Chapter XXXII: Taking Up Dropt Stitches

Next day Mr. Beresford paid Mrs. Meredith a visit of condolence. It was natural and necessary, considering their friendship; but the manner in which that friendship had been interrupted, and the occasion upon which it was resumed, were both embarrassing. It had been a short note from Maxwell which had communicated the news to him, and in this it had been taken for granted that he would now remain at home. Old Mr. Sommerville had himself communicated the information to Maxwell, and his letter was enclosed. ‘I hear your friend Beresford had made up his mind to go away, out of consideration for Mrs. Meredith,’ he had written, ‘which was very gentlemanly on his part, and showed fine feeling. I think it right accordingly to let you know at once of the great change which has taken place in her position. I have received the news this morning of her husband and my poor friend John Meredith’s death at Calcutta on the 3rd inst. It was sudden, but not quite unexpected, as he had been suffering from fever. This of course changes Mrs. Meredith’s situation altogether. She is now a widow, and of course responsible to no one. I would not for the world be answerable for depriving her of the sympathy of a kind friend, _which may in the long run be so important for her_, at a period of trouble. So I trust you will communicate the news to your friend with the least possible delay. I have not seen Mrs. Meredith; but as they have been long separated, I do not doubt that she bears the loss with Christian composure,’ said the sharp-witted old man. ‘I send you old Sommerville’s letter,’ Mr. Maxwell added on his own account; ‘it does not require any comment of mine; and of course you will act as you think proper; but my own opinion is, that he is an old busybody, making suggestions of patent absurdity.’ Mr. Beresford was much nettled by this note. Whatever Sommerville’s suggestion might mean it was for him to judge of it, not Maxwell, who thrust himself so calmly into other people’s business. Sommerville’s letter might not have pleased him by itself, but Maxwell’s gloss was unpardonable. He tore it up and threw it into his waste-basket with unnecessary energy. But for that perhaps he might have felt more abashed by the embarrassing character of the reunion; but being thus schooled, he rebelled. He went to the house next door in the afternoon, towards the darkening. The spring sunshine had died away, and the evening was cold as winter almost. There had been no reception that day--visitor after visitor had been sent away with the news of the ‘bereavement.’ The same word has to be used whether the loss is one which crushes all delight out of life, or one which solemnly disturbs the current for a moment, to leave it only brighter than before. All the servants at Mrs. Meredith’s were preternaturally solemn. The aspect of the house could not have been more funereal had half the population succumbed. Already, by some wonderful effort of millinery, the maids as well as their mistress had got their black gowns.

Mrs. Meredith herself sat in the drawing-room, crape from head to foot, in all the crispness of a fresh widow’s cap. Never was black so black, or white so white. She had an innocent satisfaction in heaping up this kind of agony. Already a design drawn by Oswald was in the hands of the goldsmith for a locket to hold her husband’s hair. She would not bate a jot of anything that the most bereaved mourner could do to show her ‘respect.’ Even the tears were ready, and they were sincere tears. A pang of compunction, a pang of regret, of remorseful pity and tenderness, melted her heart, and there was a certain pleasure of melancholy in all this which made it spontaneous. It was the very luxury of sentiment, to be able to feel your heart untouched underneath, and yet to be so deeply, unfeignedly sorry, to be so true a mourner at so little real cost. Mrs. Meredith held out her hand to her visitor as he came in--he was the only one whom she had received.

‘This is kind,’ she said--‘very kind. As you were always such a good friend to us, I could not say no to you.’

‘I was very sorry,’ he said; as indeed what else was there to say?

‘Oh, yes, I knew you would feel for us. It was so sudden--quite well when the last mail came in, and this one to bring such news! You scarcely knew him; and, oh, I feel it so much now, that none of my friends, that not even the boys knew him as they ought to have known him. It seems as if it must have been my fault.’

‘_That_ it could never have been. You must not reproach yourself; though one always does, however the loss happens,’ he said, in a low and sorrowful tone. He was thinking of his wife, for whom he had mourned with the intensity of despair, but the same words answered both cases. He stood as he had done the last time he was there, not looking at her in her panoply of mourning, but looking dreamily into the fire. And she cried a little, with a childish sob in her throat. The grief was perfectly real, childlike, and innocent. He was much more affected by the recollection of that last meeting at which he had taken leave of her than she was--he remembered it better. The new incident even kept her from seeing anything more than the most ordinary every-day fact, one friend coming to see another, in his return.

