Nurse Heatherdale's Story

ILLUSTRATED BY L LESLIE BROOKE
MACMILLAN & CO LONDON MDCCCXCI
TO MY FAR-AWAY BUT FAITHFUL FRIEND GISÉLA
Lindfield, August 22, 1891.


I could fancy it was only yesterday! That first time I saw them. And to think how many years ago it is really! And how many times I have told the story—or, perhaps, I should say the stories , for after all it is only a string of simple day-by-day events I have to tell, though to me and to the children about me they seem so interesting and, in some ways, I think I may say, rather out of the common. So that now that I am getting old, or 'beginning to think just a tiny bit about some day getting old,' which is the only way Miss Erica will let me say it, and knowing that nobody else can know all the ins and outs which make the whole just as I do, and having a nice quiet time to myself most days (specially since dear tiresome little Master Ramsey is off to school with his brothers), I am going to try to put it down as well as I can. My 'as well as I can' won't be anything very scholarly or fine, I know well; but if one knows what one wants to say it seems to me the words will come. And the story will be there for the dear children, who are never sharp judging of old Heather—and for their children after them, maybe.
I was standing at our cottage door that afternoon—a beautiful summer afternoon it was, early in June. I was looking idly enough across the common, for our cottage stood—stands still, perhaps—I have not been there for many a year—just at the edge of Brayling Common, where it skirts the pine-woods, when I saw them pass. Quite a little troop they looked, though they were scarcely near enough for me to see them plainly. There was the donkey, old Larkins's donkey, which they had hired for the time, with a tot of a girl riding on it, the page-boy leading it, and a nursemaid walking on one side, and on the other an older little lady—somewhere about ten years old she looked, though she was really only eight. What an air she had, to be sure! What a grand way of holding herself and stepping along like a little princess, for all that she and her sisters were dressed as simple as simple. Pink cotton frocks, if I remember right, a bit longer in the skirts than our young ladies wear them now, and nice white cotton stockings,—it was long before black silk ones were the fashion for children,—and ankle-strap shoes, and white sun-bonnets, made with casers and cords, nice and shady for the complexions, though you really had to be close to before you could see a child's face inside of them. And some way behind, another little lady, a good bit shorter than Miss Bess—I meant to give all their names in order later on, but it seems strange-like not to say it—and looking quite three years younger, though there was really not two between them. And alongside of her a boy, thin and pale and darkish-haired—that, I could see, as he had no sun-bonnet of course, only a cap of some kind. He too was a good bit taller than Miss ——, the middle young lady I mean, though short for his age, which was eleven past. They were walking together, these two—they were mostly always together, and I saw that the boy was a little lame, just a touch, but enough to take the spring out of his step that one likes to see in a young thing. And though I couldn't see her face, only some long fair curls, long enough to come below the cape of her bonnet, a feeling came over me that the child beside him was walking slow, keeping back as it were, on purpose to bear him company. There was something gentle and pitying-like in her little figure, in the way she went closer to the boy and took his hand when the nurse turned round and called back something—I couldn't hear the words but I fancied the tone was sharp—to the two children behind, which made them press forward a little. The other young lady turned as they came nearer and said something with a sort of toss-up of her proud little head to the nurse. And then I saw that she held out her hand to her younger sister, who kept hold all the same of the boy's hand on the other side. And that was how they were walking when they went in among the trees and were lost to my sight.