A little amused laugh was Mrs Dolly’s answer.
“Thou hast not all the sorrows of life in thine own portion, little Phoebe. I have felt it. I do not often now. The journey is too near at an end to fret much over the hard fare or the rough road. When there be only a few days to pass ere you leave school, your mind is more set on the coming holidays than on the length or hardness of the lessons that lie betwixt.”
“I wish I hadn’t to go to Delawarr Court!” sighed Phoebe. “There will be a great parcel of people, and not one I know but Rhoda, and Mrs Gatty, and Mrs Molly; and Rhoda always snubs me when Mrs Molly’s there.”
“Molly is trying,” admitted the old lady. “But I think, dear child, you might make a friend of Gatty.”
“Perhaps,” said Phoebe.
“And, Phoebe, strive against discontent,” said Mrs Dorothy; adding, with a smile, “and call it discontent, and not vapours. There is a great deal in giving names to things. So long as you call your pride self-respect and high spirit, you will reckon yourself much better than you are; and so long as you call your discontent low spirits or vapours, you will reckon yourself worse used than you are. Don’t split on that rock, Phoebe. The worst thing you can do with wounds is to keep pulling off the bandage to see how they are getting on; and the worst thing you can do with griefs and wrongs is to nurse them and brood over them. Carry them to the Lord and show them to Him, and ask His help to bear them or right them, as He chooses; and then forget all about them as fast as you can. Dear old Scots Davie gave me that counsel, and through fifty years I have proved how good it was.”
“You never finished your story, Mrs Dolly,” suggested Phoebe.
“I did not, my dear. Yet there was little to finish. I did but tarry at Court till the great plague-time, when all was broke up, and I went home to nurse my mother, who took the plague and died of it. After that I continued to dwell with my father. For a while after my mother’s death, he was very low and melancholical, saying that God had now met with him and was visiting his old sins upon him. And then, the very next year, came the fire, and we were burned out and left homeless. Then he was worse than ever. ’Twas like the curse pronounced on David, said he, that the sword should never depart from his house: he could never look to know rest nor peace any more; God hated him, and pursued him to the death. No word of mine, though I strove to find many from the Word of God, seemed to bring him any comfort at all. They were not for him, he said, but for them toward whom God had purposes of mercy, and there was none for him. He had sinned against light and knowledge; and God would none of him any more.
“One morning, about a week after the fire, as I was coming back from my marketing to the little mean lodging where we had took shelter, and was just going in at the door, I was sorely started to feel a great warm hand on my shoulder, and a loud, cheery voice saith, ‘Dolly Jennings, whither away so fast thou canst not see an old friend?’ I looked up, and there was dear old Farmer Ingham, in his thick boots and country homespun; but I declare to you, child, that in my trouble his face was to me as that of an angel of God. I brake down, and sobbed aloud. ‘Come, come, now!’ saith he, comfortably; ‘not so bad as that, is it? I’ve been seeking thee these four days, Dolly, child. I knew I could find thee if I came myself, though the Missis said I never should; and I’ve asked at one, and asked at another, and looked up streets and down streets, till this morning I saw a young maid, with her back to me, a-going down an alley; and says I, right out loud, “That’s Dolly’s back, or else I’m a Dutchman!” So I ran after thee, and only just catched thee up. I’m not so lissome as thou; nay, nor so lissome as I was at thy years. However, here I am, and here thou art; so that’s all right. And there’s a good bed and a warm welcome for everyone of you at Ingle Nook’—that was the name of his farm, my dear—‘and I’ve brought up a cart and the old tit to drag it, and we’ll see if we can’t make thee laugh and be rosy again.’ Dear old man! no nay would he take, nor suffer so much as a word from father about our being any cost and trouble to him. ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said he; ‘I’ve got money saved, and the farm’s doing well, and only my two bits of maids to leave it to; and who should I desire to help in this big trouble, if not my own foster-child, and hers?’ So father yielded, and we went down to Ingle Nook.
“Farmer Ingham very soon found what was wrong with father. ‘Eh, poor soul!’ said he to me, ‘he’s the hundredth sheep that’s got lost out on the moor, and he reckons the Shepherd’ll bide warm in the fold with the ninety and nine, and never give a thought to him, poor, starved, straying thing! Dear, dear!—and as if I’d do such a thing, sinner that I am!—as if I could eat a crust in peace till I’d been after my sheep, poor wretch!—and to think the good Lord’d do it!—and the poor thing a-bleating out there, and wanting to get home! Dear, dear! how we poor sinners do wrong the good Lord!’ I said, ‘Won’t you say a word to him, daddy?’ That was what I had always called him, my dear, since I was a little child. ‘Eh, child!’ says he, ‘what canst thou be thinking on? The like of me to preach to a parson, all regular done up, bands and cassock and shovel hat and all! But I’ll tell thee what—there’s Dr Bates a-coming to bide with me a night this next week, on his way from the North into Sussex, and I’ll ask him to edge in a word. He’s a grand man, Dolly! “Silver-tongued Bates.” Thou’lt hear.’