"Mrs. Watkins," she began hurriedly, in a sweet, cultivated voice, and then stopped and drew back as another person came into the shop; "no, do not let me interrupt you. I was only going to say that one of the young ladies at Miss Martingale"s seems very poorly, and Miss Theresa is a little troubled about her, so I have promised to go back for an hour or two; but I have my key with me if I should be late."
"Dear bless my heart, Mrs. Trafford," exclaimed Mrs. Watkins, fussily, as she looked at her lodger"s pale, tired face, "you are never going out on such an evening, and all the streets swept as clean as if with a new broom; and you with your cough, and the fog, and not to mention the rawness which sucks into your chest like a lozenge;" and here Mrs.
Watkins shook her head, and weighed out a quarter of a pound of mixed tea, in a disapproving manner.
Mrs. Trafford smiled. "My good friend," she said, in rather an amused voice, "you ought to know me better by this time; have you ever remembered that either frost, or rain, or fog have kept me in-doors a single day when duty called me out;" and here she folded her cloak round her, and prepared to leave the shop.
"It"s ill tempting Providence, neighbor," remarked the other woman, who had been standing silently by and now put in her word, for she was an innocent country body with a garrulous tongue; "it"s ill tempting Providence, for "the wind and the sea obey Him." I had a son myself some fourteen years next Michaelmas," continued the simple creature, "as brave and bonny a lad as ever blessed a mother"s eyes, and that feared naught; but the snow-drift that swept over the c.u.mberland Fells found him stumbling and wandering, poor Willie, from the right way, and froze his dear heart dead."
The lady advanced a few steps, and then stopped as though seized by a sudden impulse, and looked wistfully in the other woman"s face.
"G.o.d help you," she said, very softly; "and was this boy of yours a good son?"
Perhaps in the whole of her simple, sorrowful life Elsie Deans had never seen anything more pathetic than that white face from which the gray hair was so tightly strained, and those anxious questionings.
"And was this boy of yours," she said, "a good son?"
"A better never breathed," faltered poor Elsie, as she drew her hand across her eyes; "he was my only bairn, was Willie."
"Why do you weep then?" returned Mrs. Trafford in her sad voice; "do you not know that there are mothers in the heart of this great city who would that their sons had never been born, or that they had seen them die in their infancy. "He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,"" she continued to herself; then aloud, and with a strange flickering smile that scarcely lighted up the pale face, "Good-night to you--happy mother whose son perished on the c.u.mberland Fells, for you will soon meet him again. Good-night, Mrs. Watkins;"
and with this abrupt adieu she went quickly out of the shop and was lost in the surrounding fog.
"A fine figure of a woman," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Elsie, shaking her old head with a puzzled look on her wrinkled face; "a fine, grand figure of a woman, but surely an "innocent," neighbor?"
"An innocent!" repeated Mrs. Watkins with an indignant snort; "an innocent! Mrs. Deans; why should such an idea enter your head? A shrewder and a brighter woman than my lodger, Mrs. Trafford, never breathed, though folks do say she has had a deal of trouble in her life--but there, it is none of my business; I never meddle in the affairs of my neighbors. I am not of the sort who let their tongue run away with them," finished Mrs. Watkins with a virtuous toss of her head.
CHAPTER VII.
NEA.
She was gay, tender, petulant and susceptible. All her feelings were quick and ardent; and having never experienced contradiction or restraint, she was little practiced in self-control; nothing but the native goodness of her heart kept her from running continually into error.--WASHINGTON IRVING.
If Mrs. Trafford had been questioned about her past life, she would have replied in patriarchal language that few and evil had been her days, and yet no life had ever opened with more promise than hers.
Many years, nearly a quarter of a century, before the gray-haired weary woman had stood in Mrs. Watkins"s shop, a young girl in a white dress, with a face as radiant as the spring morning itself, leaned over the balcony of Belgrave House to wave good-bye to her father as he rode away eastward.
Those who knew Nea Huntingdon in those early days say that she was wonderfully beautiful.
There was a picture of her in the Royal Academy, a dark-haired girl in a velvet dress, sitting under a marble column with a blaze of oriental scarves at her feet, and a Scotch deerhound beside her, and both face and figure were well-nigh faultless. Nea had lost her mother in her childhood, and she lived alone with her father in the great house that stood at the corner of the square, with its flower-laden balconies and many windows facing the setting sun.
