He said nothing, and she waited a moment as if expecting him to speak.
Then she moved to the table where she had been sitting and folded up her needlework.
"Shall I get you some wine, Dad?" she asked presently in a quiet voice.
"No!" he replied, curtly--"Priscilla can get it."
"Then good-night!"
Still standing erect he turned his head and looked at her.
"Are you going?" he said. "Without your usual kiss?--your usual tenderness? Why should you change to me? Your own father--if he was your father--deserted you,--and I have been, a father to you in his place, wronging my own honourable name for your sake; am I to blame for this? Be reasonable! The laws of man are one thing and the laws of G.o.d are another,--and we have to make the best we can of ourselves between the two. There"s many a piece of wicked injustice in the world, but nothing more wicked than to set shame or blame on a child that"s born without permit of law or blessing of priest. For it"s not the child"s fault,--it"s brought into the world without its own consent,--and yet the world fastens a slur upon it! That"s downright brutal and senseless!--for if there is any blame attached to the matter it should be fastened on the parents, and not on the child. And that"s what I thought when you were left on my hands--I took the blame of you on myself, and I was careful that you should be treated with every kindness and respect--mind you that! Respect! There"s not a man on the place that doesn"t doff his cap to you; and you"ve been as my own daughter always. You can"t deny it! And more than that"--here his strong voice faltered--"I"ve loved you!--yes-I"ve loved you, little Innocent--"
She looked up in his face and saw it quivering with suppressed emotion, and the strange cold sense of aloofness that had numbed her senses suddenly gave way like snow melting in the spring. In a moment she was in his arms, weeping out her pent-up tears on his breast, and he, stroking her soft hair, soothed her with every tender and gentle word he could think of.
"There, there!" he murmured, fondly. "Thou must look at it in this way, dear child! That if G.o.d deprived thee of one father he gave thee another in his place! Make the best of that gift before it be taken from thee!"
CHAPTER IV
There are still a few old houses left in rural England which are as yet happily unmolested by the destroying ravages of modern improvement, and Briar Farm was one of these. History and romance alike had their share in its annals, and its t.i.tle-deeds went back to the autumnal days of 1581, when the Duke of Anjou came over from France to England with a royal train of n.o.blemen and gentlemen in the hope to espouse the greatest monarch of all time, "the most renowned and victorious" Queen Elizabeth, whose reign has clearly demonstrated to the world how much more ably a clever woman can rule a country than a clever man, if she is left to her own instinctive wisdom and prescience. No king has ever been wiser or more diplomatic than Elizabeth, and no king has left a more brilliant renown. As the coldest of male historians is bound to admit, "her singular powers of government were founded equally on her temper and on her capacity. Endowed with a great command over herself, she soon obtained an uncontrolled ascendant over her people. Few sovereigns of England succeeded to the throne under more difficult circ.u.mstances, and none ever conducted the government with such uniform success and felicity." Had Elizabeth been weak, the Duke of Anjou might have realised his ambitious dream, with the unhappiest results for England; and that he fortunately failed was entirely due to her sagacity and her quick perception of his irresolute and feeble character. In the sumptuous train attendant upon this "Pet.i.t Grenouille," as he styled himself in one of his babyish epistles to England"s sovereign majesty, there was a certain knight more inclined to the study of letters than to the breaking of lances,--the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin, who being much about the court in the wake of his somewhat capricious and hot-tempered master, came, unfortunately for his own peace of mind, into occasional personal contact with one of the most bewitching young women of her time, the Lady Penelope Devereux, afterwards Lady Rich, she in whom, according to a contemporary writer, "lodged all attractive graces and beauty, wit and sweetness of behaviour which might render her the mistress of all eyes and hearts."
Surrounded as she was by many suitors, his pa.s.sion was hopeless from the first, and that he found it so was evident from the fact that he suddenly disappeared from the court and from his master"s retinue, and was never heard of by the great world again. Yet he was not far away.
He had not the resolution to leave England, the land which enshrined the lady of his love,--and he had lost all inclination to return to France. He therefore retired into the depths of the sweet English country, among the then unspoilt forests and woodlands, and there happening to find a small manor-house for immediate sale, surrounded by a considerable quant.i.ty of land, he purchased it for the ready cash he had about him and settled down in it for the remainder of his life.
