So little Fred's fate was arranged for him, for a time at least. Betty taught him to weed in the garden, and to water her many precious pots and boxes of slips and seedlings. She took him with her, when she carried home flowers or plants to her customers, and though he seldom spoke, and never unless asked a question, she soon found that he knew his way as well as she did, and that he never made a mistake about a message. So as time went on, he was provided with a little handcart, and became her trusty little messenger. Other people employed him too, so that he earned many a penny, and these he brought home faithfully to Betty.
He had been a very small child for his age, but now he began to grow, and became a tall, slight boy, with, as Betty used to say, "as pretty a face as any lady." Yet many a long day passed, before any one could find out whether he remembered anything that had happened to him before he became "Betty Giles's Fred," as the neighbours called him now.
[CHAPTER IX.]
IN THE NEW HOME.
LET us pay a flying visit to Kelmersdale to see how it fared with "grandma." Mrs. Rayburn has not hitherto appeared in a very amiable light in these pages, yet she was not an altogether bad woman. She had a heart, though it was so overlaid with selfishness that she herself hardly knew that it existed, and she had a conscience, though she made but little use of it.
And now, as she sat alone in her snug room, and ate her comfortable meals, she failed to get the slightest comfort or enjoyment out of any of these things. The faces of the two boys—Frank's gentle smile, Fred's saucy laugh—rose up before her, no matter what she was doing or where she was.
She felt sure now that Janet would write or come to claim her children, though she had so often declared that Janet had deliberately deserted them, and would be heard of no more. Most people believed that the boys had fallen into the Kelmer, and now lay in one of those deep holes, or pools, into which those drowned in that river generally disappeared. But Mrs. Rayburn did not believe this, though she tried to do so. Every horrid story of the oppression of children by chimney-sweeps, travelling tinkers, professional acrobats, and others, came into her head whenever she thought of the two boys; she pictured them to herself as suffering and starved and beaten, overworked and ill-used in every possible way. She had always been fond of stories of horrors, and now she paid for her bad taste, for they supplied her imagination with horrors enough to drive any one mad. Those about her said that Mrs. Rayburn cared for those children far more than any one could have expected, considering that their father was only her stepson, and by no means a creditable one, by her own showing.
So passed the autumn, a few weeks being fine, and then the weather broke, and there were cold, damp days and rainy, windy nights.