CHAPTER I.

The Lonely Cot.

LONELY was the little cottage in which dwelt Silas Mytton, the hewer and chopper of firewood. It stood in a corner of a heath, with not another house near it, and all the winds could sweep over it unchecked from every quarter. It was a small patched-up place, with one little window at the side of the door, and above it another peeping from under the low thatched roof. The cottage had been scarcely large enough to hold Silas, his wife, and their five children; but now Mrs. Mytton was dead, and the eldest boy had gone to sea.

The common looked pleasant enough in the summer, when the blossoms on the flags showed like white feathers round the patches of water, and the heather purpled the ground, and yellow furze dotted it with gold, and geese fed there, and donkeys browsed, and butterflies fluttered over the honied wild-flowers.

But a very dreary place looked the common in winter, when the heath was brown, and the blossoms dead, and the patches of water grew broader and larger, and all around them was swamp, till sharp frost turned the water into ice, and the north wind rushed wildly across the waste, and covered it with snow. Mytton's cottage was then a dreary abode indeed, for seldom did any one care to go near it, and the wind not only swept over but through it, at least so it seemed to the dwellers therein.

There was a little thatched out-house or shed in front of the cottage, and from thence, hour after hour, as long as daylight lasted, might be heard the sound of chopping up wood. It was by this, that Mytton gained his living; for, except in harvest-time, and then rarely, he never worked as a day-labourer for any of the farmers around. Wood-chopping seemed to come as natural to the Mytton family as flying does to birds, or swimming to fishes. Mrs. Mytton had been chopping in the shed but the day before she died, and on the evening after the poor woman's funeral, when her sorrowing family returned from the churchyard, they set to chopping again. Mytton might be seen constantly at work, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, showing his hairy freckled arms as he steadily plied the hatchet.

He was a hard-featured, stern-looking man, with rough grizzled chin, and cheeks shaven but once a month, and his appearance was that of one who had had a long struggle with want and care. Mytton's trials, however, had rather soured than subdued him; he was a prouder man in his cottage than Sir Marmaduke in his castle. The wood-chopper was wont to tell his children on winter evenings how his grandfather's grandfather had been a gentleman, and a mighty rich one too, who had owned more acres of land in Shropshire than there were sedges round the pool; who had kept twenty hunters in his stables, and had gone up to London once every year in a family coach drawn by six fine grey horses.

The little Myttons, shivering in their cold cottage, used to listen to their father's accounts of such grandeur in bygone days, much as they would have listened to fairy stories. They knew that they neither fared better, nor worked the less hard, because they bore the name of some grand squire who had lived at a time which seemed to them as far back as that of the Deluge. The fine family coach was to the young wood-choppers much the same kind of thing as that which Cinderella's fairy in the story made out of a pumpkin. When the tale had been told, the cottage children went to their beds, and thought very little more about the grandeur of olden times.

All but Amy, the eldest girl, a shy and thoughtful child, with large forehead and earnest brown eyes, which seemed never to rest on the objects near her, but to be looking for something beyond. As Amy's eyes, so was her mind; in her secluded cottage home, the girl was living in a little world of her own.

When scrubbing the tile-floor, or mending the linen, or chopping wood (for girls as well as boys passed most of their time at this work), Amy's thoughts were full of fancies suggested by her father's winter tales. She was imagining the grand times come again—her father living in a turreted castle ten times as large as Sir Marmaduke's dwelling, and her brothers—Silas, Ned, and Joe—each mounted on a prancing white horse with trappings of gold; and her dear mother dressed out in satin and gems, giving out loaves every Sunday to hundreds and hundreds of the poor. These were but foolish fancies, and Amy would have been ashamed to have told them to any one but little May, her youngest sister, who would open wide her blue eyes and think how delightful it would be to ride in a carriage, and eat roast meat every day in the week!

Amy's foolish day-dreams only lasted till the time when, at a lady's request to her parents, she attended a village school, which was nearly two miles from her home. Then every day the little pale girl, with her bag on her arm, might be seen crossing the common. Amy was the quickest and most willing of scholars, her lessons were always well learned, she was ever ready with her answers, and the teacher regarded as her best pupil, the thin, stunted, sickly child, who seemed to take in the meaning of everything with her eyes.

These were very happy times for poor Amy, though the walk to and from the school was almost too much for her strength, and wearily she dragged her limbs along before she reached her father's cottage. Amy was ill-clad and ill-fed, her frame had never been hardy; with her nothing seemed to grow but her mind. At the age of twelve, which was hers when my story opens, Amy was little taller, and scarcely as heavy, as her sister May, who was but half that age.