Little by little, such social ambitions as he had ever possessed left him, and with every pa.s.sing year he grew more and more attached to the simplicity and seclusion of his surroundings. He had leisure for the indulgence of his delight in books, and he was able to give the rein to his pa.s.sion for poetry, though it is nowhere recorded that he ever published the numerous essays, sonnets and rhymed pieces which, written in the picturesque caligraphy of the period, and roughly bound by himself in sheepskin, occupied a couple of shelves in his library. He entered with animation and interest into the pleasures of farming and other agricultural pursuits, and by-and-bye as time went on and the former idol of his dreams descended from her fair estate of virtue and scandalised the world by her liaison with Lord Mountjoy, he appears to have gradually resigned the illusions of his first love, for he married a simple village girl, remarkable, so it was said, for her beauty, but more so for her skill in making b.u.t.ter and cheese. She could neither read nor write, however, and the traditions concerning the Sieur Amadis relate that he took a singular pleasure in teaching her these accomplishments, as well as in training her to sing and to accompany herself upon the lute in a very pretty manner. She made him an excellent wife, and gave him no less than six children, three boys and three girls, all of whom were brought up at home under the supervision of their father and mother, and encouraged to excel in country pursuits and to understand the art of profitable farming. It was in their days that Briar Farm entered upon its long career of prosperity, which still continued. The Sieur Amadis died in his seventieth year, and by his own wish, expressed in his "Last Will and Testament," was buried in a sequestered spot on his own lands, under a stone slab which he had himself fashioned, carving upon it his rec.u.mbent figure in the costume of a knight, a cross upon his breast and a broken sword at his side.
His wife, though several years younger than himself, only lived a twelve-month after him and was interred by his side. Their resting-place was now walled off, planted thickly with flowers, and held sacred by every succeeding heir to the farm as the burial-place of the first Jocelyns. Steadily and in order, the families springing from the parent tree of the French knight Amadis had occupied Briar Farm in unbroken succession, and through three centuries the property had been kept intact, none of its possessions being dispersed and none of its land being sold. The house was practically in the same sound condition as when the Sieur Amadis fitted and furnished it for his own occupation,--there was the same pewter, the same solid furniture, the same fine tapestry, preserved by the careful mending of many hundreds of needles worked by hands long ago mingled with the dust of the grave, and, strange as it may seem to those who are only acquainted with the flimsy manufactures of to-day, the same stout hand-wrought linen, which, mended and replenished each year, lasted so long because never washed by modern methods, but always by hand in clear cold running water. There were presses full of this linen, deliriously scented with lavender, and there were also the spinning-wheels that had spun the flax and the hand-looms on which the threads had been woven. These were witnesses to the days when women, instead of gadding abroad, were happy to be at home--when the winter evenings seemed short and bright because as they sat spinning by the blazing log fire they were cheerful in their occupation, singing songs and telling stories and having so much to do that there was no time to indulge in the morbid a.n.a.lysis of life and the things of life which in our present shiftless day perplex and confuse idle and unhealthy brains.
And now after more than three centuries, the direct male line of Amadis de Jocelin had culminated in Hugo, commonly called Farmer Jocelyn, who, on account of some secret love disappointment, the details of which he had never told to anyone, had remained unmarried. Till the appearance on the scene of the child, Innocent, who was by the village folk accepted and believed to be the illegitimate offspring of this ill-starred love, it was tacitly understood that Robin Clifford, his nephew, and the only son of his twin sister, would be the heir to Briar Farm; but when it was seen how much the old man seemed to cling to Innocent, and to rely upon her ever tender care of him, the question arose as to whether there might not be an heiress after all, instead of an heir. And the rustic wiseacres gossiped, as is their wont, watching with no small degree of interest the turn of events which had lately taken place in the frank and open admiration and affection displayed by Robin for his illegitimate cousin, as it was thought she was, and as Farmer Jocelyn had tacitly allowed it to be understood. If the two young people married, everybody agreed it would be the right thing, and the best possible outlook for the continued prosperity of Briar Farm.
For after all, it was the farm that had to be chiefly considered, so they opined,--the farm was an historic and valuable property as well as an excellent paying concern. The great point to be attained was that it should go on as it had always gone on from the days of the Sieur Amadis,--and that it should be kept in the possession of the same family. This at any rate was known to be the cherished wish of old Hugo Jocelyn, though he was not given to any very free expression of his feelings. He knew that his neighbours envied him, watched him and commented on his actions,--he knew also that the tale he had told them concerning Innocent had to a great extent whispered away his own good name and fastened a social slur upon the girl,--yet he could not, according to his own views, have seen any other way out of the difficulty. The human world is always wicked-tongued; and it is common knowledge that any man or woman introducing an "adopted" child into a family is at once accused, whether he or she be conscious of the accusation or not, of pa.s.sing off his own b.a.s.t.a.r.d under the "adoption"
pretext. Hugo Jocelyn was fairly certain that none of his neighbours would credit the romantic episode of the man on horseback arriving in a storm and leaving a nameless child on his hands. The story was quite true,--but truth is always precisely what people refuse to believe.
