CHAPTER VIII
SORROW'S CROWN OF SORROW
Occasionally they went down to the warehouse, and while Chilian was busy some of the captains or mates would speak to her. They knew about her father and one sad fact she did not know. For she had settled in her mind that Captain Corwin would bring him back and that it would take a long, long while. So she tried to be content and if not teasing or fretting was one of the ways of being good, she tried her utmost to keep to that. She was too brave to tell falsehoods to shield herself from any inadvertent wrongdoing, even if Cousin Elizabeth did sometimes say:
"You ought to be soundly whipped. To spare the rod is to spoil the child."
She thought if anybody ever did whip her she should hate him all the rest of her life. Servants and workmen were beaten in India, and it seemed degrading. She did not know that Cousin Chilian had insisted that she should never be struck. He was understanding more every day how her father had loved her, and finding sweet traits in her unfolding.
She liked these rough bronzed men to touch their odd hats to her and call her Missy. Some of them had seen her in Calcutta and knew her father. And when she said, "It takes a long, long while to go there and come back, but when Captain Corwin brings him he is going to live here and will never go to sea any more"—"No, that he never will, missy;" and the sailor drew his hand across his eyes.
Oh, how full the wharves were with shipping! Flags and pennons waved, and white sails; others, gray with age and weather, flapped in the wind. She liked to see them start out; she always sent a message by them in the full faith of childhood. And there were the fishermen in the cove lower down. Fishing was quite a great business.
Cousin Giles had made his visit and spent two whole days down in the warehouse, when they had not taken her. But she helped Cousin Eunice cut the stems of the sweet garden herbs for drying, and the others for perfumery. There was lavender, the blossoms had been gathered long ago, and sweet marjoram and sweet clover. She always gathered the full-blown rose leaves and sewed them up in little bags and laid them among the household stores. Everything was so fragrant. Cynthia thought she liked it better than sandalwood and the pungent Oriental perfumes.
Then came the autumnal storms, when the vessels hugged the docks securely at anchor. The house was chilly all through and fires were in order. Some two or three miles below there was a wreck of an East Indiaman, and for days fragments floated around. Some lives were lost, and the little girl shuddered over the accounts.
All the foliage began to turn and fall. The late flowers hung their heads. It had been a beautiful autumn, people said to pay up for the late spring.