Читать книгу Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio. - Fern Fanny - Страница 7

It was the night for the weekly vestry lecture. I was left quite alone in the old kitchen. My uncle had extinguished the lamp in leaving, saying that it was “a waste to burn out oil for me.” The fire, also, had been carefully taken apart, and the brands laid at an incombustible distance from each other. The old clock kept up a sepulchral, death-watch tick, and I could hear the falling snow drifting gloomily against the windows.

I drew the old, wooden settle closer between the tall andirons, and sat sorrowfully gazing into the dying embers. What was to become of me? for it seemed impossible to bear longer the intolerable galling of my yoke. Even the charity of strangers seemed to me preferable to the grudging, insulting tolerance of my kindred. But, with my sixteen years’ experience of quiet valley-life, where should I turn my untried footsteps? To Him who guideth the little bird through the pathless air, would I look.

Weeping, I prayed.

“My poor child,” said a voice at my side; and Master Grey removed my hands gently from my tear-stained face, and held them in his own. “My poor Hetty, life looks very dark to you, does it not? I know all you suffer. Don’t pain yourself to tell me about it; I overheard your uncle’s crushing words. I know there are none to love you – none to care for you – none on whom you can lean. It is a bitter feeling, my poor child. I, too, have passed through it. You would go from hence, but where? Life is full of snares, and you are too young, and too inexperienced to brave them.

“Hetty,” and Master Grey drew me gently toward him, – “Hetty, could you be happy with me?”

Is the ship-wrecked mariner happy, who opens his despairing eyes at length in the long looked for, long prayed for, home?

Is the little bird happy, who folds her weary wings safe from the pursuer’s talons, in her own fleece-lined nest?

Is the little child happy, who wakes, sobbing, in the gloomy night, from troubled dreams, to find his golden head still safely pillowed on the dear, maternal bosom?