CHAPTER II

"Cast Out"

EASTER hardly knew how heroic an act was her confession of faith in God. She was a little afraid of her father, but her love of him was deep, though untried; and, like thousands of other converts to Christianity, from the days of our Lord Himself, when the man born blind was cast out and disowned by his parents, she had felt no fear of the cruel and unnatural separation which might befall her through any bigotry and obstinacy of her father. She stood in the flickering firelight, which was bright enough for them to see, without any other light, her eyes glistening, and the colour coming and going on her face, ready to fling her arms round her father's neck, and burst into a passion of tears upon his breast.

But his face was harsh and stormy, as he stood up with his stern eyes riveted upon her. "Say that once more, Easter," he muttered, "and you'll never darken my doors again."

"No, no, my man! No, no, Williams!" interposed the rector hastily. "Let Easter alone. I'll answer for her. She has always been a good girl, and she'll be a good girl now."

"What does the girl mean, then," asked Christmas angrily, "talking of being converted, and believing in God? I can say, 'I believe in God Almighty,' and all the rest of it, as well as any man or woman in England. Easter means more than that; don't you, girl?"

"Yes, father," she answered, in a firm, low voice; "I mean they've taught me how sinful I am, and how the Lord Jesus Christ did really die on the cross to save me, and that God loves me as if He was my real father. I'm not saying it like I used to say it in church, out of a book. I believe it with all my heart."

"Then you've taken up with a lot o' cant, and you may march out of my house, and see what cant and them that cant will do for you!" said Christmas, white with fury.

It was all in vain that the rector remonstrated and pleaded for Easter, and that Easter herself knelt at his feet and with many tears besought him to let her stay at home. He vowed that unless she would recall all she had said, and promise solemnly never to hold intercourse with any of the canting lot again, he would never more call her daughter, or look upon her in any other light than as an enemy.

Next morning, at the earliest dawn of day, Easter quitted her home. She had not tried to sleep; and she knew her father had not slept, for she had heard his heavy footstep moving to and fro in his bedroom. It had been his command that she should leave the shelter of his roof as soon as it was light, and she was obeying him. For the last time she opened her little casement, and looked out on the garden below, where the roses and hollyhocks and sunflowers were in blossom, and where the bees in the hive under her window were already beginning to stir. She was going away, not knowing whither she went: but she believed that God would be as faithful to His promises as her father was to his word.

As she went slowly and sadly along the village lane, where the cottagers were still asleep, all the old familiar places looked strange at this strange hour and in the grey dawn. Even the churchyard, where she had played for hours together as a child, seemed different and foreign to her, as though she was cut off from all relations with it and her past life. Where was she to go? Whom could she turn to? She must not stay with Widow Evans, lest it should displease her father more. She was passing under the rectory wall, when she heard the old rector's voice calling her.

"Easter!" he cried. "Easter, what are you about to do? Are you going to forsake your father?"

"He has cast me off," she answered, weeping; "he will not let me stay if I do not deny God."

"Dear! Dear! Dear!" cried the old rector. "He's an obstinate man, and I don't know what to say between you. You are two wilful ones, I fear. But I'll do my best to bring him round; and here, my lassie, here's five pounds for you, and a letter to my cousin, who will find you a place somewhere. Good-bye, and God bless you, Easter!"

"Do you believe in God?" asked Easter, looking up at him through her tears.

"Of course I do," he answered testily, "and so does your father. We believe in Him after one fashion, and you after another. But, Easter, yours is the best, I know."

He uttered the last words in a mournful tone, and watched her as she went sadly on her lonely way, until the hawthorn hedge hid her form from his sight. She was as nearly as possible like his own child to him; he had watched her growing up from day to day through all the changes of childhood and girlhood. He was a kindly old man, and loved to be at peace and on good terms with every one. And here was a brangle in the very centre of his parish, making desolate the house he frequented most. Besides, he could recall a time when he had felt the worth of a courageous faith like that which had sent Easter out into a world she knew nothing of, in simple reliance upon God and implicit obedience to the Saviour whose name she had taken. She was a Christian. Was he a Christian, too? The old rector thought of his self-indulgences, his country pleasures, and his neglected people; but he felt his heart heavy and dull. He could not lift it out of the miry clay in which it had grovelled so long.

