[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: "As she stood looking at John, the pale cheeks flushed
a little."--P. 181.]
JOHN'S LILY
BY
ELEANOR C. PRICE
AUTHOR OF "A LOYAL MIND," "ALEXIA," "RED TOWERS," ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED BY W. H. C. GROOME_
London
WELLS GARDNER, DARTON & CO.
3, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.C.
AND 44, VICTORIA STREET, S.W.
1894
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. A LITTLE CHILD
II. STORM AND SUNLIGHT
III. HOME AT MARKWOOD
IV. THE CHURCHYARD STILE
V. MRS. ALFRICK
VI. AT THE FAIR
VII. IN THE DARK
VIII. THE TRUTH
IX. PARTED
X. IN DANGER
XI. THE STRANGER
XII. TAKEN AWAY
XIII. GIVEN BACK
XIV. SEVEN YEARS AFTER
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"In the Doorway stood a tall young Girl, dressed in white" ...
Frontispiece
Mary searching for Lily
"In the Cart a Child was tied to the seat"
"A Lily among the Lilies"
JOHN'S LILY
CHAPTER I
_A LITTLE CHILD_
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From GOD, Who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!"
--WORDSWORTH.
It was a sultry evening in summer, and John Randal was standing on
the departure platform of a London railway station, looking at the
train. He was a tall, fine-looking young fellow of three or four and
twenty, brown and sunburnt, with dark stern eyes and an extremely
grave expression. His clothes were good, though rustic-looking, and
he carried a brown paper parcel in his hand. Any one who watched him
might have thought there was something odd in the deep interest with
which he gazed at the train, for his eyes were not attracted from it
by the hurrying passengers, the porters with their loads of luggage,
the ticket-collectors and guards in handsome uniform. It might have
been thought that he was looking out for a friend; but no, it was the
train itself which interested him. Except in one or two short trips
that same week on the underground railway, John Randal had never seen
a train before.
And yet his home was only thirty miles from London. But the small
retired village where he had spent his whole life lay quite out of
the world's track, in the quietest of valleys, sheltered among chalk
hills and beech woods, ten miles at least from the nearest railway
station. If the people in John's village wanted to go far from home
they walked, or else they travelled in the carrier's cart which
passed twice a week along the valley on its way to and from London.
This state of things had lasted for many years, but its end was now
drawing near. Already a new line of railway passed within four miles
of John's home, and people thought that as soon as it was finished
and opened, new times would dawn for that quiet country.
John did not care much about all this. He was an old-fashioned young
man, and the life he knew was good enough for him--his cottage in the
village street, his blacksmith's forge, his garden, where red roses
and tall white lilies grew, his mother, with her gentle ways and slow
movements. He did very well, it seemed to him, and he could not see
that the railway would bring much good to a village like theirs.
Noise, and smoke, and dirt; newspapers and bad characters. John
thought and said that he and his neighbours could get on very well
without the railway.
He was an ignorant fellow, you see. Till a week ago he had never
left home for more than a day. Then his mother, who always thought
that the world ought to know more of her John, persuaded him to go to
London to see her brother, who was a printer. John tied up a change
of clothes in a red handkerchief, and walked to London. His uncle
and aunt were very kind to him, and took him about sight-seeing as
far as they could. His aunt thought him a queer chap, for nothing
seemed to surprise him much. Nothing tired him; he could walk for
hours; but every day he grew more thoughtful and silent, as if his
brain was oppressed by all he saw. When the day came for him to go
home, his aunt packed his things, red handkerchief and all, with the
presents he had bought for his mother, in a brown paper parcel, which
she thought more respectable-looking than a bundle for a young man of
her nephew's appearance; for no one would have taken John, by his
looks, for a mere country lad. His uncle advised him to go home as
far as he could by train, and John consented to this, as he would get
home quicker. He came with him to the station, got his ticket for
him, and left him on the platform to wait till the train started.
Here then John stood waiting, and all the fuss and noise and hurry of
the station went crowding up and down without his taking much outward
notice of it. Inwardly, he was rather nervous about the journey,
wishing he had trusted to his own legs rather than to those
carriages, solid as they looked, into which so many people seemed to
be crowding.
