Melbourne House, Volume 1

A little girl was coming down a flight of stairs that led up from a great hall, slowly letting her feet pause on each stair, while the light touch of her hand on the rail guided her. The very thoughtful little face seemed to be intent on something out of the house, and when she reached the bottom, she still stood with her hand on the great baluster that rested on the marble there, and looked wistfully out of the open door.

So the sunlight came in and looked at her; a little figure in a white frock and blue sash, with the hair cut short all over a little round head, and a face not only just now full of some grave concern, but with habitually thoughtful eyes and a wise little mouth. She did not seem to see the sunlight which poured all over her, and lit up a wide, deep hall, floored with marble, and opening at the other end on trees and flowers, which shewed the sunlight busy there too. The child lingered wistfully. Then crossed the hall, and went into a matted, breezy, elegant room, where a lady lay luxuriously on a couch, playing with a book and a leaf-cutter. She could not be busy with anything in that attitude. Nearly all that was to be seen was a flow of lavender silk flounces, a rich slipper at rest on a cushion, and a dainty little cap with roses on a head too much at ease to rest. By the side of the lavender silk stood the little white dress, still and preoccupied as before-a few minutes without any notice.

"Do you want anything, Daisy?"

"Mamma, I want to know something."

"Well, what is it?"

"Mamma"-Daisy seemed to be engaged on a very puzzling question-"what does it mean to be a Christian?"

"What?" said her mother, rousing herself up for the first time to look at her.

"To be a Christian, mamma?"

"It means, to be baptized and go to church, and all that," said the lady, turning back to her book.

"But mamma, that isn't all I mean."

"I don't know what you mean. What has put it into your head?"

"Something Mr. Dinwiddie said."

"What absurd nonsense! Who is Mr. Dinwiddie?"

"You know him. He lives at Mrs. Sandford's."

"And where did he talk to you?"

"In the little school in the woods. In his Sunday-school. Yesterday."

"Well, it's absurd nonsense, your going there. You have nothing to do with such things. Mr. Randolph?-"

An inarticulate sound, testifying that he was attending, came from a gentleman who had lounged in and was lounging through the room.

"I won't have Daisy go to that Sunday-school any more, down there in the woods. Just tell her she is not to do it, will you? She is getting her head full of the most absurd nonsense. Daisy is just the child to be ruined by it."

"You hear, Daisy," said Mr. Randolph, indolently, as he lounged finally out of the room by an open window; which, as did all the windows in the room, served for a door also. By the door by which she had entered, Daisy silently withdrew again, making no effort to change the resolution of either of her parents. She knew it would be of no use; for excessively indulgent as they both were in general, whenever they took it upon them to exercise authority, it was unflinchingly done. Her father would never even hear a supplication to reconsider a judgment, especially if pronounced at the desire of her mother. So Daisy knew.

It was a disappointment, greater than anybody thought or would have guessed, that saw her. She went out to the large porch before the door, and stood there, with the same thoughtful look upon her face, a little cast down now. Still she did not shed tears about the matter, unless one time when Daisy's hand went up to her brow rather quick, it was to get rid of some improper suggestion there. More did not appear, either before or after the sudden crunching of the gravel by a pair of light wheels, and the coming up of a little Shetland pony, drawing a miniature chaise.

"Hollo, Daisy! come along; he goes splendidly!"

So shouted the driver, a boy somewhat bigger than Daisy.

"Where are you going?"

"Anywhere-down to the church, if you'll be quick. Never mind your hat!"

He waited, however, while Daisy dashed into the house and out again, and then stepped into the low chaise beside him. Then the eager intimation was given to the pony, which set off as if knowing that impatience was behind him. The smooth, wide, gravelled road was as good and much better than a plank flooring; the chaise rolled daintily on under the great trees; the pony was not forgetful, yet ever and anon a touch of his owner's whip came to remind him, and the fellow's little body fairly wriggled from side to side in his efforts to get on.

"I wish you wouldn't whip him so!" said Daisy, "he's doing as well as he can."

"What do girls know about driving!" was the retort from the small piece of masculine science beside her.

"Ask papa," said Daisy quietly.

"Well, what do they know about horses, any how!"

"I can see," said Daisy, whose manner of speech was somewhat slow and deliberate, and in the choice of words, like one who had lived among grown people. "I can observe."

