A Letter of Credit Part 23

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth, and even for evermore. Praise ye the Lord.'"

"Would anybody be well kept that was kept so?" Mrs. Carpenter broke forth, with the tears running down her face. "O my little Rotha! my little daughter! if I knew you in that care, how blessed I should be!"

The tears streamed, and Mrs. Carpenter in vain tried to wipe them dry.

Rotha looked on, troubled, and a little conscience-stricken.

"Mother," she began, "don't he take care of anybody except Christians?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Carpenter; "he takes care of the children of Christians; and so I have faith that he will take care of you; but it is not just so.

If you will not come to him now, he may take painful ways to bring you; if you will not trust him now, he may cut away everything else you trust to, till you flee to him for help. But I wish you would take the easier way."

"But can I help my will?" said Rotha again, holding fast to that tough argument. "What can I do?"

"I cannot tell. You had better ask Mr. Digby. I am not able for any more questions just now."

"Mother. I'll bring you your milk," said Rotha, rather glad of a diversion. "Mother, do you think Mr. Digby can answer all sorts of questions?"

"Better than I can."

She brought her mother the gla.s.s of milk and the biscuit and sat watching her while she took them. She noticed the thin hands, the exhausted look, the weary att.i.tude, the pale face. What state of things was this? Her mother eating biscuit and oysters got with another person's money; doing no work, or next to none; living in lodgings, but apparently without the prospect of earning the means to pay her rent; too feeble to do much but rest in that spring chair.

"Mother," Rotha began, with a lurking, unrecognized feeling of anxiety-- "I wish you would make haste and get well!"

Mrs. Carpenter was eating biscuit, and made no reply.

"Don't you think you _are_ a little better?"

"Not exactly to-day."

"What _would_ do you good?"

"Nothing that you could give me, darling. I am very comfortable. I wonder to see myself so supplied with everything I can possibly want. Look at this chair! It is almost better than all the rest."

"That and the fire."

"Yes; the blessed fire! It is so good!"

"But I wish you'd get well, mother!" Rotha said with a half sigh.

Mrs. Carpenter made no answer.

"I don't see how we are going to do, if you don't get well soon," Rotha went on with a kind of impatient uneasiness. "What shall we do for money, mother? there's the rent and everything."

"You forget what you have just been reading, my child. Do you think the words mean nothing?--'The Lord is thy keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.'"

"But that don't pay rent," said Rotha.

"You think the Lord can do great things, and cannot do little things. I can trust him for all."

"Then why cannot you trust him for me?"

"I do."

"Then why are you troubled?"

"Because here your self-will comes in; and you may have to go through hard times before it is broken."

"Broken? My self-will broken?"

"Yes."

"I do not want to be a creature without a will. I do not like such creatures."

"You must talk to Mr. Digby, Rotha. I am too tired."

"I won't tire you any more, mother dear! But I don't see why I should talk to Mr. Digby."

And for a few moments Rotha was silent. Then she broke out again.

"Mother, don't you think if you could get back to Medwayville you would be well again?"

"I shall never go back to Medwayville," the sick woman said faintly.

"But if you could get into the country somewhere? out of this horrid dust and these mean little streets. O mother, think of the great fields of gra.s.s, and the trees, and the flowers!"

"Darling, I am very well here. Suppose you take the poker and punch that lump of coal, so that it may blaze up a little."

Rotha punched the lump of coal, and sat watching the brilliant jets of flame that leapt from it, sending a gentle illumination all through the room; revolving in her mind whether it might be possible by and by to get her mother among the sights and sounds of the country again.

As the spring advanced however, though the desirableness of such a move might be more apparent, the difficulty of it as evidently increased. The close, stifling air of the city, when the warm days came, was hard to bear for the sick woman, and hard in two ways for Rotha. But Mrs.