Suddenly, in getting out of the way of a truck of luggage, a man and
woman pushed up against him. The woman was holding a child by the
hand, and as she pulled it hastily to one side, the little thing fell
down on its face on the platform, catching its feet in the ends of a
long shawl which was bundled round it. It cried, not loudly, but
with low, frightened, broken-hearted sobs. The man spoke loudly and
roughly--"What are you doing there?" and the woman dragged at the
child's arm. John stooped and set her on her feet again; a fair
little girl, not more than three years old, whose delicate prettiness
struck him even at that first moment. She stretched out her arm and
laid hold of his hand, lifting her face in the folds of the shawl and
looking up with wet frightened eyes, sobbing low all the time. The
man and woman were talking together, and took no notice of her. John
caught a few words of their talk--"Take care what you're about--a big
reward offered--a fine chance for us--keep your eyes open and mind
what you're about--if anything happens you'll pay for it." Some
scraps like these fell on his ears, for the man spoke loudly and
desperately. The woman seemed half stupid, and her muttered answers
were too low to be heard.
"Come, bring her along," said the man roughly.
The child's hand was snatched from John's, and her parents, or
whatever they were, hurried her away to the train. They looked
anything but respectable. The man, though his dress had an attempt
at smartness, might have come out of the lowest slums, and the
woman's dirty finery was even more repulsive. John remembered their
faces afterwards: the man's white, with a pale moustache and a
cunning expression; the woman's flushed, stupid, and sleepy. He
watched them across the platform to the door of a carriage, into
which the man hastily pushed the woman and child, turning round
himself to look suspiciously up and down the train. Then the porters
began to shut the doors, and one of them, passing John, looked up and
asked if he was going by this train. "Then get in, and look sharp
about it."
John crossed the platform with his free country stride, and stepped
in at the first open door. Rather to his surprise, for he was not
aware of having followed them, he found himself in the same
compartment with the woman and child. The man had moved a few steps
away, but as soon as the door was shut, he came back to the window.
"None of your games, you know," he said to the woman. "Write to the
old shop, and you'll hear from me. You understand?"
She nodded. The man glanced sharply at John in the further corner,
and then looked at her with a grin. He evidently thought him a very
harmless fellow-passenger.
In another minute the train steamed slowly out of the great station
into the lingering daylight of June, where towers and spires and
roofs and bridges all stood out clear against a rosy evening sky, and
sweet breaths of fresh reviving air blew in at the window, becoming
sweeter and fresher as the train's speed increased, and before very
long John saw green fields that looked greener than ever in coming
twilight, and dark trees in motionless peace as the train thundered
past them, and quiet streams, near whose banks the cows were lying
down to sleep.
He leaned out of the window, feeling as if he had been out of the
country for a year instead of a week, saying to himself, "Well, I've
seen London, and that will do for me. I don't want to leave Markwood
again in a hurry. Still, I've seen it, and now I can feel for the
poor folks that has to live there in that racket and mess all the
days of their life. As for this here train----"
He leaned back in his corner, and looked round the comfortable
carriage with a wonder and admiration that was not yet deadened by
custom. Then his eyes lingered on his fellow-traveller. Almost
immediately after leaving London she had fallen asleep, and her poor
untidy head bobbed helplessly up and down on the cushion. At first
she had stuffed the child, treating it like a bundle of shawls, into
the corner between herself and the window, but presently it roused
her by beginning to cry again with the same sad, frightened little
moaning sound as before. She snatched it up, shook it, mumbled a few
angry words, and laid it roughly at full length on the seat beside
her. There it remained quite still, perhaps too much terrified to
cry, while she settled herself in her corner and fell asleep once
more.
John too, at the opposite end of the carriage, dozed off for a few
minutes. He had had a tiring week, and it was the custom in his
mother's house to go to bed early. When he awoke, suddenly startled
by something that touched his knee, it was nearly dark outside, and
the flickering lamp lighted the carriage dimly. On the floor stood a
little figure all in white, with soft hair curling behind her ears,
with one small hand outstretched, with a pale face, and large wistful
eyes lifted towards John. The child had scrambled down from the
seat, had struggled out of the shawl which was wrapped round her, and
had crept along the floor with her little white feet, which John now
saw were bare, to her friend of the platform.
