Kitty Alone - Baring-Gould Sabine

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rector. “If she does, then regard her as a gift from heaven. Once before she was put, a frail and feeble object, into your arms to rear and cherish. You were then too much engrossed in your daughter to give to this child your full attention. Your own Wilmot has been taken away. Now your niece has been almost withdrawn from you. But the hand that holds the issues of life and death spares her; she is committed to you once more--again helpless, frail, and committed to you that you may envelop her in an atmosphere of Love.”

      “I have loved her,” said Mrs. Pepperill. “This is the second time, sir, that you have charged me with lack of love towards Kate.”

      “Wilmot,” said the rector, “was one who stormed the heart. She went up against it, with flags flying and martial music, and broke in at the point of the bayonet. Kate’s nature is different. She will storm no heart. She sits on the doorstep as a beggar, and does not even knock and solicit admission. Throw open your door, extend your hand, and the timid child will falter in, frightened, yet elate with hope.”

      “I don’t know,” said Zerah meditatively. “You’ll excuse my saying it, but when a child is heartless”--

      “Heartless?--who is heartless?”

      “Kate, to be sure.”

      “Heartless?” repeated the rector. “You are in grievous error. No child is heartless. None of God’s creatures are void of love. God is love Himself, and we are all made in the image of the Creator. In all of us is the divine attribute of love. We were made to love and to be loved. It is a necessity of our nature. This poor little spirit--with how much love has it been suckled? With how much has its nakedness been clothed? The cream of your heart’s affection was given to your own daughter, and only the whey--thin and somewhat acidulated--offered to the niece. Turn over a new leaf, Mrs. Pepperill. Treat this child in a manner different from that in which she has been treated. I allow frankly that you have not been unkind, unjust, ungracious. But such a soul as this cannot flower in an atmosphere of negatives. You know something about the principle on which the atmospheric railway acts, do you not, Mrs. Pepperill? There is a pump which exhausts the air. Now put a plant, an animal, into a vessel from which the vital air has been withdrawn, and plant or animal will die at once. It has been given nothing deleterious, nothing poisonous has been administered. It dies simply because it has been deprived of that atmosphere in which God ordained that it should live and flourish. My good friend,” said the rector, and his voice shook with mingled tenderness of feeling and humour, “if I were to take you up and set you under the exhausting apparatus, and work at the pump, you would gasp--gasp and die.”

      The woman turned cold and blank at the suggestion.

      “If I did that,” continued the parson, “the coroner who sat on you would pronounce that you had been murdered by me. I should be sent to the assizes, and should infallibly be hung. Very well: there are other kinds of murder than killing the body. There is the killing of the noble, divine nature in man, and that not by acts of violence only, but by denial of what is essential to its existence. Remember this, Mrs. Pepperill: what the atmosphere is to the lungs, that love is to the heart. God created the lungs to be inflated with air, and the heart to be filled with Love.”

      CHAPTER IX

       CONVALESCENCE

       Table of Contents

      The voice of Pasco was heard shouting up the stairs to his wife. Mrs. Pepperill, glad to escape the lecture, went to the door and called down, “Don’t make such a noise, when the girl is ill.”

      “Come, will you, Zerah; there’s some one wants to have a say with you.”

      With a curt excuse to the parson, Mrs. Pepperill descended. She found her husband at the foot of the stairs, with his hand on the banister.

      “Pasco,” said she, “what do’y think now? The parson has been accusing me of murdering Kate. If she dies, he says he’ll have me up to Exeter Assizes and hung for it. I’ll never set foot in church again, never--I’ll join the Primitive Methodists.”

      “As you please,” said her husband. “But go to the door at once. There is John Pooke waiting, and won’t be satisfied till he has had a talk with you about Kate. He wants to know all about Kitty--how she’s doing, whether she’s in danger, if she wants anything that the Pookes can supply. He’s hanging about the door like what they call a morbid fly. He’s in a terrible taking, and won’t be put off with what I can tell.”

      “Well, now,” exclaimed Zerah, “here’s an idea! Something may come of that night on a mud-bank after all, and more than she deserves. Oh my! if my Wilmot was alive, and Jan Pooke were to inquire after her! Go up, Pasco, and send that parson away. I won’t speak to him again--abusing of me and calling me names shameful, and he an ordained minister. What in the world are we coming to?”

      When the doctor arrived, he pronounced that he would pull Kate through.

      Presently the delirium passed away, and on the following morning the light of intelligence returned to her eyes.

      “They are still there,” she said eagerly, raising her head and listening.

      “What are still there?” asked her aunt.

      “The gulls.”

      In fact, these animated foam-flakes of the ocean were about in vast numbers, uttering their peculiar cries as they hovered over the mud.

      “Of course they are there--why not?”

      “Father said he was going to make ladies’ waistcoats of them, and I’ve been fretting and crying--and then, the daffodils”--

      “Oh, bother the daffodils and the gulls! They may wait a long while before waistcoats are made of them.”

      “It is not of daffodils father was going to make waistcoats. He said he would have all the gulls shot.”

      “Never worrit your head about that. The birds can take care of themselves and fly away to sea.”

      “But the daffodils cannot get away. He was going to have a scythe and mow them all down and sell them.”

      “Wait till folk are fools enough to buy.”

      There was much to be done in the house. Mrs. Pepperill was unable to be always in the room with her niece. It was too early in the year for pleasure parties to come up the river in boats for tea or coffee, winkles and cockles, in the open air, but the house itself exacted attention--the cooking, the washing, had to be done. Now that Zerah was deprived of the assistance of her niece, perhaps for the first time did she realise how useful the girl had been to her. By night Kate was left alone; there was no space in the attic chamber for a second bed, nor did her condition require imperatively that some one should be with her all night.

      When her consciousness returned, Kate woke in the long darkness, and watched the circular spots of light that danced on the walls and careered over the floor, as the rushlight flickered in the draught between window and door. Above, on the low ceiling, was the circle of light, broad and yellow as the moon, cast by the candle, its rays unimpeded in that direction, but all round was the perforated rim, and through that the rays shot and painted stars--stars at times moving, wheeling, glinting; and Kate, in a half-torpid condition, thought she could make out among them the Plough with its curved tail, and wondered whether it were turning. Then she passed into dreamland, and woke and saw in the spots of light the white pearls of her uncle’s neckcloth, and was puzzled why they did not remain stationary. Whilst vexing her mind with this question she slid away into unconsciousness again, and when next her eyes opened, it was to see an orchard surrounding her, in which were daffodils that flickered, and she marvelled what that great one was above on the ceiling, so much larger than all the rest. Always, whenever with the ebb the gulls came up the river in thousands, and their laugh rang into the little room, it was to Kate as though a waft of sea-air blew over her hot face; and she laughed also, and said to herself, “They are not yet made into waistcoats.”

      Occasionally

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