'Weep with me, all you that read
This little story,
And know, for whom a tear you shed,
Death's self is sorry.'
It is Sunday. The Lapwing is ploughing her way through a short chopping sea in the Bay of Biscay; and here at home, at Roupell, the people are issuing in a little quiet stream from afternoon church. They are coming out rather later, and with rather more alacrity than usual, both which phenomena are to be accounted for by the fact of Mr. Evans--never churlishly loth to yield his pulpit to a spiritual brother--having lent it to a very young deacon, who has taken a mean advantage of this concession to inflict fifty minutes of stammering extempore upon the congregation.
The Vicar has sat during this visitation in an attitude of hopeless depression, and has given out, with an intense feeling born of the excessive appositeness of the words to his own case, the hymn after the sermon--
'Art thou weary, art thou languid?'
Peggy sits alone in her pew, and her mind straying away from the fledgeling curate's flounderings, she asks herself sadly for how many more Sundays will this be so?
Mrs. Evans overtakes her as she walks down the path after service, to tell her that she and her whole family are to set forth on the following Tuesday in pursuit of that change for which she has been so long sighing.
'Mr. Evans is off on his own account!' cries she in cheerful narration. 'He does not like travelling with so large a party; it fidgets him, so he is off on his own account. The Archdeacon wanted him to go with him to the Diocesan Conference; but, as he justly says, what he needs to recruit him is an entire change of ideas as well as scene. So he is going to run over to Trouville or Deauville, or one of those French watering-places.'
'Indeed!'
'It seems very unkind of us--I am so sorry that we are leaving you here alone,' pursues Mrs. Evans, her elated eye and tone giving the lie to her regretful words. 'And they tell me that you are to lose milady too; she talks of a month at Brighton. She does not much fancy being at the Manor at the fall of the leaf.'
'Thank you,' replies Peggy civilly; 'but we never mind being by ourselves.'
'Oh, I know that you do not in a general way,' returns Mrs. Evans. 'But of course just now it is different; Prue so far from well. I only thought--I was only afraid--in case----'
'In case what?' asks Peggy curtly, while a cold hand seems crawling up towards her heart.
'Oh, nothing! nothing! I was only going to say, in case--in case she--she had a relapse.'
'And why should she have a relapse?' inquires Margaret sharply, in an alarmed and angry voice, turning round upon her companion.
'Why indeed!' replies the other, looking aside, and laughing rather confusedly. 'And at all events, you have Dr. Acton. He is so nice and attentive, and yet does not go on paying his visits long after there is any need for them, just to run up a bill as so many of them do.'
She is interrupted in her eulogium of the parish doctor by the appearance on the scene--both of them running at the top of their speed, as if they more than suspected pursuers behind them--of Lily and Franky Harborough. They, too, being on the wing home to-morrow, have come to bid their friend, Miss Lambton, good-bye; a ceremony which they entirely disdain to go through either in the churchyard or in the road, or indeed anywhere but under her own roof.
'Well, then, if you come you must be very quiet; you must make no noise,' she has said warningly.
She repeats the caution when they have reached the hall of the Red House, upon the settle of which there is no Prue lying; for though she is so much better--oh, so much--she has not yet been moved downstairs from the dressing-room.
'You must be very quiet,' Peggy repeats; 'you must remember that Prue is ill!'
Franky has climbed upon her knee, and is playing with the clasp of her Norwegian belt. He pauses from his occupation to ask her gravely, and in a rather awed voice, 'Is she very ill? Is she going to die?'
'God forbid!' cries Peggy, starting as if she had been stabbed. What! are they all agreed to run their knives in their different ways into her? 'My darling, do not say such dreadful things!'
'People do not die because they are ill,' remarks Lily, rather contemptuously; 'you did not die!'
'No, I did not die,' echoes the little boy thoughtfully.
He sits very quietly on Margaret's lap for a while, and when at length he climbs down, walks about the room on ostentatious tiptoe, speaking in stage-whispers.
It is only at the moment of parting, in the eagerness of pressing upon his friend once more for acceptance his five-bladed knife, and self-denyingly rebutting her counter offer of the largest ferret, that he forgets himself and Prue's invalidhood so far as to raise his little voice above the subdued key which he has imposed upon himself.
Peggy stands leaning against the gate, watching, until it has turned the corner out of sight, the tiny sailor-dressed figure disappearing down the road, with its refused love-gift reluctantly restored to the custody of its white duck trousers-pocket, with its small shoulders shaken with its sobs, and with its hand dragging back in petulant protest against the relentless grasp of its nurse.
'Poor little fellow! I almost wish that I had taken his knife,' she says regretfully.
And now they are all gone, dispersed their different ways: milady in her brougham, the children and maids in the omnibus, and the Evans family squeezed into, packed all over, and bulging out of their own one-horse waggonette and the inn fly. They are all gone--gone a week, a fortnight, now a month ago.
