CHAPTER LIII.
‘Were my whole life to come one heap of troubles,
The pleasure of this moment would suffice,
And sweeten all my griefs with its remembrance.’
For the twentieth time within the last hour Susan has rushed tumultuously to the window, under the mistaken impression that she has heard the sound of wheels, and for the twentieth time has walked back dejectedly to her seat to the slow accompaniment of her aunt’s voice: ‘Impatience, Susan, never took a second off any hour.’ It sounds like a heading from a copy-book.
But Susan, after each disappointment, feels her spirits rise again, and, with glad delight in her heart, trifles with the work she is pretending to do. Betty and the boys are on the top of the garden wall, and have promised to send her instant tidings of the approach of the carriage. Susan felt she could not watch from there the home-coming of her Bonnie. The workings of the human mind are strange, and Susan, who had climbed many a wall in her time, and still can climb them with the best, shrank with a sort of nervous terror from being up there—on the top of that wall—when he came! She would have to climb down, you see, to meet her little sweetheart, whereas here it will be so easy to run out and catch him to her heart, and ask him if he has forgotten his Susan during all these long, long days.
But truly this sitting indoors is very trying. It would be much better to go to the gate and wait there. Even though those others on the garden wall will have the first glimpse of him, still—at the gate she would have the first kiss. Her father had gone to the station to meet him, but had forbidden the others to go with him. Susan had been somehow glad of this command. But to go to the gate! She had thought of this often, but had somehow recoiled from it through a sense of nervousness; but now it grows too much for her, and flinging down her work, she runs out of the room and up to the gate, and there stands trembling, listening, waiting.
Waiting for what? She hardly knows. Crosby’s letters of late have been very vague. They have scarcely conveyed anything. But that Bonnie is alive is certain, and that is all that Susan dwells on now. God grant he be not worse than when he left her—that he is better there seems no real reason for believing. But still he is coming back to her—her little boy!
And in this fair spring weather too, so closely verging on the warmer summer. That will be good for him. If Mr. Crosby had not taken him away when he did, surely those late winter frosts and colds would have chilled to death the little life left in his precious body.... A perfect passion of gratitude towards Crosby shakes her soul, and brings the tears to her eyes. She will never forget that, never. And though, of course, he has failed in a sense, and her little Bonnie will come back to her as he went—on crutches, that had always hurt so cruelly poor Susan’s heart—still, he has done all he could, and he is to be reverenced and loved for ever because of it. Who else, indeed, would have thought of the delicate child, or——
Oh! what is that?