Meantime, Adele is making friends in Ashfield and in the parsonage. The
irrepressible buoyancy of her character cannot be kept under even by the
severity of conduct which belongs to the home of the Doctor. If she
yields rigid obedience to all the laws of the household, as she is
taught to do, her vivacity sparkles all the more in those short
intervals of time when the laws are silent. There is something in this
beaming mirth of hers which the Doctor loves, though he struggles
against the love. He shuts his door fast, that the snatches of some
profane song from her little lips (with him all French songs are
profane) may not come in to disturb him; but as her voice rises
cheerily, higher and higher, in the summer dusk, he catches himself
lending a profane ear; the blitheness, the sweetness, the mellowness of
her tones win upon his dreary solitude; there is something softer in
them than in the measured vocables of sister Eliza; it brings a souvenir
of the girlish Rachel, and his memory floats back upon the strains of
the new singer, to the days when that dear voice filled his heart; and
he thinks--thanking Adaly for the thought--she is singing with the
angels now!
But the spinster, who has no ear for music, in the midst of such a
carol, will cry out in sharp tones from her chamber, "Adele, Adele, not
so loud, child! you will disturb the Doctor!"
Even then Adele has her resource in the garden and the orchard, where
she never tires of wandering up and down,--and never wandering there but
some fragment of a song breaks from her lips.
From time to time the Doctor summons her to his study to have serious
talk with her. She has, indeed, shared the Saturday-night instruction in
the Catechism, in company with Reuben, and being quick at words, no
matter how long they may be, she has learned it all; and Reuben and she
dash through "what is required" and "what is forbidden" and "the reasons
annexed" like a pair of prancing horses, kept diligently in hand by that
excellent whip, Miss Johns. But the study has not wrought that gravity
in the mind of the child which the good parson had hoped for; the seed,
he fears, has fallen upon stony places. He therefore, as we have said,
summons her from time to time to his study.
And Adele comes, always at the first summons, with a tripping step, and,
with a little coquettish adjustment of her dress and hair, flings
herself into the big chair before him,--
"Now, New Papa, here I am!"
"Ah, Adaly! I wish, child, that you could be more serious than you are."
"Serious! ha! ha!"--(she sees a look of pain on the face of the Doctor,)
"but I will be,--I am"; and with great effort she throws a most
unnatural expression of repose into her face.
"You are a good girl, Adaly; but this is not the seriousness I want to
find in you. I want you to feel, my child, that you are walking on the
brink of a precipice,--that your heart is desperately wicked."
"Oh, no, New Papa! you don't think I'm desperately wicked?"--and she
says it with a charming eagerness of manner.
"Yes, desperately wicked, Adaly,--leaning to the things of this world,
and not fastening your affections on things above, on the realities
beyond the grave."
"But all that is so far away, New Papa!"
"Not so far as you think, child; they may come to-day."
Adele is sobered in earnest now, and tosses her little feet back and
forth, in an agony of apprehension.