“But we are both getting on very well, Sally, are we not? I am quite safe here, and darling father is growing stronger and fatter every day, thank God! and then our hope is very strong. Why should you be anxious?”
Sally prefaced her reply with one of the professional gasps wherewith she was wont to bring down the iron pestle.
“Well, now, you white folks am de greatest ijits eber was born. Do you t’ink you’ll deliber your fadder from de Moors by feedin’ him on biscuits an’ hope? What’s de end ob all dis to come to? das what I want to know. Ob course you can’t go on for eber. You sure to be cotched at last, and de whole affair’ll bust up. You’ll be tooked away, an’ your fadder’ll be t’rowed on de hooks or whacked to deaf. Oh! I’s most mis’rable!”
The poor creature seemed inclined to howl at this point, but she constrained herself and didn’t.
In the gloom of the cheerless Bagnio, Hugh Sommers found his wet blanket in Edouard Laronde.
“But it is unwise to look only at the bright side of things,” said the Frenchman, after sympathising with his friend’s joy in having discovered his daughter so unexpectedly and in such a curious manner. “No doubt, from her disguise, she must, as you say, be in hiding, and in comparative safety with friends, else she could not be moving so freely about this accursed city, but what is to be the end of it all?”
Laronde unconsciously echoed Sally’s question to Hester, but Hugh Sommers had not as much to say in reply as his daughter, for he was too well acquainted with the possibilities of life to suppose that biscuits and hope would do much towards the “end,” although valuable auxiliaries in the meantime.
“I see not the end, Laronde,” he said, after a pause; “but the end is in the hands of God, and I will trust Him.”
“So is the middle, and so is the beginning, as well as the end,” returned Laronde cynically; “why, then, are you so perplexed and anxious about these if the end is, as you seem to think, so sure? Why don’t you trust God all through?”
“I do trust God all through, my friend, but there is this difference—that with the end I have nothing to do save to wait patiently and trustfully, whereas with the beginning and middle it is my duty to act and energise hopefully.”