“But I do, though,” said Zekiel; “it was enough to break a body’s heart, and she so innocent like. I never was so put to it in my life, to know what to do. There she had gone and tidied up the kitchen, hung the tea-kettle on the fire as well as she knew how, and sat waiting for her gran’mother to ‘wake up,’ as she called it. How could I tell her she was dead? Blast me if I could, to this minute.”
“But you didn’t come away and leave her so?” asked John.
“No,” replied Zekiel, “for a peddler came in, and little rose-bud ran up, glad-like, to see him; then I beckoned him one side, and told him just how it was, and he turned as white as a turnip, and great big tears rolled down his face, as he took little rose-bud up in his arms and kissed her. Then he told me he was a kind of a relation like, and poor, but that he would take the child and do the best he could by her; and I knew he must be clever, for children are powerful ’cute, and never take to cranky folks, any how—and so I left them, and came blubbering into town. I vow it was enough to make the very stones cry, to see little rose-bud take on so, after the old lady.”
There was no litigious will to be read, no costly effects to quarrel about, in Lucy Ford’s poor cottage, and yet Golconda’s mines were all too poor to buy the priceless treasures to which the peddler fell heir—Mary’s picture and Mary’s child!
With such talismans, what should he fear? what could he not accomplish? He no longer walked with his head bowed upon his breast. The pure love of that sinless little one restored his long-lost self-respect. Life was dear to him. His eye regained its luster; his step its firmness. Even his humble calling, now more than ever necessary, became to him dignified and attractive. Fanny should have an education worthy of Mary’s child. For the present, till he had amassed a little capital, he must find her a home in some quiet farmer’s family, where he could oversee her, in his occasional visits.
Dear little Fanny! with her smiles and tears, she had already twined herself round every fiber of his heart. “Cousin John,” as the peddler taught her to call him, “was to take care of her always, and she was to love him dearly—dearly—better than any body, but mamma and grandma.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
Ah! there is Mrs. Quip’s head, poked out of the north chamber window. A sure sign that it is five o’clock to the minute. Now she scuds across the yard, making a prodigious flutter with her flying calico long-short, among the hens and chickens, who take refuge in an upturned old barrel. Snatching some sticks from the wood-pile, she scuds back again to the kitchen, twitches a match from the mantel, lights the fire, hangs on the tea-kettle, jerks out the table, rattles on the cups and saucers, plates, knives, forks, etc., and throws open every blind, door, and window. This done, she flies up stairs, pokes Susan in the ribs, drags Mary out on the floor, throws a mug of water in “that lazy John’s face,” and intimates that “breakfast will be on the table in less than fifteen minutes.”