Читать книгу Will Weatherhelm: The Yarn of an Old Sailor - William Henry Giles Kingston - Страница 15

I felt very sad and grave, but I had no longer an inclination to cry. “She wrote that for herself,” I thought. “I’ll try and hope as she hoped, and perhaps her prayers may lighten, if they do not remove, the heavy curse I brought down on my head.”

With regard to the curse I fancied was following me, I now know that I was entirely mistaken. Our loving Father in Heaven does not curse His creatures, though He permits for their benefit the consequences of sin to fall on their heads.

I will not repeat all the ideas which passed across my mind. I was not nearly so sad as I might have expected. I had met with sympathy and kindness, though from a stranger, and that lightened the burden; and then, though Miss Rundle was an odd creature, I could not help feeling pleased at seeing her again, and hearing from her about my aunt. I had little fear about her marriage, and I had every expectation of finding the sailor she had married, some fine old fellow well worthy of her, even though he had been all his life before the mast. While I was sitting down beside my grandmother’s grave, and thinking of the years that were past, the days of my childhood, and the many strange things which had since occurred to me, every now and then reading over the words on the tombstone: “Hope!—if on me your hope is placed,” and trying to understand their full meaning, and very full I found it, I happened to look up, and then I saw at a little distance a young woman who seemed to have been passing along a path across the churchyard, regarding me attentively. She was dressed in black, which made her look very fair and pale, and certainly I had never seen anybody else in all my life who came up in appearance to what I should fancy an angel in heaven would look like. This is what I thought at the moment. When she saw that she was observed, she drew her shawl instinctively closer around her, and moved on.