“Susan thought it best not to tell her. We used to hear her murmuring his name among all ours in her prayers, Susie, Sam, Hal, Bessie, and so on; but she never was herself enough to understand, and they thought it might only stir her up to expect to see him. Oh, Aunt Lily, I don’t think you—any of you—would have gone on so; but you are all much more affectionate and demonstrative than our branch of the family.”
“Ah, my dear, I am sure there was a pang in your mother’s heart that she never durst mention,” said Lady Merrifield, her imagination dwelling in terror on her Wilfred, the one child in whom she could not help detecting the weakness of character of his unhappy cousin. “Depend upon it, Bessie, her prayers were hovering round him all the time, and bringing that act of restitution, though she was not allowed to hear of it.”
“I had not thought of that,” said Bessie, in a low tone, “though I think David has. I have heard his voice choke over an intercession for the absent.”
“Think of it now, my dear, and do not let habitual reserve hinder you from speaking of it to Susan and David, though most likely they have the habit already. Who knows what united prayer may do with Him who deviseth means to bring home His banished?”
Steps returning, Bessie wiped away her tears in haste, actually the first she had shed for the lost Hal, though there was a heartache too deep for tears.
CHAPTER XVI—THE REGIMENT OF WOMEN
“And happier than the merriest games
Is the joy of our new and nobler aims.”F. R. Havergal.
Miss Mohun and Miss Merrifield encountered Miss Prescott and Agatha among a perfect herd of cycles, making Bessie laugh over the recollections of the horror caused at Stokesley by the arrival of Arthurine Arthuret on a tricycle twelve years previously.
The place was the Town Hall, the High School having proved too small for the number of the intended audience, and Lord Rotherwood having been captured, in spite of the Kittiwake being pronounced ready to sail, and all the younger passengers being actually on board, entertaining a party from Clipstone. There he sat enthroned on the platform, with portraits of himself, his Elizabethan ancestor, and the Prince of Wales overhead, and, in propria persona on either side, the Mayor of Rockstone, Captain Henderson, and a sprinkling of the committee, Jane, of course, being one; while in the space beneath was a sea of hats, more or less beflowered and befeathered.
Lord Rotherwood began by complaining of an act of piracy! After being exposed to a tempest and forced to put in for supplies, here he was captured, and called upon to distribute prizes! He perceived that it was a new act of aggression on the part of the ladies, proving to what lengths they were coming. Tyrants they had always been, but to find them wreckers to boot was a novelty. However, prizes were the natural sequence of a maritime exploit, and he was happy to distribute them to the maidens about to start on the voyage of life, hoping that these dainty logbooks would prove a stimulus and a compass to steer by even into unexplored seas, such as he believed the better-informed ladies were about to describe to them.