CHAPTER LI.
"The last touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day
and by night.
Their last step on the stairs, at the door, still throbs through
me, if ever so light.
Their last gift which they left to my childhood, far off in the
long-ago years,
Is now turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystals
of tears.
'Dig the snow,' she said,
'For my church-yard bed;
Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,
If one only of these, my beloveds, shall love with heart-warm tears,
As I have loved these.'"
It seems to me in these days as if, but for the servants, I were quite alone in the house. Father is ill. We always thought that he never would care about any thing, or any of us, but we are wrong. Barbara's death has shaken him very much. Mother is with him always, nursing him, and being at his beck and call, and I see nothing of her.
Tou Tou has gone to school, and so it comes to pass that, in the late populous school-room, I sit alone. Where formerly one could hardly make one's voice heard for the merry clamor, there is now no noise, but the faint buzzing of the house-flies on the pane, and now and again, as it grows toward sunset, the loud wintry winds keening and calling.
The Brat indeed runs over for a couple of days, but I am so glad when they are over, and he is gone. I used to like the Brat the best of all the boys, and perhaps by-and-by I shall again; but, for the moment, do you know, I almost hate him.
Once or twice I quite hate him, when I hear him laughing in his old thorough, light-hearted way—when I hear him jumping up-stairs three steps at a time, whistling the same tune he used to whistle before he went.
Poor boy! He would be always sorrowful if he could, and is very much ashamed of himself for not being, but he cannot.
Life is still pleasant to him, though Barbara is dead, and so I unjustly hate him, and am glad when he is gone. Have not I come home because here she was loved, here, at least, through all the village—the village about which she trod like one of God's kind angels—I shall be certain of meeting a keen and assured sympathy in my sorrow.
"... Where indeed
The roof so lowly but that beam of heaven
Dawned some time through the door-way?"