The benefits of being soused in a horse-trough.—Some farther specimens of Miss Sowersoft's moral excellence.—An unlooked-for discovery is partially made, which materially concerns Miss Fanny Woodruff and Dr. Rowel.

ON the following morning Palethorpe arose, and finding Colin still asleep, was proceeding, whip in hand, to help him up according to custom, when, as he turned down the clothes that almost enveloped the child's head, the unusual appearance of his countenance arrested the man's attention as well as his hand. His veins were swollen with rapid bounding blood, and his heart thumped audibly in its place, and with doubly accelerated motion, as though eagerly hastening to beat out its appointed number of pulsations, and leave the little harassed life it contained again free from the pains and vexations of this lower world.

Something like remorse passed for a moment over the man's dark countenance as he gazed. What had they done to him?—what was amiss? He covered the boy carefully up again, and hastened down stairs to communicate the news to Miss Sowersoft.

“Oh,—it's all nonsense!” she exclaimed, on hearing all that Mr. Palethorpe had to say about it. “The lad's got a bit of a cold,—that's all. I 'll make him a basin of milk, with a little of that nice feverfew out of the garden boiled in it, and then if you wake him up, and let him take that, it will stick to his ribs, and do him an amazing deal of good.”

But as there was no hurry about such a matter, Miss Sowersoft very leisurely took her own breakfast before she set about carrying her very charitable project into execution. When the milk, with some sprigs of feverfew boiled in it, was ready, Sally was sent up stairs with it. She found Colin awake, but weak and ill; and, much to her surprise, on presenting him with a lump of bread and the basin of milk, which more closely resembled a light green wash for stencilling walls, than any true Christian dish, he could neither touch nor bear the sight of either.

“La!” cried Sally, “why, I never heard anything like it, as neither to eat nor drink! Come, cram a bit down your throat with your finger, and see if it will not get you an appetite. Why, I can eat and drink very well, and why shouldn't you? Come, come, don't be soft, and refuse what Gor-amighty sends you, while it lies in your power to get it. I'm sure this milk is very nice, indeed.”

In corroboration of her statement she took a sip. But Colin shook his head feebly and heavily, and declared it would do him no good. He could take nothing,—he wanted nothing, but to be left alone, that he might think and wish, and weep as he thought and wished that he were but once more at home, or that his mother or Fanny were but with him.

Shortly after Sally had returned below stairs, and communicated the astounding intelligence that Colin would take neither bit nor sup, Miss Sowersoft herself crept up stairs. She assured him he had plenty of colour in his face; that there could not be anything particularly amiss with him; advised him against putting on pretences of sickness, lest he should be struck with sickness in reality as a judgment on him, like the children that mocked the prophet Elijah, and were eaten up by bears; and concluded by insinuating, that if he were tickled with a whip-thong, he would in all probability be a great deal better directly.

“Send me home!” bitterly ejaculated Colin, bursting into tears. “Put me in a cart, and send me home!—I want to go home!—I must go home!—Mother'!—Fanny!—Oh, come to me!—I shall die—I shall die!”

Miss Sowersoft felt rather alarmed; but reflecting that there was nothing like showing a little spirit and resolution when young folks took such whims as those into their heads, she severely taunted him with being home-sick and mother-sick; told him that neither she nor Fanny, if they were present, could do more for him than she could; and threatened that, if he did not leave off that hideous noise, which was disgraceful to a great lad of his age, she would tie a stocking round his mouth, and stop him that way. There being no great consolation in all this, it is not surprising that our hero made such slight application of it, that, for the matter of any difference it made in him, Miss Sowersoft might just as well have tied her stocking across her own mouth, or stuffed it in, which ever she might prefer, as have given utterance to it. She was therefore constrained to submit to the lad's own way, and to confess in her own mind that there really was something more amiss with him than at first she had believed.

By mid-day he had become a great deal worse; and in the afternoon, as his disorder still rapidly increased, Mr. Palethorpe was despatched on horseback to Bramleigh, for the purpose of consulting Dr. Rowel.

About six o'clock in the evening he returned home, bringing with him a packet of white powders in little blue papers, tied together much in the fashion of that little pyrotechnic engine of mischief usually denominated a cracker.