‘I suppose you have no details?’

‘Not one. We cannot hear till the next mail. It will be some comfort to have particulars. Poor John! he was always so strong, one never had any fear. I was the one that could not stand the climate; and yet I am left and he is taken!’

‘But you have not been exposed to the climate,’ said Mr. Beresford. She was not wise in these expressions of her personal grief, though her friends always thought her so wise in her sympathy. She resumed softly:

‘I have no fears about the boys to embitter my grief. I know they will be well cared for. He was so good a father, though he had them so little with him. Oh, why did you not tell me to send him one of the boys?’

Mr. Beresford would have felt himself the cruellest of malignants, had he ventured to make such a suggestion in former days, but he did not say this now. ‘You did what you thought was best for them,’ he said.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘for them; there was their education to be thought of. That was what I considered; but I do not think--do you think,’ she added, with an unconscious clasping of her hands and entreating look, ‘that, since the great occasion for it is over--Edward need go to India now?’

The form of the speech was that of an assertion--the tone that of a question. She might follow her own inclinations like other people; but she liked to have them sanctioned and approved by her friends.

‘Surely not, if you don’t wish it. There is only your wish to be considered.’

‘It is not myself I am thinking of. It is for him,’ she said, faltering. Of all things that could happen to her, she was least willing to allow that her own will or wish had any share in her decisions. It was a weakness which perhaps the more enlightened of her friends were already aware of. As for Mr. Beresford, he was more critical of her than ever he had been before, although more entirely sympathetic, more ready to throw himself into her service. She looked at him so anxiously. She wanted his opinion and the support of his concurrence. There was nothing for him to do, to be of use as he proposed, but to agree with her, to support what she had thought of--that was friendship indeed.

On the next day Miss Cherry paid a similar visit of condolence, but she was not so tenderly sympathetic as, under other circumstances, she would naturally have been. She looked at the new-made widow with a critical eye. A short time before no one had been more anxious than Miss Cherry that Mrs. Meredith should suffer no harm, should lose no title of respect due to her. She had with her own soft hand struck a blow, the severity of which astonished herself, at her favourite and only brother on Mrs. Meredith’s account; but the sudden revolution in their neighbour’s affairs, instead of touching her heart, closed it. The position was changed, and a hundred tremors and terrors took at once possession of her gentle bosom. Who could doubt what James would wish now--what James would do? and who could doubt that the woman who had permitted him so intimate a friendship would respond to these wishes? This idea leaped at once into the minds of all the lookers-on. Old Sommerville sent the news with a chuckle of grim cynicism yet kindness; Maxwell communicated it with a grudge; and Miss Cherry received it with an instant conviction yet defiance. They had no doubt of what would, nay, must ensue, and jumped at the conclusion with unanimous agreement; and it would be quite true to say that Mr. Meredith’s death brought quite as great a pang to Miss Cherry, who had never seen him, as it did to his wife, though in a different way. If the first marriage, the natural youthful beginning of serious life, brings often with it a train of attendant embarrassments, almost miseries, what is a second marriage to do? Good Miss Cherry’s maidenly mind was shocked by the idea that her brother, so long held up somewhat proudly by the family as an example of conjugal fidelity and true sorrow, had allowed feelings less exalted to get possession of him. And what would Cara do? How would her imaginative delicate being, too finely touched for common issues, conform to the vulgar idea of a stepmother? Miss Cherry grew hot and angry as she thought of it. And a man who had such a child, a grown-up daughter, sweetest and only fit substitute for the mother dead, what did he want with a new companion, a new love? Faugh! to use such a word disgusted her; and that James--_James!_ the most heart-broken and inconsolable of mourners, should come to that! With all this in her mind, it may be supposed that Miss Cherry’s feelings when she went to see Mrs. Meredith and found her in all her crape, crying softly by the fire, were not so sweet as they ought to have been. She said the usual things in the way of consolation--how, as it was to be, perhaps it was best that they had heard of it all at once, and had not been kept in anxiety; and how she supposed such afflictions were necessary for us, though it was very sad that the dear boys had known so little of their father; but, on the other hand, how that fact must soften it to them all, for of course it was not as if he had died at home, where they would have felt the loss every day. This last speech had a sting in it, which was little intentional, and yet gave Miss Cherry a sense of remorse after it was said; for though she had a certain desire to give pain, momentary, and the result of much provocation, yet the moment the pain was given, it was herself who suffered most. This is what it is to have a soft nature; most people have at least a temporary satisfaction in the result when they have been able to inflict a wound.

