HARD TIMES.

For the first few days Bessie seemed stunned and paralyzed by her trouble. After her few household duties were done she would sit in the bow-window, looking out with a wan, set face upon the vessels passing to and fro, up and down the river. Never more would she, and Peter’s mother, watch for his ship sailing homewards; never more would she bid the children clap their hands and shout “Father!” as if he could hear them call amid the noises on deck. What was there left for her and them but to die, as her husband had died, to swell Penrose’s riches?

But before the week was over a fresh calamity aroused her from her despair. The sailmaker handed over his stock and house of business to his creditors, and she had notice to quit as soon as she could find another dwelling-place. It was high time to wake out of the dull stupor of grief, for their stock of money was well nigh spent; and she had a helpless, ailing old woman, and two little children, all looking to her for the bare necessaries of life.

It had been a sad time for Peter’s mother. She had never fairly felt at home in England, nor had she grown quite accustomed to English manners. Now she had lost her sons, a dreary sense of utter loneliness and desolation preyed upon her. It was a cruel country, where no one cared for brave men like her husband and her sons, but left them to perish, if other men grew richer by their death. Now this fresh blow had fallen she knew well enough that Bessie must have a desperate fight for bread for herself and the children. But if she went back to Normandy there would be no home for her except the hospital, and she shrank painfully from seeking a refuge there. Her father had been a prosperous fisherman, owning several boats, and had given her a good sum for her marriage portion, though he had not altogether liked her wedding an English sailor. She had lived so well after her marriage, among her own people, surrounded with every English comfort, and made so much of by her English husband, that it was tenfold more humiliating to go back to her native town and there beg for a corner and a bed in the hospital.

But there was a simple courage and tenderness in her heart which would not suffer this pride to turn her aside from treading her old dignity and good fortune under her feet, if that was the right thing to do for Bessie and her grandchildren. She could not be any other than a burden to Bessie if she remained. Yet to part with her and the children and place the deep and cruel sea, the grave of her husband and son! between herself and them, how hard that would be? All through the sleepless night that followed the notice to quit the sailmaker’s house this question rang through her brain, “Must I go? Must I leave them?” but before the late, lingering sun rose the answer was clear to her. She must go.

“Bessie,” she said, early in the morning, “I will go back to my France, my Normandy. You shall never be able to keep me; that is impossible. I go to eat the bread of charity from my own people, not from strange people. I cannot go into what you call a workhouse. I must leave you and my baby and my Nannette. It is too much of misfortune; yet the good God loves us still.”

“If I could only believe it!” wailed Bessie.

“But in truth he loves us,” persisted her mother-in-law, with tears in her dark eyes. “His Son, our Lord Jesus, had sorrows worse to bear. His poor mother had sorrows worse to bear. She did stand by him and did see him hang on his cross, the crown of thorns upon his head, and she must not try to take him down from the cross, and she must not take one little thorn out of his crown. That must have made me die--to see Peter and Victor sinking in the sea and not to do something to save them.”

“But Mary saw him again in three days,” said Bessie.

“And we shall see Peter and Victor again,” she went on, “not in three days, but some day. But I shall go back to my town; I can live here no more. And I will take with me nothing but my cradle, our cradle, where I rocked Peter when he was my first eldest little baby. They will let me keep it in the hospital, if the sister Marie is still alive. The sister Marie knows me very well.”

There was little time for thinking over the question. Bessie could not bear to let Peter’s mother go; but December had already set in, with bitter snowy weather and keen north-east winds, and the poor shivering ailing woman was racked with sharp rheumatic pains. She had always been fond of talking of her sunny Normandy, with its bright blue skies and its blossoming apple-orchard; and Bessie, who knew little of foreign countries, except the strange accounts brought by Peter from his voyages, thought it must be nearly always summer in France. It was best then for her to go back to Normandy. So she packed up the few possessions that her husband’s mother would consent to take away with her in the heavy old wooden cradle, and had it carried to the wharf, not far off, from which a steamer was about to sail for Havre. It was all hurriedly done, for she had but one more night to stay in her old home; and it would be a good thing for Peter’s mother to be gone before she was turned out. With the baby in her arms, and little Nan clinging to her grandmother’s hand, they passed sorrowfully along the old familiar streets to the wharf where the steamer lay.

“Mother,” cried Bessie, “we shall never see one another any more!”

The Frenchwoman’s brown face was quivering and her lips trembling, though she strove hard to speak bravely to her son’s wife, whose face she was never likely to see again.

“The good God is very good,” she said, “and he loves us. He is very good, though my two sons are lost, and I go away quite old, and solitary, and poor. If he does not love me, who shall be good to me? I have not one other friend. No, no. I have called Him always my good God, and he must be my good God still. He will love you and me.”

“Are you going in the ship to look for father and Uncle Victor?” asked little Nan. They had neither of them found it in their hearts to tell the child plainly that both her father and Victor were drowned, though she had heard them say that they were lost. “Are you going to find father?” she asked, again pulling her grandmother’s cloak.

“They’ll never be found again, never, no more!” said Bessie, falling on her knees, and taking the little girl into her arms; “none of us will ever find father again.”

“But God can find him,” said the child. “God holds him and Uncle Victor in his hand, and he couldn’t lose them. Mother, has God lost them out of the hollow of his hand?”

“No, no, my Nannette,” answered her grandmother; “the good God cannot lose them. ‘No one can steal them out of the hand of my Father;’ that is said by our Lord Jesus. ‘No one can steal them out of my hand,’ he said also. There is not one of us lost in his hand. But I must part. Adieu, my Nannette, my Bessie, my poor little baby!”

Bessie put the baby into little Nan’s arms, and clung weeping to Peter’s mother. To part with her was something like losing him afresh. There would be no one left to talk with her about him, and to share her grief. She was such a poor, desolate, bereaved, sorrowful woman, too! How ailing and infirm she looked, as she stood leaning over the bulwark, gazing back towards them, while the steamer moved slowly off! She stayed there, on deck, waving her white handkerchief towards them, long after her own dim eyes had lost all sight of Bessie and the children on the wharf; yet as long as she thought they could see her handkerchief fluttering against the dark hull of the vessel, she would not go below, in spite of the keen wind blowing up the river.

The last thing she saw was the bow-window, now black and cheerless, with no firelight gleaming through its panes. She crept away then, as if with a fresh wound in her sorrowful heart, down into the darkest corner of the cabin. The sailors, the rigging, every sound and sight, brought to her mind too strongly her boys, whom she could never keep away from the sea. With her brown withered face turned away from the dim light, and with long-hoarded tears streaming from her eyes, she gave way at last to a paroxysm of deep and bitter grief, such as the old seldom feel. Her brave, beautiful sons! her pleasant, loving daughter-in-law! her pretty babies, whose cradle only she had brought away with her--all were lost. If she had but kept her boys in France, even if they had gone to sea, it would not have been in some worn-out or overladen ship. She could have borne it better if they had perished by the unavoidable perils of the sea, or if God had taken them away by one of his irresistible decrees. But they had had no chance; they had been cast away that the ship’s owner might be a richer man.