Sweeter to Margaret than Lusitanian nectar such as Chianti yields was
her drink of barley water.
Margaret without working out the queer problem of how she came there,
fell into a deep and quiet sleep.
And between sleeping profoundly, eating morsels of food with ravenous
enjoyment, lying placidly wakeful and watching without curiosity the
movements of her two nurses, Margaret saw the young moon grow into a
full, round orb, which glimmered in a halo through the bottle-green
glass of the cracked window, and silvered her from head to foot, each
long, still night; and at last strength came to her, and with it
recollection.
"Did I come to you, Mr. Doane?" she asked, one evening, when that person
was sitting by her bedside peacefully smoking his pipe, and listening
with pride to the voice of Johnnie in the kitchen chanting his spelling
lesson.
"Come to us? No, miss, you didn't but we come to you," replied the
bricklayer, stuffing down the ashes further into his pipe.
"I want to know about it, please; I do not understand at all how I am at
Lynthorpe."
"Where was you when you was took bad?"
Margaret pondered a long time.
"The last I distinctly remember is of being a mile and a half from
Rotherhithe."
"Lor-a-musy! and didn't nobody give ye a seat in their wagon down here?
Did you walk all the way, and so light of head like?" She put her thin
hand to her forehead again.
"I remember of being lost on a common outside of Rotherhithe," she
answered, "and I do not know what became of me after that. I sat down to
rest, and I suppose I must have been there all night. Is it long ago?"
"What date was it, dear miss, that you was lost on the moor? Can ye mind
that?"
"It was the seventh of October."
"Just think o' that now! It was two days after that when I found you
sitting at the foot of a hay-rick in Farmer Bracon's land, a mile from
here. You was a sorry sight, but I know'd yer again, and came close to
yer. You was neither sleeping nor not sleeping, but whispering to
yourself; so I brought you home to the wife, and she and me we've nursed
ye through, thank heaven! And here's the papers as was found on ye,
miss, by the wife," rising and producing them from a carefully-locked
little box in the cupboard; "and here's the purse with a shilling in it,
which was all that we saw with ye, and you a sending me a guinea reg'lar
every quarter for Johnnie's schooling, for a kind miss, as ye are."
Margaret lay quiet for a while; her deep gray eyes were full of tears,
her bleached face tremulous with smiles.
"Heaven is taking great care of me, and I have much to be thankful for.
Kind John Doane and his wife, for instance."
The bricklayer puffed hard, and slowly spelled out her meaning, and
arrived at it with a snort of surprised pleasure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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