Chapter VIII: Consolation

‘This is indeed an affliction, dear Miss Beresford. We came up directly we heard of it; I would not let a moment pass. Oh, how little we know! We were thinking of your poor niece as having returned from her foreign tour; as being about to enter upon the brilliant society of the season. I don’t know when I have received such a shock; and my poor Maria, her feelings were almost beyond control; but she would not stay away.’

‘I thought she would come,’ said Miss Charity. ‘Maria always likes to get news from the fountain-head, and to see how people are bearing their troubles. Yes, my dear, I am bearing mine very well, as you see. Poor Annie! she was only my niece by marriage after all. At my age one sees even one’s own nieces, women with families, die without great trouble. It may sound hard, but it’s true. When a woman is married, and has her own children about her, you can’t but feel that she’s less to you. It’s dreadful for _them_; but, so far as you are concerned, you lost her long ago.’

‘Oh, dear Miss Beresford, you like to pretend you are calm, to hide how soft-hearted you are! But we know you better than that. I myself, though I knew (comparatively) so little of poor Mrs. James----’

‘And I thought you did not like each other, so it is all the more kind of you to cry. Cherry will cry too as much as you please, and be thankful for your sympathy. Have you had a pleasant walk? I think the primroses are thicker than ever this spring. We have been sending up basketsful. She was fond of them----’ Here the old lady faltered for a moment. This was the kind of allusion that melted her, not straightforward talk. She was in profound black, a great deal more crape than the dressmaker thought at all necessary, but Miss Charity had her own views on these subjects. ‘Put double upon me, and take it off the child,’ she had said, to the wonder of the tradespeople, who felt that the mourning for a niece by marriage was a very different thing from that which was required for a mother. Mrs. Burchell respected her greatly for her crape. She knew the value of it, and the unthriftiness, and felt that this was indeed showing respect.

‘We heard it was very sudden at last,’ said the Rector, ‘that nobody had the least idea--it was a very lingering disorder that she was supposed to have? So we heard, at least. Do you happen to know how the doctors accounted for its suddenness at last? There is something very dreadful to the imagination in so sudden a death.’

‘I wish I could think I should have as quick an end,’ said Miss Charity; ‘but we Beresfords are strong, and die hard. We can’t shake off life like that. We have to get rid of it by inches.’

‘My dear lady,’ said the Rector, ‘I don’t mean to say that I would put any trust in death-bed repentances; but surely it is a privilege to have that time left to us for solemn thought, for making sure that we are in the right way.’

‘I never think much when I am ill, my dear Rector; I can’t. I think why the flies buzz so, and I think if I was Martha it would make me unhappy to have such a red nose; and if you came to me, instead of listening to what you said, I should be thinking all the time that your white tie was undone’ (here the Rector furtively and nervously glanced down, and instinctively put up his hand to feel if the remark was true) ‘or your coat rusty at the elbows. I say these things at a hazard, not that I ever remarked them,’ she added, laughing. ‘You are tidiness itself.’

The Rector was put out by these chance possibilities of criticism, and could not but feel that Miss Charity’s quick eyes must have seen him with his white tie untidy, loosely unfastened, under his beard. He had grown a beard, like so many clergymen, and it was not an improvement. Instead of looking clean, as he once did, he looked black and coarse, a mixture of sea-captain and divine. He kept putting up his hand stealthily all the time he remained, and inviting his wife with nervous glances, to let him know if all was right. Unfortunately he could not see it under the forest of black beard.

‘We heard,’ said his wife, coming to his relief, ‘that there was something about an opiate--an over-dose, something of that sort--that poor Mrs. James had taken it without measuring it, or--you know how everything is exaggerated. I was quite afraid, and so glad to see the death in the paper without any inquest or formalities of that kind, which must be so painful. Was there really nothing in the story of the opiate? It is so strange how things get about.’

‘I don’t think it at all strange, Maria. The servants call in a strange doctor, in their fright, who does not know anything about her case or temperament. He hears that she has to take some calming drops to relieve her pain, and of course he jumps in his ignorance to the idea of an overdose. It is the fashionable thing now-a-days. It is what they all say----’

‘And there was _no_ truth in it?’

‘None whatever,’ said Miss Charity, who, safest of all advocates, implicitly believed what she was saying, not knowing that any doubt had ever existed on the subject. She sat facing them in her new mourning, so freshly, crisply black. Miss Charity knew of no mystery even, and her calm certainty had all the genuine force of truth.

