EMILIE’S TRIALS.

The truth must be told of Emilie; she was not clever with her hands, and she was, nevertheless, a little too confident in her power of execution, so willing and anxious was she to serve you. The directions Fred gave her were far from clear; and after the paper was all cut and was to be pasted together, sorrowful to say, it would not do at all. Fred, in spite of his late apology was very angry, and seizing the scissors said he should know better another time than to ask Miss Schomberg to do what she did not understand. “You have wasted my paper, too,” said the boy, “and my time in waiting for what I could better have done myself.”

Emilie was very sorry, and she said so; but a balloon could not exactly be made out of her sorrow, and nothing short of a balloon would pacify Fred, that was plain. “Must it be ready for to-morrow?” she asked.

“Yes, it must,” he said. Three other boys were going to send up balloons. It was the Queen’s coronation day, and he had promised to take a fourth balloon to the party; and the rehearsal of all this stirred up Fred’s ire afresh, and he looked any thing but kind at Miss Schomberg. What was to be done? Edith suggested driving to the next market town to buy one; but her papa wanted the pony gig, so they could only sally forth to Mrs. Cox’s for some more tissue paper, and begin the work again. This was very provoking to Edith.

“To have spent all the morning and now to be going to spend all the afternoon over a trumpery balloon, which you can’t make after all, Miss Schomberg, is very tiresome, and I wanted to go to old Joe Murray’s to-day and see if the children have picked me up any corallines.”

“I am very sorry, dear, my carelessness should punish you; but don’t disturb me by grumbling and I will try and get done before tea, and then we will go together.” This time Emilie was more successful; she took pains to understand what was to be done, and the gores of her balloon fitted beautifully.

“Now Edith, dear, ring for some paste,” said Emilie, just as the clock struck four; Margaret answered the bell. Margaret was the housemaid, and so far from endeavouring in her capacity to overcome evil with good, she was perpetually making mischief and increasing any evil there might be, either in kitchen or parlour, by her mode of delivering a message. She would be sure to add her mite to any blame that she might hear, in her report to the kitchen, and thus, without being herself a bad or violent temper, was continually fomenting strife, and adding fuel to the fire of the cook, who was of a very choleric turn. The request for paste was civilly made and received, but Emilie unfortunately called Margaret back to say, “Oh, ask cook, please, to make it stiffer than she did the last that we had for the kite; that did not prove quite strong.”

Margaret took the message down and informed cook that “Miss Schomberg did not think she knew how to make paste.” “Then let her come and make it herself,” said cook. “She wants to be cook I think; she had better come. I sha’nt make it. What is it for?”

“Oh,” said Margaret, “she is after some foreign filagree work of hers, that’s all.”

“Well, I’m busy now and I am not going to put myself out about it, she must wait.”

Emilie did wait the due time, but as the paste did not come she went down for it. “Is the paste ready, cook?” she asked.

“No, Miss Schomberg,” was the short reply, and cook went on assiduously washing up her plates.

“Will you be so kind as to make it, cook, for I want it particularly that it may have as much time as possible to dry.”

“Perhaps you will make it yourself then,” was the gracious rejoinder. Emilie was not above making a little paste, and as she saw that something had put cook out, she willingly consented; but she did not know where to get either flour or saucepan, and cook and Margaret kept making signs and laughing, so that it was not very pleasant. She grew quite hot, as she had to ask first for a spoon, then for a saucepan, then for the flour and water; at last she modestly turned round and said, “Cook, I really do not quite know how to make a little paste. I am ashamed to say it, but I have lived so long in lodgings that I see nothing of what is done in the kitchen. Will you tell or show me? I am very ignorant.”

Her kind civil tone quite changed cook’s, and she said, “Oh, Miss, I’ll make it, only you see, you shouldn’t have said I didn’t know how.” Emilie explained, and the cook was pacified, and gave Miss Schomberg a good deal of gratuitous information during the process. How she did not like her place, and should not stay, and how she disliked her mistress, and plenty more to which Emilie listened politely, but did not make much reply. She plainly perceived that cook wanted a very forbearing mistress, but she could not exactly tell her so. She merely said in her quaint quiet way, that every one had something to bear, and the paste being made, she left the kitchen.

“Well, I must say, Miss Schomberg has a nice way of speaking, which gets over you some how,” said cook, “I wish I had her temper.”

More than one in the kitchen mentally echoed that wish of cook’s.

