CHAPTER XII.
I WAS NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS.
I had no idea Miss Ruth could talk as she did that night. She seemed to open her heart to me with the simplicity of a child, giving me a deeper insight into a very lovely nature. Carrie had hitherto been my ideal, but on this night I caught myself wondering once or twice whether Carrie would ever exercise such patience and uncomplaining endurance under so many crossed purposes, such broken work.
"I was never quite like other people," she said to me when I had closed the book; "you know I was a mere infant in my nurse's arms, when that accident happened." I nodded, for I had heard the sad details from Uncle Geoffrey; how an unbroken pair of young horses had shied across the road just as the nurse who was carrying Miss Ruth was attempting to cross it; the nurse had been knocked down and dreadfully injured, and her little charge had been violently thrown against the curb, and it had been thought by the doctor that one of the horses must have kicked her. For a long time she lay in a state of great suffering, and it was soon known that her health had sustained permanent injury.
"I was always a crooked, stunted little thing," she went on, with a lovely smile. "My childhood was a sad ordeal; it was just battling with pain, and making believe that I did not mind. I used to try and bear it as cheerfully as I could, because mother fretted so over me; but in secret I was terribly rebellious, often I cried myself to sleep with angry passionate tears, because I was not like other girls.
"Do you care to hear all this?" interrupting herself to look at my attentive face. It must have been a sufficient answer, for she went on talking without waiting for me to speak.
"Giles was very good to me, but it was hard on him for his only sister to be such a useless invalid. He was active and strong, and I could not expect to keep him chained to my couch—I was always on a couch then—he had his friends and his cricket and football, and I could not expect to see much of him, I had to let him go with the rest.
"Things went on like this—outward submission and inward revolt—much affection, but little of the grace of patience, until the eve of my confirmation, when a stranger came to preach at the parish church. I never heard his name before, and I never have heard it since. People said he came from a distance; but I shall never forget that sermon to my dying day, or the silvery penetrating voice that delivered it.
"It was as though a message from heaven was brought straight to me, to the poor discontented child who sat so heart weary and desponding in the corner of the pew. I cannot oven remember the text; it was something about the suffering of Christ, but I knew that it was addressed to the suffering members of His church, and that he touched upon all physical and mental pain. And what struck me most was that he spoke of pain as a privilege, a high privilege and special training; something that called us into a fuller and inner fellowship with our suffering head.
"He told us the heathen might dread pain, but not the Christian; that one really worthy of the name must be content to be the cross bearer, to tread really and literally in the steps of the Master.