The Rector and his wife looked at each other. ‘It shows that one should not believe the tenth part of what one hears,’ he said. ‘I was told confidently that poor Mrs. James Beresford held strange ideas about some things.’

‘That you may be quite sure of, Rector. I never knew any one yet worth their salt who did not hold odd ideas about something----’

‘Not about fundamentals, my dear lady. I am not straitlaced; but there are some matters--on some things, I am sure, none of us would like to give an uncertain sound. Life, for example--human life, is too sacred to be trifled with; but there is a set of speculatists, of false philosophers--I don’t know what to call them--sceptics, infidels they generally are, and at the same time radicals, republicans----’

‘Ah, politics? I dare say poor Annie was odd in politics. What did it matter? they were not political people. If James had been in Parliament, indeed, as I should like to have seen him--but unfortunately he was a man of fine tastes; that is fatal. A man of fine tastes, who is fond of travelling, and collecting, and rapt up in his wife, will never become a public man; and I should like to have seen James in Parliament. Strange ideas! oh, yes, queer to the last degree. If there is anything worse than republicanism (is there?) I should think poor Annie went in for that.’

‘That is bad enough, but it is not exactly what I meant,’ said the Rector; and then he rose up with an air of the deepest conventional respect. ‘My dear, here is your kind friend, Miss Cherry,’ he said.

Mrs. Burchell sprang up at the intimation, and rushed forward with open arms. She had put on a black merino dress instead of her usual silk, and a black shawl, to mark her sense of the calamity--and swallowed up poor slim Miss Cherry in the entanglements of that embrace, with solemn fervour. Cherry had not much sense of humour, and she was too good to pass any judgment upon the sudden warmth of affection thus exhibited; but it was a little confusing and suffocating to find herself without any warning engulfed in Mrs. Burchell’s old merino and the folds of her shawl.

‘Oh, my dear, dear Cherry, if I could but tell you how I feel for you! How little did we think when we last met----’

‘You are very kind,’ said Miss Cherry, drawing herself forth somewhat limp and crushed from this embrace. ‘I am sure you are very kind.’ Her lips quivered and the tears came to her eyes; but she was not so overwhelmed as her consoler, who had begun to sob. ‘It is my poor brother I think of,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘It is little to us in comparison with, what it is to him. I think of him most; more than of poor Annie, who is safe out of all trouble.’

‘We must hope so, at least,’ said the Rector, shaking his head; and his wife stopped sobbing, and interchanged a glance with him, which was full of meaning.

‘Poor Mrs. James! It was so sudden. I fear there was no time for preparation--no time even for thought?’

‘Men soon get the better of these things,’ said Miss Charity, ‘and the more they feel it at the time the more easily they are cured. Cherry there will think of her longer than her husband will. I don’t mean to say your grief’s so great, my dear, but it will last.’

‘Oh, aunt, you do James injustice! He thought of nothing but Annie. The light of his eyes is gone, and the comfort of his house, and all he cares for in life.’

Here poor Miss Cherry, moved by her own eloquence, began to cry, picturing to herself this dismal future. Nothing at Sunninghill was changed: the room was as full of primroses as the woods were; great baskets of them mingled with blue violets filled every corner; the sunshine came in unclouded; the whole place was bright. It struck the tender-hearted woman with sudden compunction: ‘We are not touched,’ she said; ‘we have everything just the same as ever, as bright; but my poor James, in that house by himself; and the child! Oh, Aunt Charity, when I think of him, I feel as if my heart would break.’

Miss Charity took up her work and began to knit furiously. ‘He will get over it,’ she said, ‘in time. It will be dreadful work at first; but he will get over it. He has plenty of friends, both men and women. Don’t upset me with your talk; he will get over it--men always do.’

‘And let us hope it will lead him to think more seriously,’ said Mrs. Burchell. ‘Oh, I am sure if you thought my dear husband could be of any use--we all know he has not been what we may call serious, and oh, dear Miss Beresford, would not this affliction be a cheap price to pay for it, if it brought him to a better state of mind?’

‘His wife’s life? It would be a high price for any advantage that would come to him, I think. Dry your eyes, Cherry, and go and put on your bonnet. This is Mr. Maxwell’s day, and you had better go back to town with him.’

