The girl's shyness wore off by degrees, her tremulous voice grew firmer, her pallid cheeks flushed with a colour tender as that of the wild almond blossom, and her eyes, bright with a new-born confidence, were lifted more frequently to the other's face. Their hands touched often and lingered caressingly together, and when the elder lady smiled, a responsive smile shone in the girl's raised eyes and played on her delicately-moulded mouth—a smile that was like sunlight on clear water, revealing a nature so simple and candid; and deep down, trembling into light, the crystalline soul which had come without flaw from its Maker's hands, and in the midst of evil had caught no stain to dim its perfect purity. It seemed now to Mrs. Churton, as she expounded the sacred doctrines which meant so much to her, that she had not known so great a happiness since her daughter, white even to her lips at the thought of the cruel pain she was about to inflict, yet unable to conceal the truth, had come to her and said with trembling voice, “Mother, I no longer believe as you do.” For how much grief had the children God had given her already caused her spirit! Two comely sons, her first and second-born, had after a time despised her teachings, and had grown up almost to manhood only to bring shame and poverty on their home; and had then drifted away beyond her ken to lose themselves in the wandering tribe of ne'er-do-wells in some distant colony. But her daughter had been left to her, the clear-minded thoughtful girl who would not be corrupted by the weakness and vices of a father, nor meet with such temptations as her brothers had been powerless to resist; and in loving this dear girl with the whole strength of her nature—this one child that was left to her to be with her in time and eternity—she had found consolation, and had been happy, until that dark day had arrived, and she heard the words that spoke to her heart
A deeper sorrow
Than the wail upon the dead.
It is true that she still hoped against hope; that she loved her daughter with passionate intensity, and clove to her, and was filled with a kind of terror at the thought of losing her, when Constance spoke, as she sometimes did, of leaving her home; but this love had no comfort, no sweetness, no joy in it, and it seemed to her more bitter than hate. It showed itself like hatred in her looks and words sometimes; for in spite of all her efforts to bear this great trial with the meekness her Divine Exemplar had taught, the bitter feeling would overcome her. “Mother, I know that you hate me!”—that was the reproach that was hardest to bear from her daughter's lips, the words that stung her to the quick. For although untrue, she felt that they were deserved; so cold did her anger and unhappiness make her seem to this rebellious child, so harsh and so bitter! And sometimes the reproach seemed to have the strange power of actually turning her love to the hatred she was charged with, and at such times she could scarcely refrain from crying out in her overmastering wrath to invoke a curse from the Almighty on her daughter's head, to reply that it was true, that she did hate her with a great hatred, but that her hatred was as nothing compared to that of her God, who would punish her for denying His existence with everlasting fire. Unable to hide her terrible agitation, she would fly to her room, her heart bursting with anguish, and casting herself on her knees cry out for deliverance from such distracting thoughts. After one of these stormy periods, followed by swift compunction, she would be able again to meet and speak to her daughter in a frame of mind which by contrast seemed strangely meek and subdued.
Now, sitting in the garden with Fan, all the old tender motherly feelings, and the love that had no pain in it, were coming back to her, and it was like the coming of spring after a long winter; and this girl, a stranger to her only yesterday, one who was altogether without that knowledge which alone can make the soul beautiful, seemed already to have filled the void in her heart.
