TAKING UP DROPT STITCHES.
Next day Mr. Beresford paid Mrs. Meredith a visit of condolence. It was
natural and necessary, considering their friendship; but the manner in
which that friendship had been interrupted, and the occasion upon which
it was resumed, were both embarrassing. It had been a short note from
Maxwell which had communicated the news to him, and in this it had been
taken for granted that he would now remain at home. Old Mr. Sommerville
had himself communicated the information to Maxwell, and his letter was
enclosed. ‘I hear your friend Beresford had made up his mind to go away,
out of consideration for Mrs. Meredith,’ he had written, ‘which was very
gentlemanly on his part, and showed fine feeling. I think it right
accordingly to let you know at once of the great change which has taken
place in her position. I have received the news this morning of her
husband and my poor friend John Meredith’s death at Calcutta on the 3rd
inst. It was sudden, but not quite unexpected, as he had been suffering
from fever. This of course changes Mrs. Meredith’s situation altogether.
She is now a widow, and of course responsible to no one. I would not for
the world be answerable for depriving her of the sympathy of a kind
friend, _which may in the long run be so important for her_, at a period
of trouble. So I trust you will communicate the news to your friend with
the least possible delay. I have not seen Mrs. Meredith; but as they
have been long separated, I do not doubt that she bears the loss with
Christian composure,’ said the sharp-witted old man. ‘I send you old
Sommerville’s letter,’ Mr. Maxwell added on his own account; ‘it does
not require any comment of mine; and of course you will act as you think
proper; but my own opinion is, that he is an old busybody, making
suggestions of patent absurdity.’ Mr. Beresford was much nettled by this
note. Whatever Sommerville’s suggestion might mean it was for him to
judge of it, not Maxwell, who thrust himself so calmly into other
people’s business. Sommerville’s letter might not have pleased him by
itself, but Maxwell’s gloss was unpardonable. He tore it up and threw it
into his waste-basket with unnecessary energy. But for that perhaps he
might have felt more abashed by the embarrassing character of the
reunion; but being thus schooled, he rebelled. He went to the house next
door in the afternoon, towards the darkening. The spring sunshine had
died away, and the evening was cold as winter almost. There had been no
reception that day--visitor after visitor had been sent away with the
news of the ‘bereavement.’ The same word has to be used whether the loss
is one which crushes all delight out of life, or one which solemnly
disturbs the current for a moment, to leave it only brighter than
before. All the servants at Mrs. Meredith’s were preternaturally
solemn. The aspect of the house could not have been more funereal had
half the population succumbed. Already, by some wonderful effort of
millinery, the maids as well as their mistress had got their black
gowns.
Mrs. Meredith herself sat in the drawing-room, crape from head to foot,
in all the crispness of a fresh widow’s cap. Never was black so black,
or white so white. She had an innocent satisfaction in heaping up this
kind of agony. Already a design drawn by Oswald was in the hands of the
goldsmith for a locket to hold her husband’s hair. She would not bate a
jot of anything that the most bereaved mourner could do to show her
‘respect.’ Even the tears were ready, and they were sincere tears. A
pang of compunction, a pang of regret, of remorseful pity and
tenderness, melted her heart, and there was a certain pleasure of
melancholy in all this which made it spontaneous. It was the very luxury
of sentiment, to be able to feel your heart untouched underneath, and
yet to be so deeply, unfeignedly sorry, to be so true a mourner at so
little real cost. Mrs. Meredith held out her hand to her visitor as he
came in--he was the only one whom she had received.
‘This is kind,’ she said--‘very kind. As you were always such a good
friend to us, I could not say no to you.’
‘I was very sorry,’ he said; as indeed what else was there to say?
‘Oh, yes, I knew you would feel for us. It was so sudden--quite well
when the last mail came in, and this one to bring such news! You
scarcely knew him; and, oh, I feel it so much now, that none of my
friends, that not even the boys knew him as they ought to have known
him. It seems as if it must have been my fault.’
‘_That_ it could never have been. You must not reproach yourself; though
one always does, however the loss happens,’ he said, in a low and
sorrowful tone. He was thinking of his wife, for whom he had mourned
with the intensity of despair, but the same words answered both cases.
