Jill: A Flower Girl

by L. T. Meade

Pleasure and he had kept at a distance. The relaxations of existence had never been permitted to him. In short, his life had been all lessons and no play.

Silas was aware of this fact himself, but up to the present he had looked upon it as a good and healthy sign of his soul’s state. His mother had taught him that chastening is the lot of the Christian.

“Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth,” she had said to him so many times, that he whispered it to himself with white lips and a haggard look on his strong face as he bent over her in her coffin.

When his fruit crop failed, and his flowers yielded but poor blooms, he repeated the old text again under his breath, and took comfort from it.

It was a great surprise, therefore, to Silas, when suddenly the old aspect of things altered, and the Lord whom he sincerely loved ceased to chasten. Life was so completely changed to Silas that he scarcely knew himself.

He was going to be married. There was nothing remarkable in the fact in itself—more than one middle-aged woman of the Wesleyan community in his own village would gladly have come to keep house for him. She would, as the expression goes, “make him and mend him.” She would cook for him, and keep his place clean, and spend his money, and be the mother of his children, whom she would bring up in the fear of the Lord.

Silas could have married Eliza Sparkes, or Mary Ann Hatton, or Hannah Martin, and he would have received the congratulations of his friends, and the sincerest good wishes from all quarters, and yet not have been able consciously to say in his heart, “The Lord has ceased to chasten.”

But he was not going to marry a middle-aged woman from the village. He was middle-aged himself, no doubt, nearly forty, but the bride who was soon coming to gladden the old cottage, and vie with the flowers in her beauty, was scarcely more than a child in years.

This wilful, pretty, dainty blossom which he had culled out of the London streets was just the very last wife any one would have expected him to take. She would not be to the taste of the Wesleyans, and he felt that the congratulations and “God speed you” from his friends would be few.

But what mattered these things, when his own heart was singing a psalm of thanksgiving from morning till night, when the flowers in his garden were absolutely riotous in the profusion of their blossoms, when the sun smiled on him, and the dews came at night to refresh him? What did he care for the neighbours, whether they were pleased or not?