Weekly commercial herald. (Vicksburg, Miss.) 1884-18??, 1886-06-11
CHAPTER w.

@A 49, AOA C0'A OCHhhS AG@ ~
been what we call an ecclesiastical girl. The
modern fashion of church decoration and
other customs of reverence and taste in re-
hgion, had not at that time fairly arisen; but
ladies were even then very active in church
work. From this Sophia had always kept
aloof, greatly to the surprise of successive
clergymen, who had marked her as likely to
be useful in their parishes. To repeated in
v~itations that she would become a district
visitor or Sunday school teacher Sophia had
always answered no; and she had never given
any reason for this refusal.
Whether she liked dancing, and feared that
her pleasure might be restricted, or what may
have been her reason, / cannot guess. Even
when our rector tried to persuade her to help
him, her answer was still a simple no;
nor could the merry little clergyman
by any semi-jocose questioning extract
from her a syllable more. He turned
about and tried gravity and serious
remonstrance; but with no better result. Ac-tS
cordingly Mr.. Brent was somewhat sur
prised when, about six months after his sons
departure, Sophia asked him if she could be
of any use to him in the parish or the Sunday
school. OF course he accepted her offer
gladly. And a capital teacher and punctual
visitor ne found her. But Mr.. Brent noticed
that at their various little meetings Sophia
would manage to linger until the other
ladies were gone, then she would talk a bit,
and somehow the talk always veered about
till it settled on Percival, when Sophia would
ask few questions and be gone. Even little
Mr.. Brent, who was not an observer of things,
sometimes felt that these two or three little
sentences about Percival were with Sophia
the business Of the day. At an earlier period
of his career he would have broken many a
jest upon this discovery; but jests were by
cones with our poor rector. The twinkle
had fallen from his eye, and the blitheness
had sunk out of his tone. A pallor was steal
ing over. his face, and he was fast turning
gray. As one of his parishioners who made
her living by laundry work said, "He looked
like a gown that had been to the wash" the
colors had run; what remained was himself
and not himself.
And now, disregarding for a moment our
small chronology, let me dismiss the rector
from this tale, where, indeed, he has little
more to do.
Poor Sophia chung to him more than mosT'
of his parishioners and she found a real
pleasure in his society, because it seemed to
be a kind of remote contact with Percival.
The bedroom where Percival had slept from
boyhood was in that house. The books he
had read were on the shelves. Here he used
to sit at dinner. There was the garden walk
where he was wont to saunter with his pipe.
She knew the very peg where his hat used to
hang. Somehow he did not seem quite so far
away when she was in the precincts of his
own home, and the ~rector's dispirited talk
had a certain l~iveliness for her, because he
was Percivalss father. Occasionally, too, she
would get a glimpse at her absent lad him
self. For instance, one day, as they were
walking together to the garden gate, the
rector said:
"Percy planted that rose"
Next week, as they went the same way,
Sophia stopped beside the rose tree to pluck
off a few withered leaves and make the plant
look trim. Mr.. Brent, stopping with her,
said Ii in his distracted way:
81 never told you; Percival planted that
rose"
He never told her! Why, by that time she
knew how many leaves were on it, and could
spell its name and knew its prospect of life,v
having become for Percivals sake a perfeA
horticultural actuary.
Then another day the rector said listlesd y
for he never joked with her about his sd
and indeed seemed to have only a faint re-
membrance of that connection:
Il heard from Percy this morning; would
you care to hear his letter."
Sophia, who would have lived on bread and
water for a week rather than miss one line
her darling wrote, said, trying with miserable
affectation to initiate the rector's apathetic
tone:
"Yes, If 1t is not troubling you"
"Perhaps," Mr.. Brent said, las you don't
seem greatly to care for it, we need not read
this one, but wait for the next"
He said this quite innocently, but he put
Sophia in a dreadful fix. With the instinct
of true generalship, however, she resolved to
recover her lost position by a bold stroke.
II would not miss hearing it for the world"
she said audaciously. 20, do read It'll"
And the rector, looking up with a faint
smile, like a man who remembers something,
took the letter out and read it through.
In none of these letters did Percy mention
her name, until three years after his depart
ure, when one day the rector read this line:
IF you euer see the girl ,rho iUGs once my
little Sophia, give her my loue."
He read it mechanically, as he did every
thing now; then, holding the letter with
loose fingers, it slipped from him ans
SKINNED down under the table, and presently
he was called from the room. Sophia dropped
on her knees and caught the sheet up, and
read the line again:
"Tyou eUer see the girl who lVas opce my
little Sophia, give her my love-"
Bless me, how she kissed that sheetl 1t got
all the love kisses that had been ripening on
her lips for six and thirty months. Had It
been the age of Transformation, that sheet
would surely have turned into a lover under
the transmitting power of those kisses. And
then Miss Sophia, who had a terribly tender
conscience of her own, looked at the letter,
and colored up at a certain suggestion of her
own mind, and wondered would it be very
wrong, and would the rector ever find it out,
and was it very mean of her to do it in the
hope that he would never find it outl And,
deciding on action, she nicely tore of the
finest little morsel Of the paper, where on the
last line these precious words were inscribed;
and she slipped the shred into her watch case,
where she could look at it night and morning.
The little girl that was my Sophia. aThaAa
Isl that shall bel until you bid her ceasei" q