THE ENGLISH FARM.
Cecile had strange dreams that night. Her faith had hitherto been very
simple, very strong, very fervent. Ever since that night at the meeting
of the Salvation Army, when the earnest and longing child had given her
heart to the One who knocked for admittance there, had she been
faithful to her first love. She had found the Guide for whom her soul
longed, and not all the troubles and anxieties of her long and weary
journey--not all the perils of the way--had power to shake her
confidence. Even in the great pain of yesterday Cecile was not greatly
disturbed. Maurice was lost, but she had asked the good Guide Jesus so
earnestly to bring back the little straying lamb, that she was quite
sure he would soon be with them again. In this confidence she had gone
to sleep. But whether it was the discomfort of her position in that
sleep, or that Satan was in very truth come to buffet her; in that
slumber came dreams so terrible, so real, that for the first time the
directness of her confidence was shaken. In her dreams she thought she
heard a voice saying to her over and over again: "There is no
Guide--there is no Lord Jesus Christ." She combated the wicked
suggestion even in her sleep, and awoke to cast it from her with
indignation.
It was daylight when the tired child opened her eyes. She was no longer
lying against Joe's breast in the forest; no, she was in the shelter of
the little hut, and Toby alone was keeping her company. Joe had
vanished, and no Maurice had returned in the darkness as she had fondly
hoped he would the night before. The candle had shed its tiny ray and
burned itself out in vain. The little wanderer had not come back.
Cecile sat up with a weary sigh; her head ached, she felt cold and
chilly. Then a queer fancy, joined to a trembling kind of hope, came
over her. That farm with the English frontage; that fair child with the
English face. Suppose those people were really English? Suppose she
went to them and asked them to help her to look for Maurice, and
suppose, while seeking for her little brother, she obtained a clew to
another and more protracted search?
Cecile thought and thought, and though her temples throbbed with pain,
and she trembled from cold and weariness, the longing to get as near as
possible to this farm, where English people might dwell, became too
great and strong to be resisted.
She rose somewhat languidly, and, calling Toby, went out into the
forest. Here the fresher air revived her, and the exercise took off a
growing sensation of heavy illness. She walked quickly, and as she did
so her hopes became more defined.
The farm Cecile meant to reach lay about a mile from the village of
Bolleau. It was situated on a pretty rise of ground to the very borders
of the forest. Cecile, walking quickly, reached it before long; then
she stood still, leaning over the paling and looking across the
enchanted ground. This paling in itself was English, and the very strut
of the barn-door fowl reminded her of Warren's Grove. How she wished
that fair child to run out! How she hoped to hear even one word of the
only language she understood! No matter her French origin, Cecile was
all English at this moment. Toby stood by her side patiently enough.
Toby, too, was in great trouble and perplexity about Maurice, but his
present strongest instinct was to get at a very fat fowl which,
unconscious of danger, was scratching up worms at its leisure within
almost reach of his nose.
Toby had a weakness, nay, a vice, in the direction of fowl; he liked to
hunt them. He could not imagine why Cecile did not go in at that low
gate which stood a little open close by. Where was the use of remaining
still, in any case, so near temptation? The unwary fowl came close,
very close. Toby could stand it no longer. He made a spring, a snap,
and caught at its beak.
Then ensued a fuss and an uproar; every fowl in the place commenced to
give voice in the cause of an injured comrade. Cackle, cackle, crow,
crow, from, it seemed, hundreds of throats. Toby retired actually
abashed, and out at the same moment, from under the rose-covered porch,
came the pretty fair-haired boy. The child was instantly followed by an
old woman, a regular Frenchwoman, upright, straight as a dart, with
coal-black eyes and snowy hair tidily put away under a tall peasant's
cap.
Cecile heard her utter a French exclamation, then chide pretty sharply
the uproarious birds. Toby lying _perdu_ behind the hedge, the fowl
were naturally chided for much ado about nothing.
Just then the little boy, breaking from the restraining hand, ran
gleefully into a field of waving corn.
"Suzanne, Suzanne!" shouted the Frenchwoman in shrill tones, and then
out flew a much younger woman, a woman who seemed, even to the child
Cecile, very young indeed. A tall, fair young woman, with a face as
pink and white as the boy's, and a wealth of even more golden hair.
"Ah! you naughty little lad. Come here, Jean," she said in English;
then catching the truant child to her bosom, she ran back with him into
the house.
Cecile felt herself turning cold, almost faint. An impulse to run into
that farmhouse, to address that fair-haired young woman, to drag her
story, whatever it might be, from her lips, came over her almost too
strongly to be resisted.
She might have yielded to it, she was indeed about to yield to it, when
suddenly a voice at her elbow, calling her by her name, caused her to
look round. There stood Joe, but Joe with a face so altered, so
ghastly, so troubled, that Cecile scarcely knew him.
"Come, Cecile, come back to the hut; I have some'ut to tell yer," he
said slowly and in hoarse tones.
And Cecile, too terrified by this fresh alarm even to remember the
English folks who lived at the farm, followed him back into the forest
without a word.