"I will not hear any disparagement of your ways and your knowledge," interrupted Mrs. Morell. "They have been every thing to my children: and if you could have gone with us...."
This, however, they all knew to be out of the question. It was not only that Miss Smith was between fifty and sixty, too old to go so far, with little prospect of comfort at the end of the journey; but she was at present disabled for much usefulness by the state of her right hand. It had been hurt by an accident a long time before, and it did not get well. The surgeon had always said it would be a long case; and she had no use whatever of the hand in the mean time. Yet she would not part with the baby till the last moment. She carried him on the left arm, and stood on the wharf with him—the mother at her side—till all the rest were on board, and Mr. Morell came for his wife. It was no grand steamer they were going in, but a humble vessel belonging to the port, which would carry them cheap.
"Now, my love," said the husband. "Now, Miss Smith," taking the child from her. "Words cannot tell...."
And if words could have told, the tongue could not have uttered them. It was little, too, that his wife could say.
"Write to us. Be sure you write. We shall write as soon as we arrive. Write to us."
Miss Smith glanced at the hand. She said only one word, "Farewell!" but she said it cheerfully.
The steam-tug was in a hurry, and down the river they went. She had one more appointment to keep with them. She was to wave her handkerchief from the rocks by the fort; and the children were to let her try whether she could see their little handkerchiefs. So she walked quickly over the common to the fort, and sat down on the beach at the top of the rocks.
It was very well that she had something to do. But the plan did not altogether answer. By the time the vessel crossed the bar it was nearly dark, and she was not quite sure, among three, which it was, and she did not suppose the children could see her handkerchief. She waved it, however, according to promise. How little they knew how wet it was!
Then there was the walk home. It was familiar, yet very strange. When she was a child her parents used to bring her here, in the summer time, for sea air and bathing. The haven and the old gray bathing houses, and the fort, and the lighthouse, and the old priory ruins crowning the rocks, were all familiar to her; but the port had so grown up that all else was strange. And how strange now was life to her! Her parents gone, many years back, and her two sisters since; and now, the Morells! She had never had any money to lose, and the retired way in which the Morells lived had prevented her knowing any body out of their house. She had not a relation nor a friend, nor even an acquaintance, in England. The Morells had not been uneasy about her. They left her a little money, and had so high an opinion of her that they did not doubt her being abundantly employed, whenever her hand should get well. They had lived too much to themselves to know that her French, learned during the war, when nobody in England could pronounce French, would not do in these days, nor that her trilling, old-fashioned style of playing on the piano, which they thought so beautiful, would be laughed at now in any boarding school; and that her elegant needleworks were quite out of fashion; and that there were new ways of teaching even reading, spelling, and writing.
She knew these things, and cautioned herself against discontent with the progress of society, because she happened to be left alone behind. She suspected, too, that the hand would not get well. The thing that she was most certain of was, that she must not rack her brain with fears and speculations as to what was to become of her. Her business was to wait till she could find something to do, or learn what she was to suffer. She thought she had better wait here. There was no call to any other place. This was more familiar and more pleasant to her than any other—the Morells' cottage being far away, and out of the question—and here she could live with the utmost possible cheapness. So here she staid.