"Thank God! That I forgave her!" she exclaimed, "thank God!"
Well indeed might she thank the Divine bestower of all forgiveness. The legacy was not after all a large one. Mrs. Brown's annuity died with her; she left little more money than buried her decently; the ground lease of the house in which she had originally resided was almost out, and the bequest was in reality limited to the present abode of Rachel; but invaluable to her indeed, was the shelter of that humble home, now her own for ever.
And when all was over; when the grave had closed on one, who not being at peace herself, could not give peace to others, when Rachel and her father remained alone in the little house, now hushed and silenced from all rude and jarring sounds, safe from all tyrannical interference, Rachel felt, with secret thankfulness, that if her lot was not happy, according to human weakness, it was blest with peace and quiet, and all the good that from them spring. If a cloud still lingered over it, it was only because, looking at her father, she remembered the unfulfilled desire of her heart; and if on days otherwise now marked with peace, there sometimes fell the darkness of a passing shadow, it was only when she saw and felt too keenly the sorrows of others.
CHAPTER XIX.
Richard Jones still hoped: "Mary was so young!" He would hope. But it was not to be; he had but tasted the cup of his sorrows; to the dregs was he to drink it; the earthly idol on which he had set his heart was to be snatched from him; he was to waken one day to the bitter knowledge: "there is no hope!"
How he felt we know not, and cannot tell: none have a right to describe that grief save they who have passed through it; we dare not unveil the father's heart: we deal but with the external aspect of things, and sad and bitter enough it was.
In a silent shop, where the sugar seemed to shrink away in the casks, where the tea-chests looked hollow, where dust gathered on the counter, on the shelves, in the corners, everywhere; where all looked blasted and withered by the deadly upas tree opposite, you might have seen a haggard man who stood there day after day, waiting for customers that came not, and who from behind his shop windows drearily watched the opposite shop, always full; thriving, fattening on his ruin; or who, sadder sight to his eyes and heart, looked at the little back parlour, where on her sick bed his dying daughter lay.
Mary, as her illness drew towards its close, became fanciful, she insisted on having her bed brought down to the back parlour, and would leave her door open, "in order to mind the shop," she said. If anything could hasten her father's ruin, this did it: the few customers whom he had left, gradually dropped off, scared away by that sick girl, looking at them with her eager, glittering eyes.
He sat by her one evening in a sad and very bitter mood. She was ill, very ill, and for three days not a soul had crossed the threshold of his shop. His love and his ambition were passing away together from his life.
"Father," querulously said Mary, "why did you shut the shop so early?" For since her illness the young girl's mind was always running on the shop.