Amy's happy school-days had not lasted for long. After the sudden death of her mother, the eldest girl of Mytton could no longer be spared from home. She must, young and fragile as she was, do the cleaning and cooking, the washing and mending, and help with the chopping besides.

Amy never complained, and seldom cried except at night when every one else was sleeping, but she felt her mother's loss keenly. She felt also her own weak health, for her strength was ebbing away day by day. Still the poor child went on with her labour as long as her small thin fingers could work; till one day she almost fainted in the shed, and never more was the chopper to be lifted by Amy Mytton. She did what she could in the cottage, but that little grew less and less; a terrible cough racked her frame; her head drooped as if its weight were too much for her strength to support, her appetite totally failed her, and Amy could never keep herself warm.

Mytton did not appear to see the change in his daughter, or, if he did, it aroused his impatience, not his tenderness; indeed there was little of tenderness in the nature of Silas Mytton.

"I wish that you would get rid of that trick of barking, child!" would be the almost angry exclamation of the father, when disturbed by the cough which had broken Amy's rest half through the night.

If, when he drove his bundles of wood in a donkey-cart to the town, any one who knew poor Amy inquired after her health, "Oh! she's well enough," he would say. Or, if he could not say that, Mytton's answer would be, "The child's a bit pinched with the cold, but she'll be all right in the spring."

But spring came, and Amy was not all right: the March winds seemed to chill her slight frame, even more than the hard frosts of winter. With a bitter spirit Mytton saw his pale, patient little girl gradually fading away.

"If she'd common comforts, she would do well enough," he would mutter. "If she had a rich man for her father, she'd not live in a cottage which lets the wind in like a sieve, she'd be wrapped up in velvets and shawls, and have a score of doctors, and they'd soon get the little one round."

Mytton fell into the common mistake of thinking that money could do everything, and this had the effect of filling his soul with malice and envy towards those better off in the world than himself, as if what the rich possessed were something taken from the poor.

Mytton had the savage feelings of a man who thinks that he has been pushed out of a place which is his by right, and Amy learned to dread anything recalling to her parent what his grandfather's grandfather had been in the past, for it always put him out of humour with everything in the present. Mytton would growl at his hard fare, abuse every one above him in social position, or, if he were in a silent mood, hack savagely at his wood, looking as if it were by no means the only thing which he would willingly chop into pieces.

Amy's brothers and little sister were so much accustomed to hear her cough, and see her feeble and sickly, that it never entered their minds that her illness might end in death. They had never known Amy strong, and the change in her was so gradual, that the children who were with her day after day scarcely noticed it at all.

One March morning, however, little flaxen-haired May came to her sister with a perplexed and rather troubled expression on her round, chubby face.

"Amy," she said, laying her thick sun-browned fingers on the wasted hand of her sister, "when Mrs. Gapp was here about the wood, what do you think I heard her a-saying to her husband 'bout you?"

"What was it, dear?" asked Amy.

"She looked at you sad-like and said, (she didn't know I was a-hearing,) 'She's not long for this world,' says she, and Gapp, he answered nothing, but he nodded his head so gravely. Amy, what did she mean?"

A light delicate flush rose on the pale cheek of Amy, and a strange brightness came into her eyes. She raised them for a moment towards the blue sky, and then turned them earnestly, not sadly, on her young sister.

"Did she say that?" asked Amy, softly.

"What did it mean?" repeated May.

"That I may soon go—where dear another has gone," murmured Amy, folding her thin little hands, and again glancing up at the sky.

May, child as she was, was startled at the words and the look; for the first time it flashed across her mind that her sister must be very ill.

"You must not go—you shall not go—we can't spare you—we can't do without you!" cried May, throwing her arms around her sister, as though to imprison her in their tight, loving embrace.

One thought possessed the mind of the little rustic for all the rest of that day, how could she make Amy well? The child was chidden by her father for being hours absent from the wood-shed, "after some mischief," as he said, when poor May had only been employing her clumsy fingers in stitching up her own pinafore into a pillow-case, and tearing up paper to stuff it, so that Amy's languid head—that head which so often was aching—might have a cushion to rest on. It was with great triumph that May carried her pillow to Amy in the evening; to have made it all by herself was a feat, to have invented it was an effort of genius, and the child thought that her cushion must work a wonderful charm on her suffering sister.

"Is it not nice—does it not make you feel so comfy?" asked May, as she placed her somewhat flat and limp paper cushion over the back of the wooden chair upon which Amy was seated.

"It is very nice, very comfy, I shall prize it so dearly, for it is stuffed with love," replied the sick girl, with a faint but pleasant smile.