CHAPTER XIV.
GOING AWAY.
“YOU will be sure to write regularly, Hetty, twice a week at the least? You must not forget; you must never forget.”
“Oh, never, mamma!” cried poor Hetty, with a quiver in her voice.
“And try if you can hear something about Cousin John. The clergyman is sure to know. Don’t ask right out, but try what you can discover. You can say that your mother knew that part of the country, and that you had heard of the Prescotts. Oh, how careless it was of me not to keep on writing! You must be very regular, Hetty—twice a week, at the very least.”
Hetty’s poor little face was very pale; her lips were trembling. The family had come, all but the very little ones, to the railway to see her off. But the boys were amused with the locomotive, and the girls with looking at the people; and Hetty felt herself forgotten already. What would it be when she was really away?
And then she relapsed into a spasm of weeping when the inevitable moment came, and the train got into motion. Poor little Hetty! They would all go back, go home, and the business of every day would go on as before, while she was flying away into the unknown, with that clang and wild tumult of sound. Hetty thought she had never realised what a railway journey was before, the clang as of giants’ hoofs going, the rush and sweep through the air, as if impelled by some horrible force that could not be appealed to to stop, or made to understand that you wanted to get out, to get out and go back again! This was the first thought of her little scared soul. Horses with a man driving could be made to stop, but this engine never: and what if it should go on, on, to the end of the world? It seemed so likely, so probable that it might do so, in the first dreadful sense of the unescapable which overwhelmed the girl’s mind. Of course when she came to herself she was a quite reasonable little girl, and knew that this could not be so, and that, as exactly as is in human possibility, the train would arrive at Horton station, where she was bound, after stopping at many other stations on the way. And presently Hetty dried her eyes, and began to look at the country; and things went a little better with her, until she had another fit of panic and horror at the end of her journey, when she stepped out, trembling, all alone, and saw, half with terror, half with pride, the brougham waiting which was to carry her, behind two sleek and shining horses, in all the glory of a “private carriage” (a thing Hetty knew nothing of), to Horton. She had been driven to the station, she was aware, in the Horton carriage when she went away, a baby, with her parents, and this knowledge—for it was not a recollection—made everything seem all the stranger. It was her mother’s home she was going to, and yet such a strange, unknown place.