‘Write to us the moment you get there,’
said Charley. How often had the injunction been
given! ’And now we had better get off—
you’ll be better when we are gone, Alaric,’—Charley
had some sense of the truth about him—’and,
Alaric, take my word for it, I’ll come and set
the Melbourne Weights and Measures to rights before
long—I’ll come and weigh your gold
for you.’
‘We had better be going now,’ said Charley,
looking down into the cabin; ‘they may let loose
and be off any moment now.’
‘Oh, Charley, not yet, not yet,’ said
Linda, clinging to her sister.
‘You’ll have to go down to the Nore, if
you stay; that’s all,’ said Charley.
And then again began the kissing and the crying.
Yes, ye dear ones—it is hard to part—it
is hard for the mother to see the child of her bosom
torn from her for ever; it is cruel that sisters should
be severed: it is a harsh sentence for the world
to give, that of such a separation as this. These,
O ye loving hearts, are the penalties of love!
Those that are content to love must always be content
to pay them.
‘Go, mamma, go,’ said Gertrude; ’dearest,
best, sweetest mother— my own, own mother;
go, Linda, darling Linda. Give my kindest love
to Harry—Charley, you and Harry will be
good to mamma, I know you will. And mamma’—and
then she whispered to her mother one last prayer in
Charley’s favour—’she may love
him now, indeed she may.’
Alaric came to them at the last moment—’Mrs.
Woodward,’ said he, ‘say that you forgive
me.’
‘I do,’ said she, embracing him—’God
knows that I do;—but, Alaric, remember
what a treasure you possess.’
And so they parted. May God speed the wanderers!
THE FATE OF THE NAVVIES
And now, having dispatched Alaric and his wife and
bairns on their long journey, we must go back for
a while and tell how Charley had been transformed
from an impudent, idle young Navvy into a well-conducted,
zealous young Weights.
When Alaric was convicted, Charley had, as we all
know, belonged to the Internal Navigation; when the
six months’ sentence had expired, Charley was
in full blow at the decorous office in Whitehall;
and during the same period Norman had resigned and
taken on himself the new duties of a country squire.
The change which had been made had affected others
than Charley. It had been produced by one of
those far-stretching, world-moving commotions which
now and then occur, sometimes twice or thrice in a
generation, and, perhaps, not again for half a century,
causing timid men to whisper in corners, and the brave
and high-spirited to struggle with the struggling
waves, so that when the storm subsides they may be
found floating on the surface. A moral earthquake
had been endured by a portion of the Civil Service
of the country.