He stood as he had done the last time he was there, not looking at her
in her panoply of mourning, but looking dreamily into the fire. And she
cried a little, with a childish sob in her throat. The grief was
perfectly real, childlike, and innocent. He was much more affected by
the recollection of that last meeting at which he had taken leave of her
than she was--he remembered it better. The new incident even kept her
from seeing anything more than the most ordinary every-day fact, one
friend coming to see another, in his return.
‘I suppose you have no details?’
‘Not one. We cannot hear till the next mail. It will be some comfort to
have particulars. Poor John! he was always so strong, one never had any
fear. I was the one that could not stand the climate; and yet I am left
and he is taken!’
‘But you have not been exposed to the climate,’ said Mr. Beresford. She
was not wise in these expressions of her personal grief, though her
friends always thought her so wise in her sympathy. She resumed softly:
‘I have no fears about the boys to embitter my grief. I know they will
be well cared for. He was so good a father, though he had them so little
with him. Oh, why did you not tell me to send him one of the boys?’
Mr. Beresford would have felt himself the cruellest of malignants, had
he ventured to make such a suggestion in former days, but he did not say
this now. ‘You did what you thought was best for them,’ he said.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘for them; there was their education to be
thought of. That was what I considered; but I do not think--do you
think,’ she added, with an unconscious clasping of her hands and
entreating look, ‘that, since the great occasion for it is over--Edward
need go to India now?’
The form of the speech was that of an assertion--the tone that of a
question. She might follow her own inclinations like other people; but
she liked to have them sanctioned and approved by her friends.
‘Surely not, if you don’t wish it. There is only your wish to be
considered.’
‘It is not myself I am thinking of. It is for him,’ she said, faltering.
Of all things that could happen to her, she was least willing to allow
that her own will or wish had any share in her decisions. It was a
weakness which perhaps the more enlightened of her friends were already
aware of. As for Mr. Beresford, he was more critical of her than ever he
had been before, although more entirely sympathetic, more ready to throw
himself into her service. She looked at him so anxiously. She wanted his
opinion and the support of his concurrence. There was nothing for him to
do, to be of use as he proposed, but to agree with her, to support what
she had thought of--that was friendship indeed.
On the next day Miss Cherry paid a similar visit of condolence, but she
was not so tenderly sympathetic as, under other circumstances, she would
naturally have been. She looked at the new-made widow with a critical
eye. A short time before no one had been more anxious than Miss Cherry
that Mrs. Meredith should suffer no harm, should lose no title of
respect due to her. She had with her own soft hand struck a blow, the
severity of which astonished herself, at her favourite and only brother
on Mrs. Meredith’s account; but the sudden revolution in their
neighbour’s affairs, instead of touching her heart, closed it. The
position was changed, and a hundred tremors and terrors took at once
possession of her gentle bosom. Who could doubt what James would wish
now--what James would do? and who could doubt that the woman who had
permitted him so intimate a friendship would respond to these wishes?
This idea leaped at once into the minds of all the lookers-on. Old
Sommerville sent the news with a chuckle of grim cynicism yet kindness;
Maxwell communicated it with a grudge; and Miss Cherry received it with
an instant conviction yet defiance. They had no doubt of what would,
nay, must ensue, and jumped at the conclusion with unanimous agreement;
and it would be quite true to say that Mr. Meredith’s death brought
quite as great a pang to Miss Cherry, who had never seen him, as it did
to his wife, though in a different way. If the first marriage, the
natural youthful beginning of serious life, brings often with it a train
of attendant embarrassments, almost miseries, what is a second marriage
to do? Good Miss Cherry’s maidenly mind was shocked by the idea that her
brother, so long held up somewhat proudly by the family as an example of
conjugal fidelity and true sorrow, had allowed feelings less exalted to
get possession of him. And what would Cara do? How would her imaginative
delicate being, too finely touched for common issues, conform to the
vulgar idea of a stepmother? Miss Cherry grew hot and angry as she
thought of it. And a man who had such a child, a grown-up daughter,
sweetest and only fit substitute for the mother dead, what did he want
with a new companion, a new love? Faugh! to use such a word disgusted
her; and that James--_James!_ the most heart-broken and inconsolable of
mourners, should come to that! With all this in her mind, it may be
supposed that Miss Cherry’s feelings when she went to see Mrs. Meredith
and found her in all her crape, crying softly by the fire, were not so
sweet as they ought to have been. She said the usual things in the way
of consolation--how, as it was to be, perhaps it was best that they had
heard of it all at once, and had not been kept in anxiety; and how she
supposed such afflictions were necessary for us, though it was very sad
that the dear boys had known so little of their father; but, on the
other hand, how that fact must soften it to them all, for of course it
was not as if he had died at home, where they would have felt the loss
every day. This last speech had a sting in it, which was little
intentional, and yet gave Miss Cherry a sense of remorse after it was
said; for though she had a certain desire to give pain, momentary, and
the result of much provocation, yet the moment the pain was given, it
was herself who suffered most. This is what it is to have a soft nature;
most people have at least a temporary satisfaction in the result when
they have been able to inflict a wound.