The night on which Innocent had learned her own history for the first time was a night of consummate beauty in the natural world. When all the gates and doors of the farm and its outbuildings had been bolted and barred for the night, the moon, almost full, rose in a cloudless heaven and shed pearl-white showers of radiance all over the newly-mown and clean-swept fields, outlining the points of the old house gables and touching with luminous silver the roses that clambered up the walls. One wide latticed window was open to the full inflowing of the scented air, and within its embrasure sat a lonely little figure in a loose white garment with hair tumbling carelessly over its shoulders and eyes that were wet with tears. The clanging chime of the old clock below stairs had struck eleven some ten minutes since, and after the echo of its bell had died away there had followed a heavy and intense silence. The window looked not upon the garden, but out upon the fields and a suggestive line of dark foliage edging them softly in the distance,--away down there, under a huge myriad-branched oak, slept the old knight Sieur Amadis de Jocelin and his English rustic wife, the founders of the Briar Farm family. The little figure in the dark embrasure of the window clasped its white hands and turned its weeping eyes towards that ancient burial-place, and the moon-rays shone upon its fair face with a silvery glimmer, giving it an almost spectral pallor. "Why was I ever born?" sighed a trembling voice--"Oh, dear G.o.d!
Why did you let it be?"
The vacant air, the vacant fields looked blankly irresponsive. They had no sympathy to give,--they never have. To great Mother Nature it is not important how or why a child is born, though she occasionally decides that it shall be of the greatest importance how and why the child shall live. What does it matter to the forces of creative life whether it is brought into the world "basely," as the phrase goes, or honourably? The child exists,--it is a human ent.i.ty--a being full of potential good or evil,--and after a certain period of growth it stands alone, and its parents have less to do with it than they imagine. It makes its own circ.u.mstances and shapes its own career, and in many cases the less it is interfered with the better. But Innocent could not reason out her position in any cold-blooded or logical way. She was too young and too unhappy. Everything that she had taken pride in was swept from her at once. Only that very morning she had made one of her many pilgrimages down to the venerable oak beneath whose trailing branches the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin lay, covered by the broad stone slab on which he had carved his own likeness, and she had put a little knot of the "Glory"
roses between his mailed hands which were folded over the cross on his breast, and she had said to the silent effigy:
"It is the last day of the haymaking, Sieur Amadis! You would be glad to see the big crop going in if you were here!"
She was accustomed to talk to the old stone knight in this fanciful way,--she had done so all her life ever since she could remember. She had taken an intense pride in thinking of him as her ancestor; she had been glad to trace her lineage back over three centuries to the love-lorn French n.o.ble who had come to England in the train of the Due d"Anjou--and now--now she knew she had no connection at all with him,--that she was an unnamed, unbaptised n.o.body--an unclaimed waif of humanity whom no one wanted! No one in all the world--except Robin! He wanted her;--but perhaps when he knew her true history his love would grow cold. She wondered whether it would be so. If it were she would not mind very much. Indeed it would be best, for she felt she could never marry him.
"No, not if I loved him with all my heart!" she said, pa.s.sionately--"Not without a name!--not till I have made a name for myself, if only that were possible!"
She left the window and walked restlessly about her room, a room that she loved very greatly because it had been the study of the Sieur Amadis. It was a wonderful room, oak-panelled from floor to ceiling, and there was no doubt about its history,--the Sieur Amadis himself had taken care of that. For on every panel he had carved with his own hand a verse, a prayer, or an aphorism, so that the walls were a kind of open notebook inscribed with his own personal memoranda. Over the wide chimney his coat-of-arms was painted, the colours having faded into tender hues like those of autumn leaves, and the motto underneath was "Mon coeur me soutien." Then followed the inscription:
"Amadis de Jocelin, Knight of France, Who here seekynge Forgetfulness did here fynde Peace."