Nea was her father"s only child, and all his hopes were centered upon her.
Mr. Huntingdon was an ambitious man; he was more, he was a profound egotist. In his character pride, the love of power, the desire for wealth, were evenly balanced and made subservient to a most indomitable will. Those who knew him well said he was a hard self-sufficient man, one who never forgot an injury or forgave it.
He had been the creator of his own fortunes; as a lad he had come to London with the traditional shilling in his pocket, and had worked his way to wealth, and was now one of the richest merchant princes in the metropolis.
He had married a young heiress, and by her help had gained entrance into society, but she had died a dissatisfied, unhappy woman, who had never gained her husband"s heart or won his confidence. In Mr.
Huntingdon"s self-engrossed nature there was no room for tenderness; he had loved his handsome young wife in a cool temperate fashion, but she had never influenced him, never really comprehended him; his iron will, hidden under a show of courtesy, had repressed her from the beginning of their married life. Perhaps her chief sin in his eyes had been that she had not given him a son; he had accepted his little daughter ungraciously, and for the first few years of her young life he had grievously neglected her.
No mother; left by herself in that great house, with nurses to spoil her and servants to wait on her, the little creature grew up wayward and self-willed; her caprices indulged, her faults and follies laughed at or glossed over by careless governesses.
Nea very seldom saw her father in those days; society claimed him when his business was over, and he was seldom at home. Sometimes Nea, playing in the square garden under the acacias, would look up and see a somber dark face watching her over the railings, but he would seldom call her to him; but, strange to say, the child worshiped him.
When he rode away in the morning a beautiful little face would be peeping at him through the geraniums on the balcony, a little dimpled hand would wave confidingly. "Good-bye, papa," she would say in her shrill little voice, but he never heard her; he knew nothing, and cared little, about the lonely child-life that was lived out in the s.p.a.cious nurseries of Belgrave House.
But, thank Heaven, childhood is seldom unhappy.
Nea laughed and played with the other children in the square garden; she drove out with her governess in the grand open carriage, where her tiny figure seemed almost lost. Nea remembered driving with her mother in that same carriage--a fair tired face had looked down on her smiling.
"Mamma, is not Belgrave House the Palace Beautiful? look how its windows are shining like gold," she had said once.
"It is not the Palace Beautiful to me, Nea," replied her mother, quietly. Nea always remembered that sad little speech, and the tears that had come into her mother"s eyes. What did it all mean? she wondered; why were the tears so often in her mother"s eyes? why did not papa drive with them sometimes? It was all a mystery to Nea.
Nea knew nothing about her mother"s heart-loneliness and repressed sympathies; with a child"s beautiful faith she thought all fathers were like that. When Colonel Hambleton played with his little daughters in the square garden, Nea watched them curiously, but without any painful comparison. "My papa is always busy, Nora," she said, loftily, to one of the little girls who asked why Mr. Huntingdon never came too; "he rides on his beautiful horse down to the city, nurse says. He has his ships to look after, you know, and sometimes he is very tired."
"Papa is never too tired to play with me and Janie," returned Nora, with a wise nod of her head; "he says it rests him so nicely."
Somehow Nea went home not quite so happily that day; a dim consciousness that things were different, that it never rested papa to play with her, oppressed her childish brain; and that evening Nea moped in her splendid nursery, and would not be consoled by her toys or even her birds and kitten. Presently it came out with floods of tears that Nea wanted her father--wanted him very badly indeed.
"You must not be naughty, Miss Nea," returned nurse, severely, for she was rather out of patience with the child"s pettishness; "Mr.
Huntingdon has a lot of grand people to dine with him to-night. The carriages will be driving up by and by, and if you are good, you shall go into one of the best bedrooms and look at them." But Nea was not to be pacified by this; the tears ended in a fit of perverse sulking that lasted until bedtime. Nea would neither look at the carriages nor the people; the ice and fruit that had been provided as a treat were pushed angrily away; Nea would not look at the dainties--she turned her flushed face aside and buried it in her pillow. "I want papa," she sobbed, as nurse pulled down the blind and left her.
That night, as Mr. Huntingdon crossed the corridor that led to his bedroom, he was startled by seeing what looked like a ma.s.s of blue and white draperies flung across his door, but as he lowered his candlestick he saw it was Nea lying fast asleep, with her head pillowed on her arms, and her dark hair half hiding her face.
