otherwise, for a boy of fourteen; and I have sometimes thought no
course of study in any school would have been so much to me as was the
entire absence of frivolous and worthless literature, and the constant
companionship of these great minds. Besides these, I read daily in my
pocket Testament; and I owed a great deal also to the instructions and
explanations of the friend who was, as it has always seemed to me,
God's especial gift to my needs.
"Our voyage appeared destined, at first, to be a highly successful one;
but just as we were nearly ready to return, we encountered a storm
which strewed the sea with wrecks. We saw our vessel go down, but we
were fortunate enough to escape in our boats; my friend and I, and two
or three more, were with the second mate in his boat, and we were soon
separated from the others. We made land on a fruitful island, peopled
by savages who were not unfriendly; but it was many months before, at
last, we got away in an East Indiaman, and while we were on the island
my friend had died suddenly, leaving untold the story of his life.
"I will not enter into the particulars of my return home,--how from
port to port and ship to ship I made my way, until, at length, after
five years of absence, I sighted the well-known landmarks of the old
town from whence I embarked.
"How familiar it all looked to me! I knew every field through which the
homeward road led, and I walked the nine miles between the town and my
father's farm in the night, as I had done before. It was three o'clock
of a September morning when I reached the old place, and I had nearly
two hours to wait before there were any signs of life about it. For
now, after all these years, I had not the courage to summon them from
their rest. How I passed those waiting hours, divided betwixt hope and
fear, you can guess. I lived over in them all the torturing anxieties
of the last five years. Was Nelly dead or alive? Should I ever see my
mother again? What had changed, while the old house among the trees had
stood so still?
"At last I heard a sound. A door opened, and my mother, who of old
always used to be the first to move, looked out. Her hair was white,
and her thin cheeks were pale; but I knew the kind eyes that looked
forth to meet the morning, and should have known them despite any
amount of change. I sprang forward to greet her.
"'Mother,' I said. She knew my voice and turned toward me trembling.
"'O Jack, Jack! I thought you were dead long ago. O my boy, my own boy!'
"And her arms were round my neck, her tender lips were kissing me; and
so she drew me in, into peace, shelter, home.
"'And Nelly?' I asked, half afraid to call the name.
"'Nelly is well. Oh, if you had but waited to see. She was ill for
awhile, but no serious harm came to her; and, instead, it was my own
boy who went away to break my heart.'
"'And has come back to heal it,' I cried, growing bold and merry with
my relief and joy.
"By this time the rest heard us, and came to the scene,--father,
brothers, and last of all, Nelly; such a beautiful Nelly of sweet
sixteen, ten times fairer and brighter than my brightest memories of
her, and all ready to forgive me, and make much of me.
"_Then_ was when the chivalry began. _Then_ I was ready enough to fetch
and carry for Miss Nelly of the dark eyes and the bright cheeks."
"Oh," said John, laughing, "then when a fellow is nineteen he can be
chivalrous to his own sister?"
"Very likely he can," Uncle Jack answered, "but my experience doesn't
prove it; for I began to be glad, very soon indeed, that Nelly was
only my adopted sister, after all. It was a good while before I got my
courage up to ask her whether she would trust herself to me on the long
home stretch through life. Be sure that I promised her, if she would,
that I'd never leave her in any dark places."
"And what did she say?"
"Oh! I mustn't tell her secrets. Go and ask her. There she comes, with
her first grandchild in her arms. Her cheeks are not bright now, she
says, but somehow they look to me just as they used to look; and I know
her eyes are as dark and deep as ever; and though I call her 'mother,'
with the rest of you, when you are all round, there is never a night
that I don't say to her, before she goes to sleep, 'God bless you,
Nelly!'"
NOBODY'S CHILD.
The summer sun was warm in the five-acre lot, and the east porch was
cool and pleasant, so the owner of the lot lingered in the porch and
talked awhile with his wife. He had married her only the April before,
and to live with her and love her had not yet grown to be an old
story. It would be her fault if it ever did grow to be one; for he was
a tender, kindly man, this Marcus Grant, with a gentle and clinging
nature, and a womanly need of loving.
