LAURA.
Thou art a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Not framed to undergo unkindly shocks,
Or to be trailed along the soiling earth—
A gem that glitters while it lives.
Margaret was at home. In a little village on the coast of Yorkshire, far from any town, not fashionable even in the season, and somewhat dull at all times, was the cottage to be found which she fondly looked upon as home. The village consisted of one street running up into the land, where butcher and baker and grocer, who all of them sold a medley of articles, displayed their small wares; a collection of fisher-huts on the coast, and some few respectable little houses, whitewashed and green-shuttered, which were only tenanted in the summer months. It was not even a particularly pretty place. Of course there was the sea, the grand wide ocean, stretching its interminable breadths away to the horizon, and it crept up upon yellow sands that were a perfect delight to the eye and to the feet, they were so bright and clean and smooth. But for this the scenery was somewhat monotonous; no mountains or hilly grounds were to be seen far or near, save, indeed, the few sand-cliffs that rose up gradually from the borders of the sea to a vast table-land of moor and meadow, stretching into the distance with scarcely a tree to break the line. A few huge boulders carved by time and water into fantastic shapes, a little scanty herbage on the sandhills, some stunted shrubs and trailing yellow flowers,—these were all that broke the monotony of sea and moor; in fact, it was a desolate place, but its desolation in no way resembled that of a city like London, the dreary monotony of a human desert. It was Nature's desolation, grand and weird, and, to the soul that could understand, full of ever-varied mystery and charm.
The sunrise over the moor when, itself purple with the rich tints of autumn coloring, it blushed into mistlike dreamy splendor; the mellower sunset over the ocean, and after the sunset the pale streaks of horizon-light and the broad ribbons of silvery moonbeams; the black mystery of a winter night, space above, space around, space infinite on every side; the clash and flash of foam-crowned waves shining through the darkness,—these were some of the charms this little seaside village possessed, these were what Margaret had missed in her miserable visit to great, lonely London. She slept at a hotel in York on the first night after leaving town. On the next day, partly by rail, partly by carriage, she reached her own home.
They did not expect her. She wondered plaintively as she drove in the little chaise, hired at the nearest station, along the low road that skirted the sea, whether her little Laura would be pleased to see her again—would have found the time long without her. Laura was not so dear to her mother as she might have been, but she was her only tie to life, the one creature who was dependent on her, to whom she was, in a certain sense, a necessity. In the course of that long drive Margaret began to reproach herself for having loved her child so little. Her heart yearned over the tiny creature whose fate was bound up with her own, fatherless, or worse than fatherless, in the tender dawning of life—mysteries around her that her poor little soul might perhaps already be trying to fathom, and trying in vain; for, as Margaret recalled with a sudden pang, it was not an ordinary child's soul that had looked at her once or twice out of Laura's dark, pensive eye. It was a soul upon which the shadow seemed to have fallen—the shadow that so early falls upon some, chilling their life in its first glad spring. Margaret had shrunk from looking into this mystery; she had answered the inquiring earnestness with which her little daughter had seemed to look into her sadness by sweetmeats, toys and diversions, and the child had gone back upon herself, dreaming her dreams alone.
Perhaps it is little known in the wise, busy world of grown-up people how keen and sensitive are the sympathies and feelings of a child, how easily the little soul can be driven in upon itself, and in some cases, rare it may be, how great the suffering that follows.
Margaret had a vague consciousness of all this, but there was something so bitter in her sadness that it shrank even from the light touch of her child, and then the dark, pensive eyes that sometimes looked so melancholy under their deep fringe veiled a memory—a memory that cut and wounded, and that in some moods she felt herself absolutely powerless to bear. So had another pair of eyes, dark too, and wistful and infinitely sad, looked out at her on a stormy night long ago—the night when her trouble had begun. Long ago—it looked long ago, yet as mortals reckon time perhaps it could only have been said to be short—one, two, three, four, long years. The remembrance of that strange sadness in her little daughter's face had brought Margaret to this again, as what did not? She reckoned the time and marvelled at its flight.
As she pondered the little chaise progressed, with abundant clacking of the whip and plunges forward and vigorous shouts from the boy-driver, and scarcely a corresponding rate of speed, for Middlethorpe was an out-of-the-way village, and no very stately vehicle of the hired species would have been permitted, under some very large gratuity, to explore its wilds. Evening was beginning to fall before the outskirts of the village had been sighted, and between the jolting of the carriage, the energy of the driver and the haunting thoughts that tormented her, Margaret began to feel that any change would be a relief.
Her little cottage was rather out of the village. It lay at some little distance, near the edge of one of the sandhills. When they entered the village she stopped her driver and told him to take on her carpet-bag; she would do the remainder of the way on foot. The boy listened to her directions, nodded his head good-humoredly, and leaving her upon the sands, started off in the direction indicated—to a little white point at some distance reached by a road winding up through the village. Margaret proceeded leisurely along the coast toward a narrow path that led up the cliff to her cottage by a nearer way.
She gazed over the wide sea, for the gray which had been its abiding characteristic through the not very brilliant May day was blushing gradually into golden brightness under the magic touch of sunset, and Margaret paused in the full enjoyment of its rich coloring. Then, with the light still in her eyes, she looked landward on to the sandhills.