"Good heavens! what can nurse be about!" he exclaimed in a shocked voice, as he lifted the child, and carried her back to her bed. Nea stirred drowsily as he moved her, and said, "Dear papa," and one warm arm crept about his neck, but she was soon fast asleep again. Somehow that childish caress haunted Mr. Huntingdon, and he thought once or twice how pretty she had looked. Nurse had a.s.sured him that the child must have crept out of bed in her sleep, but Mr. Huntingdon did not feel satisfied, and the next morning, as he was eating his breakfast, he sent for Nea.
She came to him willingly enough, and stood beside him.
"What were you doing, my dear, last night?" he asked, kindly, as he kissed her. "Did nurse tell you that I found you lying by my bedroom door, and that I carried you back to bed?"
"Yes, papa; but why did you not wake me? I tried not to go to sleep until you came, but I suppose I could not help it."
"But what were you doing?" he asked, in a puzzled tone; "don"t you know, Nea, that it was very wrong for a little girl to be out of her bed at that time of night?" But as Mr. Huntingdon spoke he remembered again how sweet the childish face had looked, pillowed on the round dimpled arm.
"I was waiting to see you, papa," replied Nea with perfect frankness; "you are always too busy or too tired to come and see me, you know, and nurse is so cross, and so is Miss Sanderson; they will never let me come and find you; so when nurse came to take away the lamp I pretended to be asleep, and then I crept out of the bed, and went to your door and tried to keep awake."
"Why did you want to see me, Nea?" asked her father, more and more puzzled; it never entered his head that his only child wanted him, and longed for him.
"Oh," she said, looking up at him with innocent eyes that reminded him of her mother, "I always want you, papa, though not so badly as I did yesterday; Colonel Hambleton was playing with Nora and Janie, and Nora said her papa was never too busy to play with them, and that made me cry a little, for you never play with me, do you, papa? and you never look up when I am waving to you from the balcony, and nurse says you don"t want to be worried with me, but that is not true, is it, papa?"
"No, no!" but his conscience p.r.i.c.ked him as he patted her head and picked out a crimson peach for her. "There, run away, Nea, for I am really in a hurry; if you are a good girl you shall come down and sit with me while I have dinner, for I shall be alone to-night;" and Nea tripped away happily.
From that day people noticed a change in Mr. Huntingdon; he began to take interest in his child, without being demonstrative, for to his cold nature demonstration was impossible; he soon evinced a decided partiality for his daughter"s society; and no wonder, as people said, for she was a most engaging little creature.
By and by she grew absolutely necessary to him, and they were never long apart. Strangers would pause to admire the pretty child on her cream-colored pony cantering beside the dark, handsome man. Nea always presided now at the breakfast-table; the dimpled hands would carry the cup of coffee round to her father"s chair, and lay flowers beside his plate. When he was alone she sat beside him as he ate his dinner, and heard about the ships that were coming across the ocean laden with goodly freights. Nea grew into a beautiful girl presently, and then a new ambition awoke in Mr. Huntingdon"s breast. Nea was his only child--with such beauty, talents, and wealth, she would be a match for an earl"s son; his heart swelled with pride as he looked at her; he begun to cherish dreams of her future that would have amazed Nea. A certain young n.o.bleman had lately made their acquaintance, a handsome simple young fellow, with a very moderate allowance of brains; indeed, in his heart Mr. Huntingdon knew that Lord Bertie Gower was merely a feather-brained boy with a weak vacillating will that had already brought him into trouble.
Mr. Huntingdon was thinking about Lord Bertie Gower as he rode away that spring morning, while Nea waved to him from the balcony; he had looked up at her and smiled, but as he turned away his thoughts were very busy. Yes, Lord Bertie was a fool, he knew that--perhaps he would not own as much to any one else, certainly not if Lord Bertie became his son-in-law--but he was well-bred and had plenty of good nature, and--Well, young men were all alike, they would have their fling, and he was hardly the man to cast a stone at them. Then he was a good-looking fellow, and girls liked him; and if Nea laughed at him, and said that he was stupid, he could soon convince her that there was no need for her husband to be clever--she was clever enough for both; he would like to see the man, with the exception of himself, who could bend Nea"s will. The girl took after him in that; she had not inherited her mother"s soft yielding nature--poor Susan, who had loved him so well.