Certain fears which had by this time crept over the mind of Miss Sowersoft caused her to be more than usually charitable and eager in her inquiries after the doctor's opinion about Colin: but the answers she received were neither very conclusive nor very satisfactory. She was, in fact, obliged to seek for consolation, for the present, in the belief, which she struggled hard to impress firmly upon herself, that the boy's illness had arisen wholly in consequence of his sitting on the ground so late in the evening to write his letter; and that his subsequent sousing in the horse-trough had no connexion whatever with it; as he might very easily have fallen accidentally into a river instead, and received no more harm from it than he had from the aforesaid pumping.

Daring several subsequent days the boy continued in such a state as filled his mistress with continual apprehensions lest her house should eventually be troubled with his corpse. About his death, considering that event solely by itself, she cared very little; he might live or die, just as his constitution inclined him, for aught she would choose between the two; only, in case he should not survive, it would annoy her very much indeed to have all the trouble of getting another body's corpse prepared for the ground, without in all likelihood ever receiving from Mrs. Clink a single halfpenny in return for it. She mentioned her apprehensions to Mr. Palethorpe, who replied that it was all silly childishness to allow herself to be imposed on by her own good feelings, and that to talk about humanity would never do for folks so far north as they were. On this unquestioned authority Miss Sowersoft would inevitably have acted that very day, and removed our hero, at any risk, to Bramleigh, in order to give him a chance of dying comfortably at home, had not fortune so ordered it, that, while preparations were being made for taking him from a bed of fever into an open cart which stood ready in the yard, Dr. Rowel chanced to ride up, and at once put his veto upon their proceedings. Not that the doctor would by any means have purposely ridden half the distance for the sake of such a patient; but as chance not unfrequently favours those whom their own species despise, it happened that his professional assistance had that afternoon been required in the case of a wealthy old lady in the neighbourhood; and, as the doctor's humanity was not, at all events, so very short-legged as not to be able to carry him one quarter of a mile when it lay in his way, he took Snitterton Lodge in his circuit, for the sake of seeing Master Colin.

It will readily be supposed that during these few days, (as the boy had not made his appearance at home on the previous Sunday, according to conditional promise,) both his mother and Fanny had almost hourly been expecting to hear from him. Nor had various discussions on the cause of his silence been by any means omitted. Mrs. Clink attributed it to the fact of his having found everything so very pleasant at Snitterton Lodge, that he really had had neither time nor inclination to wean himself for a few short hours from the delights with which he was surrounded; but Fanny, whose mind had been dwelling ever since his departure upon the dismal forebodings with which Miss Sowersoft's appearance had filled it, expressed to Mrs. Clink her full belief that something had happened to Colin, or he would never have neglected either to come himself, or to write, as he had promised.

“I am sure,” she continued, very pensively, “it has made me so uneasy all this last week, that I have dreamed about him almost every night. Something has happened to him, I am as certain as if I had seen it; for I can trust to Colin's word just as well as though he had taken his oath about it. However, I will walk over this afternoon and see; for I shall never rest until I know for a certainty.”

“Walk, fiddlesticks!” exclaimed Mrs. Clink. “If you go over there in that suspicious manner, as though you fancied they had murdered him, it is a hundred to one but you will affront Miss Sowersoft, and get Colin turned out of a situation that may be the making of him. Stay where you are—do; and if you cannot make anything, do not mar it by interfering in a matter that you know nothing about. I have had trouble enough with him one way or another, without his being brought back on my hands, when he is as comfortable, I dare say, as he possibly can be.”

Though the latter remark was evidently intended to apply to Fanny's supposed injudicious solicitude for Colin's welfare, the girl passed it by without observation. She hurried her day's work forwards, in order to gain the necessary time for making her projected visit; and at about the middle of the afternoon suddenly disappeared from the eyes of Mrs. Clink, without informing her previously touching her place of destination.

While Dr. Rowel was yet in attendance on Colin, Fanny arrived and introduced herself to Miss Sowersoft, as she was employing herself in picking the pips off a handful of cowslips which lay in her lap. On seeing Fanny thus unexpectedly, and under circumstances which she felt would require some very ingenious explanation or evasion, her countenance seemed to darken as though a positive shadow had been cast upon it. A struggle between her real feelings and her consciousness of the necessity to disguise them ensued; and in the course of a few brief seconds the darkness of her countenance passed away, and she affected to salute her unwelcome visitor with much cordiality.

