“Shall we have just a bit of a prayer together, Steady, as we always have?” said the poor girl, with a faltering voice. It had been the habit of the brother and sister thus to pray, from the time when they had knelt as children together in their cottage home at Wildwaste, perhaps to be startled from their knees by the noisy entrance of a parent reeling home from the ale-house. Steady was very quiet, almost stolid; he had had no outburst of sorrow on hearing of the death of his father; perhaps those miserable days at Wildwaste had left deeper memories on a mind more slow to receive or to part with impressions; he had certainly never been buoyed up with the same joyous hopes as his sister had been, and was therefore less sensitive to disappointment. The lad knelt down without reply, leaving, as usual, to Lottie the uttering of the simple prayer, to which he was wont to add the closing Amen.
“Pray God bless and keep dear—;” Lottie could go no further. Alas! who has not felt how the first omission of a dear familiar name in prayer brings vividly to the soul of the mourner the reality of that separation, which, as regards this world, is softened by no hope. Lottie could only sob, while her brother, slowly and very briefly, concluded the little prayer.
Lottie rose on the morrow with the feeling that there was a great blank in her life; and yet it was not in the nature of things that she should sorrow as long and as deeply for such a parent as Abner had been, as for one who had faithfully fulfilled the duties of husband and father. She resolved to devote herself more than ever to her mother; and was almost glad, for her sake, that she herself had been obliged to leave Wildwaste. The return of Arthur and Lina Madden from Palestine had diverted the attention of gossips from the subject of Lottie’s mysterious sovereigns, and as it was widely known that she had been seen on the box of a carriage in which not only Arthur but Mr. Eardley had been seated, slander itself was forced to own that “the gentlefolk, anyways, seemed to know as how Lottie had come honestly by that money; though ’twas a pity, it was, that she made such a mystery about it.”
In the afternoon the unwelcome step of Mrs. Green was heard on the stair. It was her third visit on that day to the widow’s little room, as she had twice before bustled up “just to see if she could do nothing for the poor soul,” as she said, but in reality to pick up scraps of gossip to retail to the baker’s sisters and the linen-draper’s wife. This time, however, Mrs. Green came up eager to impart news rather than to hear it. Unceremoniously seating herself in the darkened room of sorrow in which were the newly-made widow and her fatherless girl, she said to Lottie, who was preparing the simple afternoon meal, “I say, Lottie Stone, I think that there new house at Wildwaste is somehow bewitched! Here’s you a-running away from it, you can’t or you won’t say why; and now there’s its own master suddenly disappeared, and no one knows what’s become of him.”
“Disappeared!” echoed Lottie, in surprise.
“Ay; no one’s seen nothing of him since last night, and all Wildwaste’s in a commotion. He’d been to bed, too, that was clear; and no one saw him leave the house in the morning; and Hannah says that she could take her oath that the chain was up on the house-door when she went to it at seven. But Mr. Gritton’s not in the Lodge; it’s been searched from top to bottom.”
“He’s been lost in the bog—like that miserable Dan Ford,” said Deborah, gloomily.
“No, not that,” replied Mrs. Green; “the bog’s not in a dangerous state just now; we’ve had so much hot sunshine, that you might ride a horse across the common from one end to the other.”
“Is my dear lady much frightened about her brother?” asked Lottie, who had been listening with breathless interest.
“Not half so much frightened as one might expect, Hannah says; nor half so much surprised at his disappearing. It seems as if she’d a notion where he has gone, though she does not choose to tell what she knows. But Miss Gritton ain’t very well, they says; depend on’t, she’s in for the fever. There’s nothing in the world so catching as small-pox.”