“I mean just the people I care about,” said Hope; “there is poor William. I do not know what ails William—for he sat in the dark like you, last night, and will always lean his head upon his hands, and sigh—sigh—and my mother—I wish you would not all be so sad.”
Helen Buchanan turned round to examine the contents of her work-basket. Her slender figure was very slightly drawn up; something almost imperceptible like the faint touch of wind upon leaves passed over her; you could not tell what it was, though you could read its swift expression as clearly as written words. Pride—sympathy—a conciousness that moved her heart and yet made it firmer; but Hope’s piece of incidental information did not sadden the face of Helen.
Hope had a comprehension of—though she could by no means have explained how she comprehended—the silent language of Helen Buchanan’s looks and motions; and she arrived at a pretty accurate conclusion in her own simple and shrewd reasonings on the subject. Mrs Buchanan came in so soon that she could try no further experiments with Helen; but as she past through the dim road, half-street, half-lane, in which their house stood, and came into the quiet Main Street of Fendie, with its half-shut shops and groups of wayside talkers, great schemes began to germinate within the small head of Hope Oswald. If only that very unreasonable opposition of her father’s could be overcome, Hope decided that William would be condemned to draw long breaths in the dark no longer. “Miss Swinton says I am sensible,” mused Hope within herself, “and my father says I am clever. I don’t know—I think it will turn out the right way some time, and we shall all be very happy, but just now—I will try!”
And immediately there flitted before the eyes of Hope, in the gentle darkness of the April night, a fairy appearance, we do not venture to say it was anything very ethereal. It was only a vision of a lilac satin frock like that famous one which Miss Adelaide Fendie, of Mount Fendie, wore at her sister’s marriage, and very fascinating was the gleam which it shed about the young schemer as she lingered at her father’s door. Hope Oswald was only fourteen.
CHAPTER V.
We must at first endure
The simple woe of knowing they are dead—
A soul-sick woe in which no comfort is—
And wish we were beside them in the dust!
That anguish dire cannot sustain itself,
But settles down into a grief that loves,
And finds relief in unreproved tears.
Then cometh sorrow, like a Sabbath! Heaven
Sends resignation down and faith; and last
Of all there falls a kind oblivion
Over the going out of that sweet light
In which we had our being.—Professor Wilson.
In the waning afternoon of another dim spring day the Laird of Mossgray entered the Cumberland valley, to which the letter of Lilias had directed him.
He had traversed the fair country beyond Carlisle, with its sloping glades, and belts of rich woodland, and now had reached a chiller and more hilly region, whose bleak inhospitable fells, still scarcely touched by the breath of spring, did yet reveal home-like glimpses, here and there, of sheltered glens and quiet houses, dwelling alone among the hills. He had to pass several of the pleasant towns of Cumberland before he reached the sequestered hamlet in which the last days of Lilias had been spent. It lay in a nook by itself, a scanty congregation of gray roofs, with the church “a gracious lady,” as was the poet’s church among the hills, serenely overlooking all, reigning over the living and the dead. From the end of the little glen you commanded the long range of a wider and more important valley, at the further end of which lay one of the most picturesque of those northern towns, its gray limestone buildings making a sheen in the distance, and a delicate cloud of smoke hovering about the points of its white spires, like something spiritual, marking where household hearths were gathered together in social amity. Not far away lay the consecrated country of the lakes: and everywhere around, bare, brown, scathed hill-tops stood out against the sky.
Mossgray proceeded to the churchyard first of all; all things beside were strange to him in the unknown village, but here he had a friend. After long search among the gray memorials of the forefathers of the hamlet, he came upon a green mound marked by no name, where the soft, green turf was faintly specked with the fragile blue of the forget-me-not; in the village churchyard this alone and the daisy found a place—occupants more fit than the garish flowers with which modern taste has peopled the cities of the dead. The Laird of Mossgray turned aside to ask the name of the occupant of this grave. It was a Scottish widow—said the sexton—lately dead, whose name was Maxwell. The inquirer returned again, and seating himself on a hillock, covered his face with his hands. The old man never knew how long he lingered there. He was not an old man then; the fervid affection of his youth—the burning grief of his early trial, were in his heart passionate and strong as when they thrilled it first; and it was not until the night fell and the dew dropped gently on him, that the sacred sorrow which belongs to the dead, came down to still the stronger throbs of his solitary heart. When he looked up, the stars were shining again in the dim and dewy sky—the hills stood up, like watching Titans, clothed in the shadowy unformed garments of the early earth, and ghost-like in the darkness rose ancient tombstones, gray with years, and the green mounds of yesterday. The great, silent, conscious world, tingling with the spiritual presence which over-brimmed its mighty precincts—and the dead—the solemn sleepers who have lived, and do but wait to live again.
But there were the faint village lights close at hand, and the orphan to be sought for there, who was committed to his care. So the old man withdrew from the grave of Lilias, to seek her child.