In reply to Fanny's inquiry respecting Colin, Miss Sowersoft stated that he was improving very nicely under Mr. Palethorpe's tuition, although they had had some trouble to make him do as he was bid; that he had enjoyed the most extraordinary good health until a few days ago, when he took a little cold, which had made him rather poorly.

“There!—I was sure of it!” cried Fanny, interrupting her; “I said so to his mother before I came away. I knew there was something amiss, or he would have written to us before now. And how did he take such a cold, Miss Sowersoft?”

“Take cold!—why, you know there are a hundred different ways of taking cold, and it is impossible sometimes for even a person himself to say how he took it. I am sure Palethorpe gets tremendous colds sometimes, and how he gets them is a perfect miracle. But, on my word, cold is so insinuating, that really, as I say sometimes, there is not a part but it will find its way to at one time or another.”

“Yes—but where is Colin now?—because I shall want to see him before I go back.”

“Oh, he is somewhere about the house,” replied Miss Sowersoft, with an unprecedented degree of effrontery; “but your seeing him is not of the least consequence. It cannot cure his cold; and as for anything else, it would very likely make him all the more discontented when you were gone again. If you take my advice, you would not see him, especially when I can tell you everything just the same as though you saw it yourself.”

At this moment the foot of the doctor, as he groped his way down stairs, was overheard by the speaker. She started up instantly, and endeavoured to hurry Fanny out of the room before that professional gentleman should enter it; but her manoeuvre failed, and before Miss Sowersoft could caution him to be silent the doctor remarked, in a sufficiently loud tone to be heard distinctly by both, that unless the boy was taken great care of, there was little chance left of his recovery.

“What boy?” exclaimed Fanny, rushing forward. “What is he so ill as that? For God's sake let me see him!”

Concluding from the direction in which the doctor had come that Colin was somewhere in the regions above, she flew rather than walked up stairs, without waiting for an invitation or a conductor, and soon threw her arms in an ecstasy of grief upon his neck.

“Oh, Colin! God has sent me on purpose to save you! Do be better, and you shall go home again very soon.”

But Colin could only put up his pallid arms in an imploring action, and cry for very joy, as he gazed in the face of one of those only two who had occupied his das and night thoughts, and been the unconscious subjects of his unceasing and most anxious wishes.

The trouble of this first meeting being over, some more quiet conversation ensued; and, although almost too ill and weak to be allowed to talk, Colin persisted in stating briefly to the horror-stricken Fanny the kind of reception he had met with on his arrival, his treatment afterwards, the taking of his letter from him, and the brutal conduct which had caused his present illness. The girl stood silent, merely because she knew not what to think, what to believe, what to doubt; and was besides utterly lost for words to express properly her strangely mingled thoughts. It was almost impossible—incredible! Why could they do it? There was no cause for it—there could be no cause for it. Human nature, and especially human nature in the shape of woman, was incapable of anything so infamous. Yet Colin was sensible—he had told an intelligible tale; and, most true of all, there he lay, a mere vision of what he was so brief a time ago,—a warranty plain and palpable that grievous wrong had been endured. Her brain was absolutely bewildered—she looked like one hovering on the doubtful boundary between sense and insanity. She cast her eyes around for surety—on the bed—at him, A burst of tears, as of a spring that for the first time breaks its bounds, succeeded,—and then another and another, as she fell on her knees and buried her face in the clothes that covered him.

By and by, the doctor and Miss Sowersoft were present in the room with her. Fanny raised her head and beheld Colin's mistress attempting, in the presence of the doctor, to do the attentive, by adjusting the sheet about the boy's neck to keep off the external air.

“Do not touch him!” exclaimed Fanny, springing to her feet; “he shall have nothing from your hands!”

“Ay!” cried the doctor: “young woman, what now, what now?”

“What now? Sir, you may well say what now! I have heard all about it—Colin has told me all. Miss Sowersoft has nearly killed him, and now wants to show, because you are here, how kind and good she is!”