Easter's absence made a greater difference to Christmas Williams than he would ever have owned in words. He had never let her toil laboriously with her own hands, as her mother and grandmother had done before her; he had been too choice of her for that. Easter had been like his favourite garden, where no common fruit or flowers were suffered to grow. He had delighted in her dainty, winsome ways, as he had delighted in his splendid show of roses, and of peaches growing ripe in the sun. He missed her sorely. There was no pretty, smiling face blooming opposite to him when he sat down to his now solitary meals. There was no light footstep tripping about the house; no sweet voice singing gaily or plaintively the old songs he had taught her himself. She was never to be seen leaning over the terrace-wall, watching for his coming along the lane. He had no one to buy some pretty trifle for when he went to market. Christmas had not foreseen the dreary change. Possibly, if he had foreseen it, he would never have uttered the oath he had bound upon his conscience.

All the neighbourhood took notice of the gloom that had fallen upon Christmas and his once pleasant house. He had always been a masterful man, but he grew morose and tyrannical as time passed on. His servants, who had been used to stay long periods with him, were constantly quitting his service, and carried away with them stories of his harsh and unreasonable conduct. The home gradually became dull and dirty, with no mistress to look after the maids. It was less and less tempting to gather about the large fireplace of an evening, as had been the practice for generations past.

The rector had offended Christmas by interceding for Easter, and by pooh-poohing his fiery zeal against the meetings in Widow Evans' cottage, and he turned into the village inn but seldom now. Christmas felt this to the very soul; but he was too proud to speak of it, or to yield an inch to his clergyman. It was reported, moreover, that the ale was badly brewed, or was kept in sour casks: a fact that might possibly have had something to do with the rector's fewer visits, and with their brevity when he came.

Christmas made no effort to learn any tidings of his daughter; but the neighbours took care he should hear them. She had taken a place as upper nurse in the family of the rector's cousin, who lived in the market-town he attended; and now and then he fancied he saw her threading her way through the busy streets on a market-day.

A year or two after she left home, he heard she had married Widow Evans' son, a poor, delicate young man, assistant only in the draper's shop where he had served his apprenticeship. Christmas cursed him bitterly in his heart; though he never uttered his name, or Easter's, with his lips. The letters Easter wrote to him he returned unopened; but none the less bitter was his resentment that she should marry without his consent. She was his daughter still, though he vowed she was not.

Presently came the news that a grandson was born to him. His own grandson! He heard it on market-day, and the farmers who were about him, buying and selling their corn, watched him inquisitively to see how he took the news. Not a change came over his hard, grim face; yet suddenly in his mind rose up the memory of that sunny Easter Sunday, when the bells were ringing joyously in the old church-tower for the resurrection of the Lord, and some one brought to him his first-born child. Another memory followed close upon it—the evening shadows of the same day closing round him as he knelt beside his dying wife, and heard her whisper in her last faint tones, "I leave my baby to you, dear Christmas!" All his lonely way home that night these two visions haunted him.

Still six months later further tidings reached his ears. Two or three of his oldest and most faithful guests, who yet lingered of an evening on the old hearth, were talking together, seated within the old screen, which concealed him from their sight, though they had a shrewd guess that he was within hearing.

"Widow Evans' son is dead," said one, "and he's left poor Easter a widow, with her babe!"

"What's she going to do?" asked another of the party.

"They say she's bound to come home to Widow Evans," was the answer. "She's ailing, is Widow Evans, and growing simple; she wants somebody to fend for her. And who so natural as Easter, poor lass? They were praying for her at the meeting last Sunday, and praying hard for 'him,' as the Lord 'ud soften his heart. You know who! It'll take a deal o' softening, I'm thinking."

"Ay! Ay!" agreed all the company.

"They say Easter's as white as a corpse," went on the speaker. "Eh! But she'll be a sight to move a heart o' stone, I say, with her babe and her pretty young face pinched up in a widow's cap. She's naught but a girl yet; I recollect her birthday as if it was yesterday. Oh! But what a feast we should ha' been sure of, in this very house, if Easter had never taken up wi' those new-fangled ways, and had married to please her father! But Christmas is too hard, I say."

"Ay! That he is," rejoined the other voices with one consent.

"Widow Evans' money is no more than five pounds a quarter," he continued, "and it dies when she dies. It will be close living for two women and a growing boy; though women know how to starve and famish better than men do, God help them! And to think of Christmas being so well off! Better than anybody knows fairly, with heaps of money in the bank. He oughtn't to be so hard!"