That was the road which led straight by the cottage door, and Edith’s heart had beaten rapidly as they drew near the turn in the street which would bring the cottage in view, and when at last she saw it, the blood surged swiftly through her heart, and her hands were clasped tightly together as she looked eagerly at what had once been her home. It was not greatly changed, except that it had recently been repainted, while the creeper, which when she lived there had just commenced fastening its little fibrous fingers to the clapboards, now covered two sides of it entirely, and made its present name, Vine Cottage, very appropriate.
There was her old room, and the window was open just as it used to be, and the honeysuckle was framed around it, and an open book was lying in it, together with a child’s work-box. It had had an occupant then, and who, she asked herself, forgetting Mary Rogers, until her eye caught sight of Gertie Westbrooke, whose bouquet of daisies and forget-me-nots fell directly in her lap and seemed a welcome to her. Then she remembered having heard from Godfrey that Mrs. Rogers was to be his tenant, and she knew this child with the bright flowing hair and eager face must be the same whose “God bless you” had been the only “God bless you” given her at her bridal.
“It is very strange,” she thought, “that this little unknown child should always cross my path with flowers and blessings and welcomes;” and she turned her head to look again at the two figures gazing after her.
If a thought that the elder of the two was Ettie Armstrong crossed her mind, I cannot tell. Probably not, as she was thinking of the cottage and the child and the bouquet, which she put in water as soon as the meeting with her husband’s family was over, and she was alone with Norah in her room, and as she turned from the window and saw them she unlocked a square ebony box, which her maid, in unpacking, had taken from her trunk. Inside this was another box, a little old-fashioned thing of painted wood, with Chinese figures on it. Abelard had bought it for her on Sixth Avenue, and she had made it a receptacle for her first wedding ring, and a lock of Abelard’s hair and the blood-stained rose which had been found next to his heart and brought her by Phebe Young. There, too, as a safe repository, she had put Gertie’s first bouquet, with the “God bless you” in it, and there she now put the second one, her welcome to Hampstead. Why she put these flowers with the sacred mementoes of Abelard she did not know, nor did she question her motive, but said to herself, “I must make that little girl’s acquaintance;” and then, donning her white dressing-gown she went to the window, from which a view of the cottage could be had, with the moonlight falling on it, just as it used to fall years ago when she was a poor obscure girl, with no thought that she should one day stand as she was standing now, the mistress of Schuyler Hill, with every possible luxury at her command. And there, too, in her old room was the glimmer of a lamp, and a little figure moved occasionally before the open window, Gertie, most probably, preparing for bed, for after a little the light disappeared, and Edith found herself wondering if the child was kneeling by her bedside and saying her prayer.
“Yes, I am sure she is praying,” she thought, “and perhaps she prays for me. I wish she would, for unless she does there is no one to pray for me now in all the wide, wide world.”
Oh! how unspeakably terrible was that thought: “Nobody to pray for me in all the wide, wide world.”
She had lost faith in her mother’s prayers, and, as a consequence, her own heart and feelings had insensibly grown harder. But they were softening now, and as she stood looking into the moonlight, she clasped her hands involuntarily, and whispered to herself:
“Oh, Father in heaven, help me from this hour to be a better woman than ever I’ve been before.”
There was a step behind her, and in a moment her husband’s arm stole round her waist, and her husband’s voice said, as playfully as Colonel Schuyler could say:
“Ah! Edith, my darling, moon-gazing, are you? What do you think of the view, and your new home, and can you be happy in it with me?”