“No, papa, I won’t go without you. Who is to take care of you when I am gone?”
“I should like to know which of us is taking care of the other. But if you went, I should persuade Mr. Thornton to let me give him double lessons. We would work up the classics famously. That would be a perpetual interest. You might go on, and see Edith at Corfu, if you liked.”
Margaret did not speak all at once. Then she said rather gravely: “Thank you, papa. But I don’t want to go. We will hope that Mr. Lennox will manage so well, that Frederick may bring Dolores to see us when they are married. And as for Edith, the regiment won’t remain much longer in Corfu. Perhaps we shall see both of them here before another year is out.”
Mr. Hale’s cheerful subjects had come to an end. Some painful recollections had stolen across his mind, and driven him into silence. By and by Margaret said:
“Papa—did you see Nicholas Higgins at the funeral? He was there, and Mary too. Poor fellow! it was his way of showing sympathy. He has a good warm heart under his bluff abrupt ways.”
“I am sure of it,” replied Mr. Hale. “I saw it all along, even while you tried to persuade me that he was all sorts of bad things. We will go and see them tomorrow, if you are strong enough to walk so far.”
“Oh yes. I want to see them. We did not pay Mary—or rather she refused to take it, Dixon says. We will go so as to catch him just after his dinner, and before he goes to his work.”
Towards evening Mr. Hale said:
“I half expected Mr. Thornton would have called. He spoke of a book yesterday which he had, and which I wanted to see. He said he would try and bring it today.”
Margaret sighed. She knew he would not come. He would be too delicate to run the chance of meeting her, while her shame must be so fresh in his memory. The very mention of his name renewed her trouble, and produced a relapse into the feeling of depressed, preoccupied exhaustion. She gave way to listless languor. Suddenly it struck her that this was a strange manner to show her patience, or to reward her father for his watchful care of her all through the day. She sat up, and offered to read aloud. His eyes were failing, and he gladly accepted her proposal. She read well: she gave the due emphasis; but had anyone asked her, when she had ended, the meaning of what she had been reading, she could not have told. She was smitten with a feeling of ingratitude to Mr. Thornton, inasmuch as, in the morning, she had refused to accept the kindness he had shown her in making further inquiry from the medical men, so as to obviate any inquest being held. Oh! she was grateful! She had been cowardly and false, and had shown her cowardliness and falsehood in action that could not be recalled; but she was not ungrateful. It sent a glow to her heart, to know she could feel towards one who had reason to despise her. His cause for contempt was so just, that she should have respected him less if she had thought he did not feel contempt. It was a pleasure to feel how thoroughly she respected him. He could not prevent her doing that; it was the one comfort in all this misery.
Late in the evening, the expected book arrived, “with Mr. Thornton’s kind regards, and wishes to know how Mr. Hale is.”
“Say that I am much better, Dixon, but that Miss Hale—”
“No, papa,” said Margaret, eagerly—“don’t say anything about me. He does not ask.”
“My dear child, how you are shivering!” said her father, a few minutes afterwards. “You must go to bed directly. You have turned quite pale!”
Margaret did not refuse to go, though she was loth to leave her father alone. She needed the relief of solitude after a day of busy thinking, and busier repenting.
But she seemed much as usual the next day; the lingering gravity and sadness, and the occasional absence of mind, were not unnatural symptoms in the early days of grief. And almost in proportion to her reestablishment in health, was her father’s relapse into his abstracted musings upon the wife he had lost, and the past era in his life that was closed to him forever.
XXXVI
Union Not Always Strength
The steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
Shelley
The sobs of the mourners, deep and low.
At the time arranged the previous day, they set out on their walk to see Nicholas Higgins and his daughter. They both were reminded of their recent loss, by a strange kind of shyness in their new habiliments, and in the fact that it was the first time, for many weeks, that they had deliberately gone out together. They drew very close to each other in unspoken sympathy.
Nicholas was sitting by the fireside in his accustomed corner; but he had not his accustomed pipe. He was leaning his head upon his hand, his arm resting on his knee. He did not get up when he saw them, though Margaret could read the welcome in his eye.
“Sit ye down, sit ye down. Fire’s welly out,” said he, giving it a vigorous poke, as if to turn attention away from himself. He was rather disorderly, to be sure, with a black unshaven beard of several days’ growth, making his pale face look yet paler, and a jacket which would have been all the better for patching.
“We thought we should have a good chance of finding you, just after dinnertime,” said Margaret.
“We have had our sorrows too, since we saw you,” said Mr. Hale.
“Ay, ay. Sorrows is more plentiful than dinners just now;
