Chapter Fourteen.
New friends.
The house seemed very quiet after Mrs Seaton went away. For that day and the next, Christie and her little charge were left to the solitude of the green room and the garden. Miss Gertrude and Clement had gone to visit their aunt, and not knowing when they might return, Christie was beginning to wonder what she should do during the long hours that her little charge slept or amused himself quietly without her. There were no books in the green room—at least, there were none she cared for. In the nursery there were a few story-books for little children—fairy tales, and rhymes, with pictures of giants and dwarfs and little old women, among which Christie recognised some that had been great favourites long ago. But after the first glance she cared no more for them.
On the morning of the third day, when Claude was taking his nap, the time began to hang heavy on her hands. She took her Bible and read a chapter or two, but in spite of herself she grew dull and dreary. The stillness of the house oppressed her. The other servants were busy in a distant apartment. She seemed quite shut in from all the world. Just opposite the window was a large locust-tree, which hid the garden from her; and the only sound that reached her was the murmur of the wind among its branches, and the hum of the bees that now and then rested a moment among the few blossoms that still lingered on them. Her thoughts turned homewards.
“I might write to Effie,” she said to herself. But she was not sufficiently in the mood for it to go to her trunk for her small store of paper and pens; and she sat still, with her head leaning on her hands and her eyes fixed on the swaying leaves, vaguely conscious that the indulgence of her present mood was not the best thing for her.
She was not permitted to indulge it long, however. The little boy stirred and tossed in his crib, and she went to arrange the coverlet over him; and as she was moving listlessly about the room, something glistened in a stray sunbeam and caught her short-sighted eyes, and from the cushions of the great easy-chair, where it had lain since the first day of her coming, she drew the book that Miss Gertrude had been reading when she watched the pretty picture she made as she sat beneath the drooping leaves.
With a cry of delight, she recognised her old favourite, “The Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life.” The very same! though this was glittering in blue and gold, a perfect contrast to the little, brown-covered book, with the title-page lost, which had made Christie forget her bread and her cooling oven on that unhappy day. But the remembrance of the old time and the old favourite came back all the more vividly because of the contrast. The memory of the old times came back. Oh, how long ago it seemed since that summer afternoon when she lay on the grass and read it for the first time! Yet how vividly it all came back! The blue sky, with the white clouds passing over it now and then, the sound of the wind among the low fir-trees, the smell of the hawthorn hedge, the voices of the children in the lane beyond, seemed once more above her and around her. And then the sound of her mother’s gentle chiding, when she found her sitting there after the shadows had grown long, came back. Her voice, her smile, the very gown and cap she wore, and the needlework she carried in her hand, came sensibly before her. Yet how long ago it seemed! Christie remembered how many times she had taken it with her to the fields, when the incompleteness of their fences during the first year of their stay on the farm had made the “herding” of the sheep and cows necessary that the grain might be safe. She had read it in the woods in spring-time, by the firelight in the long winter evenings, and by stealth on Sundays, when the weather had kept her from the kirk. It was associated in her remembrance with many things pleasant and many things sad; and no wonder that for a while she turned over the leaves, catching only here and there a glimpse of the familiar words, because of the tears that hid them.
Sitting on the floor, with the book held close to her face, she read, and forgot all else. The little lad tossed and murmured, and mechanically she put forth her hand and rocked him in his crib; but she neither heard nor saw when the door opened and some one came in.