Volume Ii Part 68 (2/2)
Fleda lay quiet till she was called to tea.
”Bless me, how pale you are?” said the housekeeper, as Fleda raised herself up at this summons; ”do you feel very bad, Miss Fleda?”
Fleda said ”No.”
”Are you frighted?” said the housekeeper ? ”there's no need of that ? Hannah says there's no need ? we'll be in by and by.”
”No, Mrs. Renney,” said Fleda, smiling. ”I believe I am not very strong yet.”
The housekeeper and Hannah both looked at her with strangely touched faces, and again begged her to try the refreshment of tea. But Fleda would not go down, so they served her up there, with great zeal and tenderness. And then she waited patiently and watched the people in the cabin, as they sat gossiping in groups, or stupefying in solitude; and thought how miserable a thing is existence where religion and refinement have not taught the mind to live in somewhat beyond and above its every-day concerns.
Late at night the boat arrived safe at Bridgeport. Mrs. Renney and Fleda had resolved to stay on board till morning, when the former promised to take her to the house of a sister she had living in the town; as the cars would not leave the place till near eleven o'clock. Rest was not to be hoped for meantime in the boat, on the miserable couch which was the best the cabin could furnish; but Fleda was so thankful to have finished the voyage in safety, that she took thankfully everything else, even lying awake. It was a wild night. The wind rose soon after they reached Bridgeport, and swept furiously over the boat, rattling the tiller chains, and making Fleda so nervously alive to possibilities that she got up two or three times to see if the boat were fast to her moorings. It was very dark, and only by a fortunately-placed lantern, she could see a bit of the dark wharf and one of the posts belonging to it, from which the lantern never budged; so, at last quieted, or tired-out, nature had her rights, and she slept.
It was not refres.h.i.+ng rest after all, and Fleda was very glad that Mrs. Renney's impatience for something comfortable made her willing to be astir as early as there was any chance of finding people up in the town. Few were abroad when they left the boat, they two. Not a foot had printed the deep layer of snow that covered the wharf. It had fallen thick during the night. Just then it was not snowing; the clouds seemed to have taken a recess, for they hung threatening yet; one uniform leaden canopy was over the whole horizon.
”The snow aint done yet,” said Mrs. Renney.
”No, but the worst of our journey is over,” said Fleda. ”I am glad to be on the land.”
”I hope we'll get something to eat here,” said Mrs. Renney, as they stepped along over the wharf. ”They ought to be ashamed to give people such a mess, when it's just as easy to have things decent. My! how it has snowed! I declare, if I'd ha'
known, I'd ha' waited till somebody had tracked a path for us.
But I guess it's just as well we didn't; you look as like a ghost as you can, Miss Fleda. You'll be better when you get some breakfast. You'd better catch on to my arm ? I'll waken up the seven sleepers but what I'll have something to put life into you directly.”
Fleda thanked her, but declined the proffered accommodation, and followed her companion in the narrow beaten path a few travellers had made in the street, feeling enough like a ghost, if want of flesh and blood reality were enough. It seemed a dream that she was walking through the grey light, and the empty streets of the little town; everything looked and felt so wild and strange.
If it was a dream, she was soon waked out of it. In the house, where they were presently received and established in sufficient comfort, there was such a little specimen of masculine humanity as never showed his face in dream-land yet ? a little bit of reality, enough to bring any dreamer to his senses. He seemed to have been brought up on stove heat, for he was all glowing yet from a very warm bed he had just tumbled out of somewhere, and he looked at the pale thin stranger by his mother's fire-place, as if she were an anomaly in the comfortable world. If he could have contented himself with looking! ? but he planted himself firmly on the rug, just two feet from Fleda, and, with a laudable and most persistent desire to examine into the causes of what he could not understand, he commenced inquiring ?
”Are you cold? ? say! Are you cold? ? say!” in a tone most provokingly made up of wonder and dulness. In vain Fleda answered him, that she was not very cold, and would soon not be cold at all by that good fire ? the question came again, apparently in all its freshness, from the interrogator's mind ?
”Are you cold? ? say !” ?
And silence and words, looking grave and laughing, were alike thrown away. Fleda shut her eyes at length, and used the small remnant of her patience to keep herself quiet till she was called to breakfast. After breakfast she accepted the offer of her hostess to go up stairs and lie down till the cars were ready; and there got some real and much needed refreshment of sleep and rest.
It lasted longer than she had counted upon. For the cars were not ready at eleven o'clock ? the snow last night had occasioned some perplexing delays. It was not till near three o'clock, that the often-despatched messenger to the depot brought back word that they might go as soon as they pleased.
It pleased Mrs. Renney to be in a great hurry, for her baggage was in the cars, she said, and it would be dreadful if she and it went different ways; so Fleda and her companion hastened down to the station-house and chose their places some time before anybody else thought of coming. They had a long, very tiresome waiting to go through, and room for some uneasy speculations about being belated and a night-journey. But Fleda was stronger now, and bore it all with her usual patient submission At length, by degrees, the people dropped in and filled the cars, and they set off.
”How early do you suppose we shall reach Greenfield?” said Fleda.
”Why, we ought to get there between nine and ten o'clock, I should think,” said her companion. ”I hope the snow will hold up till we get there.”
Fleda thought it a hope very unlikely to be fulfilled. There were as yet no snow-flakes to be seen near by, but, at a little distance, the low clouds seemed already to enshroud every clump of trees, and put a mist about every hill. They surely would descend more palpably soon.
It was pleasant to be moving swiftly on again towards the end of their journey, if Fleda could have rid herself of some qualms about the possible storm and the certain darkness; they might not reach Greenfield by ten o'clock; and she disliked travelling in the night at any time. But she could do nothing, and she resigned herself anew to the comfort and trust she had built upon last night. She had the seat next the window, and with a very sober kind of pleasure watched the pretty landscape they were flitting by ? misty as her own prospects ?
darkening as they? ? no, she would not allow that thought. ”
'Surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear G.o.d;'
and I can trust Him.” And she found a strange sweetness in that naked trust and clinging of faith, that faith never tried never knows. But the breath of daylight was already gone, though the universal spread of snow gave the eye a fair range yet, white, white, as far as the view could reach, with that light misty drapery round everything in the distance, and merging into the soft grey sky; and every now and then, as the wind served, a thick wreath of white vapour came by from the engine and hid all, eddying past the windows, and then skimming off away over the snowy ground from which it would not lift; a more palpable veil for a moment of the distant things ? and then broken, scattered, fragmentary, lovely in its frailty, and evanis.h.i.+ng. It was a pretty afternoon, but a sober; and the bare, black, solitary trees near hand which the cars flew by, looked to Fleda constantly like finger-posts of the past; and back, at their bidding, her thoughts and her spirits went, back and forward, comparing, in her own mental view what had once been so gay and genial with its present bleak and chill condition. And from this, in sudden contrast, came a strangely fair and bright image of heaven ? its exchange of peace for all this turmoil ? of rest for all this weary bearing up of mind and body against the ills that beset both ? of its quiet home for this unstable strange world, where nothing is at a standstill ? of perfect and pure society for the unsatisfactory and wearying friends.h.i.+ps that the most are here. The thought came to Fleda like one of those unearthly clear north-western skies from which a storm-cloud has rolled away, that seem almost to mock earth with their distance from its defilement and agitations. ”Truly I know that it shall be well with them that fear G.o.d!” She could remember Hugh ? she could not think of the words without him ?
and yet say them with the full bounding a.s.surance. And in that weary and uneasy afternoon, her mind rested and delighted itself with two lines of George Herbert, that only a Christian can well understand ?
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