Every night of her life since she could read Innocent had stood in front of these armorial bearings in her little white night-gown and had conned over these words. She had taken the memory and tradition of Amadis to her heart and soul. He was HER ancestor,--hers, she had always said;--she had almost learned her letters from the inscriptions he had carved, and through these she could read old English and a considerable amount of old French besides. When she was about twelve years old she and Robin Clifford, playing about together in this room, happened to knock against one panel that gave forth a hollow reverberant sound, and moved by curiosity they tried whether they could open it. After some abortive efforts Robin"s fingers closed by chance on a hidden spring, which being thus pressed caused the panel to fly open, disclosing a narrow secret stair. Full of burning excitement the two children ran up it, and to their delight found themselves in a small square musty chamber in which were two enormous old dower-chests, locked. Their locks were no bar to the agility of Robin, who, fetching a hammer, forced the old hasps asunder and threw back the lids. The coffers were full of books and ma.n.u.scripts written on vellum, a veritable sixteenth-century treasure-trove. They hastened to report the find to Farmer Jocelyn, who, though never greatly taken with books or anything concerning them, was sufficiently interested to go with the eager children and look at the discovery they had made. But as he could make nothing of either books or ma.n.u.scripts himself, he gave over the whole collection to Innocent, saying that as they were found in her part of the house she might keep them. No one--not even Robin--knew how much she had loved and studied these old books, or how patiently she had spelt out the ma.n.u.scripts; and no one could have guessed what a wide knowledge of literature she had gained or what fine taste she had developed from her silent communications with the parted spirit of the Sieur Amadis and his poetical remains. She had even arranged her room as she thought he might have liked it, in severe yet perfect taste. It was now her study as it had been his,--the heavy oak table had a great pewter inkstand upon it and a few loose sheets of paper with two or three quill pens ready to hand,--some quaint old vellum-bound volumes and a brown earthenware bowl full of "Glory" roses were set just where they could catch the morning sunshine through the lattice window. One side of the room was lined with loaded bookshelves, and at its furthest end a wide arch of roughly hewn oak disclosed a smaller apartment where she slept. Here there was a quaint little four-poster bedstead, hung with quite priceless Jacobean tapestry, and a still more rare and beautiful work of art--an early Italian mirror, full length and framed in silver, a curio worth many hundreds of pounds. In this mirror Innocent had surveyed herself with more or less disfavour since her infancy. It was a mirror that had always been there--a mirror in which the wife of the Sieur Amadis must have often gazed upon her own reflection, and in which, after her, all the wives and daughters of the succeeding Jocelyns had seen their charms presented to their own admiration. The two old dower-chests which had been found in the upper chamber were placed on either side of the mirror, and held all the simple home-made garments which were Innocent"s only wear. A special joy of hers lay in the fact that she knew the management of the secret sliding panel, and that she could at her own pleasure slip up the mysterious stairway with a book and be thus removed from all the household in a solitude which to her was ideal. To-night as she wandered up and down her room like a little distraught ghost, all the happy and romantic a.s.sociations of the home she had loved and cherished for so many years seemed cut down like a sheaf of fair blossoms by a careless reaper,--a sordid and miserable taint was on her life, and she shuddered with mingled fear and grief as she realised that she had not even the simple privilege of ordinary baptism. She was a nameless waif, dependent on the charity of Farmer Jocelyn. True, the old man had grown to love her and she had loved him--ah!--let the many tender prayers offered up for him in this very room bear witness before the throne of G.o.d to her devotion to her "father" as she had thought him! And now--if what the doctors said was true--if he was soon to die--what would become of her? She wrung her little hands in unconscious agony.
"What shall I do?" she murmured, sobbingly--"I have no claim on him, or on anyone in the world! Dear G.o.d, what shall I do?"
Her restless walk up and down took her into her sleeping-chamber, and there she lit a candle and looked at herself in the old Italian mirror.
A little woe-begone creature gazed sorrowfully back at her from its shining surface, with br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes and quivering lips, and hair all tossed loosely away from a small sad face as pale as a watery moon, and she drew back from her own reflection with a gesture of repugnance.
"I am no use to anybody in any way," she said, despairingly--"I am not even good-looking. And Robin--poor foolish Robin!--called me "lovely"
this afternoon! He has no eyes!"
Then a sudden thought flew across her brain of Ned Landon. The tall powerful-looking brute loved her, she knew. Every look of his told her that his very soul pursued her with a reckless and relentless pa.s.sion.
