is I?" she said, "and what for you make morning so soon?"

"O Mark, Mark! she's all right," the mother cried, in a passion of joy. "'Nanty' has saved her;" and then she bent over the little girl in her thin night-gown, and took her by the arm.

"Nanty, Nanty!"

She had seized the broken arm, and the pain roused the fainting girl.

"Yes'm," she said, starting up. "I'm so sorry to be good for nothing just now, when you want me so much, but I broke my arm jumping out."

Afterwards, when the family had found a new shelter, the whole story came out. The maid, Judith, had read herself to sleep, and her candle had tipped over and set the bed on fire. The flames had aroused her to a terror which utterly swept away whatever presence of mind she might have had under other circumstances, and without one thought for Rose or "Nanty" she had hurried off to call the neighbors to the scene of action.