here in this parcel,--and the hat. My honour! I never was so fine before. Four guineas--with the hat.”
“Do you call this ‘talking sensible’?” asked Kate.
Again they subsided into silence. It was hard, in the piercing wind, in the darkness, to keep up an interest in any topic.
The cold cut like a razor. The wind moaned over the bulwarks of the ferry-boat. The mud exhaled a dead and unpleasant odour. Gulls fluttered near and screamed. The clouds overhead parted, and for a while exposed tracts of sky, thick strewn with stars that glittered frostily.
Presently the young man said, “Hang it! you will catch cold. Lie in the bottom of the boat, and I will throw my coat over you.”
“But you will yourself be chilled.”
“I--I am tough as nails. But stay. I know something better. I have my new bottle-green coat, splendid as the day. You shall have that over you.”
“But it may become crumpled.”
“Sister Sue shall iron it again.”
“Or stained.”
“You shan’t die of cold just to save my bottle-green. Lie down. I wish the hat could be made to serve some purpose. There’s no water in the boat?”
“None.”
“And I am glad. It would have gone to my heart like a knife to have had to bale it out with my box-hat.”
Kate was now very chilled. After the exertion, and the consequent heat in which she had been, the reaction had set in, and the blood curdled in her veins. The wind pierced the thin shawl as though it were a cobweb. Pooke folded up his garments to make a pillow for her head, insisted on her lying down, so that the side of the boat might in some measure screen her from the wind, and then he spread his new coat over her.
“There, Kitty. Hang it! we are comrades in ill-luck; so there is a brotherhood of misery between us. Let me call you Kitty, and let me be Jan to you--Tottle if you will.”
“Only when you begin to boast about your new suit”--
“There, Kitty, don’t be hard on me. I must think of something to keep me warm, and what else so warming as the thoughts of the ducks, and nankeen, and bottle-green, and the box-hat. I don’t believe anything else could make me keep up my spirits. Go to sleep, and when I feel the boat lift, I will sing out.”
Kate was touched by the kindness of the soft-headed lad. As she lay in the bottom of the boat without speaking, and he thought she was dozing, he put down his hand and touched the clothes about her. He wished to assure himself that she was well covered.
Kate was not asleep; she was thinking. She had not met with much consideration in the short span of her life. Lying in the boat with her eyes fixed on the stars, her restless mind was working.
Presently, moved by an uncontrollable impulse, she asked, “John, why do some of the stars twinkle and others do not?”
“How should I know? I suppose they were out on a spree when they ought to ha’ been in bed, and now can’t keep their eyes from winking.”
“Some, however, burn quite steadily.”
“Them’s the good stars, that keep regular hours, and go to bed when they ought. Your eyes’ll be winking no end to-morrow.”
“John, what becomes of the stars by day?”
“Kitty--Kate, don’t ask any more questions, or I shall jump overboard. I can’t bear it; I can’t indeed. It makes my head ache.”
CHAPTER VI
A CAPTURE
Kate Quarm had never felt a mother’s love. She could not recall her mother, who had died when she was an infant. Her father, encumbered with a motherless babe, had handed the child over to his sister Zerah, a hard woman, who resented the infliction upon her in addition to the cares and solicitudes of her house. From her aunt Kate received no love. Her uncle paid to her no attention, save when he was provoked to rebuke by some noise made in childish play, or some damage done in childish levity.
Thus Kate had grown up to the verge of womanhood with all her affections buried in her bosom. That dark heart was like a cellar stored with flower bulbs and roots. They are not dead, they send forth bleached and sickly shoots without vigour and incapable of bloom. Hers was a tender, craving nature, one that hungered for love; and as she received none, wherever she turned, to whomsoever she looked, she had become self-contained, reserved, and silent. Her aunt thought her sullen and obstinate.
As already related, Mrs. Pepperill had not been always childless. She had possessed a daughter, Wilmot, who had been the joy and pride of her heart. Wilmot had been a bright, merry girl, with fair hair and forget-me-not blue eyes, and cheeks in which the lily was commingled with the rose. Wilmot was a born coax and coquette; she cajoled her mother to give her what she desired, and she flattered her father into humouring her caprices.
Naturally, the reserved, pale Kate was thrown into shadow by the forward, glowing Wilmot; and the parents daily contrasted their own child with that of the brother, and always to the disadvantage of the latter.
Wilmot had a mischievous spirit, and delighted in teasing and tyrannising over her cousin. Malevolent she was not, but inconsiderate; she was spoiled, and, as a spoiled child, capricious and domineering. She liked--in her fashion, loved--Kate, as she liked and loved a plaything, that she might trifle with and knock about; not as a playfellow, to be considered and conciliated. Association with Wilmot hardly in any degree brightened the existence of Kate; it rather served to cloud it. Petty wrongs, continuous setting back, repeated slights, wounded and crushed a naturally expansive and susceptible nature. Kate hardly ventured to appeal to her father or to her aunt against her cousin, even when that cousin’s treatment was most unjust and insupportable; the aunt naturally sided with her own child, and the father heedlessly laughed at Kate’s troubles as undeserving of consideration.
Then, suddenly, Wilmot was attacked by fever, which carried her off in three days. The mother was inconsolable. The light went out of her life with the extinction of the vital spark in the bosom of her child.
The death of Wilmot was of no advantage to Kate. She was no longer, indeed, given over to the petty tyranny of her cousin, but she was left exposed to a hardened and embittered aunt, who resented on her the loss of her own child. Into the void heart of Zerah, Kate had no chance of finding access; that void was filled with discontent, verjuice, and acrimony. An unreasonable anger against the child who was not wanted and yet remained, in place of the child who was the apple of her eye, and was taken from her, made itself felt in a thousand ways.
Without being absolutely unkind to her, Zerah was ungracious. She held Kate at arm’s length, spoke to her in harsh and peremptory tones, looked at her with contracted pupils and with puckered brow. Filled with resentment against Providence, she made the child feel her disappointment and antagonism. The reserve, the lack of light-heartedness in the child told against her, and Zerah little considered that this temperament was produced by her own ungenerous treatment.
At the time of this story, Kate was of
