Stephen Grattans Faith | Page 6

filled her with a vague fear now; it no longer fell softly and silently; the wind bore it by in whirling masses, that hid the river and the pond and the changing sky, and then laid it down in the valleys and on the hill-sides, to lie there, Sophy knew, till April showers and sunshine should come to melt it away. It was vain to look for any one coming with the expected food. Except now and then in a momentary lull of the storm it was quite impossible to see a rod beyond the window, and these glimpses only served to show that they were, on one side at least, quite shut in by a mountainous drift.
Yes, Sophy began to be quite afraid of the snow; tales that she had heard during her summer visits to the mountains came to her mind--how in a single night the valleys would be filled, and how whole flocks of sheep, and sometimes an unwary shepherd, had perished beneath it. She remembered how her grandfather had showed her a cottage where a mother and her children had been quite shut in for two nights and a day, till the neighbours had come to dig them out; and how a lad who had gone out for help before the storm was over had never come home again, but perished on the moor, and how they only found him in the spring time, when the snow melted and showed his dead face turned towards the sky. These things quite appalled her when she thought of venturing out in the storm.
The little store of meal held out wonderfully; the bread was put aside for her mother--hidden, indeed, that no little brother, hungry and adventurous, might find it. That night the storm abated, but towards morning it grew bitterly cold, so cold that the little lads in their thin garments could not venture out to play at making roads in the snow, and they had to submit to another day's confinement. They went out a little towards afternoon, and came in again merry and hungry, and by no means satisfied with the scanty supper which their sister had prepared for them.
CHAPTER THREE.
HOME TRIALS.
We could never tell you all that the poor mother suffered as she lay there day after day helpless among her children. Her own illness and helplessness was the last drop, which made her cup overflow. Gradually, as she lay there listening to the roaring of the storm, it became clear, to her how little she had come to trust to her husband's promises of reformation. It was to her own efforts she must trust for the support of herself and her children; her faith in him quite failed after so many hopes and disappointments; and now what was to become of them all?
She was angry and bitter against herself, poor woman, because her hope of better days had quite perished. She called herself faithless, and said to herself that she did not deserve that it should go well with her husband, since she had ceased to believe in him and trust him; but, sick in body and sick at heart, she had no power, for the time at least, to rally. She prayed in her misery often and long, but it was to a God who seemed far away--a God who had apparently hidden His face from her.
The third day was drawing to a close. Sophy gathered the children to their daily reading near their mother's bed, and, with great pains and patience, found and kept the place for them. John was ten, and a good reader--quite equal to Sophy herself, he thought; but Ned and little Will were only just beginning to be able to read with the rest, and their sister took all the pains in the world to improve them and to make them really care for the reading; and almost always, this hour was a very pleasant time. The lesson to-day was the fifth of Mark.
"Now, boys, you must attend carefully," said Sophy, when they were seated; "because there are many wonderful things in the chapter. I read it last night by the firelight after you were all in bed; and I want each of you to tell me which part you think most wonderful. You must begin, Will, and then Ned; and then I'll read your verses over after you, so that you may understand them."
For the two little lads could make but little of anything they read themselves as yet, though they listened with pleasure to the reading of their sister. And, besides, the double reading would help to pass the time and make her brothers contented in the house.
Mrs Morely was beguiled from the indulgence of her own sad thoughts, first as she watched the little girl's