What a cheerless, wretched afternoon! Rain, rain, go to Spain! What matter? Home is home, be it ever so homely,—and the Stone House is anything but that, I am told—for I have never been within it. Mrs. Pevensey’s first call was during my illness. How fresh and blooming she looked! I had heard of her numerous family, but not of her personal appearance—she did not visit any one I then knew, and I was unprepared for her sweet face and charming manners. She seemed to enter like a stream of sunshine, or like Una into the dark cottage of Abbessa. How kind, how good she was!—she thought she could never do enough for me.
And now she is ill herself—crippled, shattered perhaps for life, though comparatively restored; as motionless, I am told, as a figure on an altar-tomb. Sad, sad!
But she is not in pain, and her mind is as cheerful and alert as ever; and the little girls will hang over her with warm kisses; and the baby, whom she cannot take in her arms, will leap and crow, and be held to her; and the faithful family servants will receive her in a flutter of sympathy, and hover about her with tender concern.
——I feel very lonely to-night. How quickly the day closed in! and how cheerless the rain sounds against the window-panes! The fire lights up with fitful gleams the picture on the opposite wall, and the footstool worked by Eugenia.
I remember, when we first went to Nutfield, Eugenia and I sallied out, one bright morning, with a basket, trowel, and old kitchen knife, to take up some of the pretty purple heath on the common for our flower-borders. We had not counted the cost. Snap went the thin old knife! Then we tugged and tugged at the tough stems with our hands, to the great injury of our gloves, and plunged at the roots with the trowel. But there seemed no end to those fibres and their ramifications underground—they spread interlaced and interwove in every direction:—and so, I think, must Mrs. Pevensey’s social affections:—while I am like a flower in a pot.
Here is Christmas close at hand, and Emily Prout is looking forward to the speedy arrival of the holidays. Harry is expected to-morrow. He will return to a humble, but happy home,—all the better able to value it for having been away from his family for some months.
I have no prospect of any other than a lonely, and perhaps a dull Christmas; and I am shut up, I fear me, for the winter. I cannot walk; the donkey-chair is unsafe for me, now that the weather is so cold; and I cannot afford a close carriage. But I will endeavour to raise my thoughts from things terrestrial to things celestial—from Christmas feasting to Him whose birthday feast it is:—
“Not more than others I deserve,
Yet God hath given me more.”