Carpenter's strength failed more and more. There was no question now of her sewing; she did not attempt it. She sat all day in her spring easy chair, by the window or before the fire as the day happened to be, now and then turning over the leaves of her Bible which always lay open before her. And now Mr. Digby when he came would often take the book and read to her; and even talks of some length would grow up out of the reading; talks that seemed delightful to both the parties concerned, though Rotha could not understand much of it. Little by little the room had entirely changed its character, and no longer seemed to be a part of Mrs. Marble's domain. A fluffy rug lay under Mrs. Carpenter's feet; a pretty lamp stood on the table; a screen of j.a.panese manufacture, endlessly interesting to Rotha, stood between the weary eyes and the fire, when there was a fire; and Mrs. Carpenter herself was enveloped in a warm, soft fleecy shawl. As the warm weather came on indeed, this had to give place to something lighter. Then Mr. Digby brought fruit; early fruit, and foreign fruit; then a little India tea caddy of very nice tea stood on the table; tea such as in all her life Mrs. Carpenter had never drunk till now. She had long ceased to make any objection to whatever Mr.

Digby pleased to do; taking it all as simply and as graciously as a child. Much more than her own child. However, Rotha was mollified towards their benefactor from that day above mentioned; and if she looked on wonderingly, and even a little jealously, at his unresisted a.s.suming of the direction of their affairs, she no more openly rebelled.

Mr. Digby, it may be remarked, kept her so persistently busy, that she had small time to disturb herself with any sort of speculations. Lessons were lively. History was added to Latin and arithmetic; Rotha had a good deal to read, and troublesome sums to manage; and finally every remnant of spare leisure was filled up by a demand for writing. Mr. Digby did not frighten her by talking of compositions, but he desired her to prepare now an abstract of the history of the crusades, now of the Stuart dynasty, now of the American revolution; and now again of the rise of the art of printing, or the use and manufacture of gunpowder.

Studying out these subjects, pondering them, writing and writing over her sketches, Rotha was both very busy and very happy; and then the handing over her papers to Mr. Digby, and his reading them, and his strictures upon them, were a matter of intense interest and delight; for though Rotha trembled with excitement she was still more thrilled with pleasure.

For she was just at the age when the mind begins to open to a rapturous consciousness of its powers, and at the same time of the wonderful riches of the fields open to the exercise of them. In her happy ignorance, in her blessed inexperience, Rotha did not see what the days were doing with her mother; and if occasionally a flash of unwelcome perception would invade her mind, with the unbounded presumption of her young years she shut her eyes and refused to believe in it. But all the while Mrs.

Carpenter was growing feebler and wasting to more of a shadow. Rotha still comforted herself that she had "a nice colour in her cheeks."

It came to be the latter end of June. Windows were open; what would have been delicious summer air came in laden with the mingled odours of street mud and street dust, garbage, the scents of butcher stalls and grocery shops, and far worse, the indefinable atmospheric tokens of poor living and uncleanness. Now and then a whiff of more energy brought a reminder not quite perverted of the places where flowers grow and cows pasture and birds sing. It only served to make the next breath more heavy and disappointing. Mrs. Carpenter sat by the window to get all the freshness she could; albeit with the air came also the sounds from without; the creak or the rattle of wheels on the pavement, the undistinguishable words of a rough voice here and there, the shrill cry of the strawberry seller, the confused, mixed, inarticulate din of the great city all around. A sultry heaviness seemed to rest upon everything, disheartening and depressing to anybody whose physical powers were not strong or his nerves not well strung for the work and struggle of life. There was a pump over the way; and from time to time the creak of its handle was to be heard, and then the helpless drip and splash of the last runnings of the water falling into the gutter, after the applicant had gone away with his or her pail. It mocked Mrs. Carpenter's ear with the recollection of running brooks, and of a certain cool deep well into which the bucket used to go down from the end of a long pole and come up sparkling with drops of the clear water.----

"Well, how do you do?" said the alert voice of Mrs. Marble by her side.

"Sort o' close, aint it?"

"Rather."

"The city aint a place for Christians to live in, when it gets to this time; anyhow, not for Christians that aint good and strong. I'd like to put you out to pasture somewheres."

"She won't go," said Rotha longingly.