“I think you are beginning to love me,” Eve said, too sensitive not to feel the change.
“My dear child, I always loved you.”
“Only a very little,” argued Eve. “You liked me pretty well in the abstract, I dare say, but you did not care for me as Mrs. John Vansittart. It was very natural. You had your own favourites, anyone of whom you would have liked Jack to marry; dear, nice girls who always wear tidy frocks, play the ‘Lieder ohne Worte,’ and visit the poor. I was altogether a detrimental.”
“It was not you, Eve—only your people.”
“My people—meaning my father. Yes, he was a stumbling-block, no doubt—a man who had gone down in the world, and about whom malevolent people said cruel things. Well, he has not been obtrusive, has he? He has kept himself in the background.”
“My dear, he has been admirable, and your sisters, when I came to know them and understand them, proved altogether unobjectionable. We saw a good deal of each other while you were away.”
“Sophy told me how kind you had been. Yes, they are good girls. Their faults are all on the surface. But the flower of the flock is gone—the brightest and the most loving. She was all love.”
“Take comfort, dear; there is deep sorrow, but there can be no bitterness in the thought of a child’s death.”
“Ah, that is what you religious people say,” cried Eve, rebelliously, “but I have not faith enough to feel that. Why should she be taken? Life was all before her, full of happiness, of beautiful sights and sounds, and joys untasted. She was taken from the evil to come, you will say—but there might be no evil. There has been no evil in your life! See how peacefully it has glided by.”
“You forget, Eve, that I have had to sorrow for a beloved husband.”
“Oh, forgive me. Yes, you have felt the burden—the shadow has fallen upon you too—the shadow, and the burden of death. Why did the Creator make a beautiful world, and then spoil it?”
“Eve, this is blasphemy.”
“The heart must rebel sometimes; one must ask these questions. ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ Is it only the fool who says that? Is it not the bitter cry of all humanity at some time or other?”
“Eve, you are writhing under your first sorrow. Let it turn your heart to God, not away from Him. Do you think the unbeliever’s creed will give you any comfort?”
“Comfort? No. There is no comfort in religion, or in unbelief. Religion only means obedience, and public worship, and kindness to the poor, and a good orderly life. It doesn’t mean the certainty of getting back our dead—somewhere, somehow, and being happy again as we have been.”
“We can rest in the hope of that, Eve, knowing that we are immortal.”
“Knowing? But we don’t know. Nobody has ever come back to tell us. Oh, if but once, only once, for one moment in a year, our dead could come back and look at us, and speak to us, death would not be death.”
Mrs. Vansittart spoke no more of comfort. It was better perhaps to let the troubled heart tire itself out with grieving. Tranquillity would come afterwards.
“And our son, our son who breathed only to die. He did not live even long enough for baptism. He was dead when the Bishop came hurriedly from his house on the hill. You think perhaps—you who are a strict Anglican—that his soul is in limbo—that he will never see the throne of God. We were going to be so fond of him, Jack and I—and Peggy wanted to live long enough to see him—but she was gone before he came, and he didn’t care about living. If she had been well and happy all things would have been different. They would have been running about together in a year or two from now. And now she would have been carrying him about in her arms. He would have been beginning to notice people, and to laugh and coo like that cottager’s child we saw yesterday, just about as old as my baby would have been now.”
“My dearest, do you suppose I am not sorry for your loss and for your husband’s? But God never meant us to rebel, even in our grief. That must not be.”
“I know I am wicked,” said Eve, with a long-drawn sigh. “I have my fits of wickedness. In church yesterday, on my knees at the altar, I thought that I was resigned, I almost believed in the heaven where we shall see and know our friends again.”
The dark hour passed, and at sunset, when Vansittart came home from a long day in the plantations, his wife received him with her brightest smile. His coming back after a few hours’ absence meant the fullness of joy.
She had spent a day at Fernhurst, and the sight of her three sisters in their somewhat ostentatious mourning had renewed her grief. She had sent them money for mourning, which largesse they had spent conscientiously, and so were swathed in crape and distinctly funereal of aspect.
There were Peggy’s sisters, whose very existence recalled her image too vividly; and there was Peggy’s room, the room which she had shared with Hetty; and the little bed where she had slept so peacefully, with her nose almost touching the sloping roof, before the cruel cough took hold of her, and disturbed those happy, childish slumbers, with their visions of fairyland, or of castles in the air which seemed solid and real to the dreamer. Everything in that cottage chamber suggested her who slept in a far lovelier spot.
The room remained just as the child had left it. Peggy’s things were sacred. There was her workbox, the substantial, old-fashioned rosewood box, inlaid with mother-o’-pearl, and lined with blue silk, the old, old blue, a colour such as modern taste holds up to scorn—for the box was nearly half a