‘Was it Mr. Maxwell who attended poor Mrs. James? I hope he is considered a clever man.’

‘How oddly you good people speak! Do you want to insinuate that he is not a clever man? He takes charge of my health, you know, and he has kept me going long enough. Eh! yes, I am irritable, I suppose; we are all put out. You good quiet folks, with all your children about, nothing happening to you----’

‘Indeed, Miss Beresford, you do us great injustice,’ said Mrs. Burchell, stung, as was natural, by such an assertion, while the Rector slowly shook his head. ‘We do not complain; but perhaps if we were to tell all, as some people do. Nothing happening to us!--ah, how little you know!’

‘Well, well, let us say you have a great many troubles; you can feel then for other people. Ah, here is Mr. Maxwell. Don’t talk of me now; don’t think of me, my good man. I am as well--as well--a great deal better than a poor useless woman of nearly threescore and ten has any right to be when the young are taken. How is James?’

The doctor, who had come in by the open window with a familiarity which made the Rector and his wife look at each other, sat down by the old lady’s side and began to talk to her. Miss Cherry had gone to put on her bonnet, and by-and-by Mr. and Mrs. Burchell rose to take their leave.

‘I am so glad to hear that, sad as it was, it was a natural death, and one that you expected,’ said the Rector, taking Maxwell aside for a moment.

The doctor stared at him, with somewhat fiery eyes. ‘A natural death? Mrs. Beresford’s? What did you expect it to be?’

‘Oh, my dear sir, I don’t mean anything! We had heard very different accounts--so many things are said----’

‘You should put a stop to them, then,’ said the other, who was not without temper; and he and Miss Charity paused in their sadder talk, as the visitors disappeared, to interchange some remarks about them which were not complimentary.

‘What they can mean by making up such wicked lies, and putting a slur on her memory, poor child!’ said the old lady with a sudden gush of hot tears.

The doctor said something very hotly about ‘meddlesome parsons,’ and hastily plunged again into descriptions of poor James. The other was not a subject on which he could linger. ‘I never saw a man so broken-hearted; they were always together; he misses her morning, noon, and night. Cherry must come to him; she must come at once,’ he said, forgetting how long it was since he had spoken of Cherry before by her Christian name. But Miss Charity noticed it with the keen spectator instinct of her age, and ruminated in an undercurrent of thought even while she thought of ‘poor James,’ whether Maxwell’s faith in Cherry ‘meant anything,’ or if new combinations of life might be involved in the sequences of that death scene.

The same thought was in the minds of the clerical pair as they went down the hill. ‘Will _that_ come to anything?’ they said to each other.

‘It is a nice little property,’ said the Rector, ‘and I suppose she will have everything.’

‘But if I was Cherry,’ said Mrs. Burchell, ‘I should not like to be thrown at his head in that very open way. Going with him to town! It is as good as offering her to him.’

‘She is no longer young, my dear,’ said the Rector, ‘and people now-a-days have not your delicacy.’

‘Oh, I have no patience with their nonsense!’ she cried; ‘and their friendships, forsooth--as if men and women could ever be friends!’

And it is possible that in other circumstances Miss Cherry’s tranquil soul might have owned a flutter at thought of the escort which she accepted so quietly to-day; but she was absorbed with thoughts of her brother and of the possible use she might be, which was sweet to her, notwithstanding her grief. Miss Charity shook her head doubtfully. ‘It is not Cherry that will help him,’ she said, ‘but the child will be the better of a woman in the house.’

Really that was what Mr. Maxwell wanted, a woman in the house; something to speak to, something to refer everything to; something to blame even, if things were not all right. The funeral was over, and all that dismal business which appals yet gives a temporary occupation and support to the sorrowful. And now the blank of common life had recommenced.

‘Perhaps she will not help him much; but she will be there,’ said the doctor. He was glad for himself that a soft-voiced, soft-eyed, pitying creature should be there. There was help in the mere fact, whatever she might say or do.