She hated him,--she trembled even now as she pictured his dark face and burning eyes;--he had annoyed and worried her in a thousand ways--ways that were not sufficiently open in their offence to be openly complained of, though had Farmer Jocelyn"s state of health given her less cause for anxiety she might have said something to him which would perhaps have opened his eyes to the situation. But not now,--not now could she appeal to anyone for protection from amorous insult. For who was she--what was she that she should resent it? She was nothing!--a mere stray child whose parents n.o.body knew,--without any lawful guardian to uphold her rights or a.s.sert her position. No wonder old Jocelyn had called her "wilding"--she was indeed a "wilding" or weed,--growing up unwanted in the garden of the world, destined to be pulled out of the soil where she had nourished and thrown contemptuously aside. A wretched sense of utter helplessness stole over her,--of incapacity, weakness and loneliness. She tried to think,--to see her way through the strange fog of untoward circ.u.mstance that had so suddenly enshrouded her. What would happen when Farmer Jocelyn died?
For one thing she would have to quit Briar Farm. She could not stay in it when Robin Clifford was its master. He would marry, of course; he would be sure to marry; and there would be no place for her in his home. She would have to earn her bread; and the only way to do that would be to go out to service. She had a good store of useful domestic knowledge,--she could bake and brew, and wash and scour; she knew how to rear poultry and keep bees; she could spin and knit and embroider; indeed her list of household accomplishments would have startled any girl fresh out of a modern Government school, where things that are useful in life are frequently forgotten, and things that are not by any means necessary are taught as though they were imperative. One other accomplishment she had,--one that she hardly whispered to herself--she could write,--write what she herself called "nonsense." Scores of little poems and essays and stories were locked away in a small old bureau in a corner of the room,--confessions and expressions of pent-up feeling which, but for this outlet, would have troubled her brain and hindered her rest. They were mostly, as she frankly admitted to her own conscience, in the "style" of the Sieur Amadis, and were inspired by his poetic suggestions. She had no fond or exaggerated idea of their merit,--they were the result of solitary hours and long silences in which she had felt she must speak to someone,--exchange thoughts with someone,--or suffer an almost intolerable restraint. That "someone" was for her the long dead knight who had come to England in the train of the Duc d"Anjou. To him she spoke,--to him she told all her troubles--but to no one else did she ever breathe her thoughts, or disclose a line of what she had written. She had often wondered whether, if she sent these struggling literary efforts to a magazine or newspaper, they would be accepted and printed. But she never made the trial, for the reason that such newspaper literature as found its way into Briar Farm filled her with amazement, repulsion and disgust. There was nothing in any modern magazine that at all resembled the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis! Strange, coa.r.s.e slang-words were used,--and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence. So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her ma.n.u.scripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets of dried rose-leaves and lavender, as though they were love-letters or old lace.
And when sometimes she shut herself up and read them over she felt like one of Hamlet"s "guilty creatures sitting at a play." Her literary attempts seemed to reproach her for their inadequacy, and when she made some fresh addition to her store of written thoughts, her crimes seemed to herself doubled and weighted. She would often sit musing, with a little frown puckering her brow, wondering why she should be moved to write at all, yet wholly unable to resist the impulse.
To-night, however, she scarcely remembered these outbreaks of her dreaming fancy,--the sordid, hard, matter-of-fact side of life alone presented itself to her depressed imagination. She pictured herself going into service--as what? Kitchen-maid, probably,--she was not tall enough for a house-parlourmaid. House-parlourmaids were bound to be effective,--even dignified,--in height and appearance. She had seen one of these superior beings in church on Sundays--a slim, stately young woman with waved hair and a hat as fashionable as that worn by her mistress, the Squire"s lady. With a deepening sense of humiliation, Innocent felt that her very limitation of inches was against her. Could she be a nursery-governess? Hardly; for though she liked good-tempered, well-behaved children, she could not even pretend to endure them when they were otherwise. Screaming, spiteful, quarrelsome children were to her less interesting than barking puppies or squealing pigs;--besides, she knew she could not be an efficient teacher of so much as one accomplishment. Music, for instance; what had she learned of music? She could play on an ancient spinet which was one of the chief treasures of the "best parlour" of Briar Farm, and she could sing old ballads very sweetly and plaintively,--but of "technique" and "style" and all the latter-day methods of musical acquirement and proficiency she was absolutely ignorant. Foreign languages were a dead letter to her--except old French. She could understand that; and Villon"s famous verses, "Ou sont les neiges d"antan?" were as familiar to her as Herrick"s "Come, my Corinna, let us go a-maying." But, on the whole, she was strangely and poorly equipped for the battle of life. Her knowledge of baking, brewing, and general housewifery would have stood her in good stead on some Colonial settlement,--but she had scarcely heard of these far-away refuges for the dest.i.tute, as she so seldom read the newspapers. Old Hugo Jocelyn looked upon the cheap daily press as "the curse of the country," and never willingly allowed a newspaper to come into the living-rooms of Briar Farm. They were relegated entirely to the kitchen and outhouses, where the farm labourers smoked over them and discussed them to their hearts" content, seldom venturing, however, to bring any item of so-called "news" to their master"s consideration. If they ever chanced to do so, he would generally turn round upon them with a few cutting observations, such as,--
"How do you know it"s true? Who gives the news? Where"s the authority?
