That dreadful day ebbed over slowly--tedious, yet so full of events
and dismal business that it looked like a year rather than a day. The
necessary investigations were got through without any special call upon
Nettie. She spent the most of the day up-stairs with Susan, whose wild
refusal to believe at first, and sullen stupor afterwards, were little
different from the picture which Nettie's imagination had already made.
The children received the news with wondering stares and questions.
That they did not understand it was little, but that they scarcely
were interested after the first movement of curiosity, disappointed and
wounded the impatient heart, which unconsciously chafed at its own total
inability to convey the feelings natural to such a terrible occasion
into any bosom but its own. Nettie's perpetual activity had hitherto
saved her from this disgust and disappointment. She had been bitterly
intolerant by moments of Fred's disgraceful content and satisfaction
with his own indulgences, but had never paused to fret over what she
could not help, nor contrast her own high youthful humour and sense of
duty with the dull insensibility around her. But to-day had rapt the
heroic little girl into a different atmosphere from that she had been
breathing hitherto. To-day she was aware that her work had been so far
taken out of her hands, and acknowledged in her heart that it was best
it should be so. She heard the heavy feet of men coming and going,
but was not obliged to descend into immediate conflict with all the
circumstances of so horrible a crisis. It was a new sensation to Nettie.
A year ago, perhaps, she would not have relinquished even that dreadful
business to any one;--to-day, the thought of having some one else who
did it for her, and took comfort in relieving her burdened hands,
fell with singular soothing power upon the heart which had come to a
knowledge of its own weakness in these last tedious months; and as
Nettie sat up-stairs with all the remorseful thoughts of nature in
her softened heart, the impossibility of impressing her own emotions
upon those around her struck her with a deeper sense of impatience,
disappointment, and disgust than ever before. When she went softly into
the darkened room where Susan lay in her gloomy bed, divided between
wailings over the injuries which poor Fred had suffered, the harshness
that had driven him out of doors, and the want of his brother or
somebody to take care of him, which had brought the poor fellow to
such an end--and complaints of the wrong done to herself, the "want of
feeling" shown by her sister, the neglect with which she was treated,
Nettie gazed at the sobbing creature with eyes unconsciously wondering,
yet but half-surprised. She knew very well beforehand that this was how
her dreadful tidings would be received; yet out of her own softened,
awed, compunctious heart--her pity too deep for tears over that lost
life--Nettie looked with the unbelief of nature at the widowed woman,
the creature who had loved him, and been his wife--yet who could only
think of somebody else to be blamed, and of herself injured, at that
terrible moment when the companion of her life was violently withdrawn
from her. And to go out of that obstinately darkened refuge of fretful
sorrow, into the room where the blind had been drawn up the moment
her back was turned, and where these three tearless children, totally
unimpressed by the information which they had received as a piece of
news with mingled curiosity and scepticism, occupied themselves with
their usual sports, or listened keenly, with sharp remarks, to the
sounds below, which only the utmost stretch of Nettie's authority could
keep them from descending to investigate, afforded a wonderful reverse
to the picture, which startled her in her momentary clearsightedness.
The contrast between her own feelings--she who had no bonds of natural
affection to Fred, and to whom he had been, by times, a very irksome
burden--and theirs, who were his very own, and belonged to him, appeared
to Nettie as no such contrast had ever appeared before. _Her_ heart
alone was heavy with regret over the ruined man--the now for ever
unredeemable life: she only, to whom his death was no loss, but even,
if she could have permitted that cruel thought to intervene, a gain and
relief, recognised with a pang of compassion almost as sharp as grief,
that grievous, miserable fate. When, a few minutes after, the noise of
the children's play rose to an outburst, Nettie flushed into a momentary
effusion of temper, and silenced the heartless imps with a voice and
look which they dared not venture to resist. Her rebuke was, however,
interrupted by a sudden call from their mother. "How can you have the
heart!--Oh, Nettie, Nettie! I knew you had no feeling!--you never had
any feeling since you were a baby--but how can you speak so to his poor
children, now that he has left them on the cold world?" cried Susan,
sobbing, from her bed. If Nettie sprang to her feet in sudden heat and
disgust, and peremptorily closed the doors intervening between the
children and their mother, nobody will much wonder at that movement of
impatience. Perhaps Nettie's eyes had never been so entirely opened to
the hopeless character of the charge she had taken upon her, as in the
temporary seclusion of that day.
