195 CHAPTER XII. THE WIDOW. THE widow returned from the lecture; she had not taken away much of it; she was not one whose virtue lay in that direction. She had gone because Cicely Loraine asked her, and she was grateful to Cicely for many a kindness and a word of sympathy. She had sat through it, gazing chiefly at the great lamp which hung from the ceiling, and counting the several glasses, though at the end she knew no more how many there were than she did at the beginning. She had sometimes looked suddenly at the lecturer when a sentence, which brought Allen to her mind, recalled her wandering sense how Sir Philip Sidney gave water to the thirsty soldier, and how Wolfe said he was content to die young. The awful tale of Alma had left a deep line graven on her memory; and the stories of burning thirst and the crying for water had remained with sad force upon her recollection; still, she had firm good sense, and more than that, deep and trustful religion, and she implicitly believed that God would protect Allen in the scene of war and peril. She had very little interest in the principle of the war or in the theoretic view of bloody battles. Why the war was; the need of curbing Russia; the Western Alliance; the importance of the Crimea, were sentences expressive of ideas for which she cared very little. Allen, her only son, was in the war, that was enough, and she cared for little else. She had ever been like that. Her husband married her for her quiet, gentle ways, and her unobtrusive modesty. But he never could get her to take pleasure in passing literature or subjects of general interest; and if she did seem engaged in the characters of Scott's Novels when he read them to her in the evening, it was always Ivanhoe and Kenilworth she liked best; and, though she never owned it, she had an inward preference for the Black Dwarf. She tried, though it was very difficult, to think that there was something very grand in the Antiquary and S. Ronan's Well. Yet she used to sit for hours in the evening when the curtains were drawn, hemming her little Allen's frocks and listening in her calm, quiet way to her husband's voice, sometimes giving a slight sigh, as she gazed a minute vacantly into the fire, and laid down the frock to put the border on the cap. Once, poor thing, when Allen was growing up, she had a sudden idea seize her mind to try if she could not interest him in the same intellectual pleasures which she always had felt her husband had been disappointed with her in not enjoying. For days the idea haunted her, owing to her having a bright and vivid recollection of something very graphic and entertaining in Marmion. One afternoon, when her husband was out, she called Allen with a light and happy voice, and said "she had something so interesting to read to him.” She got down "Marmion," while Allen sat on a stool before the fire, with his hands on his knees, waiting in happy expectation. But he waited long-she looked in vain through page after page. But where the vivid scene was she could not tell. She stopped at the Battle and Clara. But no! it had no special interest to engage Allen or even herself. She began to read in three separate places; but none seemed to answer her expectation, or Allen's hopes; she had the impression of some general interest which no one scene realised; and she laid down the book in quiet disappointment, and told Allen "to go and play, she would read to him another day." She had forgotten that we sometimes get general impressions of pleasure in a book when scene succeeds scene, or some well-known voice reads them; which, when we come to read them for ourselves, fleet like a dream from our grasp. She clung so to her husband for every thing, and her feeling was, "When he is dead, I shall go with him down to the grave, for I cannot surely live without him. How can I pull through life alone with that child?" But he did die, and she, to the surprise of all, was calm and still; and did pursue her walk along the path of life neither more quickly nor slowly, with Allen by her side. Such was the widow; and she it was whom Cicely made to come to the lecture, and she had gone as she had been bidden; though she had in herself her own little world of thoughts and ideas which moved and acted as separately from the world outside and Cicely Loraine, as clouds move silently along independently of the objects of the world over which they pass. It was the morning after the lecture that the widow was sitting by herself at breakfast, a meal which never occupied much time with her, for lonely as she was, she always found something to do and to be busy about. The detail and catalogue of her daily work was kept with full accuracy by Peggy Tomkins, whose round face and sharp eye might often be seen peering over the window curtains to watch what the widow was about, with that baby on her arm who clung to Peggy as pertinaciously, yet just as unlike her, as a bough of mistletoe to an apple tree. Well, to return;-the morning after the lecture she was sitting at breakfast, and the postman Letters seldom came to her, for she had few to write to her. But this morning, whether the lecture had made her nervous, or what not, she turned very pale as she put the cup down, and grew somewhat short of breath as the door opened, and the maid laid two letters beside her. Both had foreign postmarks, and both were from the Crimea. She opened Allen's first. She had heard from him twice since Alma, in both of which he had made light of a wound which he had received in the skirmish. came. It was with rather more expression of feeling than usual that the widow opened the first letter, which was in the handwriting of her son. It ran thus: "My dearest Mother, "The wound I received at the battle of Alma, though in itself slight, has taken a greater effect on my constitution than I at first imagined. I have been compelled for the last few days to lay by in the tem porary hospital at Balaklava. I have all the kindness and attention shown me which the circumstances of the case admit of, but in the many hours of solitude I have to spend my heart continually yearns after you, and my mind goes back to those days of illness in my boyhood when you were so much to me. Do not be anxious about me, my dearest mother, but I thought I ought to let you know how I was. May God bless you. "Your own "ALLEN." The widow with a trembling hand laid the letter on the table. She knew her son's nature too well, as she had that of her husband who was dead, not to feel very anxious. She felt sure that that letter described but one third of the truth; and she gazed four or five times at the direction on the envelope which lay still unopened before her. At length quietly saying, "GoD's blessed will be done," she took it up, and broke the seal. The handwriting was a strange one to her, but a boding told her already what its contents would be. It ran as follows :— "Madam, : "Having for some days past been in attendance on your son at the hospital at Balaklava; and having had reason, as all must, to admire his heroism in the field, and his patience in sickness; I take the liberty of writing to you, to assure you that he lies in a precarious state, and to prepare your mind for the possible intelligence that the next post may bring you. I know |