CHAPTER XXXVII

'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?'