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Chapter XLII
It behoves us to leave Kit for a while, thoughtful and expectant, and to
follow the fortunes of little Nell; resuming the thread of the narrative
at the point where it was left, some chapters back.
In one of those wanderings in the evening time, when, following the
two sisters at a humble distance, she felt, in her sympathy with them
and her recognition in their trials of something akin to her own
loneliness of spirit, a comfort and consolation which made such
moments a time of deep delight, though the softened pleasure they
yielded was of that kind which lives and dies in tears - in one of those
wanderings at the quiet hour of twilight, when sky, and earth, and air,
and rippling water, and sound of distant bells, claimed kindred with
the emotions of the solitary child, and inspired her with soothing
thoughts, but not of a child's world or its easy joys - in one of those
rambles which had now become her only pleasure or relief from care,
light had faded into darkness and evening deepened into night, and
still the young creature lingered in the gloom; feeling a companionship
in Nature so serene and still, when noise of tongues and glare of
garish lights would have been solitude indeed.
The sisters had gone home, and she was alone. She raised her eyes to
the bright stars, looking down so mildly from the wide worlds of air,
and, gazing on them, found new stars burst upon her view, and more
beyond, and more beyond again, until the whole great expanse
sparkled with shining spheres, rising higher and higher in
immeasurable space, eternal in their numbers as in their changeless
and incorruptible existence. She bent over the calm river, and saw
them shining in the same majestic order as when the dove beheld
them gleaming through the swollen waters, upon the mountain tops
down far below, and dead mankind, a million fathoms deep.
The child sat silently beneath a tree, hushed in her very breath by the
stillness of the night, and all its attendant wonders. The time and
place awoke reflection, and she thought with a quiet hope - less hope,
perhaps, than resignation - on the past, and present, and what was
yet before her. Between the old man and herself there had come a
gradual separation, harder to bear than any former sorrow. Every
evening, and often in the day-time too, he was absent, alone; and
although she well knew where he went, and why - too well from the
constant drain upon her scanty purse and from his haggard looks - he
evaded all inquiry, maintained a strict reserve, and even shunned her
presence.
She sat meditating sorrowfully upon this change, and mingling it, as it
were, with everything about her, when the distant church-clock bell
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