Part 7 (1/2)

”Mrs. Watkins,” she began hurriedly, in a sweet, cultivated voice, and then stopped and drew back as another person came into the shop; ”no, do not let me interrupt you. I was only going to say that one of the young ladies at Miss Martingale's seems very poorly, and Miss Theresa is a little troubled about her, so I have promised to go back for an hour or two; but I have my key with me if I should be late.”

”Dear bless my heart, Mrs. Trafford,” exclaimed Mrs. Watkins, fussily, as she looked at her lodger's pale, tired face, ”you are never going out on such an evening, and all the streets swept as clean as if with a new broom; and you with your cough, and the fog, and not to mention the rawness which sucks into your chest like a lozenge;” and here Mrs.

Watkins shook her head, and weighed out a quarter of a pound of mixed tea, in a disapproving manner.

Mrs. Trafford smiled. ”My good friend,” she said, in rather an amused voice, ”you ought to know me better by this time; have you ever remembered that either frost, or rain, or fog have kept me in-doors a single day when duty called me out;” and here she folded her cloak round her, and prepared to leave the shop.

”It's ill tempting Providence, neighbor,” remarked the other woman, who had been standing silently by and now put in her word, for she was an innocent country body with a garrulous tongue; ”it's ill tempting Providence, for 'the wind and the sea obey Him.' I had a son myself some fourteen years next Michaelmas,” continued the simple creature, ”as brave and bonny a lad as ever blessed a mother's eyes, and that feared naught; but the snow-drift that swept over the c.u.mberland Fells found him stumbling and wandering, poor Willie, from the right way, and froze his dear heart dead.”

The lady advanced a few steps, and then stopped as though seized by a sudden impulse, and looked wistfully in the other woman's face.

”G.o.d help you,” she said, very softly; ”and was this boy of yours a good son?”

Perhaps in the whole of her simple, sorrowful life Elsie Deans had never seen anything more pathetic than that white face from which the gray hair was so tightly strained, and those anxious questionings.

”And was this boy of yours,” she said, ”a good son?”

”A better never breathed,” faltered poor Elsie, as she drew her hand across her eyes; ”he was my only bairn, was Willie.”

”Why do you weep then?” returned Mrs. Trafford in her sad voice; ”do you not know that there are mothers in the heart of this great city who would that their sons had never been born, or that they had seen them die in their infancy. 'He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,'” she continued to herself; then aloud, and with a strange flickering smile that scarcely lighted up the pale face, ”Good-night to you--happy mother whose son perished on the c.u.mberland Fells, for you will soon meet him again. Good-night, Mrs. Watkins;”

and with this abrupt adieu she went quickly out of the shop and was lost in the surrounding fog.

”A fine figure of a woman,” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Elsie, shaking her old head with a puzzled look on her wrinkled face; ”a fine, grand figure of a woman, but surely an 'innocent,' neighbor?”

”An innocent!” repeated Mrs. Watkins with an indignant snort; ”an innocent! Mrs. Deans; why should such an idea enter your head? A shrewder and a brighter woman than my lodger, Mrs. Trafford, never breathed, though folks do say she has had a deal of trouble in her life--but there, it is none of my business; I never meddle in the affairs of my neighbors. I am not of the sort who let their tongue run away with them,” finished Mrs. Watkins with a virtuous toss of her head.

CHAPTER VII.

NEA.

She was gay, tender, petulant and susceptible. All her feelings were quick and ardent; and having never experienced contradiction or restraint, she was little practiced in self-control; nothing but the native goodness of her heart kept her from running continually into error.--WAs.h.i.+NGTON IRVING.

If Mrs. Trafford had been questioned about her past life, she would have replied in patriarchal language that few and evil had been her days, and yet no life had ever opened with more promise than hers.

Many years, nearly a quarter of a century, before the gray-haired weary woman had stood in Mrs. Watkins's shop, a young girl in a white dress, with a face as radiant as the spring morning itself, leaned over the balcony of Belgrave House to wave good-bye to her father as he rode away eastward.

Those who knew Nea Huntingdon in those early days say that she was wonderfully beautiful.

There was a picture of her in the Royal Academy, a dark-haired girl in a velvet dress, sitting under a marble column with a blaze of oriental scarves at her feet, and a Scotch deerhound beside her, and both face and figure were well-nigh faultless. Nea had lost her mother in her childhood, and she lived alone with her father in the great house that stood at the corner of the square, with its flower-laden balconies and many windows facing the setting sun.

Nea was her father's only child, and all his hopes were centered upon her.

Mr. Huntingdon was an ambitious man; he was more, he was a profound egotist. In his character pride, the love of power, the desire for wealth, were evenly balanced and made subservient to a most indomitable will. Those who knew him well said he was a hard self-sufficient man, one who never forgot an injury or forgave it.

He had been the creator of his own fortunes; as a lad he had come to London with the traditional s.h.i.+lling in his pocket, and had worked his way to wealth, and was now one of the richest merchant princes in the metropolis.

He had married a young heiress, and by her help had gained entrance into society, but she had died a dissatisfied, unhappy woman, who had never gained her husband's heart or won his confidence. In Mr.

Huntingdon's self-engrossed nature there was no room for tenderness; he had loved his handsome young wife in a cool temperate fas.h.i.+on, but she had never influenced him, never really comprehended him; his iron will, hidden under a show of courtesy, had repressed her from the beginning of their married life. Perhaps her chief sin in his eyes had been that she had not given him a son; he had accepted his little daughter ungraciously, and for the first few years of her young life he had grievously neglected her.