HUGH INGELOW KEEPS HIS PROMISE.
Mrs. Susan Sharpe was up with the lark, or, rather, with the sea-gulls
whirling and shrieking out on the tossing waters. The early morning sun
streamed in the little chamber; the wind wailed plaintively still, and
the dull tramp, tramp of the multitudinous waves kept up their ceaseless
refrain.
All was yet still in the lone farmhouse--no living thing was stirring,
not even the rats, that had held high carnival all night. Down in the
back yard and front garden, Tiger and Nero prowled about their beat,
surlily growling at the tossing trees, and were monarchs of all they
surveyed.
Mrs. Sharpe was not an imaginative person, luckily. She got up and made
her toilet, and splashed herself briskly in a basin of cold water. The
effect of these ablutions was singular--they effected a total cure of
her inflamed eyelids.
More singular still, a wig of red hair stood on the dressing-table, and
Mrs. Sharpe's cranium was adorned with a respectable growth of dark,
glossy, brown hair.
"If they only saw me now," said Mrs. Sharpe to herself, with a chuckle,
"I rather think they'd open their old eyes!"
She went to work artistically--reddened her eyelids over again,
carefully adjusted her wig, set her cap on it, fixed her spectacles on
her nose, and surveyed herself complacently in the cracked
chimney-glass.
"You'll do," said Mrs. Sharpe, nodding familiarly to her image: "You're
as ugly as if somebody had bespoke you. I only wonder how that little
unfortunate can take to such a looking object--and she does take to me,
poor dear! And now I'll write to him. He's sure to be along in the
course of the morning."
Taking from her capacious pocket a blank-book and a lead-pencil, Mrs.
Susan Sharpe sat down and wrote.
And this is what Mrs. Sharpe wrote:
"She's here, and safe and well, and don't know me no more than the dead.
But I can't get her out. Two old women and one old man are on the watch
all day long. I daren't sneeze but they know it. And before they go off
the watch there's two big, savage dogs goes on, and prowl about all
night. I don't know what to do; tell me. She's awful down-hearted, and
cries and goes on. I heard your whistle last night. Her room is next to
mine--the windows to the left. If you walk on the beach she'll see you;
she sits at the window all day. Doctor O. is going to Cuba in a week,
and going to take her with him; so you had better be quick."
Mrs. Sharpe read her own composition over two or three times, with a
satisfied look.
"I think that will do," she murmured. "Trust him to find a way out of a
fix, and we're in a fix now, if there ever was one. Drat the dogs! If it
wasn't for them I could get on myself."
Mrs. Sharpe was not a rapid scribe. It had taken her a considerable
while to write this, and the household was astir. She folded it up in
the smallest possible dimensions, and wedged it into her thimble.
"A brass thimble makes a good, strong envelope," said the nurse, with a
grim smile. "And now to begin my day's work."
She quitted her own apartment and went into that of her charge. Mollie
was still asleep--sleeping like a babe, with lips apart, and cheeks
softly flushed, and loose, golden hair falling in burnished masses over
the pillow. Involuntarily Mrs. Sharpe paused.
"She looks like a picture," she thought. "No wonder he's crazy in love."
The sound of the opening door awoke the light sleeper. She rose up on
her elbow and stared around. The nurse advanced with a propitiatory
smile.
"Good-morning, miss," she said, cheerfully. "I hope you had a nice
sleep."
"Oh, is it you?" said Mollie. "I was dreaming I was back home with
guardy, and Sir Roger, and poor Hugh, and here I am still. Oh!" in a
voice of bitter anguish, "why did you awake me?"
"My poor dear," said the nurse, touched, "I didn't know, you know, or I
wouldn't. There! don't think about it now, but get up, like a good girl,
and wash and dress yourself, and have your breakfast comfortable. Things
won't be always like this, you know."
Mollie looked wistfully at her, but Mrs. Sharpe wasn't going to commit
herself, with no certainty but that listening ears were at the door.
She assisted the poor prisoner with her toilet, combed out and curled
the beautiful, abundant hair, and made her as pretty as a picture.
"She's lost her rosy cheeks, and is failed away to nothing," mused the
nurse. "Only for that, she'd be the loveliest thing the sun shines on."
"And now you're fixed, my pretty dear," said Mrs. Sharpe, "I'll go down
and get your breakfast. Nobody ever feels right in the morning on an
empty stomach."
Down in the kitchen, Mrs. Sharpe found things in a lively state of
preparation--coffee boiling, steak broiling, toast making, and muffins
baking. Old Sally, in a state threatening spontaneous combustion, bent
over the fire, and Mrs. Oleander, in her rocking-chair, superintended.
"Are you only getting up now?" asked the doctor's mother, suspiciously.
