"The Lord has taught you," murmured Rachel, bending over the flowers with something like awe, and a glow spread over her sallow cheek, and there came a light to her large brown eyes.
Of the two apprentices—one a sickly, fretful girl of sixteen, heard her not; she went on sewing, and the very way in which she drew her needle and thread was peevish. The other apprentice did hear Rachel, and she looked, or rather stared at the dress-maker, with grim wonder. Indeed, there was something particularly grim about this young maiden—a drear stolidity that defies describing. A pure Saxon she was—no infusion of Celtic, or Danish, or Norman blood had lightened the native weight of her nature. She was young, yet she already went through life settling everything, and living in a moral tower of most uninviting aspect. But though Jane settled everything, she did not profess to understand everything; and when, as happened every now and then, Rachel Gray came out with such remarks as that above recorded, Jane felt confounded. "She couldn't make out Miss Gray—that she couldn't."
"I'm so tired!" peevishly said Mary, the fretful apprentice.
At once Rachel kindly observed: "Put by your work, dear."
Again Mrs. Gray snuffed, and came out with: "Lawk! she's always grummy!"
Mary tossed away her work, folded her arms, and looked sullen. Jane, the grim apprentice, drew her needle and thread twice as fast as before. "Thank Heaven!" she piously thought, "I am not lazy, nor sickly, and I can't see much difference between the two—that I can't."
Rachel's work lay in her lap; she sat looking at the crocuses until she fell in a dream far in the past.
For the past is our realm, free to all, high or low, who wish to dwell in it. There we may set aside the bitterness and the sorrow; there we may choose none but the pleasing visions, the bright, sunny spots where it is sweet to linger. The Future, fair as Hope may make it, is a dream, we claim it in vain. The Present, harsh or delightful, must be endured, yet it flies from us before we can say "it is gone." But the Past is ours to call up at our will. It is vivid and distinct as truth. In good and in evil, it is irrevocable; the divine seal has been set upon it for evermore.
In that Book—a pure and holy one was hers—though not without a few dark and sad pages—Rachel Gray often read. And now, the sight of the yellow flower of spring took her back, to a happy day of her childhood. She saw herself a little girl again, with her younger sister Jane, and the whole school to which they belonged, out on a holiday treat in a green forest. Near that forest there was a breezy field; and there it was that Rachel first saw the yellow crocuses bloom. She remembered her joy, her delight at the wonderful beauty of the wild field flowers—how she and Jane heaped their laps with them, and sat down at the task; and how, when tired with the pleasant labour, they rested, as many yellow crocuses as before seemed to blow and play in the breeze around them. And she remembered, too, how, even then, there passed across her childish mind, a silent wonder at their multitude, an undefined awe for the power of the Almighty Hand who made the little flower, and bade it bloom in the green fields, beneath the misty azure of a soft spring sky.
And then swiftly followed other thoughts. Where was little, blue-eyed Jane, her younger sister, her little companion and friend? Sleeping in a London grave, far from the pleasant and sunny spots where God's wild flowers bloom. And she—why she was pursuing her path in life, doing the will of God Almighty.