At first Peggy is glad of their departure, even milady's. What security has she but that, with all her hearty rough kindness, with her good sound human heart, and her plentiful kitchen physic, she may not at any moment stick another knife into her, with some well-intended word, as Mrs. Evans, as little Franky have already done? She would fain see no one--no one. The fox, swishing his brush in lazy welcome to her, and raising his russet head to be scratched through the wires of his house, poisons their intercourse with no insinuation that Prue is not really better. Minky does not ask her with the terrible point-blankness of childhood, 'Is Prue going to die?'
She will confine herself, then, to their kind and painless company.
But as the days go by, each dwindling day with the mark of night's little theft upon its shorn proportions; as the wind's hand and the frost's tooth make ravine among dear summer's leaves; as the beautiful blue and green year swoons in November's damp grasp--a change comes over her spirit, a famine for the touch of some compassionate hand, for the sound of some humane brave voice bidding her be of good cheer. It is a forlorn and rainy autumn. As in the days of St. Paul's shipwreck, so in those of Peggy's, 'neither sun nor stars in many days appeared.' When the rain-sheets are not soaking the saturated ground, the thick, dull blue mists reign everywhere. They have left their legitimate distant province, and have advanced even to the very walls of the Red House, swaddling the laurels and the naked lilacs, and the China roses that offer the delicate pertinacity of their blossoms to the autumn blast.
The garden has not yet been done up for the winter, as Jacob is waiting until 'they dratted leaves' are all down; and the rows of frost-blackened dahlias looming through the fog, the tattered garlands of canariensis, the scentless ragged mignonette, seem to Margaret's fancy, inflamed and heightened by grief and sleeplessness--for she seldom now has an unbroken night--to be the grinning skeletons of her former harmless joys.
The park is a fog-swathed swamp, here and there quite under water. Once or twice when she has passed by the Manor, its shuttered windows have appeared to scowl sullenly at her. Even the silence of the Vicarage seems hostile, as does the shut gate, upon which no pea-shooting boys or long-legged down-at-heel girls are swinging and shouting.
To the village, usually so often haunted by her charitable feet, she scarcely ever now goes. She dares not enter the cottages, because she knows what their inmates will say to her. It is no longer only Jacob's 'missis' to whom the rapidity with which Miss Prue is going downhill is matter of outspoken compassionate wonder. They mean no unkindness. They do as they would be done by. How many times has Peggy heard them calmly discussing in the very presence of their dying, the probability or improbability of their holding out until Christmas, or Candlemas, or Whitsun, as the case may be! But the first time that a kind-hearted cottage wife suggests to her, as in like case she would wish to have it suggested to herself, 'What a sad thing it is to think that poor Miss Prue will never see the primroses again, she as was allers so fond of flowers!' Peggy has stumbled away, half-stunned, as if some great and crushing weight had fallen on her head. And this Prue, about whom her village friends are making such sad prophecies, how is it with her? If you had asked her, she would have said, 'Well, very well, excellently well!'
Every day for the last month she has been going to be moved down next day to her settle in the hall; but whenever the new morning has come, that move has been deferred to the next. 'There is nothing the matter with her, really nothing; only she does not feel quite up to it; and, after all, there is plenty of time for her to get well in. Twenty-four hours will not make much difference, and she is so happy and comfortable up here.'
Up here, lying on the dressing-room sofa, with the fire flickering on the hearth beside her, talking to her cheerfully through her bad nights and her drowsy days; with every little present given her by Freddy ranged round her, within easy reach of her eye and hand, like a sick child's toys, and with his letters--they are not very many, for he is but a poor correspondent, though he says such beautiful things when he does write--kept delicately blue-ribboned in a little packet under her pillow, or oftener still held in her hot dry hand.
Their number has lately been swelled by the addition of a bulky one from Southampton, over which she has rained torrents of blissful tears. Hanging on the wall opposite to her, so that her look may rest continually upon it, is a large card, upon which she has had the number of the days of her lover's intended absence marked in black strokes. Every morning at her waking she has it brought to her, in order to put a pen-line through one more day. There are over thirty already thus scored out, as she shows to Peggy with a radiant smile.
At the beginning of the month, her sofa had been always covered with books. Freddy's own poems--these indeed stay to the last; the 'Browning' he has retrieved for her from Miss Hartley; books of criticism, of history, of verse, over which she pores laboriously, in pursuance of her promise to him to be more able to enter into his thoughts and understand his ideas upon his return. But by and by she has to cease from the attempt.
'I am afraid I cannot quite manage it,' she says to her sister, with an apologetic intonation; 'my head does not seem very clear. Sometimes I am afraid'--the wistful tears stealing into her blue eyes--'that it is not in me; that when he comes back he will find me just where he left me; that he will have to put up with me as I am.'