And what do I care if some human brute has murdered his wife and blown out his own brains? Am I going to be any the better for reading such a tale? And if one Government is in or t"other out, what does it matter to me, or to any of you, so long as you can work and pay your way? The newspapers are always trying to persuade us to meddle in other folks"s business;--I say, take care of your own affairs!--serve G.o.d and obey the laws of the country, and there won"t be much going wrong with you!
If you must read, read a decent book--something that will last--not a printed sheet full of advertis.e.m.e.nts that"s fresh one day and torn up for waste paper the next!"
Under the sway of these prejudiced and arbitrary opinions, it was not possible for Innocent to have much knowledge of the world that lay outside Briar Farm. Sometimes she found Priscilla reading an old magazine or looking at a picture-paper, and she would borrow these and take them up to her own room surrept.i.tiously for an hour or so, but she was always more or less pained and puzzled by their contents. It seemed to her that there were an extraordinary number of pictures of women with scarcely any clothes on, and she could not understand how they managed to be pictured at all in such scanty attire.
"Who are they?" she asked of Priscilla on one occasion--"And how is it that they are photographed like this? It must be so shameful for them!"
Priscilla explained as best she could that they were "dancers and the like."
"They lives by their legs, lovey!" she said soothingly--"It"s only their legs that gits them their bread and b.u.t.ter, and I s"pose they"re bound to show "em off. Don"t you worry "ow they gits done! You"ll never come across any of "em!"
Innocent shut her sensitive mouth in a firm, proud line.
"I hope not!" she said.
And she felt as if she had almost wronged the sanct.i.ty of the little study which had formerly belonged to the Sieur Amadis by allowing such pictures to enter it. Of course she knew that dancers and actors, both male and female, existed,--a whole troupe of them came every year to the small theatre of the country town which, by breaking out into an eruption of new slate-roofed houses among the few remaining picturesque gables and tiles of an earlier period, boasted of its "advancement"
some eight or ten miles away; but her "father," as she had thought him, had an insurmountable objection to what he termed "gadding abroad," and would not allow her to be seen even at the annual fair in the town, much less at the theatre. Moreover, it happened once that a girl in the village had run away with a strolling player and had gone on the stage,--an incident which had caused a great sensation in the tiny wood-encircled hamlet, and had brought all the old women of the place out to their doorsteps to croak and chatter, and prognosticate terrible things in the future for the eloping damsel. Innocent alone had ventured to defend her.
"If she loved the man she was right to go with him," she said.
"Oh, don"t talk to me about love!" retorted Priscilla, shaking her head--"That"s fancy rubbish! You know naught about it, dearie! On the stage indeed! Poor little hussy! She"ll be on the street in a year or two, G.o.d help her!"
"What is that?" asked Innocent. "Is it to be a beggar?"
Priscilla made no reply beyond her usual sniff, which expressed volumes.
"If she has found someone who really cares for her, she will never want," Innocent went on, gently. "No man could be so cruel as to take away a girl from her home for his own pleasure and then leave her alone in the world. It would be impossible! You must not think such hard things, Priscilla!"
And, smiling, she had gone her way,--while Priscilla, shaking her head again, had looked after her, dimly wondering how long she would keep her faith in men.
On this still moonlight night, when the sadness of her soul seemed heavier than she could bear, her mind suddenly reverted to this episode. She thought of the girl who had run away; and remembered that no one in the village had ever seen or heard of her again, not even her patient hard-working parents to whom she had been a pride and joy.
"Now she had a real father and mother!" she mused, wistfully--"They loved her and would have done anything for her--yet she ran away from them with a stranger! I could never have done that! But I have no father and no mother--no one but Dad!--ah!--how I have loved Dad!--and yet I don"t belong to him--and when he is dead--"