His wife, though she was young and pretty, with bright eyes, and bright
lips, and soft, waving hair, was harder than he, and colder, and more
selfish. But she had given him all the heart she had, and in these
early days she cared very much indeed about pleasing him, and keeping
him satisfied with her; or, rather, making him continue to admire her,
for quiet satisfaction on his part would not have been enough.
He had thrown himself down on the door-stone, and his head was leaning
against her lap, as she sat on her low chair in the porch, and ran her
fingers in and out of his thick chestnut hair, thinking to herself
what a fortunate woman she was to be the wife of this manly, handsome
fellow, whom so many girls wanted, and the mistress of his well-filled,
comfortable house.
From this east porch where they sat they could see down the long line
of dusty road that led to the church and the few houses clustered round
it, which passed for a village. The farmhouse stood on the top of a
high hill; and up this hill they now saw a woman toiling slowly. The
summer sun burned fiercely down on her, the dust rose with every step
in a choking cloud about her, but still she struggled on.
Little events are full of interest in country solitudes, and both Grant
and his wife watched the wanderer with curiosity.
"Well, I never saw her before, that's certain," the husband said,
after a long look as she drew nearer.
"Nor I," returned his wife. "But see, Mark, she has a baby in her arms.
She's trying to keep the sun off it with that shawl; and, sure as you
live, she is turning in here."
"Why, so she is;" and Grant rose to his feet.
"May I sit down in the shade and rest?" asked the stranger, drawing
nigh. She spoke in a clear, silvery voice, which betrayed some of
her secrets, since it was the voice of a lady, and also it was the
utterance of despair, for its hopeless monotone was unvarying.
"Certainly," and Mrs. Grant rose and offered her own low chair, for
clearly this was no common tramp.
"And might I trouble you for a glass of water?"
"I'll go for some fresh," Grant said, full of hospitable intent.
But before he got back with the water he heard his wife calling him,
and hurrying forward at the sound, he found her holding the stranger's
head, on her shoulder, and the baby, who was just opening sleepy eyes,
in her arms.
"Quick, Mark, do something. I think she is dying. She must be
sun-struck."
And so it proved. No one ever knew how far she had toiled in that
intense heat, with the baby in her arms,--no one ever knew any thing
more about her, for when the sun set, which had scorched and withered
her life, she, too, was gone to unknown shores. She spoke only once
after she asked for the glass of water, and that was just before she
died. The baby, in another room, uttered a cry, and she tried to turn
her head toward the sound.
"It is your baby," Mrs. Grant said, kindly, "but she is all right. What
do you call her?"
The strangest change came over the dying face: it may have been only
a foreshadowing of death, but it seemed more like a mortal agony of
renunciation and of despair.
"Nothing," she said, as evenly and with as little change of inflection
as if she were already a ghost; "nothing: she is nobody's child."
But in half an hour after that she was dead, and Mrs. Grant, who was
very literal in her ideas, always thought that the stranger had not
known what she said; but, she used to add, the child _was_ nobody's
child, for all they should ever know about it.
After the mother was buried, she began to think it was time to dispose
of this child, which was nobody's. She was not without heart, and
she had worked diligently to fashion small garments enough to make
the little creature comfortable; but now, she thought, her duty was
done, and she wondered Mark said nothing about taking the baby to the
alms-house.
At last, one evening, she herself proposed it. Her husband looked at
her in mild surprise. He supposed all women loved babies by instinct,
and he took it for granted that of course his wife wanted this one,
only she probably thought he wouldn't like it round.
"Why, did you think I wouldn't let you keep it?" he asked quietly.
"I think God has sent it to us, and we've really no right to turn it
over to any one else, to say nothing of the pleasure it is to have the
little bundle."
As I said, Mrs. Grant was still in a state of mind not to be satisfied
without her husband's admiration. She would not have fallen short of
his ideal of her for any thing; she would, at least, _seem_ all that he
desired her to _be_. She was quick enough to understand that he _would_
think less of her if he saw her unwilling to keep the baby, so she
smiled on him with what cheerfulness she could summon, and treated the
matter as settled.
Thus the child, which was nobody's, grew up in the Grant household.
She had been six months old, apparently, when she came there, and by
midwinter she began to totter round on her little feet, and to say
short words.
But no one ever taught her to say papa or mamma, those lovely first
words of childhood. What had nobody's child to do with such names?
