CHAPTER VIII.

CROSS PURPOSES.

"When love shall, pitying, call me home, To that sweet, sweet home that has long been hers, With yearning rapture my eyes will roam O'er throngs of the sainted worshippers. For I think the child with the starry eyes, Who vanished away to that far-off land, Will look from some window in Paradise, And beckon me in with her tiny hand." _Helen Marion Burnside._

Queenie's forebodings were not verified, for, in spite of two untoward circumstances, the greater part of the winter passed quietly to the inhabitants of the cottage and Church-Stile House.

Only two things marred its perfect harmony. Garth had not yet spoken, and Cathy had bade good-bye to her friends at Hepshaw, and had begun her London work in earnest.

Queenie felt the loss of her friend bitterly; every one missed the bright, light-hearted girl. Cathy's moods had of late been strangely variable: fits of despondency had alternated with bursts of wild, exuberant spirits; a certain sweet recklessness had tinged even her farewell greetings.

They were all at the station to see her off, even Mr. Logan and Miss Cosie, and at the last moment Dr. Stewart appeared.

Queenie seemed utterly quenched, and Langley looked depressed and tearful; but Cathy looked at them all with her bright, resolute smile.

"Good-bye, dear friends; don't miss me too much, before long I shall be amongst you again," she said, as she waved her hand gaily, and the train moved slowly away.

A curiously sweet expression crossed Mr. Logan's face as he walked by Queenie's side down the path bordered by plane trees that led from the station to the Deerhound.

"Miss her! how can we help missing her?" cried the girl, appealing to him with sorrowful eyes, as though to claim his sympathy. "Langley will be dreadfully lonely without her, and as for Emmie and me! why she was the only friend that we had at Granite Lodge, the dearest, and the kindest, and the bravest." But here Queenie's eulogy ended in a little sob.

"Young things love to try their strength," replied Mr. Logan, softly. "We would fain clip their wings, but they would be sure to grow again. When I think of Miss Catherine," he went on, his eyes darkening strangely, "going out so bravely to her work in the heart of the great city without a tear on her bright face, however much her heart may be aching at leaving us all behind, I cannot help thinking of the white dove flying all those days over those wastes of water, with the olive branch in its mouth, and what Noah must have felt when he pulled it into the ark. It did not come to him even of its own accord, the wild weary thing, but he must needs put out his hand and draw it into its refuge."

Queenie looked up at him somewhat startled, but he did not seem to notice her surprise; his eyes had a far-off, abstracted look in them, and during the remainder of the walk he preserved an almost unbroken silence.

Cathy wrote long cheery letters, full of amusing descriptions. She liked her work on the whole, she told them, and was not daunted by the difficulties that beset the path of beginners. "It was all in the day's work," as she wrote; "and what was the good of possessing a fount of endurance fit for a Spartan woman if there was nothing to bear. In fact, I am determined to serve my noviciate properly, and to make the best of things. I am no more inclined to see bugbears now than I was to discern Emmie's favorite ghost in the old garret at Granite Lodge; so make your mind easy, my precious old Queen, and do not indulge in any more troublesome fancies on my account."

Queenie did not show these letters to any one but Emmie; but the two gloated over them in private, and tried to imagine Cathy in her black stuff dress and little white cap, moving among the dim wards with her light springy step hushed so as not to disturb the sleepers, "looking not a bit like our Cathy, but like any other ordinary person," as Emmie observed with a sigh. But if Queenie missed her friend now, the time was to come when she would yearn for her out of the fulness of an over-charged and wounded heart; when her first thought would be, "If only Cathy were here."

Things were not quite satisfactory between herself and Garth Clayton. The young man had grown strangely shy in his ways with her, and held himself almost entirely aloof from the cottage.

The fact was, Garth was in a predicament.

He was more in love than ever; but in his present circumstances marriage was out of the question. How was he to bring home a wife to the old home, entangled as he was by a load of debt and difficulties?

Garth was perfectly honest in his intentions. He had made up his mind that Queenie Marriott was the woman he loved; but he had a man's horror of a long engagement. "What's the good of telling a girl you love her if you can't see your way clear to make her your wife?" he always said; and he acted on this opinion so thoroughly that his quiet withdrawal of attentions filled the girl's heart with dismay.