‘Oh, yes, my dear, she feels it, I suppose,’ Miss Cherry said, when she returned. ‘She was sitting over the fire, and the room much too warm for the season; for it is really like spring to-day. Of course a woman must feel it more or less when she has lost her husband. I have never been in these circumstances, but I don’t see how one could help that--however little one cared for the man.’

‘Did she care little for the man?’ Cara was at the age when most things are taken for granted. She had not entered into any peculiarities in the position of Mrs. Meredith with her husband. She was like Hamlet, recognising more and more, as she realised her own position, the quagmires and unsafe footing round her--was this another? There was a sinking sensation in Cara’s youthful mind, and a doubt and faltering wherever she thought to place her foot.

‘My dear child,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘when a woman spends years after years away from her husband, never making any effort to join him, quite satisfied with a letter now and then, receiving her own friends, making a circle, going into society--while the poor man is toiling to keep it up, thousands and thousands of miles away’--here Miss Cherry paused, a little frightened by the blackness of the picture which she had herself drawn. ‘I hope I am not doing anyone injustice,’ she faltered. ‘Oh, my dear, you may be sure I don’t mean that. And I believe poor Mrs. Meredith could not stand the climate, and of course there was the boys’ education to think of--children always must come home. Indeed, how anyone can settle in India knowing that their children must be sent away----’

‘Aunt Cherry, no one is to be trusted,’ said the girl, tears coming to her eyes; ‘there is no truth anywhere. We are all making a pretence one way or another; pretending to care for people who are living, pretending to mourn for people who are dead; pretending that one thing is our object, while we are trying for another; pretending to be merry, pretending to be sad. Ah! it makes my heart sick!’

‘Cara, Cara! What do you know about such things? They say it is so in the world, but you and I have very little to do with the world, dear. You must not think--indeed, indeed, you must not think that it is so with us.’

‘I don’t know anything of the world,’ said Cara. ‘I only know what is round me. If Mrs. Meredith is false, and papa false, and other people----’

‘My dear,’ said Miss Cherry, trembling a little, ‘it is always dangerous to apply abstract principles so. When I say that Mrs. Meredith was a long time away from her husband, I do not say that she is _false_. Oh, Cara, no! that would be terrible. If I say anything, all I mean is that she could not be so grieved, not so _dreadfully_ grieved, as a woman would be whose husband had been always with her. Think of the boys, for instance; they did not know him really; they may be very sorry; but, how different would it be if it was a father like your father! And other people--what do you mean by other people?’

‘Nothing,’ said Cara, turning away, for she could not reply to Miss Cherry’s argument. Would she indeed, in her own person, grieve for her father more than the Merediths did for theirs? Here was another mystery unpenetrated by Miss Cherry, incomprehensible to herself. Nobody knew the gulf that lay between her and him, and she could not tell herself what it meant. How kind he had been to her, though she repaid him in this way; but did he love--really love--his child any more than she loved him? Did anybody love any other, or only pretend and go through the semblance of loving? She did not doubt her aunts, it is true; but then her certainty in respect to them took, to some degree, the form of indifference. Taken for granted, not inquired into, that love itself might have failed, perhaps--but Cara never thought of it as possible. It was like the sunny house it dwelt on, always open, due not to anything in her, but to the mere fact that she was Cara. They would have loved any other kind of girl, she said to herself, under the same name just as well. Poor child! she was like Hamlet, though unaware of that sublimity. Friends, lovers, relations, all had failed her. Every soul thought of himself--no one truly or unfeignedly of others. Her head swam, her heart sank, the firm ground gave way under her feet wherever she turned. It might not cost the others much, but it cost her a great deal; even she herself in her own person: did she love more truly than they did? No; she was not devoted to her father, nor to Oswald, whom she was supposed to care for; and if to--anyone else, then they did not care for her, Cara said to herself, and fled from her thoughts with a beating heart.