"Been up these two hours, ma'am," responded Mrs. Sharpe. "I tidied up
myself and my room, and then tidied up Miss Dane and her'n. I came down
to fetch up her breakfast."
"It's all ready," said Sally. "Fetch along your tray."
So Susan Sharpe fetched along her tray, and received a bountiful supply
of coffee and toast, and steak and muffins.
"There's nothing like plenty of good victuals for curing the vapors,"
observed Sally, sagely. "You make the young woman eat this, Mrs. Sharpe,
and she'll feel better, you'll see."
Mrs. Sharpe smiled, as she bore off her burden, at the idea Sally must
have of one little girl's appetite.
She found Mollie sitting at the window gazing at the sea, sparkling as
if sown with stars, in the morning sunshine.
"Is it not beautiful?" she said, turning to the nurse. "Oh, if I were
only free once more--free to have a plunge in that snow-white surf--free
to have a breezy run along that delightful beach this magnificent
morning?"
Mrs. Sharpe set down her tray, looked cautiously around her, lowered her
voice, fixed her green-spectacled eyes meaningly on Mollie's face, and
uttered these remarkable words:
"Wait! You may be free before long!"
"What do you mean?" cried Mollie, starting violently.
"Hush! 'Sh! 'sh!" laying her hand over the girl's mouth. "Not a word.
Walls have ears, in prisons. Take your breakfast, miss," raising her
voice. "It will do you no good, acting ugly and not eating."
For the stairs had creaked under a cautious, ascending footstep, and
Mrs. Sharpe had heard that creak.
So, too, had Mollie this time; and she turned her shining eyes in
eloquent silence to Mrs. Sharpe, and Mrs. Sharpe had nodded, and smiled,
and grimaced toward the door in a way that spoke volumes.
"I'm going down to get my breakfast, now," she said, authoritatively.
"Let me see what you'll have done by the time I get back."
The stairs were creaking again. Mrs. Sharpe did not hurry too much, and
Mrs. Oleander, all panting, was back in her rocker when she re-entered
the kitchen, trying very hard to look as though she had never left it.
"And how's your patient to-day, Mrs. Sharpe?" she asked, as soon as she
could properly get her wind.
"Much the same," said Mrs. Sharpe, with brevity; "wants to starve
herself to death, crying in spells, and making a time. Let me help you."
This to Sally, who was scrambling to get half a dozen things at once on
the table. Mrs. Sharpe came to the rescue with a practiced hand, and
upon the entrance of old Peter, who had been out chaining up the dogs,
the quartet immediately sat down to breakfast.
After breakfast, the new nurse again made herself generally useful in
the kitchen, helped Sally, who was inclined to give out at the knees, to
"red up," washed dishes and swept the floor with a brisk celerity worthy
of all praise.
And then, it being wash-day, she whipped up her sleeves, displaying two
lusty, round arms, and fell to with a will among the soiled linens and
steaming soap-suds.
"I may as well do something," she said, brusquely, in answer to Mrs.
Oleander's very faint objections; "there's nothing to do upstairs, and
she doesn't want me. She only calls me names."
So Mrs. Susan Sharpe rubbed, and wrung, and soaped, and pounded, and
boiled, and blued for three mortal hours, and then there was a huge
basket of clothes all ready to go on the line.
"Now, ma'am," said this priceless treasure, "if you'll just show me the
clothes-line, I'll hang these here out."
Mrs. Oleander pointed to two long ropes strung at the lower end of the
back yard, and Susan Sharpe, hoisting the basket, set off at once to
hang them to dry.
The two old women watched her from the window with admiring eyes.
"She's a noble worker!" at last said old Sally. "She 'minds me of the
time when I was a young girl myself. Dearie me! It went to my heart to
see her rubbing them sheets and things as if they were nothing."
"And I think she's to be trusted, too," said Mrs. Oleander. "She talks
as sharp to that girl as you or I, Sally. I shouldn't mind if we had her
here for good."
Meantime, the object of all this commendation had marched across the
yard, and proceeded scientifically to hang the garments on the line. But
all the while the keen eyes inside the green spectacles went roving
about, and alighted presently on something that rewarded her for her
hard day's work.
It was a man emerging from the pine woods, and crossing the waste strip
of marshland that extended to the farm.
A high board fence separated the back yard from this waste land, and but
few ever came that way.
The man wore the dress and had the pack of a peddler, and a quantity of
tow hair escaped from under a broad-brimmed hat. The brown face was half
hidden in an enormous growth of light whiskers.
"Can it be?" thought Susan, with a throbbing heart. "I darsn't speak,
for them two old witches are watching from the window."