Cara had been living a strange life through these melancholy days. She had not known, poor child, the full significance of that scene by her mother’s bedside, of which she had been a witness. She did not fully understand even now: but glimmers of horrible intelligence had come to her during that interview in the library, and the things she had heard afterwards from the servants had enlightened her still more. She heard the whispers that circulated among them, terrified whispers, said half under their breath. That she had done it herself--that she knew, poor dear, what she was doing--that if anything had been known, there would have been an inquest, and things would have come out. This was what Cara heard breathing about in half whispers, and which filled her with strange panic, lest her secret should escape her. She knew the secret, and she only. Nobody had questioned her, but the child’s impulse to tell had bound her very soul for days after. She had resisted it, though she had felt guilty and miserable to know something which no one else knew; but she had kept her secret. ‘Don’t let us brand her with the name of suicide.’ These words seemed to ring in her ears night and day. She repeated them over and over to herself. ‘Don’t let us brand her with the name of suicide.’

‘No, no,’ poor Cara said to herself, trembling; ‘no, no:’ though this premature and horrible secret weighed down her heart like a visible burden. Oh, if she could but have told it to nurse, or to Aunt Cherry! but she must not, not even to papa. When her aunt arrived, it was mingled torture and relief to the poor child. She clung round her with sobbing, longing so to tell; but even to cling and to sob was consolatory, and Aunt Cherry wanted no explanation of that unusual depth of childish distress. ‘Cara was not like other children,’ she said to herself. She had feelings which were deeper and more tender. She was ‘sensitive,’ she was ‘nervous.’ She was more loving than the ordinary children, who cry one moment and forget the next. And kind Cherry, though her own grief was of the milder, secondary kind, as was natural, had always tears of sympathy to give for the grief of others. She took the little girl almost entirely into her own care, and would talk to her for hours together; about being ‘good,’ about subduing all her little irritabilities, in order to please mamma, who was in heaven, and would be grieved in her happiness to think that her child was not ‘good.’ Cara was greatly awed and subdued by this talk. It hushed her, yet set her wondering; and those conversations were sometimes very strange ones, which went on between the two in their melancholy and silent hours.

‘Does everybody go to heaven who dies?’ said Cara, with awe-stricken looks.

Miss Cherry trembled a little, having some fear of false doctrine before her eyes. ‘Everybody, I hope, who loves God. There are bad people, Cara; but we don’t know them, you and I.’

‘Who love God? but I never think of God, Aunt Cherry. At least, I do now; I wonder. But if they did not do that, would they still go to heaven all the same?’

‘God loves us, dear,’ said Cherry, with the tears in her soft eyes. ‘Fathers and mothers love their children, whether their children love them or not. That is all we know.’

‘Whatever they do? if they even laugh, and go wrong? Yes,’ said Cara, very thoughtfully, ‘I suppose papa would not send me away, out into the dark, if I did ever so wrong.’

‘I am sure he would not; but you must not think of such things, dear; they are too difficult for you. When you are older, you will understand better,’ Cherry said, faltering, and with something in her heart which contradicted her; for did not the child ‘understand’ better than she?

Then Cara started another difficulty, quite as appalling; facing it with innocent confidence, yet wonder: ‘What sort of a place,’ she asked, softly, looking up with her blue eyes full of serious faith and awe, ‘is heaven?’

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘you ask me what I would give all I have in the world to know! There are so many whom I love there.’

‘But what do you _think_? Often when one doesn’t know, one has an _idea_. I don’t know Italy or India; but I imagine something. Aunt Cherry, tell me what you think.’

‘Oh, Cara, my darling, I don’t know what it is _like_! I know there is no trouble or pain in it; and that God is not so far off as here. No, He is not far off here; but we can’t see Him; and we are such poor dull creatures. And I _think_, Cara, I _think_ that our Lord must be always about there. That people may go and stand on the roadside and see Him pass, and talk to Him, and be satisfied about everything.’

‘How--be satisfied about everything?’

‘Oh, child! _I_ should not want anything more. He sees both sides, my darling, both here and there, and understands. I am sure they must be able to speak to Him, and go to Him, whenever they will----’

This thought brought great tears, a suffusion of utter wistfulness yet heart-content, to Cherry’s eyes. Little Cara did not know very well what was meant by such words. She did not understand this conception of the great Creator as a better taught child might have done. But she said to herself, all secretly: ‘If there is One like _that_, whether it is in heaven or earth, I might tell Him, and it would be no harm.’

While Miss Cherry dried her eyes, her heart lightened by that overflowing. Perhaps, though they had not seen Him, He had passed that way, and heard the babble--what was it more?--between the woman and the child.