The balloon went on beautifully, and was completed by seven o’clock. Fred was delighted when he came in to tea, and John no less so. All the rude speeches were forgotten, and Emilie was as sympathetic in her joy as an elder sister could have been. “I don’t know what you will do without Miss Schomberg,” said Mr. Parker, as he sipped his tea.

“She had better come and live with us,” said Fred, “and keep us all in order. I’m sure I should have no objection.”

Emilie felt quite paid for the little self-denial she had exercised, when she found that her greatest enemy, he who had declared he would “plague her to death, and pay her off for not letting them send up their fire-works,” was really conquered by that powerful weapon, love.

Fred had thought more than he chose to acknowledge of Emilie’s kindness; he could not forget it. It was so different to the treatment he had met with from his associates generally. It made him ask what could be the reason of Emilie’s conduct. She had nothing to get by it, that was certain, and Fred made up his mind to have some talk with Miss Schomberg on the subject the first time they were alone. He had some trials at school with a boy who was bent on annoying him, and trying to stir up his temper; perhaps the peacemaker might tell him how to deal with this lad. Fred was an impetuous boy, and now began to like Miss Schomberg as warmly as he had previously disliked her.

On their way to old Joe’s house that night, Emilie thought she would call in on Miss Webster, not having parted from her very warmly on the first night of the holidays. A fortnight of these holidays had passed away, and Emilie began to long for her quiet evenings, and to see dear aunt Agnes again. She looked quite affectionately up to the little sitting room window, where her geraniums stood, and even thought kindly of Miss Webster herself, to whom it was not quite so easy to feel genial. She entered the shop. The apprentice sate there at work, busily trimming a fine rice straw bonnet for the lodger within. She looked up joyously at Emilie’s approach. She thought how often that kind German face had been to her like a sunbeam on a dull path; how often her musical voice had spoken words of counsel, and comfort, and sympathy, to her in her hard life. How she had pressed her hand when she (the apprentice) came home one night and told her, “My poor mother is dead,” and how she had said, “We are both orphans now, Lucy. We can feel for one another.” How she had taught her by example, often, and by word sometimes, not to answer again if any thing annoyed or irritated her, and in short how much Lucy had missed the young lady only Lucy could say.

Emilie inquired for her mistress, but the words were scarcely out of her lips, than she said, “Oh, Miss, she’s so bad! She has scalt her foot, and is quite laid up, and the lodgers are very angry. They say they don’t get properly attended to and so they mean to go. Dear me, there is such a commotion, but her foot is very had, poor thing, and I have to mind the shop, or I would wait upon her more; and the girl is very inattentive and saucy, so that I don’t see what we are to do. Will you go and see Miss Webster, Miss?”

Emilie cheerfully consented, leaving Edith with Lucy to learn straw plaiting, if she liked, and to listen to her artless talk. Lucy had less veneration for the name of Queen Victoria than for that of Schomberg. Emilie was to her the very perfection of human nature, and accordingly she sang her praises loud and long.

On the sofa, the very sofa for which M. Schomberg had so longed, lay Miss Webster, the expression of her face manifesting the greatest pain. The servant girl had just brought up her mistress’s tea, a cold, slopped, miserable looking mess. A slice of thick bread and butter, half soaked in the spilled beverage, was on a plate, and that a dirty one; and the tray which held the meal was offered to the poor sick woman so carelessly, that the contents were nearly shot into her lap. It was easy to see that love formed no part of Betsey’s service of her mistress, and that she rendered every attention grudgingly and ill. Emilie went up cordially to Miss Webster, and was not prepared for the repulsive reception with which she met. She wondered what she could have said or done, except, indeed, in the refusal of the instrument, and that was atoned for. Emilie might have known, however, that nothing makes our manners so distant and cold to another, as the knowledge that we have injured or offended him. Miss Webster, in receiving Emilie’s advances, truly was experiencing the truth of the scripture saying, that coals of fire should be heaped on her head.

Poor Miss Webster! “There! set down the tray, you may go, and don’t let me see you in that filthy cap again, not fit to be touched with a pair of tongs; and don’t go up to Mrs. Newson in that slipshod fashion, don’t Betsey; and when you have taken up tea come here, I have an errand for you to go. Shut the door gently. Oh, dear! dear, these servants!”

This was so continually the lament of Miss Webster, that Emilie would not have noticed it, but that she appeared so miserable, and she therefore kindly said, “I am afraid Betsey does not wait on you nicely, Miss Webster, she is so very young. I had no idea of this accident, how did it happen?”

