Shirley

vague and visionary! Come, Shirley, we ought to go into church.«
    »Caroline, I will not: I will stay out here with my mother Eve, in these days called Nature. I love her – undying, mighty being! Heaven may have faded from her brow when she fell in paradise; but all that is glorious on earth shines there still. She is taking me to her bosom, and showing me her heart. Hush, Caroline! you will see her and feel as I do, if we are both silent.«
    »I will humour your whim; but you will begin talking again, ere ten minutes are over.«
    Miss Keeldar, on whom the soft excitement of the warm summer evening seemed working with unwonted power, leaned against an upright headstone: she fixed her eyes on the deep-burning west, and sank into a pleasurable trance. Caroline, going a little apart, paced to and fro beneath the Rectory garden-wall, dreaming, too, in her way. Shirley had mentioned the word »mother:« that word suggested to Caroline's imagination not the mighty and mystical parent of Shirley's visions, but a gentle human form – the form she ascribed to her own mother; unknown, unloved, but not unlonged-for.
    »Oh, that the day would come when she would remember her child! Oh, that I might know her, and knowing, love her!«
    Such was her aspiration.
    The longing of her childhood filled her soul again. The desire which many a night had kept her awake in her crib, and which fear of its fallacy had of late years almost extinguished, relit suddenly, and glowed warm in her heart: that her mother might come some happy day, and send for her to her presence – look upon her fondly with loving eyes, and say to her tenderly, in a sweet voice: –
    »Caroline, my child, I have a home for you: you shall live with me. All the love you have needed, and not tasted, from infancy, I have saved for you carefully. Come! it shall cherish you now.«
    A noise on the road roused Caroline from her filial hopes, and Shirley from her Titan visions. They listened, and heard the tramp of horses: they looked, and saw a glitter through the trees: they caught through the foliage glimpses of martial scarlet; helm shone, plume waved. Silent and orderly, six soldiers rode softly by.
    »The same we saw this afternoon,« whispered Shirley: »they have been halting somewhere till now. They wish to be as little noticed as possible, and are seeking their rendezvous at this quiet hour, while the people are at church. Did I not say we should see unusual things erelong?«
    Scarcely were sight and sound of the soldiers lost, when another and somewhat different disturbance broke the night-hush – a child's impatient scream. They looked: a man issued from the church, carrying in his arms an infant – a robust, ruddy little boy, of some two years old – roaring with all the power of his lungs; he had probably just awaked from a church-sleep: two little girls, of nine and ten followed. The influence of the fresh air, and the attraction of some flowers gathered from a grave, soon quieted the child; the man sat down with him, dandling him on his knee as tenderly as any woman; the two little girls took their places one on each side.
    »Good-evening, William,« said Shirley, after due scrutiny of the man. He had seen her before, and apparently was waiting to be recognized; he now took off his hat, and grinned a smile of pleasure. He was a rough-headed, hard-featured personage, not old, but very weather-beaten; his attire was decent and clean, that of his children singularly neat: it was our old friend, Farren. The young ladies approached him.
    »You are not going into the church?« he inquired, gazing at them complacently, yet with a mixture of bashfulness in his look: a sentiment not by any means the result of awe of their station, but only of appreciation of their elegance and youth. Before gentlemen – such as Moore or Helstone, for instance – William was often a little dogged; with proud or insolent ladies, too, he was quite unmanageable, sometimes very resentful; but he was most sensible of, most tractable to, good-humour and civility. His nature – a stubborn one – was repelled by inflexibility in other natures; for which reason, he had never been able to like his former master, Moore; and, unconscious of that gentleman's good opinion of himself, and of the service he had secretly rendered him in recommending him as gardener to Mr. Yorke, and by this means to other families in the neighbourhood, he continued to harbour a grudge against his austerity.