“And who, think you, is the admirable helpmate my scape-grace has had the saving good luck to find? A daughter of the worthy man who undertook the care of poor Dr. Lloyd’s orphans,—the orphans who owed so much to your generous exertions to secure a provision for them; and that child, now just risen from her father’s grave, is my pet companion, my darling ewe lamb,—Dr. Lloyd’s daughter Amy.”
Here the child joined us, quickening her pace as she recognized the old man, and nestling to his side as she glanced wistfully towards myself. A winning, candid, lovable child’s face, somewhat melancholy, somewhat more thoughtful than is common to the face of childhood, but calm, intelligent, and ineffably mild. Presently she stole from the old man, and put her hand in mine.
“Are you not the kind gentleman who came to see him that night when he passed away from us, and who, they all say at home, was so good to my brothers and me? Yes, I recollect you now.” And she put her pure face to mine, wooing me to kiss it.
I kind! I good! I—I! Alas! she little knew, little guessed, the wrathful imprecation her father had bequeathed to me that fatal night!
I did not dare to kiss Dr. Lloyd’s orphan daughter, but my tears fell over her hand. She took them as signs of pity, and, in her infant thankfulness, silently kissed me.
“Oh, my friend!” I murmured to Faber, “I have much that I yearn to say to you—alone—alone! Come to my house with me, be at least my guest as long as you stay in this town.”
“Willingly,” said Faber, looking at me more intently than he had done before, and with the true eye of the practised Healer, at once soft and penetrating.
He rose, took my arm, and whispering a word in the ear of the little girl, she went on before us, turning her head, as she gained the gate, for another look at her father’s grave. As we walked to my house, Julius Faber spoke to me much of this child. Her brothers were all at school; she was greatly attached to his nephew’s wife; she had become yet more attached to Faber himself, though on so short an acquaintance; it had been settled that she was to accompany the emigrants to Australia.
“There,” said he, “the sum, that some munificent, but unknown friend of her father has settled on her, will provide her no mean dower for a colonist’s wife, when the time comes for her to bring a blessing to some other hearth than ours.” He went on to say that she had wished to accompany him to L——, in order to visit her father’s grave before crossing the wide seas; “and she has taken such fond care of me all the way, that you might fancy I were the child of the two. I come back to this town, partly to dispose of a few poor houses in it which still belong to me, principally to bid you farewell before quitting the Old World, no doubt forever. So, on arriving to-day, I left Amy by herself in the churchyard while I went to your house, but you were from home. And now I must congratulate you on the reputation you have so rapidly acquired, which has even surpassed my predictions.”
“You are aware,” said I, falteringly, “of the extraordinary charge from which that part of my reputation dearest to all men has just emerged!”