Читать книгу Temptation on a Tower - J. D. Hennessey - Страница 5

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To make our story clear to the reader, it will be wise, perchance, to put back the clock of time from the 25th of December, 18--, for a trifle over twenty years. A baby boy had just awakened in a cottage by the sea, not more than a quarter of a mile away from Stewart Towers. Blinking his eyes, he gazed wonderingly from out of his soft cambric and fleecy woollen wrappings at his nurse. The room was meanly furnished, but spotlessly clean. The personal surroundings of the infant were rich and costly, as though he was a child of expectancy and promise, whose advent had been desired and waited for, and who was destined to a fortune and a name.

But the homely face of the nurse looked down pitifully upon the little stranger as she whispered to herself rather than to the child:

"It's a hard, sad world you've come to, little beauty; you'd better have stayed in the country where they wear no clothes."

At this she soothed the child with a motherly hand and placed some food beside it in the cradle, and pressed the rubber teat into the little rosebud mouth; the child sucked vigorously, and the kindhearted woman wished that it had been its mother's breast instead.

"The wee things drink in love with their mother's milk," she thought, looking disdainfully at the bottle.

"The child's the very image of its mother," said the good nurse to herself, as she commenced her household work, "and I shall love the mite for its mother's sake; but dear me! to think that this is Christmas Eve and she has come and gone again and left this little mite behind her, and it's no more than three months and a day. She was very close about herself--very close--and that stupid Peter of mine seemed just as gone upon her as I was afterward myself--and he knows no more about her. But she was a lady, and has some one that loves her, but I don't know that she was married, although I am not going to tell Peter. Men guess and think a lot themselves, and often know more than they say, but I don't think that could have occurred to him."

At this Mrs. Sampson stepped across to the window to take a look at Peter, for this morning she could see him occasionally, although he was a mile or more away. In full view of the cottage window there stretched the great waters Of the South Pacific Ocean, and far out at sea like a speck upon its placid bosom was a fisherman's boat.

The good woman stood and watched it, as indeed well she might, for it contained not only Peter Sampson, her husband, but Sonny Sampson, as the neighbours called her only child, now grown to be a strong limbed youth, nearly as tall as his father. They were schnapper fishing.

The woman stood and watched the boat, as now and again it would disappear for a full half minute as it sank in the hollow between two waves. It was the long roll of the Pacific across thousands of miles of open water to the south east which caused these great waves to break in thunder and foam upon the iron bound coast of south-eastern Australia.

The scene which spread itself before Nurse Sampson (for thus was she known among the people of the place) was singular and romantic, if not actually beautiful. A tiny bay had been formed by a cleft in the rugged, rock bound shore. Here, for centuries and more, the ocean had washed up yellow sand between the two rock strewn shores, which, in turn, a fresh water stream washed back again. The miniature bay was a mere cleft in the rocky coast, so narrow that a strong-armed man might have thrown a stone from the pile of water-worn rocks on the one side to the dwarfed cliffs upon the other. There were a few cottages overlooking the sea in addition to Peter Sampson's, and on the city side, looking down upon the lowly homes of the fishermen, was the residence of the eccentric Donald Stewart.

But, as Catherine Sampson stood there dreamily watching her husband's boat, and also a distant coasting schooner, and the smoke of a steamer still hull down on the distant horizon, she saw other things. There were grey clouds above the land and sea, and they set her thinking about the mother and the child. Of the mother of whom she knew so little, of the child she had yet to learn about and understand. She was a woman of active temperament and cheerful disposition, but the grey of the morning seemed to have cast its sombre tints upon her mind.

It was good, perhaps, that it was so, for it is only as we see life under varied aspects that we truly understand it. Sunshine hides as well as reveals. There are things which will never be seen except in a darkened landscape; never be learned except under sombre skies. The stars which lie hid in the daytime shine out in the night, and we want to look at life under all conditions to know it truly. This morning the grey side of it was uppermost to Peter Sampson's wife.

"Ah me!" ejaculated the woman at last, as a sigh escaped her lips, "the wee mite will be a sight of trouble and responsibility to me. I wonder why the good God allows bairns to be born into a world as doesn't want them."

"But he's come to stay," continued the good woman, bustling about her work to make up for lost time, "and he'll need to be cared for. Besides," she said, "to-morrow will be Christmas Day."