So saying, Fanny resolutely set about making the arrangement which Miss Sowersoft had contemplated with her own hands.

“Why—what—who is this young woman?” asked the doctor, somewhat astonished at the unexpected scene which had just passed before him.

“Nobody!” replied Miss Sowersoft; “she is only Mrs. Clink's servant, and a pert impudent hussy, too, as you have heard.”

At the same time she looked in the doctor's face, and endeavoured to smile contemptuously, though it “came off” in such a manner as would inevitably have frightened anybody less accustomed than was Dr. Rowel to witness the agonies of the human countenance.

“Yes, sir,” added Fanny, “I am only a servant; but I am a woman, whether servant or mistress. I nursed this lad when I was but six years old myself, and have taken care of him ever since. She shall not drown him, though she thinks she will!”

“Me drown him!” exclaimed Miss Sowersoft in feigned amazement.

“Yes,” replied Fanny, “you drown him. If you had not half murdered him in that trough, he would never have been here now.”

“Do let us go down stairs, doctor,” observed Miss Sowersoft; “such rubbish as this is not worth hearing.” And she made her way towards the door.

“Where is that letter?” cried Fanny eagerly, fearful lest the lady to whom she addressed herself should escape.

“Pshaw! nonsense! don't catechise me!” replied Miss Sowersoft, as she tripped down stairs; while the doctor, half in soliloquy and half addressing Miss Sowersoft, remarked, in allusion to Fanny, “She's a damsel of some spirit too!” Then addressing the girl herself, “Are you the little girl I saw at Mrs. Clink's when this boy was born?”

“Yes, sir, I am,” answered Fanny, as her passion sunk almost to nothing, and she blushed to be so questioned.

“Ah, indeed!” cried Doctor Rowel. “Well, I should not have thought it. Why, you are quite a fine young woman now. Dear-a-me! I had quite lost sight of you. I could not have believed it. Humph!” And the doctor surveyed her fair proportions with something of astonishment, and a great deal of satisfaction. To think that from such a little pale, half-fed, unhappy thing of work and thought beyond her years as she then was, there should have sprung up the full-sized, the pretty featured, and naturally genteel-looking girl now before him! But then, he had not that benefit which the reader enjoys, of reflecting how worldly circumstances, how poverty and plenty, sway the tempers of mankind; and that, as Mistress Clink's circumstances improved, so had Fanny improved likewise; and from seven or eight years old upwards, Fanny had enjoyed a much more comfortable home than, on his first introduction to her, might reasonably have been expected.

Doctor Rowel resumed his conversation.

“And how came you to be put to service so very early? for you had not, if I remember rightly, either health or strength to recommend you.”

Colin's eyes as he lay were fixed, as it might have been the eyes of a picture, on the doctor's countenance.

“I don't know, I'm sure, sir,” replied Fanny: but after a few moments' hesitation, added, “I suppose it was because I had no friends.”

“No friends!” the doctor repeated,—“why, where's your father and mother?”

“I never knew them, sir.”

“Indeed! never knew them!”

“No, sir!” and Fanny sobbed at the very recollection of her childhood's helplessness.

“Humph!” ejaculated the doctor; “you scarcely seem to have been born for a servant. Where did Mrs. Clink find you?”

“I do not know, sir. She never told me.”

“Ah!—oh! oh!—well! It's odd she never told you. So you do not know either who your father, or your mother, or your friends were?”

“No, sir,—I do not. But I remember———”

“Well,—go on,—you remember,—what do you remember? where did you come from? Do you know that?”

“I think, from Leeds, sir.”

“Leeds!” exclaimed the doctor; “and what else do you remember?”

“I can remember, sir,—though I can but just remember it,—that my father was taken away from me once, and I never saw him again.”

“And, what's your name?” continued the doctor in evident excitement.

“Fanny Woodruff,” she replied.

The doctor's features became pale and rigid, and his eyes were fixed upon her almost immoveably.

“God bless my soul!” he slowly ejaculated, as he rose to leave the room; “she should have been lost, or dead!”

But he turned again when at the head of the stairs.