That evening there was an interchange of visits, something in the old fashion. Edward thought he might come in, in the evening, when the public about would not be scandalised by the idea that he was able to visit his friends so soon after his father’s death; and Mr. Beresford said to himself that, surely he might go for a little to comfort his neighbour who was in trouble, and who had not herself been out of doors for these two long days. The young man and the older man crossed each other, but without meeting; and both of the visits were very pleasant. Miss Cherry was as kind to Edward as she had been cold to his mother. She got up to meet him and took his two hands in hers. She called him, inarticulately, her dear boy, and asked after his health tenderly, as if he had been ill. As for Cara, she did nothing but look at him with a wistful look, trying to read in his eyes what he felt; and when her aunt entered into the usual commonplaces about resignation to God’s will, Cara broke in almost abruptly, impatient even of this amiable fiction.

‘You forget what you were saying to-day,’ she said: ‘that Edward did not know his father, and therefore could not grieve as--I should.’

‘That is quite true,’ he said, ‘and therefore it is a different kind of feeling. Not the grief that Cara would feel; but that painful sense of not being able to feel, which is almost worse. I never thought of my father--scarcely knew him. Some time, of course, we were to meet--that was all; and gratitude to him, or any attempt to repay him, was not in my thoughts. And now it is impossible ever, in any place, were one to go to the world’s end--or at any time, were one to live as long as Methuselah, to say a kind word to him, to try to make up to him a little. This is more painful than Cara’s worst grief would be, knowing she had done everything, made everything bright.’

‘Oh, no, no!’ she said, putting up her hands.

‘Ah, yes, yes!’ he said, looking at her with melting eyes, softened and enlarged by the moisture in them, and smiling upon her. Cara, in her confusion, could not meet the look and the smile.

‘Oh, Edward,’ she said, ‘it is you who are the best of us all. I am not good, as you think me. I am a sham, like all the rest; but if there is one that is true----’

‘Cara is foolish,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘I don’t know what is come to her, Edward. She talks as if nobody was to be relied upon; but I suppose she is at the age of fancy, when girls take things into their heads. I remember when I was your age, my darling, I had a great many fancies too. And I am afraid I have some still, though I ought to know better. I suppose you will take your mother away somewhere, Edward, for a little change?’

‘I have not heard anything about it, Miss Cherry; but there will be one change, most likely, very important to me, if I settle to do it. I need not go out to India now--unless I please.’

‘Oh, Edward, I am so glad; for, of course, you would not wish it--you did not wish it?’

‘No,’ he said, slowly. ‘I did not wish it; but, after all, if that seemed the best way to be good for something--to make some use of one’s life----’

He spoke to Miss Cherry, but his eyes were on Cara. If she had said anything; if she had even lifted her eyes; if she had made any sign to show that even as her brother--her husband’s brother--he could be of use to her! But Cara made no reply either by word or look. She put her hand nervously upon the book which lay on the table--the book he had been reading.

‘Oh, Cara, you must not think of that,’ said Miss Cherry; ‘we can’t be so selfish as to ask Edward to read to-night.’

‘Yes; let me read,’ he said. ‘Why should not I? I am glad to do anything after these two days. It seemed unkind to _him_, not to make some break in life--though I don’t know why; and there is nothing within reach to do. Let me read.’

Then Cara looked at him, with eyes like his own, suffused; her heart was melting, her mind satisfied. ‘But this is the one who does not care for me,’ she was saying to herself.

Next door there was less conversation between the elder people. Mr. Beresford tried, indeed, to take upon him the part of consoler--to talk to her and lessen her burden; but that change of all their relations did not answer. He fell silent after a while, and she dried her eyes and began to talk to him. The maid who brought up tea announced that Missis had picked up wonderful; while the other servants in the kitchen looked at each other, and shook their heads.

‘Anyhow, _that’s_ better than the other way,’ the cook said, oracularly, ‘and we knows what we has before us--if the young gentlemen don’t find nothing to say.’