The heath, shrouded in gray mist, lay desolate and comfortless before their eyes.
The youngest at her breast, the two other children crying near her, she stepped into the vehicle which was to lead her towards her new fate, which, alas! seemed so dark.
When they drove out of the gate, the cold winds from the heath whipped their faces with icy scourges. Then the little one, who for so long had been lying peaceful and quiet, began to cry bitterly. She wrapped him closer in her cloak and bent down low over the shivering little form, in order to hide the tears, which were streaming down her cheeks incessantly.
After half an hour’s drive over the heavy rain-soaked clay roads, they reached their destination. She could have shrieked aloud when she saw the new house before her in all its desolation and ruin.
Wretched mud farm-buildings; a swampy yard; a low dwelling-house with a shingle roof, from the walls of which the chalk had crumbled down and showed the bare wall underneath; a wilderness of a garden, in which the last sad remains of the summer asters and sunflowers stood among half-decayed vegetables, round about a gaudy painted fence, which seemed to have received extreme unction just before its end—this was the place where the family of the ruined squire had to live henceforth.
This was the place where little Paul grew up, and to which the love of his childhood, the care of half his life was devoted.
He was in his early years a delicate, sickly creature, and many a night his mother trembled lest the feeble light of his life should be extinguished before dawn. At such times she would sit in the dark, low bedroom, leaning her elbow on the edge of his little bed, gazing with feverish eyes at his little thin body, which was painfully convulsed by spasms.
But he passed all the crises of his early childhood, and at five years old, though pale and weak of limb and almost careworn in face—for he had really retained the old look—he was a healthy boy, who gave promise of long life.
At this time his first recollections begin. The earliest, which in after-years he often recalled, was as follows:
The room is half dark. Icicles are clinging to the windows, and through the curtains shines the red glow of the sunset. The elder brothers have gone skating, but he is in his little bed—for he has to go to bed early—and near him sits his mother, one hand encircling his neck, and the other on the edge of the cradle, in which the two little sisters sleep, which Master Stork brought a year ago, both on the same day.