It was late when Rachel reached home. She found her step-mother sitting up for her, rigid, amazed y indignant—so indignant, indeed, that though she rated Rachel soundly for her audacity in presuming to stay out so long without previous leave obtained, she quite forgot to inquire particularly why she had not come home earlier. A series of disasters had been occasioned by Rachel's absence; Jane and Mary had quarrelled, Mrs. Gray had been kept an hour waiting for her supper, the beer had naturally become flat and worthless, and whilst Mrs. Gray was sleeping—and how could she help sleeping, being quite faint and exhausted with her long vigil—puss had got up on the table and walked off with Rachel's polony.
There was a touch of quiet humour in Rachel, and with a demure smile, she internally wondered why it was precisely her polony that had been selected by puss, but aloud she merely declared that she could make an excellent supper on bread and beer. Mrs. Gray, who held the reins of domestic management in their little household, assured her that she had better, for that nothing else was she going to get; she sat down heroically determined to eat the whole of her polony in order to punish and provoke her step-daughter; but somehow or other the half of that dainty had, before the end of the meal, found its way to the plate of Rachel, who, when she protested against this act of generosity, was imperiously ordered to hold her tongue, which order she did not dare to resist; for if Mrs. Gray's heart was mellow, her temper was sufficiently tart.
The apprentices had long been gone to bed; as soon as supper was over,
Mrs. Gray intimated to Rachel the propriety of following their example.
Rachel ventured to demur meekly.
"I cannot, mother—I have work to finish."
"Then better have sat at home and finished it, than have gone gadding about, and nearly got a pitch plaster on your mouth," grumbled Mrs. Gray, who was a firm believer in pitch plasters, and abductions, and highway robberies, and all sorts of horrors. "Mind you don't set the house a fire," she added, retiring.
"Why, mother," said Rachel, smiling, "you treat me like a child, and I am twenty-six."
"What about that? when you aint got no more sense than a baby."
Rachel did not venture to dispute, a proposition so distinctly stated. She remained up, and sat sewing until her work was finished; she then took out from some secret repository a small end of candle, lit it, and extinguished the long candle, by the light of which she had been working. From her pocket she took a small key; it opened a work-box, whence she drew a shirt collar finely stitched; she worked until her eyes ached, but she heeded it not, until they closed with involuntary fatigue and sleep, and still she would not obey the voice of wearied nature; still she stitched for love, like the poor shirtmaker for bread, until, without previous warning, her candle end suddenly flickered, then expired in its socket, and left her in darkness. Rachel gently opened the window, and partly unclosed the shutter; the moon was riding in the sky above the old house opposite, her pale clear light glided over its brown walls and the quiet street, down into the silent parlour of Rachel. She looked around her, moved at seeing familiar objects under an unusual aspect. In that old chair she had often seen her father sitting; on such a moonlight night as this she and Jane, then already declining, had sat by the window, and looking at that same sky, had talked with youthful fervour of high and eternal things. And now Jane knew the divine secrets she had guessed from afar, and Thomas Gray, alas! was a stranger and an alien in his own home.
"Who knows," thought Rachel, "but he will return some day? Who knows— who can tell? Life is long, and hope is eternal. Ah! if he should come back, even though he never looked at me, never spoke, blessed, thrice blessed, should ever be held the day…" And a prayer, not framed in words, but in deep feelings, gushed like a pure spring from her inmost heart. But, indeed, when did she not pray? When was God divided from her thoughts? When did prayer fail to prompt the kind, gentle words that fell from her lips, or to lend its daily grace to a pure and blameless life?
For to her, God was not what He, alas! is to so many—an unapproachable Deity, to be worshipped from afar, in fear and trembling, or a cold though sublime abstraction. No, Jesus was her friend, her counsellor, her refuge. There was familiarity and tenderness in her very love for Him; and, though she scarcely knew it herself, a deep and fervent sense of His divine humanity of those thirty-three years of earthly life, of toil, of poverty, of trouble, and of sorrow which move our very hearts within us, when we look from Bethlehem to Calvary, from the lowly birth in the Manger to the bitter death on the Cross.