‘Oh, yes, my dear, she feels it, I suppose,’ Miss Cherry said, when she
returned. ‘She was sitting over the fire, and the room much too warm for
the season; for it is really like spring to-day. Of course a woman must
feel it more or less when she has lost her husband. I have never been in
these circumstances, but I don’t see how one could help that--however
little one cared for the man.’
‘Did she care little for the man?’ Cara was at the age when most things
are taken for granted. She had not entered into any peculiarities in the
position of Mrs. Meredith with her husband. She was like Hamlet,
recognising more and more, as she realised her own position, the
quagmires and unsafe footing round her--was this another? There was a
sinking sensation in Cara’s youthful mind, and a doubt and faltering
wherever she thought to place her foot.
‘My dear child,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘when a woman spends years after
years away from her husband, never making any effort to join him, quite
satisfied with a letter now and then, receiving her own friends, making
a circle, going into society--while the poor man is toiling to keep it
up, thousands and thousands of miles away’--here Miss Cherry paused, a
little frightened by the blackness of the picture which she had herself
drawn. ‘I hope I am not doing anyone injustice,’ she faltered. ‘Oh, my
dear, you may be sure I don’t mean that. And I believe poor Mrs.
Meredith could not stand the climate, and of course there was the boys’
education to think of--children always must come home. Indeed, how
anyone can settle in India knowing that their children must be sent
away----’
‘Aunt Cherry, no one is to be trusted,’ said the girl, tears coming to
her eyes; ‘there is no truth anywhere. We are all making a pretence one
way or another; pretending to care for people who are living, pretending
to mourn for people who are dead; pretending that one thing is our
object, while we are trying for another; pretending to be merry,
pretending to be sad. Ah! it makes my heart sick!’
‘Cara, Cara! What do you know about such things? They say it is so in
the world, but you and I have very little to do with the world, dear.
You must not think--indeed, indeed, you must not think that it is so
with us.’
‘I don’t know anything of the world,’ said Cara. ‘I only know what is
round me. If Mrs. Meredith is false, and papa false, and other
people----’
‘My dear,’ said Miss Cherry, trembling a little, ‘it is always dangerous
to apply abstract principles so. When I say that Mrs. Meredith was a
long time away from her husband, I do not say that she is _false_. Oh,
Cara, no! that would be terrible. If I say anything, all I mean is that
she could not be so grieved, not so _dreadfully_ grieved, as a woman
would be whose husband had been always with her. Think of the boys, for
instance; they did not know him really; they may be very sorry; but, how
different would it be if it was a father like your father! And other
people--what do you mean by other people?’
‘Nothing,’ said Cara, turning away, for she could not reply to Miss
Cherry’s argument. Would she indeed, in her own person, grieve for her
father more than the Merediths did for theirs? Here was another mystery
unpenetrated by Miss Cherry, incomprehensible to herself. Nobody knew
the gulf that lay between her and him, and she could not tell herself
what it meant. How kind he had been to her, though she repaid him in
this way; but did he love--really love--his child any more than she
loved him? Did anybody love any other, or only pretend and go through
the semblance of loving? She did not doubt her aunts, it is true; but
then her certainty in respect to them took, to some degree, the form of
indifference. Taken for granted, not inquired into, that love itself
might have failed, perhaps--but Cara never thought of it as possible. It
was like the sunny house it dwelt on, always open, due not to anything
in her, but to the mere fact that she was Cara. They would have loved
any other kind of girl, she said to herself, under the same name just as
well. Poor child! she was like Hamlet, though unaware of that sublimity.