She does not suffer much actual pain, only her nights are increasingly broken, and her cough teases her sadly, which only makes her say that she is quite glad Freddy is not here, as a cough always fidgets him so. One morning in early November, after a night of more than usually wakeful unrest on the part of her sister, Peggy, who has had a bed made for herself on a sofa at the foot of the sick girl's, and has been up and down with her all night, is standing at the open hall door, trying to get a little freshness into eyes and brain. Her eyes are stiff with watching, and her brain feels thick and woolly, so thick and woolly that you would have thought it incapable of framing a definite idea. And yet across it there comes shooting now and again with steely clearness a torturing question--a question that is dressed sometimes in her own words, sometimes in Freddy's childish lisp, sometimes in the villagers' rough Doric; but that, however dressed, is yet always, always the same.
She has mechanically picked up the morning paper, and her languid eye is wandering carelessly over the daily prosaic list of the born, the wed, and the departed. As well that as anything else, though even as she makes the apathetic reflection, the question darts again in a new and hideous guise before her mind: 'How long will it be before there is another entry among these?'
With a great dry sob, she is in the act of dashing down the journal, when her glance is arrested by the letters of a familiar name, Harborough. It seems that there is a Harborough dead. Can it be that Betty has gone to her account? or that her complaisant husband has carried his complaisance so far as to take himself out of the world, and leave the field clear for that other? She has time to taste the full bitterness of this new thought, in the half second before her eye has mastered the advertisement:
'On the 3d inst., at Harborough Castle, ----shire, after a few days' illness, Francis Hugh de Vere Deloraine, only son of Ralph Harborough, Esq., aged 6 years.'
Even now that she has read it, she does not at once understand who it is that is dead. The string of high-sounding unfamiliar names sets her at fault. 'Francis Hugh de Vere Deloraine.' Is it--can it be Franky that is dead? Can it be that neither father nor mother have trodden the universal road, but that it is the little blooming child who has led the way? Why, it is impossible! There must be some mistake. It was only yesterday, as it were, that he was here; that she saw him passing through that very gate. In the confusion of her ideas, she has hurried out along the damp drive to the entrance-gate, and, standing there, gazes irrationally down the road, as if she expected once again to see the tiny sturdiness of the sailor figure, the tear-washed roses of the little face turned back over its shoulder in such fond and pouting protest at having to leave her; but the mist-bound road is empty--empty, save of its mire and of its rotting leaves. 'Franky dead! Little Franky dead!' She says it out loud, as if the idea could gain entrance into her brain more easily by her ears; and then she leans her forehead against the damp gate-post, and bursts out crying.
'I wish that I had given him another kiss! I wish that I had gone to the turn of the road with him, as he asked me! I wish that I had taken his knife!'
Her tears seem to make her intelligence clearer, to render sharper her power of suffering.
'Is there no one to be left alive? Is Death to have it all his own way?'
Her dimmed eyes rest on a drift of leaves blown by the last blusterous wind against the hedge-bank outside; a discoloured pile--the yellow poplar leaf, the black-brown pear and the bronzed beech, the ribbed hazel and the smooth lime--one fate has overtaken them all. Dead--dead!
At her foot is an elm-leaf half-dragged underground by the dark industry of some blind earthworm. Underground--underground! That is the bourne of us all; of the young green leaf, aloft two months ago on the tree-top, visited by the voyaging birds and the gamesome airs, as of the little bounding joyous child.
The searching vapour has penetrated her clothes, and made her shiver with cold; but she dares not yet go indoors again, dares not yet face her sick Prue, with those sudden tidings written on her face.
She retraces her steps along the drive, and turns into the garden--the empty garden; empty to-day of even Jacob's presence, as he is kept at home by his rheumatism. It is profoundly silent. The fog has got even into the robin's throat. It is profoundly silent; and yet to Peggy, the air is full of voices--the voices of her dead, her lost, and her dying. Her mother, Talbot, Prue, and now little Franky. He was not much to her, perhaps you may say; and yet she can ill spare his little drop of love out of her empty cup. Along the walks they hurry to meet her, and yet, as they come up to her, they pass her by with averted faces.
'I am certainly very lonely,' she says to herself, with a sort of astonishment; 'it is a very unusual case. There has happened to me what happens commonly to people only at eighty: I have outlived everything! I was given very few people to love, to begin with; but I did love them well. I gave them my very best. Oh, you cannot say, any of you, that I did not give you my very best, and yet not one of you will stay with me. Not one of you. God--God! What have I done to be picked out of all the world for such a fate? Is it fair? Is it fair?'
Her voice goes wailing out into the mist; but the dying world around her has no answer to give to her riddle. It is awaiting that to its own. She has thrown herself down on the seat under her hawthorn bower, and from its dull berries and sharp thorns, and few still-clinging yellow leaves, the cold drops drip on her bare head, mix with the scalding drops on her cheeks; but she feels them not as she lies there, huddled up, collapsed, and despairing. Not for long, however. By and by her soul, as is the way with souls habitually brave, puts on its courage again. She raises herself, and lifts her drowned and weary eyes, as if through the fogs and exhalations they would pierce to Him who, as all the world once thought, as many still hold to be a truth far dearer than life, sits in judgment and mercy beyond them.
'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' she says solemnly. 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'