And meanwhile, down-stairs, Edward Rider was superintending all the
arrangements of the time for Nettie's sake. Not because it was his
brother who lay there, no longer a burden to any man; nor because
natural duty pointed him out as the natural guardian of the orphaned
family. The doctor, indeed, would have done his duty in such a hard
case, however it had been required of him; but the circumstances were
different now: the melancholy bustle, the shame, the consciousness that
everybody knew what manner of existence this lost life had been, the
exposure, the publicity--all that would have wrung with a hundred sharp
wounds a spirit so susceptible to public comments--came with dulled force
upon the doctor's mind to-day. When the people about saw the grave and
seemly composure with which he went about this dismal business, without
those starts and flushes of grievous irritation and shame which the
very mention of his brother had once brought upon him, they believed,
and honoured him in the belief, that death had awakened the ancient
fraternal kindness in Edward Rider's heart. But it was not fraternal
kindness that smoothed off the rude edges of that burden; it was the
consciousness of doing Nettie's work for her, taking her place, sparing
that creature, over whom his heart yearned, the hardest and painfulest
business she had yet been involved in. We cannot take credit for the
doctor which he did not deserve. He forgave Fred when he saw his
motionless figure, never more to do evil or offend in this world, laid
in pitiful solitude in that room, which still was Nettie's room, and
which even in death he grudged to his brother. But Edward's distinct
apprehension of right and wrong, and Fred's deserts in this world,
were not altered by that diviner compunction which had moved Nettie. He
forgave, but did not forget, nor defend with remorseful tenderness his
brother's memory. Not for Fred's sake, but Nettie's, he held his place
in the troubled cottage, and assumed the position of head of the family.
Hard certainties of experience prevented the doctor's unimaginative
mind from respecting here the ideal anguish of sudden widowhood and
bereavement. This was a conclusion noways unnatural or surprising for
such a life as Fred's--and Edward knew, with that contemptuous hardness
into which incessant personal contact with the world drives most men,
that neither the wife nor the children were capable of deep or permanent
feeling. "They will only hang upon _her_ all the heavier," he said
to himself, bitterly; and for her, with repentant love, Edward Rider
exerted himself. In all the house no heart, but Nettie's alone,
acknowledged an ache of pity for Fred and his ruined life. "Mrs Rider,
to be sure, will feel at first--it's only natural," said Mrs Smith;
"but there wasn't nothing else to be looked for; and if it were not
hardhearted to say it, and him lying in his coffin, they'll be a deal
better off without him nor with him. But Smith and me, we have ourselves
to look to, and it's a terrible blow, is this, to a house as was always
as respectable as e'er a one in Carlingford. The lodgings is ruined!
The very marks of the feet, if it was nothing else!" cried the afflicted
landlady, contemplating the scratched tiles in the hall with actual
tears of vexation and regret. But this was the true state of the case to
every unconcerned spectator. Only Nettie, on whom the burden had fallen,
and was yet to fall heaviest, felt the eyes, which were hot and heavy
with watching, grow dim with tears of unspeakable compassion. From
the fulness of her youth and strength--strength so burdened, youth so
dauntless and dutiful--Nettie gazed with a pity too deep for words at
the awful spectacle of that existence lost. That the lifeless thing in
the room below could have been a man, and yet have come and gone so
disastrously through the world, was terrible to think of, to that
living labouring creature, in the depth of her own strange toils and
responsibilities. Her heart ached over that wretched, miserable fate.
Neither toil nor anguish was to be compared to the dread loss of a life
sustained by that departed soul.