It might have seemed strange to most people that Julia Grant did
not love this little thing, so thrown upon her mercy in its tender
babyhood. But, despite theories, all women are not fond of children.
Every woman is, perhaps, fond, in a blind, instinctive way, of her own;
but the more heavenly love which takes all children in its arms and
blesses them is not by any means universal.
The most powerful trait in Mrs. Grant's character was a silent,
unobtrusive selfishness. The whole world revolved, to her thought,
about _her_. Rains fell, dews dropped earthward, winds blew and suns
shone for Julia Grant. She had consented with secret reluctance to
keep the child, and from that moment a root of bitterness and jealousy
had sprung up in her heart. If her husband had thought much of _her_
comfort, she used to say to herself, he would not have wanted to put
all this care upon her.
She was quite ready, therefore, to be jealous, and to feel as if
something was taken from her every time he tossed the little one in
his arms, or called it a pet name; and after a while--not at once, for
he was naturally the most unsuspicious of men--some instinct revealed
this to him, and made him, lover of peace as he was, very chary of
manifesting in his wife's presence any especial tenderness for the
little stranger within his gates.
But summer and winter came and went, and with their sun and shade
nobody's child grew on toward girlhood. She had a great deal of beauty,
of a shadowy, delicate kind. She was seldom ill, but she was a very
frail-looking child. The quick, changeful color in her cheeks, the
depth of feeling in her dark eyes, the tremulous curves about her
mouth, all indicated an organization of extreme sensitiveness; a nature
to which love would be as the very breath of life, but which was too
shrinking and timid ever to put forth any claims for it, or make any
advances.
For ten years she was the only little one in the Grant household.
Their affairs prospered, they grew richer every year, as if nobody's
child had brought a blessing with her; but it was a constant source of
bitterness to Mrs. Grant that they were laying up for strangers, or
perhaps for this waif, whom no one else claimed, and who seemed likely
to remain in their house for ever, like some noiseless, unwelcome
shadow.
But at last, when the child had been for ten years her unwelcome
housemate, to Mrs. Grant herself was given a little baby girl, God's
messenger of love, as I think every child must be, to every mother.
Never had baby a warmer welcome. The preparations made for her were
worthy of a little queen, and she opened her eyes on a world of love
and of summer.
But perhaps no one, not even her mother, lavished upon her such a
passion of devotion as the poor little waif, nobody's child, who had
never in her life before had any one whom she dared to caress. Perhaps
her devotion to baby touched Mrs. Grant's heart; at any rate she
saw that she could trust the little one to her without fear, and so
nobody's child became a self-constituted but most faithful nurse and
body-guard to this other child, whom loving hearts were so proud and
glad to own.
And little Rose--for so they named the summer baby--clung to her young
nurse with a fond tenacity, very exacting and wearing, indeed, but
unutterably sweet to the shy girl whom no one else loved. She began to
feel that she was of some use,--even she had her own name and place in
the world; and this reminds me that I have not yet told you her name.
She had been christened Annette soon after she came under the Grant
roof, but little Rose called her "Nanty," and this odd title was the
very first word that small person ever spoke. She was a lovely baby,
one of the rosy, fat, dimpled, laughing kind, and so thoroughly healthy
that she seldom cried, except when "Nanty" disappeared for a moment
from her sight. The touch of her baby fingers seemed to make Marcus
Grant and his wife both young again. Day by day some line of care faded
out of their faces, which time had begun to harden. The mother smiled,
as she had never smiled before, on her baby; and here, at last, was an
object on which the father's great, loving heart could lavish itself,
unblamed, and unquestioned.
Rose was a year and a half old, when one cold winter night her father
and mother were persuaded to go to a house warming, a mile away. Mrs.
Grant was seldom willing to leave her baby, but this gay company was to
assemble at the new house of one of her best friends, and she took a
fancy to be present.
"'Nanty' will be just as careful of Rose, to do her justice, as I
should," she said; "and I think it's only neighborly to go."
Her husband, always sociable in his nature, assented readily enough;
and eight o'clock saw them well tucked in under the buffalo robes of
their sleigh, and started for the scene of festivities.