"See that, then!"-And a cut, smarter than ordinary, drove the pony to his last legs, namely, a gallop. Away they went; it was but a short-legged gallop after all; yet they passed along swiftly over the smooth gravel road. Great, beautiful trees overshadowed the ground on either side with their long arms; and underneath, the turf was mown short, fresh and green. Sometimes a flowering bush of some sort broke the general green with a huge spot of white or red flowers; gradually those became fewer, and were lost sight of; but the beautiful grass and the trees seemed to be unending. Then a gray rock here and there began to shew itself. Pony got through his gallop, and subsided again to a waddling trot.

"This whip's the real thing," said the young driver, displaying and surveying it as he spoke; "that is a whip now, fit for a man to use."

"A man wouldn't use it as you do," said Daisy. "It is cruel."

"That's what you think. I guess you'd see papa use a whip once in a while."

"Besides, you came along too fast to see anything."

"Well, I told you I was going to the church, and we hadn't time to go slowly. What did you come for?"

"I suppose I came for some diversion," said Daisy with a sigh.

"Ain't Loupe a splendid little fellow?"

"Very; I think so."

"Why, Daisy, what ails you? there is no fun in you to-day. What's the matter?"

"I am concerned about something. There is nothing the matter."

"Concerned about Loupe, eh!"

"I am not thinking about Loupe. O Ransom! stop him; there's Nora

Dinwiddie; I want to get out."

[Illustration: THE CHURCH BY THE WINTERGREENS.]

The place at which they were arrived had a little less the air of carefully kept grounds, and more the look of a sweet wild wood; for the trees clustered thicker in patches, and grey rock, in large and in small quantities, was plenty about among the trees. Yet still here was care; no unsightly underbrush or rubbish of dead branches was anywhere to be seen; and the greensward, where it spread, was shaven and soft as ever. It spread on three sides around a little church, which, in green and gray, seemed almost a part of its surroundings. A little church, with a little quaint bell-tower and arched doorway, built after some old, old model; it stood as quietly in the green solitude of trees and rocks, as if it and they had grown up together. It was almost so. The walls were of native greystone in its natural roughness; all over the front and one angle the American ivy climbed and waved, mounting to the tower; while at the back, the closer clinging Irish ivy covered the little "apse," and creeping round the corner, was advancing to the windows, and promising to case the first one in a loving frame of its own. It seemed that no carriage-road came to this place, other than the dressed gravelled path which the pony-chaise had travelled, and which made a circuit on approaching the rear of the church. The worshippers must come humbly on foot; and a wicket in front of the church led out upon a path suited for such. Perhaps a public road might be not far off, but at least here there was no promise of it. In the edge of the thicket, at the side of the church, was the girl whose appearance Daisy had hailed.

"I sha'n't wait for you," cried her brother, as she sprang down.

"No-go-I don't want you,"-and Daisy made few steps over the greensward to the thicket. Then it was,-"O Nora! how do you do? what are you doing?"-and "O Daisy! I'm getting wintergreens." Anybody who has ever been nine, or ten, or eleven years old, and gone in the woods looking for wintergreens, knows what followed. The eager plunging into the thickest of the thicket; the happy search of every likely bank or open ground in the shelter of some rock; the careless, delicious straying from rock to rock, and whithersoever the bank or the course of the thicket might lead them. The wintergreens sweet under foot, sweet in the hands of the children, the whole air full of sweetness. Naturally their quest led them to the thicker and wilder grown part of the wood; prettier there, they declared it to be, where the ground became broken, and there were ups and downs, and rocky dells and heights, and to turn a corner was to come upon something new. They did not note nor care where they went, intent upon business and pleasure together, till they came out suddenly upon a little rocky height, where a small spot was shaded with cedars and set with benches around and under them. The view away off over the tops of the trees to other heights and hills in the distance was winningly fair, especially as the sun shewed it just now in bright, cool light and shadow. It was getting near sundown.

"Look where we are!" cried Nora, "at the Sunday-school!"

Daisy seated herself without answering.

"I think," went on Nora, as she followed the example, "it is the very prettiest place for a Sunday-school that there ever was."

"Have you been in other Sunday-schools?" asked Daisy.

"Yes, in two."

"What were they like?"

"O they were in a church, or in some sort of a room. I like being out of doors best; don't you?"

"Yes, I think so. But was the school just like this in other things?"

"O yes; only once I had a teacher who always asked us what we thought about everything. I didn't like that."

"What you thought about everything?" said Daisy.

"Yes; every verse and question, she would say, 'What do you think about it?' and I didn't like that, because I never thought anything."

Whereat Daisy fell into a muse. Her question recurred to her; but it was hardly likely, she felt, that her little companion could enlighten her. Nora was a bright, lively, spirited child, with black eyes and waves of beautiful black hair; neither at rest; sportive energy and enjoyment in every motion. Daisy was silent.

