A long intimacy with affliction will very frequently be found to impress even a religiously-disposed mind with a strong tinge of fatalism. The apparent hopelessness of all effort to avert calamity, or stem the tide of evil fortune, often suggests, as its last consolation, the notion of a predetermined destiny, to which we are bound to submit with patient trustfulness; a temperament of great humility aids this conviction. Both of these conditions were Nelly's; she had “supped sorrow” from her cradle, while her estimate of herself was the very lowest possible. “I suppose it is so,” said she again; “all is for the best.”
She already pictured to herself the new spring this change of fortune would impart to her father's life: with what delight he would read the letters from his children; how he would once more, through them, taste of that world whose pleasures he was so fondly attached to. “I never could have yielded him a gratification like this,” said Nelly, as the tears rose in her eyes. “I am but the image of our fallen fortunes, and in me, 'poor lame Nelly,' he can but see reflected our ruined lot. All is for the best it must be so!” sighed she, heavily; and just as the words escaped, her father, with noiseless step, entered the chamber.
“To be sure it is, Nelly darling,” said he, as he sat down near her, “and glad I am that you 've come to reason at last. 'T is plain enough this is n't the way the Daltons ought to be passing their life, in a little hole of a place, without society or acquaintance of any kind. You and I may bear it, not but it's mighty hard upon me sometimes, too, but Kate there just look at her and say, is it a girl like that should be wasting away her youth in a dreary village? Lady Hester tells me and sure nobody should know better that there never was the time in the world when real beauty had the same chance as now, and I 'd like to see the girl that could stand beside her. Do you know, Nelly,” here he drew closer, so as to speak in a whisper, “do you know, that I do be fancying the strangest things might happen to us yet, that Frank might be a great general, and Kate married to God knows what sort of a grandee, with money enough to redeem Mount Dalton, and lay my old bones in the churchyard with my ancestors? I can't get it out of my head but it will come about, somehow. What do you think yourself?”
“I'm but an indifferent castle-builder, papa,” said she, laughing softly. “I rarely attempt anything beyond a peasant hut or a shealing.”
“And nobody could make the one or the other more neat and comfortable, that I 'll say for you, Nelly. It would have a look of home about it before you were a day under the roof.”
The young girl blushed deeply; for, humble as the praise might have sounded to other ears, to hers it was the most touching she could have listened to.
“I 'm not flattering you a bit. 'T is your own mother you take after; you might put her down in the bleakest spot of Ireland, and 't is a garden she 'd make it. Let her stop for shelter in a cabin, and before the shower was over you 'd not know the place. It would be all swept and clean, and the dishes ranged neatly on the dresser; and the pig she could n't abide a pig turned out, and the hens driven into the cowshed, and the children's faces washed, and their hair combed, and, maybe, the little gossoon of five years old upon her knee, saying his 'Hail, Mary,' or his 'A B C,' while she was teaching his mother how to wind the thread off the wheel; for she could spin a hank of yarn as well as any cottier's wife in the townland. The kind creature she was! But she never had a taste for real diversion; it always made her low-spirited and sad.”
“Perhaps the pleasures you speak of were too dearly purchased, papa,” said Nelly.
“Indeed, maybe they were,” said he, dubiously, and as though the thought had now occurred for the first time; “and, now that you say it, I begin to believe it was that same that might have fretted her. The way she was brought up made her think so, too. That brother was always talking about wastefulness, and extravagance, and so on; and, if it was in her nature, he 'd have made her as stingy as himself; and look what it comes to after all. We spent it when we had it, the Daltons are a good warrant for that; and there was he grubbing and grabbing all his days, to leave it after him to a rich man, that does n't know whether he has so many thousands more or not.”
Nelly made no reply, not wishing to encourage, by the slightest apparent interest, the continuance on the theme which invariably suggested her father's gloomiest reveries.