Then, remembering what Mrs. Jerry had said of the bits of calico, she brought the candle close to the bed and examined the pieces carefully, especially the blue and white one in which Mrs. Jerry had said her mother had looked so prettily. It was delicate in color and in pattern, but to Reinette, who had never in her life worn anything coarser than the fine French cambrics, it seemed too common a fabric for the picture she held in her heart of her mother. It did not at all match the lovely pearls she kept so sacredly among her treasures. Her trunks and boxes had been brought from the station, and in one of them were the pearls.
Unlocking the box, Reinette took out the exquisite necklace, bracelets, and ear-rings which her father told her her mother had worn to a ball, where she had been noted as the most beautiful woman present.
Taking them now to the bedside, she laid them upon the squares of blue and tried to picture to herself the beautiful woman in creamy white satin who had worn them and the girl who had picked berries with Mrs. Jerry, and worn the dress of blue.
“Pearls and calico! There is a great gulf between them,” she thought, “but no greater than the distance between my old life and the new, which I must live bravely and well.”
Then, returning the pearls to their casket, with a feeling that now she should never wear them, she undressed herself rapidly, for her head was beginning to ache, and throwing herself upon the bed drew the patch-work quilt over her, caressing it as if it had been a living thing, and whispering, softly:
“Dear mother, I do not love you one whit the less because you once picked berries in father’s fields and wore the cotton gown, and you seem near to me to-night, as if your arms were round me, and you were pitying your desolate little girl, who has nobody to pity her, nobody to love her, nobody to pray for her now, and she so wretched and bad.”
Poor little Reinette was mistaken when she thought there was no one to pity or pray for her now, for across the river, over the hill, and under the poplar trees, a light was still burning in the chamber where Grandma Ferguson knelt, in her short night-gown and wide frilled cap, and prayed for Margaret’s child, that God would comfort her and have her in his keeping, while at the Knoll, Phil was thinking of the great sad eyes which, though they had flashed only one look at him, haunted him persistently, they were so full of pathos and pain.
“Poor little girl,” he said, “alone in a new country, with such a lot of us whom she never heard of thrust upon her. I pity her by Jove!”
CHAPTER XII.
REINETTE AND MR. BERESFORD.
