The elder sons and daughters of the family, middle-aged people, with growing-up children of their own, put themselves about to come from various distances to condole and remonstrate gently with their mother, until poor Mrs. Bloomfield’s forlorn hope was at its last tremulous gasp. Even Flora threatened to fail her, for the old dog began, not so much to sit listening, as to crouch down, it seemed in despair.
But one April day, when the country air was full of the scent of blossoming furze bushes and the songs of birds, awakening to the knowledge that summer was at hand, Flora pricked her ears, started up, and pawed eagerly at the door.
“There! I told you; there is Harry at last,” cried a shrill quavering voice, and then Mrs. Bloomfield fell back in a dead faint; for, even as she had spoken, she had recognised that it was only the postman who was advancing to give his accustomed rap, and her strained nerves and breaking heart could not stand the bitter disappointment.
“This delusion will kill my mother,” said one of the daughters, hurrying to attend to Mrs. Bloomfield, while one of the sons received the letters. “That wretched dog of poor Harry’s must be taken away from the place.”
“Yes, Conty,” said her brother hastily; “but this is very like—it cannot be—good Heavens! it is Harry’s handwriting, and see”—pointing to the end of a letter he had torn open—“here is his signature. Could the brute have scented it a hundred yards off?”
“Oh! never mind, if dear Harry be only alive and well. Find out all about it, that we may tell mamma the first thing after she knows what we are saying. There, the red is coming into her poor lips again; but I am sure nothing will bring her back like such good news. No, Jem, I have no fear for the shock; it is sorrow and not joy which drains the blood from the heart; and the knowledge that she and Flora have been proved right, and all the rest of us wrong, will help to steady her. Don’t you know so much of human nature?” demanded the half-laughing, half-crying, middle-aged daughter.
Harry’s story was one not altogether strange to men’s experience, and which occurs once and again in a generation, but when it happens is always regarded as a marvel with the attributes of a romance.
The cutter had been lost in a stormy night on a coral reef in the southern seas; but a boat’s-load of the crew, among whom was the junior lieutenant, had managed to land on an uninhabited island, and make good a living there for four dreary months. “If I had only got Flora with me,” Harry wrote in the letter—in which he was at last able to announce his rescue, and in which he sought to make light of the hardships he and his companions had undergone—to his father and mother, “the old lass would have found plenty to do among the rabbits and a kind of partridge. She would have been invaluable, if her very value had not proved the ruin of her, and if she had not fallen a victim to her general gaminess, as other poor beggars were like to do; but that is all over now.”
When the castaway men were at last taken off the island, it was by a foreign ship that carried them thousands of miles out of their track; but the sufferers had been treated with every attention and kindness by good Samaritans in the guise of Brazilian sailors, and by the time Harry’s letter should reach the parsonage, to disperse any little anxiety that might be entertained there, the writer would be far on his way home.