How it happened took Miss Webster some time to tell. It happened in no very unusual manner, and the effect was a scalt foot, which she forthwith shewed Miss Schomberg. There was no doubt that it was a very bad foot, and Emilie saw that it needed a good nurse more than a good doctor. Mr. Parker was a medical man, and Emilie knew she should have no difficulty in obtaining that kind of assistance for her. But the nursing! Miss Webster was feverish and uneasy, and in such suffering that something must be done. At the sight of her pain all was forgotten, but that she was a fellow-creature, helpless and forsaken, and that she must be helped.

All this time any one coming in might have imagined that Emilie had been the cause of the disaster, so affronted was Miss Webster’s manner, and so pettishly did she reject all her visitor’s suggestions as preposterous and impossible.

“Will you give up your walk to-night, Edith,” said Emilie on her return to the shop, “Poor Miss Webster is in such pain I cannot leave her, and if you would run home and ask your papa to step in and see her, and say she has scalt her foot badly, I would thank you very much.”

Emilie spoke earnestly, so earnestly that Edith asked if she were grown very fond of that “sour old maid all of a sudden.”

“Very fond! No Edith; but it does not, or ought not to require us to be very fond of people to do our duty to them.”

“Well, I don’t see what duty you owe to that mean creature, and I see no reason why I should lose my walk again to-night. You treat people you don’t love better than those you do it seems; or else your professions of loving me mean nothing. All day long you have been after Fred’s balloon, and now I suppose mean to be all night long after Miss Webster’s foot.”

Emilie made no reply; she could only have reproached Edith for selfishness and temper at least equal to Miss Webster’s, but telling Lucy she should soon return, hastened to Mr. Parker’s house, followed by Edith; he was soon at the patient’s side, and as Emilie foretold, it was a case more for an attentive nurse than a skilful doctor. He promised to send her an application, but, “Miss Schomberg,” said he, “sleep is what she wants; she tells me she has had no rest since the accident occurred. What is to be done?” “Can you not send for a neighbour, Miss Webster, or some one to attend to your household, and to nurse you too. If you worry yourself in this way you will be quite ill.”

Poor Miss Webster was ill, she knew it; and having neither neighbour nor friend within reach, she did what was very natural in her case, she took up her handkerchief and began to cry. “Oh, come, Miss Webster,” said Emilie, cheerfully, “I will get you to bed, and Lucy shall come when the shop is closed, and to-morrow I will get aunt Agnes to come and nurse you. Keep up your spirits.”

“Ah, it is very well to talk of keeping up spirits, and as to your aunt Agnes, there never was any love lost between us. No thank you, Miss Schomberg, no thank you. If I may just trouble you to help me to the side of my bed, I can get in, and do very well alone. Good night.” Emilie stood looking pitifully at her. “I hope I don’t keep you, Miss Schomberg, pray don’t stay, you cannot help me,” and here Miss Webster rose, but the agony of putting her foot to the ground was so great that she could not restrain a cry, and Emilie, who saw that the poor sufferer was like a child in helplessness, and like a child, moreover, in petulance, calmly but resolutely declared her intention of remaining until Lucy could leave the shop.

Having helped her landlady into bed, she ran down-stairs to try and appease the indignant lodgers, who protested, and with truth, that they had rung, rung, rung, and no one answered the bell; that they wanted tea, that Miss Webster had undertaken to wait on them, that they were not waited on, and that accordingly they would seek other lodgings on the morrow, they would, &c., &c. “Miss Webster, ma’am, is very ill to-night. She has a young careless servant girl, and is, I assure you, very much distressed that you should be put out thus. I will bring up your tea, ma’am, in five minutes, if you will allow me. It is very disagreeable for you, but I am sure if you could see the poor woman, ma’am, you would pity her.” Mrs. Harmer did pity her only from Emilie’s simple account of her state, and declared she was very sorry she had seemed angry, but the girl did not say her mistress was ill, only that she was lying down, which appeared very disrespectful and inattentive, when they had been waiting two hours for tea.

The shop was by this time cleared up, and Lucy was able to attend to the lodgers. Whilst Emilie having applied the rags soaked in the lotion which had arrived, proceeded to get Miss Webster a warm and neatly served cup of tea.

It would have been very cheering to hear a pleasant “thank you;” but Miss Webster received all these attentions with stiff and almost silent displeasure. Do not blame her too severely, a hard struggle was going on; but the law of kindness is at work, and it will not fail.