Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Slave of the Lamp by Henry Seton Merriman
page 56 of 314 (17%)
Prague, when his father and Mr. Carew were colleagues in a brilliant but
unfortunate embassy. Five years had passed since then. The two fathers
were now dead, and the children had dropped apart as men and women do
when their own personal interests begin to engross them. Now again, in
this late summer time, they were to meet. All, that is, who were left.
The _debris_, as it were. Three voices there were whose tones would
never more be heard in the round of merry jest. Mr. Carew, Walter
Vellacott (Uncle Walter, the young ones called him), and little Charlie
Carew, the bright-eyed sailor of the family, had all three travelled on.
The two former, whose age and work achieved had softened their
departure, were often spoken of with gently lowered voice, but little
Charlie's name was never mentioned. It was a fatal mistake--this
silence--if you will; but it was one of those mistakes which are often
made in wisdom. In splendid, solitary grandeur he lay awaiting the end
of all things--the call of his Creator--in the grey ice-fields of the
North. The darling of his ship, he had died with a smile in his blue
eyes and a sad little jest upon his lips to cheer the rough fur-clad
giants kneeling at his side. Time, the merciful, had healed, as best he
could (which is by no means perfectly), the wound in the younger hearts.
It is only the old that are quite beyond his powers; he cannot touch
them. Mrs. Carew, a woman with a patient face and a ready smile, was the
only representative of the vanishing generation. Her daughters--ay! and
perhaps her sons as well (though boys are not credited with so much
tender divination)--knew the meaning of the little droop at the side of
their mother's smiling lips. They detected the insincerity of her kindly
laugh.

Shortly after leaving Exeter, Christian's station was reached. This was
an old-fashioned seaport town, whose good fortune it was to lie too far
west for a London watering-place, and too far east for Plymouth or
DigitalOcean Referral Badge