"Nanty," for her part, was well content. Rose was already asleep, her
little cheek, pink as the heart of one of her namesake flowers, resting
on one dimpled hand, while the other was tossed above her head, as we
have all seen babies sleep. The maid-of-all-work went off early to her
bed in the next chamber, and the man, who had a family of his own not
far away, took his departure, and then "Nanty" raked up the fire, and
crept softly into bed beside little Rose.
It was nearly midnight when she woke, roused from her slumber by
a light, a vivid, red light, brighter than day. In one moment she
realized her position. The house was on fire, and the flames were
already far advanced.
She sprang to the door and opened it, but it was only to be met and
driven back by a sheet of fire. There was no hope of escape that way.
Rose was her only thought. If she could save the child, she did not
care for herself.
She opened the chamber window. The leap seemed desperate to her timid
gaze, but the snow underneath the window might break the fall. Then
she thought of something better. She caught the blankets from the bed,
and rolled Rose in them hurriedly, then dragged off the feather-bed,
by an effort of uttermost strength, and forced it through the window;
and then, reaching out as far as she could, she dropped Rose, closely
wrapped in the blankets, upon the bed, and sprang herself from another
window, lest she might fall upon the child.
For her there was no bed underneath, and no wrapping of soft woollens.
Heavily she fell to the ground, and a violent shock, followed by deadly
pain, told her that she had broken her arm. She thanked God, in that
breathless moment, that it was not her leg, for somehow she must move
Rose to a place of safety, out of reach, at least, of falling timbers.
How she did it she never could have told, but in thirty seconds Rose
and the bed were out of the yard and across the street, and then she
sank down beside her charge, utterly unconscious.
Mr. and Mrs. Grant were driving home after the festival when they
caught the gleam of a wild, strange light in the direction of their own
home.
"The house is on fire!" Mrs. Grant cried, with white lips.
"Rose!" the father answered hoarsely, and whipped his horse into a run.
A quarter of a mile away from home they met the maid.
"Master, mistress," she screamed after them, "the house is on fire, and
I'm going for help."
They did not stop for questions. Had "Nanty" also forsaken little Rose?
But they found "Nanty" at her post, though at first they thought she
was dead. The mother pulled away the blankets from the little bundle
beside her, and Baby Rose rubbed her chubby hands into her sleepy eyes.
"Where is I?" she said, "and what for you make morning so soon?"
"O Mark, Mark! she's all right," the mother cried, in a passion of joy.
"'Nanty' has saved her;" and then she bent over the little girl in her
thin night-gown, and took her by the arm.
"Nanty, Nanty!"
She had seized the broken arm, and the pain roused the fainting girl.
"Yes'm," she said, starting up. "I'm so sorry to be good for nothing
just now, when you want me so much, but I broke my arm jumping out."
Afterwards, when the family had found a new shelter, the whole story
came out. The maid, Judith, had read herself to sleep, and her candle
had tipped over and set the bed on fire. The flames had aroused her to
a terror which utterly swept away whatever presence of mind she might
have had under other circumstances, and without one thought for Rose
or "Nanty" she had hurried off to call the neighbors to the scene of
action.
One might have feared that the fright and exposure would prove fatal to
one so frail and delicate as "Nanty" had always been; but by the time
her arm was well healed she was stronger than ever before, drawing new
life, as it seemed, from the love and care lavished on her so freely;
for now even Mrs. Grant's heart had opened and taken her in.
One day Marcus Grant said to his wife,--
"But for 'Nanty' we should have had no child at all. It seems hard that
she, who saved our darling, should be nobody's child herself."
"You think we ought to adopt her, and make her ours legally?" his wife
answered, smiling cheerfully. "I have been thinking the same thing
myself. We will do it when you please, for I believe God sent her to
us, to be our own, just as much as ever He sent Rose."
So it came about, before another spring, that "Nanty" was no longer
nobody's child. Father, mother, and little sister all belonged to her,
and she had name and place in life, and a happy home where love smiled
for ever.
MY LITTLE GENTLEMAN.