"Would he be so cold and distant with me if he really loved me?" Queenie asked herself. "He never comes to see me now, and if I go up to Church-Stile House he is always so busy, and seems as if he fears to be alone with me. Does he think that I want him to pay me attentions if he has ceased to care for me in the way he did?" asked the girl, her breast heaving at the thought; and she mourned for the loss of her friend, and in her secret soul refused to be comforted.

But she knew nothing of the conflict that went on under that assumed coldness of manner that wounded her so greatly.

Garth found his life anything but easy just now; to be sure, ruin no longer stared him in the face, but his debt was a secret torment to him, and fretted his proud nature with a sense of positive injury.

He would fain have drawn out as little as possible of the sum placed for his benefit, but his needs were pressing. Scarcity of orders, the rise in the men's wages, the heavily-freighted accounts of the cottages he had so lavishly provided for his workmen, had obliged him to expend already seven or eight hundred pounds of the money. The quarry was now in good working order again; and in a few months the young master of Warstdale trusted that he would be enabled to repay the first instalment of the debt; and then, and not till then, would he open his lips to speak any words of love.

Garth was capable of keeping any resolution that he had formed. It was no fear of betraying himself that made him avoid Queenie; but the girl's presence was so sweet to him, and the longing to tell what was in his heart was so great, that the pain of such silence was unendurable to him.

And so he quietly withdrew himself, and went on with his daily work as though no such thoughts were his; and Queenie meekly accepted her banishment and bore Langley's reproaches on her unsociability as patiently as she could, until Langley discovered how matters were, and held her peace ever afterward like a wise woman, and petted and made much of the girl when she came down to the cottage.

And Queenie saw little of Garth, only lifting her brown eyes timidly to his face when she met him in the village, and he stopped to exchange a greeting with her and Emmie; but he never once said, "Why do we see you so seldom at Church-Stile House?" but only asked kindly after hers and the child's welfare, and bade her wrap up Emmie and cherish her now the bitter winter weather had set in.

Queenie ate her Christmas dinner at the vicarage, with only Mr. Logan and Miss Cosie; and her New Year's day was spent at Juniper Lodge. The Claytons were not present on either of these occasions; Garth had gone up to London to see Cathy, and Langley had spent both days at Karldale Grange in Gertrude Chester's sick room. A long season of suffering that no skill could avert or tenderness alleviate had set in for the unhappy lady, and Langley's services were in constant requisition.

Now and then Mr. Chester came over to Hepshaw. He always paid a visit to the cottage, and would go up, as a matter of course, into Emmie's little room, and sit for a long time by the empty bed where his darling had slept her little life away, and then he would come sorrowfully down again, and he and Queenie would talk softly of the child and her endearing ways.

These visits always made Queenie feel very sad. Time had not mitigated the father's heavy loss. He still mourned heavily for his little Nan. His florid face looked pale and haggard. A few threads of grey were clearly perceptible in the golden brown beard; but his eyes always lighted up with a look of tenderness when Queenie mentioned his wife.

"Ah, my poor Gertie," he would say, sorrowfully. "You would scarcely know her, Miss Marriott, she is so changed; she suffers so terribly. Langley will have told you; and yet since the death of our little darling there has never been a word or breath of complaint. She endures her worst agonies with fortitude; even Dr. Stewart marvels at her, and says he had never witnessed greater stoicism. It is only 'Hold my hand, Harry,' or 'I shall soon be relieved, dear husband, when this attack has passed,' just that, and nothing more."

"Yes, indeed; Langley cannot say enough in her praise, she says her self-control is wonderful."

"Poor soul, she's fighting away her life by inches. You cannot tell what a man feels when he sees his wife suffering and is helpless to relieve it. Sometimes I think that for her sake I shall be thankful when it is over, and she is with the child. I can't get it out of my mind that she ought to have her mother or myself to take care of her; she must feel so lost in that great glittering place."

"She is safer and better cared for there than even in your arms, dear Mr. Chester."

"Yes, I know; and Gertie reproves me and says I am a sad heathen, and so I am; but I am sure of one thing," speaking in a voice of suppressed emotion: "that if I am ever good enough--God help me for the sinner that I am,--but if I am ever helped to win an entrance in heaven, that my little Nan will be the first to see me, and she will come running to me, the darling, and I shall feel the clasp of her sweet arms about me, and the softness of her baby face against mine; and 'father's come,' she will say that first, I know," breaking off hurriedly as the tears came into Queenie's eyes.