"What is supposed to be going on here?" said a stronger voice behind them, which brought both their heads round. It was to see another head just making its way up above the level of their platform; a head that looked strong and spirited as the voice had sounded; a head set with dark hair, and eyes that were too full of light to let you see what colour they were. Both children came to their feet, one saying, "Marmaduke!" the other, "Mr. Dinwiddie!"

"What do two such mature people do when they get together? I should like to know," said the young man as he reached the top.

"Talking, sir," said Daisy.

"Picking wintergreens," said the other, in a breath.

"Talking! I dare say you do. If both things have gone on together, like your answers," said he, helping himself out of Nora's stock of wintergreens,-"you must have had a basket of talk."

"That basket isn't full, sir," said Daisy.

"My dear," said Mr. Dinwiddie, diving again into his sister's, "that basket never is; there's a hole in it somewhere."

"You are making a hole in mine," said Nora, laughing. "You sha'n't do it, Marmaduke; they're for old Mrs. Holt, you know."

"Come along, then," said her brother; "as long as the baskets are not full the fun isn't over."

And soon the children thought so. Such a scrambling to new places as they had then; such a harvest of finest wintergreens as they all gathered together; till Nora took off her sunbonnet to serve for a new basket. And such joyous, lively, rambling talk as they had all three, too; it was twice as good as they had before; or as Daisy, who was quiet in her epithets, phrased it, "it was nice." By Mr. Dinwiddie's help they could go faster and further than they could alone; he could jump them up and down the rocks, and tell them where it was no use to waste their time in trying to go.

They had wandered, as it seemed to them, a long distance-they knew not whither-when the children's exclamations suddenly burst forth, as they came out upon the Sunday-school place again. They were glad to sit down and rest. It was just sundown, and the light was glistening, crisp and clear, on the leaves of the trees and on the distant hill-points. In the west a mass of glory that the eye could not bear was sinking towards the horizon. The eye could not bear it, and yet every eye turned that way.

"Can you see the sun?" said Mr. Dinwiddie.

"No, sir,"-and "No, Marmaduke."

"Then why do you look at it?"

"I don't know!" laughed Nora; but Daisy said: "Because it is so beautiful, Mr. Dinwiddie."

"Once when I was in Ireland," said the gentleman, "I was looking, near sunset, at some curious old ruins. They were near a very poor little village where I had to pass the night. There had been a little chapel or church of some sort, but it had crumbled away; only bits of the walls were standing, and in place of the floor there was nothing but grass and weeds, and one or two monuments that had been under shelter of the roof. One of them was a large square tomb in the middle of the place. It had been very handsome. The top of it had held two statues, lying there with hands upraised in prayer, in memory of those who slept beneath. But it was so very old-the statues had been lying there so long since the roof that sheltered them was gone, that they were worn away so that you could only just see that they had been statues; you could just make out the remains of what had been the heads and where the hands had been. It was all rough and shapeless now." [Footnote A: See frontispiece.]

"What had worn the stone so?" asked Daisy.

"The weather-the heat and the cold, and the rain, and the dew."

"But it must have taken a great while?"

"A very great while. Their names were forgotten-nobody knew whose monument or what church had been there."

"More than a hundred years?" asked Nora.

"It had been many hundred."

"O Duke!"

"What's the matter? Don't you believe that people died many hundred years ago?"

"Yes; but-"

"And they had monuments erected to them, and they thought their names would live forever; but these names were long gone, and the very stone over their grave was going. While I sat there, thinking about them, and wondering what sort of people they were in their lifetime,-the sun, which had been behind a tree, got lower, and the beams came striking across the stone and brightening up those poor old worn heads and hands of what had been statues. And with that the words rushed into my head, and they have never got out since,-'Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.'"

"When, Mr. Dinwiddie?" said Daisy, after a timid silence.

"When the King comes!" said the young man, still looking off to the glowing west,-"the time when he will put away out of his kingdom all things that offend him. You may read about it, if you will, in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, in the parable of the tares."

He turned round to Daisy as he spoke, and the two looked steadily into one another's faces; the child wondering very much what feeling it could be that had called an additional sparkle into those bright eyes the moment before, and brought to the mouth, which was always in happy play, an expression of happy rest. He, on his part, queried what lay under the thoughtful, almost anxious, search of the little one's quiet grey eyes.

"Do you know," he said, "that you must go home? The sun is almost down."

So home they went-Mr. Dinwiddie and Nora taking care of Daisy quite to the house. But it was long after sundown then.

"What has kept you?" her mother asked, as Daisy came in to the tea-table.