On the other side it seemed to Fan, as she looked up to meet the grave tender countenance bent towards her, that it grew every moment dearer to her sight, It was a comely face still: Miss Churton's beauty was inherited from her mother—certainly not from her father. The features were regular, and perhaps that grey hair had once been golden, thought Fan—and the face now pallid and lined with care full of rich colour. Imagination lends a powerful aid to affection. She had found someone to love and was happy once more. For to her love was everything; “all thoughts, all feelings, all delights” were its ministers and “fed its sacred flame”; this was the secret motive ever inspiring her, and it was impossible for her to put any other, higher or lower, in its place. Not that sweet sickness and rage of the heart which is also called love, and which so enriches life that we look with a kind of contemptuous pity on those who have never experienced it, thinking that they have only a dim incomplete existence, and move through life ghost-like and sorrowful among their joyous brothers and sisters. Such a feeling had never yet touched or come near to her young heart; and her ignorance was so great, and the transition to her present life so recent, that she did not yet distinguish between the different kinds of that feeling—that which was wholly gross and animal, seen in foul faces and whispered in her ears by polluted lips, from which she had fled, trembling and terrified, through the dark lanes and streets of the City of Dreadful Night; and the same feeling as it appears, sublimed and beautified, in the refined and the virtuous. As yet she knew nothing about a beautiful love of that kind; but she had in the highest degree that purer, better affection which we prize as our most sacred possession, and even attribute to the immortals, since our earthly finite minds cannot conceive any more beautiful bond uniting them. It was this flame in her heart which had kept her like one alone, apart and unsoiled in the midst of squalor and vice, which had made her girlhood so unspeakably sad. Her soul had existed in a semi-starved condition on such affection as her miserable intemperate mother had bestowed on her, and, for the rest, the sight of love in which she had no part in some measure ministered to her wants and helped to sustain her.
One of the memories of her dreary life in Moon Street, which remained most vividly impressed on her mind, was of a very poor family whose head was an old man who mended broken-bottomed cane-chairs for a living; the others being a daughter, a middle-aged woman whose husband had forsaken her, and her three children. The eldest child was a stolid-looking round-faced girl about thirteen years old, who had the care of the little ones while her mother was away at work in a laundry. This family lodged in a house adjoining the one in which Fan lived, and for several weeks after they came there she used to shrink away in fear from the old grandfather whenever she saw him going out in the morning and returning in the evening. He was a tall spare old man, sixty-five or seventy years old, with clothes worn almost to threads, a broad-brimmed old felt hat on his head, and one of his knees stiff, so that he walked like a man with a wooden leg. But he was erect as a soldier, and always walked swiftly, even when returning, tired no doubt, from a long day's wandering and burdened with his bundle of cane and three or four old broken chairs—his day's harvest. But what a face was that old man's! He had long hair, almost white, a thin grey stern face with sharp aquiline features, and, set deep under his feather-like tufty eyebrows, blue eyes that looked cold and keen as steel. If he had walked in Pall Mall, dressed like a gentleman, the passer-by would have turned to look after him, and probably said, “There goes a leader of men—a man of action—a fighter of England's battles in some distant quarter of the globe.” But he was only an old gatherer of broken chairs, and got sixpence for each chair he mended, and lived on it; an indomitable old man who lived bravely and would die bravely, albeit not on any burning plain or in any wild mountain pass, leading his men, but in a garret, where he would mend his last broken chair, and look up unflinching in the Destroyer's face. Whenever he came stumping rapidly past, and turned that swift piercing eagle glance on Fan, she would shrink aside as if she felt the sting of sleet or a gust of icy-cold wind on her face. That was at first. Afterwards she discovered that at a certain hour of the late afternoon the eldest girl would come down and take up her station in the doorway to wait his coming. When he appeared her eyes would sparkle and her whole face kindle with a glad excitement, and hiding herself in the doorway, she would wait his arrival, then suddenly spring out to startle him with a joyous cry. The sight of this daily meeting had such a fascination for Fan that she would always try to be there at the proper time to witness it; and after it was over she would go about for hours feeling a kind of reflected happiness in her heart at the love which gladdened these poor people's lives.
Afterwards, in Dawson Place, Mary's affection for her had made her inexpressibly happy, in spite of some very serious troubles, and now, when Mary's last warning words had made any close friendship with Miss Churton impossible, her heart turned readily to the mother. In this case there had been no prohibition; Mary's jealousy had not gone so far as that; Mrs. Churton was the one being in her new home to whom she could cling without offence, and who could satisfy her soul with the food for which it hungered.
They had been sitting together over two hours in the garden when Mrs. Churton at length rose from her seat.
“I hope that I have not tired you—I hope that you have liked your lesson,” she said, taking the girl's hand.
“I have liked it so much,” answered Fan. “I like to be with you so much, because”—she hesitated a little and then finished—“because I think that you like me.”