Here the peddler espied her, and trolled out, in a rich, manly voice:
"My father he has locked the door,
My mother keeps the key:
But neither bolts nor bars shall part
My own true love and me."
"It is him!" gasped Mrs. Susan Sharpe. "Oh, good gracious!"
"Good-day to you, my strapping, lass. How do you find yourself this
blessed morning?"
Susan Sharpe knew there were listening ears and looking eyes in the
kitchen, and for their benefit she retorted:
"It's no business of yours how I am! Be off with you! We don't allow no
vagrants here!"
"But I ain't a vagrant, my duck o' diamonds. I'm a respectable Yankee
peddler, trying to turn an honest penny by selling knickknacks to the
fair sect. Do let me in, there's a pretty dear! You hain't no idee of
the lovely things I've got in my pack--all dirt cheap, too!"
"I don't want nothing," said Mrs. Susan Sharpe.
"But your ma does, my love, or your elder sister, which I see 'em at the
winder this minute. Now do go, there's a lamb, and ask your ma if I
mayn't come in."
Mrs. Sharpe dropped her basket in a pet and stalked back to the house.
"It's a peddler-man," she said, crossly, "a-wanting to come in. I told
him he couldn't, and it's of no use; and the best thing you can do is to
set the dogs on him."
"No, no!" cried Mrs. Oleander, shrilly. "Let him come in. I like
peddlers. Go with her, Sally, and tell the man to come round to the
garden gate."
"I'll tell him," said Susan Sharpe, stalking out again. "Let Sally go
and open the gate."
She marched across the yard and addressed the "perambulating merchant."
"You're to go round to the front gate. This way. I've a note for you in
my thimble. I'll drop the thimble in your box."
The first half of Mrs. Sharpe's speech was given for the benefit of Mrs.
Oleander's greedy ears--the latter half, hurriedly and in a low voice,
for his own.
The sagacious peddler nodded, struck up a second stave of his ditty, and
trudged round to the front gate.
Mrs. Sharpe finished hanging out the clothes before she re-entered the
kitchen. When she did, there sat the peddler displaying his wares, and
expatiating volubly on their transcendent merits. And there stood Sally
and Mrs. Oleander, devouring the contents of the box with greedy eyes.
It is not in the heart of women--country women, particularly--to resist
the fascinations of the peddler's pack.
Mrs. Oleander and her old servant were rather of the strong-minded
order; but their eyes glistened avariciously, for all that, at the
display of combs, and brushes, and handkerchiefs, and ribbons, and gaudy
prints, and stockings, and cotton cloth, and all the innumerables that
peddlers do delight in.
"This red-and-black silk handkerchief, ma'am," the peddler was crying,
holding up a gay square of silk tartan, "is one fifty, and dirt cheap at
that. Seein' it's you, ma'am, however, I'll take a dollar for it. Wuth
two--it is, by ginger! Sold three dozens on 'em down the village, and
got two dollars apiece for 'em, every one."
"I'll take it at a dollar," said Mrs. Oleander. "Sally, that piece of
brown merino would just suit you."
"Makes up lovely, ma'am," said the peddler, turning to Sally; "only four
dollars for the hull piece. Jest feel of it--soft as a baby's skin.
Halloo! miss, what can I do for you?"
This last to Susan Sharpe, who had set down her basket, and was looking
on.
"Nothing," replied Susan, with asperity.
"Oh, now, don't you say that!" exclaimed this persuasive man; "you do
want suthin'--lots o' things--I kin see it in them air sparklin' eyes o'
your'n. What makes you wear green glasses. See here, I've blue, and
white, and fancy colors, with silver straddles for the nose. Do look at
'em--there's a love!"
Mrs. Oleander laughed, and Mrs. Sharpe so far unbent her austerity as to
kneel down and begin rummaging the miscellaneous articles.
The peddler's quick eye never left her hands; and when he heard the tiny
click of something falling, an intelligent flash shot from him to the
obnoxious green glasses.
"I want a thimble," said Mrs. Sharpe, with phlegm. "I've lost mine. How
much do you ask for these here, mister?"
"Three cents apiece."
Susan paid down the three cents, pocketed the brass thimble, and slowly
rose.
"No more to sell to-day," said the peddler, bundling up with celerity.
"So you won't take the brown, ma'am? Sorry we can't make a trade; but
I'll run up again to-morrow with a new lot, and I've no doubt we can
strike a bargain. Good-morning, ladies."
With which Mr. Peddler shouldered his pack and trudged away, singing.
Old Peter let him out, and locked the gate after, and watched him out
of sight. The peddler ceased his song the moment he was out of hearing,
struck into the woods the instant he was out of sight, and flinging his
pack on the grass, tore it open.