"I didn't know how late it was, mamma."

"Where have you been?"

"I was picking wintergreens with Nora Dinwiddie."

"I hope you brought me some," said Mr. Randolph.

"O I did, papa; only I have not put them in order yet."

"And where did you and Nora part?"

"Here, at the door, mamma."

"Was she alone?"

"No, ma'am-Mr. Dinwiddie found us in the wood, and he took her home, and he brought me home first."

Daisy was somewhat of a diplomatist. Perhaps a little natural reserve of character might have been the beginning of it, but the habit had certainly grown from Daisy's experience of her mother's somewhat capricious and erratic views of her movements. She could not but find out that things which to her father's sense were quite harmless and unobjectionable, were invested with an unknown and unexpected character of danger or disagreeableness in the eyes of her mother; neither could Daisy get hold of any chain of reasoning by which she might know beforehand what would meet her mother's favour and what would not. The unconscious conclusion was, that reason had little to do with it; and the consequence, that without being untrue, Daisy had learned to be very uncommunicative about her thoughts, plans, or wishes. To her mother, that is; she was more free with her father, though the habit, once a habit, asserted itself everywhere. Perhaps, too, among causes, the example of her mother's own elegant manner of shewing truth only as one shews a fine picture,-in the best light,-might have had its effect. Daisy's diplomacy served her little on the present occasion.

"Daisy!" said her mother, "look at me." Daisy fixed her eves on the pleasant, handsome, mild face. "You are not to go anywhere in future where Mr. Dinwiddie is. Do you understand?"

"If he finds you lost out at night, though," said Mr. Randolph a little humorously, "he may bring you home."

Daisy wondered and obeyed, mentally, in silence; making no answer to either speaker. It was not her habit either to shew her dismay on such occasions, and she shewed none. But when she went up an hour later to be undressed for bed, instead of letting the business go on, Daisy took a Bible and sat down by the light and pored over a page that she had found.

The woman waiting on her, a sad-faced mulatto, middle-aged and respectable looking, went patiently round the room, doing or seeming to do some trifles of business, then stood still and looked at the child, who was intent on her book.

"Come, Miss Daisy," said she at last, "wouldn't you like to be undressed?"

The words were said in a tone so low they were hardly more than a suggestion. Daisy gave them no heed. The woman stood with dressing gown on her arm and a look of habitual endurance upon her face. It was a singular face, so set in its lines of enforced patience, so unbending. The black eyes were bright enough, but without the help of the least play of those fixed lines, they expressed nothing. A little sigh came from the lips at last, which also was plainly at home there.

"Miss Daisy, it's gettin' very late."

"June, did you ever read the parable of the tares?"

"The what, Miss Daisy?"

"The parable about the wheat and the tares in the Bible-in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew?"

"Yes, ma'am,"-came somewhat dry and unwillingly from June's lips, and she moved the dressing-gown on her arm significantly.

"Do you remember it?"

"Yes, ma'am,-I suppose I do, Miss Daisy-"

"June, when do you think it will be?"

"When will what, Miss Daisy?"

"When the 'Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.' It says, 'in the end of this world'-did you know this world would come to an end, June?"

"Yes, Miss Daisy-"

"When will it be, June?"

"I don't know, Miss Daisy."

"There won't be anybody alive that is alive now, will there?"

Again unwillingly the answer came: "Yes, ma'am. Miss Daisy, hadn't you better-"

"How do you know, June?"

"I have heard so-it's in the Bible-it will be when the Lord comes."

"Do you like to think of it, June?"

The child's searching eyes were upon her. The woman half laughed, half answered, and turning aside, broke down and burst into tears.

"What's the matter, June?" said Daisy, coming nearer and speaking awedly; for it was startling to see that stony face give way to anything but its habitual formal smile. But the woman recovered herself almost immediately, and answered as usual: "It's nothing, Miss Daisy." She always spoke as if everything about her was "nothing" to everybody else.

"But, June," said Daisy tenderly, "why do you feel bad about it?"

"I shouldn't, I s'pose," said the woman desperately, answering because she was obliged to answer; "I hain't no right to feel so-if I felt ready."

"How can one be ready, June? that is what I want to know. Aren't you ready?"

"Do, don't, Miss Daisy!-the Lord have mercy upon us!" said June under her breath, wrought up to great excitement, and unable to bear the look of the child's soft grey eyes. "Why don't ye ask your papa about them things? he can tell ye."

Alas, Daisy's lips were sealed. Not to father or mother would she apply with any second question on this subject. And now she must not ask Mr. Dinwiddie. She went to bed, turning the matter all over and over in her little head.