Better rub than rust!”
But was rubbing really better than rusting, if it were but a voluntary and needless friction? Lucy realised now that the deeper agonies and anxieties and the more strenuous efforts of the past few months had given her new standpoints, and had separated her from much which she would once have tolerated without question. She remembered having read the utterance of a certain writer, somewhat to this effect—“I have been through the furnace, and I have passed out too scorched to mingle freely with those who are not even singed.” Lucy could not quite see the matter in that aspect. Rather she would have expressed herself—“I have been out on God’s wolds, under His open sky with its storms and its starlight, and I cannot again relish close, artificially-lit rooms, sickly with manufactured perfumes.” Oh, when once Charlie was at home again, how much they would have to be thankful for, in their life grown at once wider and deeper! What a new meaning was given to the old words, “The Lord drew me out of many waters.... He brought me forth also into a large place.”
So Lucy’s long holiday from her classes at the Institute proved both restful and delightful. Nor were they barren of practical results. She found many picturesque “bits” to sketch near London. Work of this kind was such pure joy to Lucy that she was apt to forget that nevertheless it remained a strain upon the nerves. She might have been wiser, ay, and thriftier too, had she indulged herself in a little sheer idleness, in lying among the clover making daisy chains or cowslip balls for Hugh. As it was, when he grew tired of playing alone, he would nestle down beside mamma, watching her busy fingers and begging for “a story,” for which he never begged in vain.
Oh, those were happy days, peaceful in their present calm, radiant with big hopes dawning! Then the evening coming-home was always cheery, with Miss Latimer hovering over the teacups, Tom’s merry welcome, and the sighing Clementina’s conscientious preparations for their creature-comforts. If Lucy’s ceaseless industry did not permit her to gather up all the physical benefit she might have got, at least her nightly rest grew sweet and calm, and the troubled haunting visions vanished.
She herself found much satisfaction in regaining her healthy moral poise. It did not fret her now when Jane Smith openly gibed at her in the street. It did not worry her when Jessie Morison’s mysterious female ally was seen passing the house, and lingering in front of the gate, as if half inclined to call. Nay, she bore herself with courage and resolution when the policeman rang the bell in the middle of the night, and roused all the household to hear that a man was lying in the area, having evidently climbed over the locked gate and descended the stairs.
She and Miss Latimer and Tom went downstairs together, Tom being an incalculable blessing in such circumstances. The invader was intoxicated, not hurt, as Lucy at first suggested, to the policeman’s great amusement.
“He’s not been so bad when he was so spry getting over; he thought he’d got a nice corner to sleep himself square in,” said that functionary, as, with Tom’s disgusted assistance, he pulled the man nearer the wall and tried to make him “sit up.” Horrors! Where did Lucy know the smooth white face and red head thus revealed to view? Why, this was no other than the carpenter whom she had accredited as Jane Smith’s lawful “young man.”
“You come out of this, my man,” said the policeman. “You’re where you’ve no call to be. And if you don’t stir your stumps pretty quick, it’ll be the worse for you.”
The man had nearly “slept himself square.” He stared wildly around, and muttered something about “coming to visit one as had called herself a friend”—“a-wanting to give her a bit of his mind.”
“Take him away and let him go,” Lucy pleaded with the policeman. “I know who he is—he’s been employed at Shand’s works—he used to visit a servant of mine who is not with me now. I don’t think she behaved very well to him.”