“Now, young woman,—if you can keep a secret,—tell nobody, not even your mistress, what has passed. Take no notice; and perhaps I may do something for you. But I thought we had seen the last of your face seventeen years ago!”

Fanny and Colin were left alone.

“He knows something about me!” was the first thought that arose in Fanny's mind. But she did not utter it, and only asked very softly, if Colin had heard what the doctor said.

“Yes,” he replied, “and I shall never forget it.”

“But, say nothing,” added the girl: “he promised to do something for me. I wonder what it is!”

“So do I,” added Colin; “something worth having, I dare say.”

Thus they talked till evening. Colin said how much better he felt since she had been with him; and Fanny declared she would not leave him again for another day, until he was well; and, when he was well, then she would get him away from such unfeeling people, even though she had to go down on her knees to beg another situation for him elsewhere.

When, some little time afterwards, Fanny went down stairs, and informed the mistress of the house of her resolution to stay and attend on Colin until he was better, that amiable creature replied, “I think you won't then. We have not any room to spare. As if I was going to keep beds at liberty, to accommodate any trunnion that may think fit to cram herself into my house! We've plenty of work on our hands without having to wait on other people's servants. What do you say, Palethorpe?”

“Well, I don't know, meesis,” replied Mr. Palethorpe; “it seems as if Mr. Rowel was understood to say he was very bad, and must be waited on pretty constantly.”

“I'm sure I sha'n't wait on him neither constantly nor inconstantly!” very pertly exclaimed Miss Sowersoft; and certainly giving a very ingenious turn to her own views, as soon as she found which way her lover's needle pointed; “I'm not going to trot up and down stairs a thousand times a day for the sake of such a thing as a plough-lad. Them may wait on him that likes him, if he is to be waited on; but I'm positive I shan't, nor anybody else that belongs to me!”

This conclusion left, without another word, the field wholly open to Fanny; and as Miss Sowersoft, on concluding her speech, bounced off into the dairy, not another word was needed.

Whatever might be the views entertained by the lady of the house touching the treatment most proper for Colin, there still were individuals amongst that rude community whose feelings were of a somewhat more catholic kind than those of their mistress; so that Fanny found no difficulty in procuring a volunteer, in the person of Abel, to go over to Bramleigh for the purpose of informing Mistress Clink how affairs stood, and of bringing back such few needful articles as Fanny might require during her stay at the farm.

All that night she passed a sleepless watch by the side of Colin's bed, beguiling the hours not devoted to immediate attendance on him, partly by looking over the little books which had come from home in his box, but more by employing her mind in the creation of every possible description of fanciful supposition touching her own origin, her history, her parents, and the knowledge which the doctor appeared to have of her earliest life. What was it?—what could it be? and, what could he mean by enjoining her to mention nothing of all this to any second person? In her he had unexpectedly found one whom he had known a baby, and had believed to be dead, or lost in the vast crowds of poverty long ago. Had she been born to better things than surrounded her now? Had she been defrauded of her rights? And, did the doctor bid her be silent because he might have to employ stratagem in order to recover them again? Perhaps she was born—nay! she knew not what she was born; nor dare she trust herself to think, scarcely; though, certain it is that a visionary world of ladies and gentlemen, and fine things, and wealth to set Colin up in the world and to make his mother comfortable, and to exalt herself over all the petty enemies by whom they were now surrounded, passed in pleasant state before her prolific imagination: while, it is equally certain, that—blushing, though unseen and in secret, at the very consciousness—a prouder feeling sprung up in her bosom, and she began to feel as though she must be more genteel, and more particular, and less like a common servant, than she had hitherto been.

Such were the golden fancies, and the pretty resolves that crowded round her brain that night. Neither, as a honest chronicler of human nature, would I take upon me to assert that she did not once or twice during these reveries rise to contemplate her features in the glass, and to adjust her hair more fancifully, and wonder—if it should be so—what kind of looking lady she should make. Truly, it was a pretty face that met her eyes in the mirror. As Colin woke up from a partial slumber, and raised his head slightly from the pillow, to ascertain what had become of his guardian, the reflection of her countenance as she was “looking the lady,” chanced to catch his eye: and, though he smiled as he gently sunk down again, he thought that that face would never again pass from before him.