CHAPTER XI.

"Sally," said Seth Dumbrick, a fortnight afterwards; "I'm beginning to be bothered in my mind."

It was night. Seth was playing "patience" with a very old and very greasy pack of cards. Sally was doing her best to mend her baby's clothes; she was as yet but an indifferent workgirl with the needle. It was not an unpleasant sight to see her taking her stitches, with knitted brow, and pursed-up lips, as though the fate of an empire was in the balance every time she dug her needle in and drew it out again. She had commenced the battle of life very early, but she had put on her armour with great cheerfulness and contentment, and was perhaps at the present moment the happiest little girl in Rosemary Lane. Her baby was asleep on the ground, comfortably covered over.

"I'm beginning to be bothered in my mind," said Seth.

Sally, ready for the bestowal of sympathy, looked up from her work.

"About what?" she asked.

"Many things. That trance of yours, to begin with. It didn't go far enough. Now, I ask you, as a prophetess--do you consider it an out-and-out prophecy?"

The grave air he assumed would have deceived a much riper intellect than Sally's. She prepared to discuss the matter seriously.

"It all come true, Mr. Dumbrick."

"No doubt of that--here you are in proof of it, and there's your father in the hospital, and there's your mother managing the workhouse in the country. It was good enough as far as it went, but it has come to an end already, and there's no more to look forward to. That's what I call not satisfactory."

"No, Mr. Dumbrick?"

"No, Sally Chester. The spirits that came to Joanna when she went off that way beat Pharaoh hollow. He couldn't hold a candle to 'em."

Much distressed by this depreciatory criticism, Sally said:

"It was Pharer's first go, Mr. Dumbrick. Perhaps he wasn't quite up to the business."

For the life of him Seth could not repress a laugh.

"There's something in that, Sally. Practice makes perfect, sure. Now, you couldn't sole and heel a pair o' boots the first time of asking; but you'd manage it in a year or two, with plenty of teaching. But about those spirits of Joanna's; they told all sorts o' things about the future, and they were always at it. And Joanna lived to be an old woman, and to the last day of her life she kept trancing away. Now, you've only had one trance, Sally."

"Yes, Mr. Dumbrick," assented Sally, with a troubled mind, "only one."

"And it doesn't seem likely that you'll have another."

"Yes, it does--yes, it does. I've felt it coming on more than once."

"How does it feel, Sally?" inquired Seth, with an open chuckle.

"A kind o' creepy like, and everything going round."

"That sounds well."

"What is it you want to know, Mr. Dumbrick?"

"Well, there's baby, Sally. She won't be a baby all her life. She'll grow up to be a woman--so will you."

Sally nodded, and listened with all her soul in her ears.

"She has no name except Baby, and it stands to reason that that won't do all along. We must find something else to call her by; it won't be fair to her otherwise, and she wouldn't thank us for it when she grows up. It'd never do to have her grow up ungrateful, and to fly at us for not giving her what everybody else has got."

"Oh! no--never, never! But she'll love us always--you'll see if she won't."

"Don't you set your mind too much on it. Perhaps our baby'll see somebody by-and-by that she'll love better than you or me, and then we shall go to the wall. We're like fiddles, Sally, and Nature's the fiddler, and plays on us."

Open-eyed, and mentally as well as physically wide awake, Sally listened without exactly understanding, but dimly conscious that something very fine was being propounded to her.

"There are not many strings in us, Sally, but, Lord! the number o' tunes that Nature plays on us! And we go through life dancing to 'em, or hobbling to 'em, as the case may be. As this little picture'll do, according to the kind of music that comes to her. As for what takes place when Nature's played her last tune on us, that's beyond you and me, Sally."

"Yes, Mr. Dumbrick," assented Sally, feeling it incumbent upon her to say something, but groping now in such dark depths that she saw no way out of them.

Seth's next utterances, however, brought a little light to her.

"In all that, there are certain things--not many--that we may fairly take credit for. You've got a big heart in a little body. I'd wager my cobbler's stall that I'm going to sit on in the clouds when your dream comes true--I'd wager that to a brass thimble that if you had only one bit o' bread, and you was hungry as you could be, you'd give it to baby, if she cried for it."

Two or three bright tears glistened in Sally's eyes, which Seth accepted as confirmation.

"Take credit for that, Sally."

"Thank you, Mr. Dumbrick," said Sally gratefully, satisfied with this reward of good words for good intentions.

"I'm going to take credit, too, Sally. I'm going to teach you and baby to read and write."

"O! Mr. Dumbrick!"

"That's as much as a real father could do. Reading's a grand thing, Sally. We've much to be thankful for. Be thankful, Sally."

"I am, Mr. Dumbrick, I am, oh, so much!"

"I don't like that mister, Sally."

"No?" questioned Sally, for ever on the alert to discover her guardian's likes or dislikes.

"It's too much like company manners. Now that we're comfortably settled we ought to be more sociable. Call me Dad, or Daddy, or Daddy Dumbrick. Your tongue'll soon get used to it."

"Yes, Mr.--Dad-dy Dumbrick."

Sally's tongue tripped so comically over the new terms that she laughed, and Seth grimly joined in the merriment.

"We soon get used to things, Sally. Once on a time we usedn't to live in houses."

"In what, then, Daddy Dumbrick?"

"In tents and forests and fields and that like."

"As the gipsies do," cried Sally. "I've seed 'em. Mother took me to a fair once."

"Now we live in garrets and cellars, and sweet-smelling habitations."

Sally looked dubious. Many of the houses round about Rosemary Lane were far from sweet-smelling, and she could not realise the advantage of the present over the past of which Seth was evidently boasting. To live in a tent in forest or field was a dream of Elysium to her, with flowers growing around her home and green grass waving. Too good for earth.

"Once on a time," continued Seth, "we couldn't read; now we can. Once on a time we weren't civilised; now we are. We've much more to be thankful for than we know of. This is the age of enlightenment, Sally, and the best thing I can do is to give you your first lesson."

Sally hastily put aside her work, and kneeling by baby's side stooped and kissed her. Seth, who had risen in search of a book, looked down upon the children.

"Don't you forget, Sally, what I said about you're going off in a trance. No, no, Sally!" he cried, putting his hand to his side to restrain his merriment; "not now. Don't you go fainting dead away now; we've got something else to do."

"I wasn't going to, Daddy," said Sally timorously, and with something like a blush on her thin, sallow face.

"Bravo, Sally; there's some lessons you know without being able to read--to tell the truth when it's necessary, and to tell the other thing when it's necessary. You little sinner, you! You've the gumption of twenty grown-up women in that little carcase of yours. Here's a book with large print. It belonged to my mother."

He brought forward a great heavy quarto with old broken clasps, and opened it.

"I shall read out loud the first few words and then you shall learn the letters one by one. Keep your eyes and your mind open and come closer."

So saying, Seth, taking the forefinger of Sally's right hand as a marker, read slowly the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."