Florence had often wished to speak to this man; yet she had never taken courage to do so, as he made no movement towards her. But one morning when she happened to come upon him suddenly, from a bypath among some pollard willows which terminated in the little shelving piece of stony ground that lay between his dwelling and the water, where he was bending over a fire he had made to caulk the old boat which was lying bottom upwards, close by, he raised his head at the sound of her footstep, and gave her Good morning.
“Good morning,” said Florence, approaching nearer, “you are at work early.”
“I’d be glad to be often at work earlier, Miss, if I had work to do.”
“Is it so hard to get?” asked Florence.
“I find it so,” replied the man.
Florence glanced to where the girl was sitting, drawn together, with her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her hands, and said:
“Is that your daughter?”
He raised his head quickly, and looking towards the girl with a brightened face, nodded to her, and said “Yes,” Florence looked towards her too, and gave her a kind salutation; the girl muttered something in return, ungraciously and sullenly.
“Is she in want of employment also?” said Florence.
The man shook his head. “No, Miss,” he said. “I work for both.”
“Are there only you two, then?” inquired Florence.
“Only us two,” said the man. “Her mother has been dead these ten year. Martha!” (he lifted up his head again, and whistled to her) “won’t you say a word to the pretty young lady?”
The girl made an impatient gesture with her cowering shoulders, and turned her head another way. Ugly, misshapen, peevish, ill-conditioned, ragged, dirty—but beloved! Oh yes! Florence had seen her father’s look towards her, and she knew whose look it had no likeness to.
“I’m afraid she’s worse this morning, my poor girl!” said the man, suspending his work, and contemplating his ill-favoured child, with a compassion that was the more tender for being rougher.
“She is ill, then!” said Florence.
The man drew a deep sigh. “I don’t believe my Martha’s had five short days’ good health,” he answered, looking at her still, “in as many long years.”
“Ay! and more than that, John,” said a neighbour, who had come down to help him with the boat.
“More than that, you say, do you?” cried the other, pushing back his battered hat, and drawing his hand across his forehead. “Very like. It seems a long, long time.”
“And the more the time,” pursued the neighbour, “the more you’ve favoured and humoured her, John, till she’s got to be a burden to herself, and everybody else.”
“Not to me,” said her father, falling to his work. “Not to me.”
Florence could feel—who better?—how truly he spoke. She drew a little closer to him, and would have been glad to touch his rugged hand, and thank him for his goodness to the miserable object that he looked upon with eyes so different from any other man’s.
“Who would favour my poor girl—to call it favouring—if I didn’t?” said the father.
“Ay, ay,” cried the neighbour. “In reason, John. But you! You rob yourself to give to her. You bind yourself hand and foot on her account. You make your life miserable along of her. And what does she care! You don’t believe she knows it?”
The father lifted up his head again, and whistled to her. Martha made the same impatient gesture with her crouching shoulders, in reply; and he was glad and happy.
“Only for that, Miss,” said the neighbour, with a smile, in which there was more of secret sympathy than he expressed; “only to get that, he never lets her out of his sight!”
“Because the day’ll come, and has been coming a long while,” observed the other, bending low over his work, “when to get half as much from that unfort’nate child of mine—to get the trembling of a finger, or the waving of a hair—would be to raise the dead.”
Florence softly put some money near his hand on the old boat, and left him.
And now Florence began to think, if she were to fall ill, if she were to fade like her dear brother, would he then know that she had loved him; would she then grow dear to him; would he come to her bedside, when she was weak and dim of sight, and take her into his embrace, and cancel all the past? Would he so forgive her, in that changed condition, for not having been able to lay open her childish heart to him, as to make it easy to relate with what emotions she had gone out of his room that night; what she had meant to say if she had had the courage; and how she had endeavoured, afterwards, to learn the way she never knew in infancy?
Yes, she thought if she were dying, he would relent. She thought, that if she lay, serene and not unwilling to depart, upon the bed that was curtained round with recollections of their darling boy, he would be touched home, and would say, “Dear Florence, live for me, and we will love each other as we might have done, and be as happy as we might have been these many years!” She thought that if she heard such words from him, and had her arms clasped round him, she could answer with a smile, “It is too late for anything but this; I never
