Erema; Or, My Father's Sin

by R. D. Blackmore

“For the old lord, instead of going on as he should, and widening his purse to the number of the mouths, was niggling at them always for offense or excuse, to take away what little he allowed them. The Captain had his pay, which would go in one hand, and the lady had a little money of her own; but still it was cruel for brought-up people to have nothing better to go on with. Not that the old lord was a miser neither; but it was said, and how far true I know not, that he never would forgive your father for marrying the daughter of a man he hated. And some went so far as to say that if he could have done it, he would have cut your father out of all the old family estates. But such a thing never could I believe of a nobleman having his own flesh and blood.

“But, money or no money, rich or poor, your father and mother, I assure you, my dear, were as happy as the day was long. For they loved one another and their children dearly, and they did not care for any mixing with the world. The Captain had enough of that when put away in quarters; likewise his wife could do without it better and better at every birth, though once she had been the very gayest of the gay, which you never will be, Miss Erema.

“Now, my dear, you look so sad and so 'solid,' as we used to say, that if I can go on at all, I must have something ready. I am quite an old nurse now, remember. Hans, go across the square, and turn on the left hand round the corner, and then three more streets toward the right, and you see one going toward the left, and you go about seven doors down it, and then you see a corner with a lamp-post.”

“Vilhelmina, I do see de lamp-post at de every corner.”

“That will teach you to look more bright, Hans. Then you find a shop window with three blue bottles, and a green one in the middle.”

“How can be any middle to three, without it is one of them?”

“Then let it be two of them. How you contradict me! Take this little bottle, and the man with a gold braid round a cap, and a tassel with a tail to it, will fill it for four-pence when you tell him who you are.”

“Yes, yes; I do now comprehend. You send me vhere I never find de vay, because I am in de vay, Vilhelmina!”

I was most thankful to Mrs. Strouss for sending her husband (however good and kind-hearted he might be) to wander among many shops of chemists, rather than to keep his eyes on me, while I listened to things that were almost sure to make me want my eyes my own. My nurse had seen, as any good nurse must, that, grown and formed as I might be, the nature of the little child that cries for its mother was in me still.

“It is very sad now,” Mrs. Strouss began again, without replying to my grateful glance; “Miss Erema, it is so sad that I wish I had never begun with it. But I see by your eyes—so like your father's, but softer, my dear, and less troublesome—that you will have the whole of it out, as he would with me once when I told him a story for the sake of another servant. It was just about a month before you were born, when the trouble began to break on us. And when once it began, it never stopped until all that were left ran away from it. I have read in the newspapers many and many sad things coming over whole families, such as they call 'shocking tragedies;' but none of them, to my mind, could be more galling than what I had to see with my very own eyes.