Run to Earth: A Novel

by M. E. Braddon

The time had passed slowly and wearily for Rosamond Jernam, and all the efforts conscientiously made by her husband's aunt, who liked the girl better the more she saw of her, and entirely acquitted her of blame in the mysterious estrangement of the young couple, failed to make her cheerful. She was wont to roam disconsolately for hours about the secluded coast, giving free course to her sadness, and cherishing one dear secret. Rosamond was so much changed in appearance of late that Susan Jernam began to feel seriously uneasy about her. She had lost her pretty fresh colour, and her face wore a haggard, weary look; it was plain to every eye that some hidden grief was preying on her mind. Mrs. Jernam, though a quiet person, and given to the minding of her own affairs, was not quite without "cronies," and to one of these she confided her anxiety about her niece. The confidante was a certain Mrs. Miller, a respectable person, but lower in the social scale than Mrs. Jernam. She was a widow, and lived in a tiny cottage, close to the beach at Allanbay; she kept no servant, but her trim little dwelling was always the very pink and pattern of neatness. She was of a silent, though not a morose temperament. It was generally understood that Mrs. Miller's husband had been a seafaring man, and had been drowned many years before she went to live at Allanbay. She had no relatives, and no previous acquaintances in that quiet nook; and if she had been a little higher in the social scale, belonging to that class which requires introductions, she might have lived a life of unbroken solitude. As it was, the neighbours made friends with her by degrees, and the poor widow's life was not an unhappy or solitary one. Mrs. Jernam had early learned the particulars of her case, and a friendship had grown up between them, of which Mrs. Miller duly acknowledged the condescension on Mrs. Jernam's part.

Mrs. Jernam called on her humble friend one day, to bestow some small favour, and, to her surprise, found her, not alone as usual, but in the act of taking leave of a man whose appearance was by no means prepossessing, and who was apparently very much disconcerted by Mrs. Jernam's arrival. Mrs. Jernam immediately proposed to go away and return on another occasion, but the man, who did not hear her name mentioned, said, gruffly:

"No call, ma'am, no call; I'm going away. Good-bye, Polly. Remember what you've got to do, and do it." Then he turned off from the cottage-door, and was out of sight in a few moments.

Mrs. Miller stood looking at her guest, rather awkwardly, but said at length:

"Pray sit down, ma'am. That's my brother; the only creature I have belonging to me in the world." And here Mrs. Miller sighed, and looked as if the possession were not an unqualified advantage.

"Has he been here long?" asked Mrs. Jernam.

"No, ma'am; he only came last night, and is gone again. He came to bring me a child to take care of, and a great tax it is."

"A child!" said Mrs. Jernam, "whose child?"

"That's more than I can tell you, ma'am," replied Mrs. Miller; "and more than he told me. She's an orphan, he says, and her father was a seafaring man, like your nephew, as I've heard you speak of. And I'm to have the charge of her for a year, and thirty pounds—it's handsome, I don't deny, but he knows that I'd take good care of any child—and she's a pretty dear, to tell the truth, as sweet a little creature as ever walked. She don't talk very plain yet, and she says, as well as I can make it out, as her name is Gerty."

And then Mrs. Miller asked Mrs. Jernam to walk into her little bedroom, and showed her, lying on a neat humble bed, carefully covered with a white coverlet, and in the deep sleep of childhood, the infant heiress of Raynham! If either of the women had only known at whom she was looking, as they scrutinized the child's fair face and talked of her beauty and her innocence in tearful whispers, looking away from the sleeping form, pitifully, at a little heap of black clothes on a chair by the bed!