“How you sleep, child! I have been awake all night, expecting every moment that we should be blown away. It does not seem possible that the house can stand against this dreadful wind much longer.”
“It is much stronger now than when we came, mother dear,” said Sophy; “it must have fallen long ago if the wind could blow it down. Go to bed again, mother, and I will bring your tea and take baby, and you shall rest.”
Mrs Morely had no choice but to lay down again. She was trembling with cold and nervous excitement, quite unable to sit up; and again Sophy was left to the guidance of their affairs, both within and without the house. This was a less easy matter to-day, for the boys were growing weary of being confined to the house, and the little ones were fretful, and it needed all their sister’s skill and patience to keep them amused and happy.
She did her very best. The daily reading of the Testament was lengthened out by questions and little stories, and then they sang the sweet Sabbath-school hymns, which tell the praises of Him who came to save sinners; and who in the greatness of His love died on the cross, that all who believe in Him might have everlasting life. So she kept them quiet while the weary mother sought a little rest: and thus the day wore on.
But all through the reading and the singing and the talk, a vague fear kept crossing the little girl’s mind. What if the things so confidently expected from the village should not come? Their little store of food was diminishing rapidly. What if their father had forgotten them? What if there was nothing awaiting them in the village? Oh, that was too dreadful to be thought of! But if there was food in the village for them, how was it to be brought to them through the drifted snow?
She eagerly watched the window for some sign that the storm was abating. The snow that had seemed so beautiful at first filled her with a vague fear now; it no longer fell softly and silently; the wind bore it by in whirling masses, that hid the river and the pond and the changing sky, and then laid it down in the valleys and on the hill-sides, to lie there, Sophy knew, till April showers and sunshine should come to melt it away. It was vain to look for any one coming with the expected food. Except now and then in a momentary lull of the storm it was quite impossible to see a rod beyond the window, and these glimpses only served to show that they were, on one side at least, quite shut in by a mountainous drift.
Yes, Sophy began to be quite afraid of the snow; tales that she had heard during her summer visits to the mountains came to her mind—how in a single night the valleys would be filled, and how whole flocks of sheep, and sometimes an unwary shepherd, had perished beneath it. She remembered how her grandfather had showed her a cottage where a mother and her children had been quite shut in for two nights and a day, till the neighbours had come to dig them out; and how a lad who had gone out for help before the storm was over had never come home again, but perished on the moor, and how they only found him in the spring time, when the snow melted and showed his dead face turned towards the sky. These things quite appalled her when she thought of venturing out in the storm.
The little store of meal held out wonderfully; the bread was put aside for her mother—hidden, indeed, that no little brother, hungry and adventurous, might find it. That night the storm abated, but towards morning it grew bitterly cold, so cold that the little lads in their thin garments could not venture out to play at making roads in the snow, and they had to submit to another day’s confinement. They went out a little towards afternoon, and came in again merry and hungry, and by no means satisfied with the scanty supper which their sister had prepared for them.