She said nothing, she did not cry, though her eyelashes were wet with
tears, but only stood with one hand on his knee, looking up
expectantly. John looked at her, and then across the carriage at the
woman--her mother, was she?--still in a heavy stupid sleep.
John was intelligent enough in some ways, but his wits were never
quick, and his home at Markwood was not the place to sharpen them.
He did not at that time make any guess about the child's story,
though he thought the whole thing queer. The strangeness of the
child's dress told him nothing. The shawl in which she had been
huddled concealed nothing but a little white woollen garment, and her
head had no covering but its own fair curls.
John stooped towards her; she held out both her arms, and he took her
with his strong brown hands and lifted her to his knee. There she
sat upright for a minute, looking at him with an odd mixture of
confidence and curiosity. Still she did not speak, and he was afraid
to ask her any question, not wishing to rouse the woman in the
opposite corner.
Presently the child began to smile. John, gazing at her in the dim
light, thought she really must be a little angel come straight from
heaven, so full of peace and sweetness was her small face now. Then
she nestled down in his arms, her soft cheek against his rough brown
coat, her heavy eyelids sank suddenly, and she fell into a sweet and
quiet sleep. John had nursed children before--all the village babies
loved him--and he did not feel the awkwardness from which some young
men would have suffered under the circumstances. He rocked the child
very gently in his arms, and presently fearing that she would be
chilled, reached across the carriage for the old shawl, and laid it
over her.
Neither the child nor the woman woke till the train stopped at
Moreton Road, the station where John was to get out. It was quite
dark now. The woman looked round with a violent start, rubbed her
eyes, and then burst out laughing. John, who did not feel at all
inclined to be friendly with her, laid the child down on the seat
with a very grave face, and without a word.
"Come along, my dear, we've got to get out," said the woman
hurriedly. "There, I say, what a naughty child you be, to be sure,
troubling the gentleman like that. Now then, come to mother, and let
me pin your shawl. Never was such a troublesome brat as you. Thank
you kindly, sir, I'm sure."
"You're welcome, ma'am. Is she your little girl?" said John gruffly,
as he took down his parcel.
"That she is, and the youngest of nine, and her father out o' work,
and me laid up for six weeks in the hospital with a broken leg. I'm
going to take her to my mother, as lives at Fiddler's Green; but it's
the awkwardest place to get at."
"So it is, if it's Fiddler's Green not far off Markwood. You won't
get there to-night," said John.
"No, to be sure not; it would be bad travelling in the dark with this
here precious child, wouldn't it? Come along, lovey."
John wondered where they were going for the night. He felt uneasy,
though he was too innocent and unsuspicious to disbelieve the woman
when she said the child was hers. But he was shy, and did not like
to ask any more questions. He lifted the child out of the train; the
woman seized her hand and dragged her away along the platform of the
quiet, lonely station, where only a stray lamp here and there
glimmered in the darkness. John, following them, thought that he had
lost his ticket, and it was a few minutes before he found it, safely
stowed away at the bottom of his safest pocket.
This delayed him, and when, coming out of the station, he looked up
and down the dreary new-made road, the woman and child had long ago
disappeared into the darkness.
He thought about them a good deal, however, as he walked on to the
village of Moreton, where he was to spend the night with the old
schoolmaster who had formerly been at Markwood, and had taught him
all he knew. Presently, in talking to this old friend, telling him
all the village news, and describing the wonderful sights of London,
he did not find room to mention the odd adventure of his first
railway journey. But he wondered several times that night what would
become of the child, whose sweet little face haunted him. "Fiddler's
Green?" Well, it would be easy to walk over there and see her again.
It was true that he did not know her grandmother's name, but those
few lonely cottages could not boast another child like her. "Why,"
said John to himself, "she was as white as a lily. And she
smiled--she smiled like one o' them baby angels in a Bible picture."