The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 36, 3 September 1903, Page 23

The Storyteller

MADGE STEWART

It was raining ; yes, raining as if the sun had never shone, and never would shine again o'er that dreary winter scene. At a window of a large house in shut, sat a girl of not more than twenty summers. She gazed abstractedly at the leafless trees that stretched and waved their gaunt branches to the grey, inclement sky. Her thoughts were far from the scene before her. Memory, with its swift and tireless wings, carried her back to a quaint little village in Southern France. There, in a cottage half hid with roses and woodbine, Madge had passed from babyhood to childhood, and from childhood into early maidenhood in all the enjoyment of a free country life.

After Captain Stewart's death, when Madge was a tiny, fair-haired sprite not yet three years old, his wife removed to this sunny home, hoping that change of scene would be as a balm to her broken heart. Besides, the doctors said the warmer climate might ward ofi that dread en,emy— consumption— which threatened to carry her off prematurely, as, also, it does so many of England's fairest flowers Heie the years glided on peacefully. Mother and daughter were all in all to each other, and felt no need of outside companionship. They wandered through the fields and lanes surrounding the village. They read, and sketched, and chatted. Seldom were seen a mother and daughter so thoroughly one. Mrs. Stewart was to Madge friend and sister as well as mother.

There is no true, lasting happiness m this world Such an ideal existence could not last. At length the fell disease appeared, and just when Madge was at the age when girlhood's developing ideas— like the shooting rosebud in early springtime, needed most of the gardener's care— required a mother's most watchful training, she was left an orphan.

Shortly before her death, Mrs. Stewart had written to her only living relatne— a stepsister — begging her, for the sake of their own dear dead mother, to give a home to her lonely child. Seeing no alternative, Mrs. Redwood had, very unwillingly, accepted the charge laid upon her. So, soon after all that remained of her loving mother had teen laid in the little village churchyard, Madge set out, accompanied by the kind old doctor's sister, who was going to England, and would put her safely on the tram which would take her to Lyndham, the nearest station to her aiunt's residence.