He had not long to search--Mrs. Sharpe's tarnished old thimble was
conspicuous enough among his glistening new ones. He fished it up, poked
out the crumpled bit of paper, and slowly read it through. When read, he
tore it into fifty morsels, and scattered them in a white shower all
about. Then, with knitted brows and compressed lips, he sat and thought
and thought for a full hour.
Meanwhile, matters went on smoothly behind him. Mrs. Sharpe, having
finished the washing, and quite won the hearts of the two old women by
her workmanlike manner, prepared her patient's dinner, and brought it
up.
On this occasion Mrs. Oleander undertook to accompany her. They found
that refractory patient at her usual post--the window--gazing with
dreamy, empty eyes over the ceaseless sea.
Susan Sharpe was strictly on her guard; her austere face never unbent,
and Mollie took her cue once more.
"Here's your dinner miss," she said, briefly; "is there anything I can
do for you?"
"Nothing," replied Mollie, sullenly. "Only leave me alone. I never want
to see either of your ugly old faces."
She turned her back upon them as she spoke, and never turned round until
they had quitted the room.
"She's a little imp, if there ever was a little imp yet," said Mrs.
Oleander, spitefully. "Does she always treat you like that?"
"Worse, mostly," said the imperturbable Susan; "but, la! I don't mind;
I'm used to 'em."
"Do you think she'll ever get better?"
"I think it's very likely, ma'am," responded Mrs. Sharpe. "Your cross
ones are always the likeliest. But, of course, I can't say."
All that long afternoon Mollie was left quite alone. Mrs. Sharpe never
came near her. This indifference on the part of the nurse quite disarmed
Mrs. Oleander's suspicions. If she had any wish to carry favor with her
son's patient, or help her to escape, surely she would not sit there in
the kitchen, hemming her new silk handkerchief, all the while. That was
what Susan did, however, and the weary, weary hours of the warm, sunny
day wore blankly on the poor, lone Mollie.
The horrible stillness of the place seemed driving her mad. The endless
monotony of the waves rolling up on the beach was growing unendurable.
The wild waste of sparkling-waters, ending in the low horizon line,
wearied her eyes like the sands of the desert.
"I shall lose all the little reason I ever had if I am kept in this
howling desolation much longer," she said, pressing her hands to her
throbbing temples. "Oh! to shut out this mocking sunshine--to lose sight
of this dreary waste, where no living thing comes! Oh, to get away from
that horrible sea! If I could only die and end it all! But I live on,
and live on where others would be happier and find death."
She sighed wearily, and looked across at the radiant western sky,
gorgeous with the coming sunset.
"What did that woman mean? Did she mean anything? Yes, I am sure she
did, and she has come here to help me to escape. Oh, Heaven have pity,
and grant me freedom once more!"
She clasped her hands and sat there like one out of herself, while the
moments wore on. Purple and gold made the western sky luminous with
glory, and when the gorgeous flames were at their brightest, and the sea
turning to a lake of blood-red fire, a little white boat, with a blue
pennant flying, shot out of the red light and drifted close to the
shore.
Mollie fixed her eyes on this tiny skiff--why, she could not have told.
Boats passed and repassed often enough, but seldom so close to the
shore. The beauty of the little bark attracted her, nestling as it did
like a white dove on the water, and that fairy azure banner flying.
A solitary figure sat in the boat, his face turned her way; but the
distance was too great for her to distinguish that face. A word in white
letters she could see on the blue flag; but again the distance was too
great for her to distinguish. She sat and watched and watched, until the
opening of the door startled her. She turned round and saw Susan
Sharpe--this time alone.
"Look there!" said Mollie, obeying a sudden impulse; "did you ever see
anything so pretty?"
The nurse looked--bent her brows and looked again. Her face flushed--she
caught her breath.
"Who is the man?" she asked, hurriedly, lowly.
"I don't know," in the same breathless way. "He is watching here--but
the distance is so great. Oh, nurse--"
She did not finish the sentence, but with hands clasped and lips parted,
stood looking imploringly in the woman's face.
"Wait a minute," said Mrs. Susan Sharpe; "there is no one on the watch
this time, thank the Lord! Mrs. Oleander's down with the toothache."
She left the room--was absent in her own two or three minutes--then
returned with a pocket telescope in her hand.
"Try this," she said, quietly; "it's small, but it's powerful."
She put it in the girl's hand. Mollie turned eagerly to the window--the
boat and the man were near enough now. The word on the blue flag was
Hope; the face of the man was still toward her, true as the needle to
the north star. With the first look she recognized it. A low cry of
amaze, and she dropped the glass, and stood all trembling with the
sudden joyful shock.
For it was the face she had sighed for, day-time and night time--it was
the man she loved. It was Hugh Ingelow.