“Come here, Nan, and kiss your mother,” said Mrs. Richmond suddenly.
The child, overawed by the entire scene, advanced. She pressed her lips to the lips growing colder moment by moment.
“And now leave the room,” said Mrs. Richmond. “Go—obey me.”
Nan went.
CHAPTER II.—“I WON’T EVER GO TO YOU.”
But she only went as far as the landing; there she crouched down in a corner and waited. She did not know what she feared, nor exactly what was going to happen; it seemed to her that there was a great darkness everywhere, and that it pressed her round and shut away the light.
The outward circumstances of Nan Esterleigh’s life had never been too bright, but all the same she had been a happy little girl; she had been petted and fussed about and loved, and her battered doll, Sophia Maria, had been the greatest imaginable comfort to her. She was quite accustomed to scanty meals and poor rooms and cross landladies. She was, alas! too, poor little girl, thoroughly accustomed to her mother’s state of miserable health. Mother had been often as bad before. Ever since Nan could remember, her mother had ached and shivered and moaned with pain; she had spent restless nights, and had stayed in bed to breakfast, and had struggled against the illness which crept on her more and more day by day. Nan in her heart of hearts supposed that very few people were well; she thought children enjoyed good health as a rule, and that grown people had illness. It was the law of life, she supposed. Now and then she confided her thoughts to Sophia Maria.
“My darling,” she used to say, “you must be as happy as you can while you are young, because there is no chance at all when you are grown-up. You will have pains then, Maria, and aches, and you will grow old, and you won’t have any strength. I’ll be the same; there’ll be two of us to keep each other company—that is one comfort.”
Now she crouched in the corner, feeling a little more depressed and a little more anxious than usual, but not really alarmed or stricken or subdued. She wondered, however, what her mother meant by the curious words she had spoken, with long pauses between, to Mrs. Richmond. They certainly pointed to a future for Nan herself; she was to go somewhere, and if all was not well she was at the end of a year to go somewhere else.
“But I am not going to leave my own mother,” thought the little girl. “Oh dear! oh dear! I know now why I am lonely; I want my poor darling Sophia.”