"And a little child shall lead them." The words seemed to come to her mind with sudden, irrepressible force. What if he were right, though he spoke only the language of love's fantasy? Might not the baby hand be stretched out to him through the darkness and silence that lay between those two loving souls, ever beckoning him on to possible good and high endeavour, through devious wanderings, past yawning pitfalls, over the tumultuous sea of life, beckoning with faint invisible touches, ever higher and higher.

"Father's come." Fanciful, and yet what more probable in the mystery of Providence and God's dealing with men than this, that amid the shining crowds the form of his little Nan should softly glide towards him; and even there in God's bright home a little child shall lead them.

And so with all apparent quietness, but with many secret anxieties, the winter wore softly away.

A week's holiday at Christmas had given the young school-mistress a short reprieve from her duties, and she had taken advantage of it to pay a three days' visit to her old friend Caleb Runciman. Emmie had pleaded hard to accompany her, but the weather was unusually inclement, and Queenie shrank from exposing the child's delicacy to such a test; so she remained under Mrs. Fawcett's charge, as Langley was engrossed with continual visits to Karldale Grange.

Caleb and Molly made much of their visitor, but the old man grumbled a good deal over his favorite's looks.

"Well, Miss Queenie, I don't believe school-keeping has agreed with you after all," he began, shaking his head. "She is thin, Molly, is she not, and looks a bit graver than she used to look?"

"Now, Caleb, don't begin fancying such nonsense. I was never better in my life. Think of this hearty meal I have just eaten; thin indeed!" and Queenie opened her brown eyes and threw up her pretty head with a movement of disdain.

"Of course you must be having your own way, Miss Queenie dear," returned the old man as he lighted his pipe; "but, all the same, I don't believe that Hepshaw air agrees with you both. There, why the precious lamb has a cough, didn't you tell Molly so just now? and you are ever so much thinner yourself, my pretty; and when is it all going to end, this play-acting, the school-mistressing, I mean, and you and the blessed lamb settle down comfortably, like sensible-minded Christians, in a nice handsome home of your own, eh, Miss Queenie?"

"Why, I don't know, Caleb," stammered the girl, rather startled at this very direct question, "I don't know at all; I have not made up my mind. Not before the end of the summer; no, certainly not before then."

Caleb laid down his pipe, with a dissatisfied look.

"I thought better of your common-sense, I did, indeed, Miss Queenie."

"Now, Caleb, if you are going to be cross I shall tell Molly to pack up my bag, and I shall just take the next train home. What is the good of being an heiress if one is never to have one's own way?"

"You have had it for a pretty long spell, I'm thinking," returned the old man with unusual pettishness, but the girl's whim fretted him sorely. "Mark my words, Miss Queenie, you will play at this thing a bit too long."

"I shouldn't wonder if you were right," a touch of gravity replacing her fun; "and I think myself that it would be as well to fix a limit, for fear I should be tempted to put off the evil hour."

"Eh, eh! now you are going to be sensible."

"I must have six clear months. Let me see, I will say the first of August. There, Caleb, on the first of August I will enter into possession of my riches. Will that content you?"

"Why not say May or June, Miss Queenie?"

"No; not a day, not an hour before," returned the girl resolutely. "My dear old friend, this is not a whim only, it is real stern necessity. The dearest friends I possess have been in great trouble, as you know, and my seeming poverty has enabled me to help them; it is for their sake, not mine, that I am making this further delay. There, it is decided; and now let us talk of something else," she finished gaily.

But Caleb was only half-mollified.

"She is thinner, and looks different somehow," he said to his faithful confidante, Molly, that night. "There is a peaking look in her brown eyes, like a half-fledged bird that sees its nest, but can't find its way to it. I doubt that she is not quite happy, Molly."

"Nay; she is no differ from other young girls," returned Molly shrewdly. "Bless your dear heart, Mr. Runciman, they are all alike! they fret a bit, and then cheer up. It is the law of nature, that's where it is; she will be as perky and chirping-like as ever by-and-bye," and Molly, who knew the symptoms well, and had buried her own sweetheart many years ago, changed the subject with womanly tact and sympathy.