Well was it then for the tempted girl that prayer had become so habitual that she intuitively turned to her God for guidance, as a child might turn to a parent. Then her pastor’s words recurred to her memory, “Let us especially beware that we use no means that are not sanctified by God’s blessing.” It was Lottie’s duty, indeed, to make every effort for her parents, but God’s work must be only done in God’s way. His blessing could not rest on ill-gotten gold, and without that blessing what could come but misery and shame? Lottie’s faith was in trial; she was called on to abstain from following the only course by which it seemed possible for her to rescue her father. It was not by low covetousness, but by the strong warm affections of the heart that the Tempter was seeking to draw the simple child into guilt. It was a short, a painful struggle, and then faith rose victorious. “Oh, no! how can I do this thing, and sin against God!” exclaimed Lottie aloud, and not trusting herself to look again at the bags of treasure, she turned suddenly round—and confronted her master!
Lottie started violently at the unexpected meeting with Gaspar; she then stood as if spell-bound, with her black eyes rivetted on his; she seemed to have no power to withdraw them, no power to utter another word. The sight of Mr. Gritton’s sallow, shrunken countenance, looking to her corpse-like in that dimly-lighted vault, exercised on the girl a kind of fascination, such as that which is attributed to the serpent’s gaze.
AN UNEXPECTED MEETING.
Gaspar had been roused from sleep by the sounds made by Lottie in the search for the gilded weight. He never enjoyed the deep refreshing slumber of a mind at rest; the miser was haunted by the fears that are natural to one whose treasure is on earth, where thieves may break through and steal. Alarmed by the noise which he heard at an hour so unusually early, Gaspar had risen and partially dressed, his anxiety being increased by the recollection that he had forgotten to lock the door of the inner vault when last he had visited it, as he frequently did, in the night-time. It was an infirmity of Gaspar, perhaps originating in the shock caused to him by the loss of the Orissa, to feel that his money was never so safe as when immediately under his eye; it was a satisfaction to the slave of Mammon to sleep over his buried treasure. Mr. Gritton was, however, nervously sensitive to the danger of keeping large sums of money in an unguarded dwelling, especially in such a lawless neighbourhood as that of Wildwaste. He must hide from all the knowledge of the existence of hoards which would tempt the burglar. With this view Gaspar had caused vaults to be constructed with a special view to concealment: no one in Wildwaste knew of their existence. Mr. Gritton did what he could to appear before men as a gentleman of very narrow means; and though he had not succeeded in this, he had until now perfectly preserved the secret of a treasure kept under his house.
It was with annoyance and alarm that Gaspar now found his secret discovered. He could not doubt the honesty of Lottie, whose words he had just overheard; he was relieved to find that his vault had been entered by no more formidable intruder; but he anxiously revolved the means of preventing the discovery from spreading further, and stood sternly regarding the trembling girl for what appeared to her a fearfully long time.
“You have taken nothing?” he asked at length; to Lottie his voice sounded hollow and terrible, breaking the painful silence.
“Oh, no, sir—you can search me—I never thought—;” the girl checked herself in the midst of her sentence—“no, I mustn’t say that, for I was tempted; but it was for my father.”
“I never heard that you had a father living,” said Gaspar.
“He is living, and in great distress, at Southampton.”