Friends, lovers, relations, all had failed her. Every soul thought of
himself--no one truly or unfeignedly of others. Her head swam, her heart
sank, the firm ground gave way under her feet wherever she turned. It
might not cost the others much, but it cost her a great deal; even she
herself in her own person: did she love more truly than they did? No;
she was not devoted to her father, nor to Oswald, whom she was supposed
to care for; and if to--anyone else, then they did not care for her,
Cara said to herself, and fled from her thoughts with a beating heart.
That evening there was an interchange of visits, something in the old
fashion. Edward thought he might come in, in the evening, when the
public about would not be scandalised by the idea that he was able to
visit his friends so soon after his father’s death; and Mr. Beresford
said to himself that, surely he might go for a little to comfort his
neighbour who was in trouble, and who had not herself been out of doors
for these two long days. The young man and the older man crossed each
other, but without meeting; and both of the visits were very pleasant.
Miss Cherry was as kind to Edward as she had been cold to his mother.
She got up to meet him and took his two hands in hers. She called him,
inarticulately, her dear boy, and asked after his health tenderly, as if
he had been ill. As for Cara, she did nothing but look at him with a
wistful look, trying to read in his eyes what he felt; and when her aunt
entered into the usual commonplaces about resignation to God’s will,
Cara broke in almost abruptly, impatient even of this amiable fiction.
‘You forget what you were saying to-day,’ she said: ‘that Edward did not
know his father, and therefore could not grieve as--I should.’
‘That is quite true,’ he said, ‘and therefore it is a different kind of
feeling. Not the grief that Cara would feel; but that painful sense of
not being able to feel, which is almost worse. I never thought of my
father--scarcely knew him. Some time, of course, we were to meet--that
was all; and gratitude to him, or any attempt to repay him, was not in
my thoughts. And now it is impossible ever, in any place, were one to go
to the world’s end--or at any time, were one to live as long as
Methuselah, to say a kind word to him, to try to make up to him a
little. This is more painful than Cara’s worst grief would be, knowing
she had done everything, made everything bright.’
‘Oh, no, no!’ she said, putting up her hands.
‘Ah, yes, yes!’ he said, looking at her with melting eyes, softened and
enlarged by the moisture in them, and smiling upon her. Cara, in her
confusion, could not meet the look and the smile.
‘Oh, Edward,’ she said, ‘it is you who are the best of us all. I am not
good, as you think me. I am a sham, like all the rest; but if there is
one that is true----’
‘Cara is foolish,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘I don’t know what is come to her,
Edward. She talks as if nobody was to be relied upon; but I suppose she
is at the age of fancy, when girls take things into their heads. I
remember when I was your age, my darling, I had a great many fancies
too. And I am afraid I have some still, though I ought to know better. I
suppose you will take your mother away somewhere, Edward, for a little
change?’
‘I have not heard anything about it, Miss Cherry; but there will be one
change, most likely, very important to me, if I settle to do it. I need
not go out to India now--unless I please.’
‘Oh, Edward, I am so glad; for, of course, you would not wish it--you
did not wish it?’
‘No,’ he said, slowly. ‘I did not wish it; but, after all, if that
seemed the best way to be good for something--to make some use of one’s
life----’
He spoke to Miss Cherry, but his eyes were on Cara. If she had said
anything; if she had even lifted her eyes; if she had made any sign to
show that even as her brother--her husband’s brother--he could be of use
to her! But Cara made no reply either by word or look. She put her hand
nervously upon the book which lay on the table--the book he had been
reading.
‘Oh, Cara, you must not think of that,’ said Miss Cherry; ‘we can’t be
so selfish as to ask Edward to read to-night.’
‘Yes; let me read,’ he said. ‘Why should not I? I am glad to do anything
after these two days. It seemed unkind to _him_, not to make some break
in life--though I don’t know why; and there is nothing within reach to
do. Let me read.’
Then Cara looked at him, with eyes like his own, suffused; her heart was
melting, her mind satisfied. ‘But this is the one who does not care for
me,’ she was saying to herself.
Next door there was less conversation between the elder people. Mr.
Beresford tried, indeed, to take upon him the part of consoler--to talk
to her and lessen her burden; but that change of all their relations did
not answer. He fell silent after a while, and she dried her eyes and
began to talk to him. The maid who brought up tea announced that Missis
had picked up wonderful; while the other servants in the kitchen looked
at each other, and shook their heads.
‘Anyhow, _that’s_ better than the other way,’ the cook said, oracularly,
‘and we knows what we has before us--if the young gentlemen don’t find
nothing to say.’