For a year the great house rising on the summit of Prospect Hill had
been an object of interest and observation, and a chief subject for
talk to the quiet country neighborhood surrounding it. Hillsdale was
an old town--a still, steady-going farming place--where the young men
ploughed the unwilling fields, and coaxed reluctant crops out of the
hard-hearted New England soil, as fathers and grandfathers had done
before them. But in all the generations since the town was settled, no
one had ever thought of building on Prospect Hill. It had been used as
pasture ground, until now, when a man from Boston had bought it, and
had had a road made to its top, and a house built on its very brow.
This house was a wonder of architectural beauty.
"With its battlements high in the hush of the air,
And the turrets thereon."
It was built of a kind of mixed stone; so that its variegated coloring
had an air of brightness and gayety very unusual. The farmers about
were exercised in mind over the amount of ox-flesh and patience
required to drag stone enough for the great building up the high hill;
but that did not trouble the architect, who gave his orders composedly,
and went on with his business, quite unheeding comment. The house,
itself, puzzled the neighbors, with its superb, arched dining-hall,
its lovely, frescoed drawing-room, its wide passages, its little
music-room, and its great library all lined with carven oak. Then, why
there should be so many chambers, unless, indeed, Mr. Shaftsbury had a
very large family.
But it was when the furniture began to come in that wonder reached
its height. Such plenishings had never been seen before in Hillsdale.
The carpet on the drawing-room must have been woven in some loom
of unheard-of size; for it seemed to be all in one piece, with a
medallion in the centre, a border round the edge, and all over its soft
velvet--into which your feet sank as into woodland moss--the daintiest
flowers that ever grew. Marble statues gleamed in front of the great
mirrors; and pictures of lovely landscapes, and radiant sunsets, and
handsome men, and fair women, hung upon the walls. In the music-room
were placed a grand piano, a harp and a guitar. The shelves which ran
round the library on all sides, half way from floor to ceiling, were
filled with substantially bound books; and above them were busts of
great men by whom immortal words had been written. It was a dream of
beauty all through,--and when it was finished, and a troop of servants,
men and women, came to make all things ready, expectation reached its
height.
A presidential progress could hardly have excited more interest than
did the arrival of a quiet, gentlemanly-looking man, dressed in gray,
with iron-gray hair and beard, at the little railroad station, where
a carriage had been sent down from Prospect Hill to meet him. This,
of course, was Mr. Shaftsbury. He was accompanied, in spite of the
many chambers, by a family of only two,--a lady much younger than
himself, dressed with elegant simplicity, with a face full of all
womanly sweetness, and a boy, about twelve or thirteen, apparently,--a
high-bred little fellow in his appearance, but somewhat pale and
delicate, and in need of the bracing air of Prospect Hill.
They drove home in the sunset,--this little family of three,--and
looked for the first time on their new abode. Mr. Shaftsbury had
selected the location, and bought the land, somewhat more than a
year before; and then had put the whole matter into the hands of a
competent architect, while he took his family to Europe, so that the
new residence had as entirely the charm of novelty for him as for the
others.
For a month after that he was to be seen busily superintending matters
about his place in the forenoon, while his wife and boy sauntered
along, never far away from him, or driving with them in the pleasant
May afternoons,--always these three only, and always together.
The first of June, the summer term of the district school began. It
was an intense surprise to the scholars to find, first of all in his
place, young Shaftsbury, from the hill. "Robert Shaftsbury, thirteen
years old," he replied to the teacher, who asked his name and age. He
studied quietly till recess, and even then lingered in his seat, with
evident shyness, though he watched the others with a look of interest
on his face. They stood apart, and talked of him among themselves,
instead of rushing out at once to play, as was their wont.
At last, after a good deal of wonderment and talk, one boy, bolder or
more reckless than the rest, marched up to him.
"I say, Velvet Jacket, how came you here?" was his salutation. "Seems
to me you're too much of a gentleman for our folks."
A slight flush warmed young Shaftsbury's pale cheeks; but he answered,
with frankness as absolute as his courtesy was perfect:--
"I have been taught at home, up to now, but my father wants me to be
with other boys of my own age; and he says a true gentleman belongs
everywhere."
The boys all heard what he said; and, in spite of their boyish
rudeness, it inspired them with a certain respect. That was the
beginning of the title which they gave him, among themselves, of
"little gentleman,"--_only_ among themselves, at first; though
afterwards, when they grew more familiar with him, they used to address
him by it, more often than by his name.