AFTERWARDS.
The funeral was over, and there were two fresh graves--the only ones in
the bit of prairie set apart for a graveyard. I have written enough in
this melancholy strain. Why should I pause to describe in detail the
solemn services held in the grove by the lake? It is enough that the
land-shark forgot his illegal traffic in claims; the money-lender ceased
for one day to talk of mortgages and per cent and foreclosure; the fat
gentleman left his corner-lots. Plausaby's bland face was wet with tears
of sincere grief, and Mr. Minorkey pressed his hand to his chest and
coughed more despairingly than ever. The grove in which the meeting was
held commanded a view of the lake at the very place where the accident
occurred. The nine survivors sat upon the front seat of all; the friends
of the deceased were all there, and, most pathetic sight of all, the two
mute white faces of the drowned were exposed to view. The people wept
before the tremulous voice of the minister had begun the service, and
there was so much weeping that the preacher could say but little. Poor
Mrs. Plausaby was nearly heart-broken. Nothing could have been more
pathetic than her absurd mingling for two days of the sincerest grief and
an anxious questioning about her mourning-dress. She would ask Isa's
opinion concerning her veil, and then sit down and cry piteously the next
minute. And now she was hopeless and utterly disconsolate at the loss of
her little Katy, but wondering all the time whether Isa could not have
fixed her bonnet so that it would not have looked quite so plain.
The old minister preached on "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy
youth." I am afraid he said some things which the liberalism of to-day
would think unfit--we all have heresies nowadays; it is quite the style.
But at least the old man reminded them that there were better investments
than corner-lots, and that even mortgages with waivers in them will be
brought into judgment. His solemn words could not have failed entirely of
doing good.
But the solemn funeral services were over; the speculator in claims dried
his eyes, and that very afternoon assigned a claim, to which he had no
right, to a simple-minded immigrant for a hundred dollars. Minorkey was
devoutly thankful that his own daughter had escaped, and that he could go
on getting mortgages with waivers in them, and Plausaby turned his
attention to contrivances for extricating himself from the embarrassments
of his situation.
The funeral was over. That is the hardest time of all. You can bear up
somehow, so long as the arrangements and cares and melancholy tributes of
the obsequies last. But if one has occupied a large share of your
thoughts, solicitudes, and affections, and there comes a time when the
very last you can ever do for them, living or dead, is done, then for the
first time you begin to take the full measure of your loss. Albert felt
now that he was picking up the broken threads of another man's life.
Between the past, which had been full of anxieties and plans for little
Kate, and the future, into which no little Kate could ever come, there
was a great chasm. There is nothing that love parts from so regretfully
as its burdens.
Mrs. Ferret came to see Charlton, and smiled her old sudden puckered
smile, and talked in her jerky complacent voice about the uses of
sanctified affliction, and her trust that the sudden death of his sister
in all the thoughtless vanity of youth would prove a solemn and
impressive warning to him to repent in health before it should be with
him everlastingly too late. Albert was very far from having that
childlike spirit which enters the kingdom of heaven easily. Some
natures, are softened by affliction, but they are not such as his.
Charlton in his aggressiveness demanded to know the reason for
everything. And in his sorrow his nature sent a defiant _why_ back to
the Power that had made Katy's fate so sad, and Mrs. Ferret's rasping
way of talking about Katy's death as a divine judgment on him filled him
with curses bitterer than Job's.
Miss Isa Marlay was an old-school Calvinist. She had been trained on the
Assembly's Catechism, interpreted in good sound West Windsor fashion. In
theory she never deviated one iota from the solid ground of the creed of
her childhood. But while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its
generalizations, she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which
women of her kind are given to making. In general, she firmly believed
that everybody who failed to have a saving faith in the vicarious
atonement of Christ would be lost. In particular, she excepted many
individual cases among her own acquaintance. And the inconsistency
between her creed and her applications of it never troubled her. She
spoke with so much confidence of the salvation of little Kate, that she
comforted Albert somewhat, notwithstanding his entire antagonism to Isa's
system of theology. If Albert had died, Miss Marlay would have fixed up a
short and easy road to bliss for him also. So much, more generous is
faith than logic! But it was not so much Isa's belief in the salvation of
Katy that did Albert good, as it was her tender and delicate sympathy,
expressed as much when she was silent as when she spoke, and when she
spoke expressed more by the tones of her voice than by her words.
There was indeed one part of Isabel's theology that Charlton would have
much liked to possess. He had accepted the idea of an Absolute God. A
personal, sympathizing, benevolent Providence was in his opinion one of
the illusions of the theologic stage of human development. Things
happened by inexorable law, he said. And in the drowning of Katy he saw
only the overloading of a boat and the inevitable action of water upon
the vital organs of the human system. It seemed to him now an awful thing
that such great and terrible forces should act irresistibly and blindly.
He wished he could find some ground upon which to base a different
opinion. He would like to have had Isabel's faith in the Paternity of God
and in the immortality of the soul. But he was too honest with himself to
suffer feeling to exert any influence on his opinions. He was in the
logical stage of his development, and built up his system after the
manner of the One-Hoss Shay. Logically he could not see sufficient ground
to change, and he scorned the weakness that would change an opinion
because of feeling. His soul might cry out in its depths for a Father in
the universe. But what does Logic care for a Soul or its cry? After a
while a wider experience brings in something better than Logic. This is
Philosophy. And Philosophy knows what Logic can not learn, that reason is
not the only faculty by which truth is apprehended--that the hungers and
intuitions of the Soul are worth more than syllogisms.
Do what he would, Charlton could not conceal from himself that in
sympathy Miss Minorkey was greatly deficient. She essayed to show
feeling, but she had little to show. It was not her fault. Do you blame
the dahlia for not having the fragrance of a tuberose? It is the most
dangerous quality of enthusiastic young men and women that they are able
to deceive themselves. Nine tenths of all conjugal disappointments come
from the ability of people in love to see more in those they love than
ever existed there. That love is blind is a fable. He has an affection of
the eyes, but it is not blindness. Nobody else ever sees so much as he
does. For here was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey,
with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and already his
sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of her nature, and the depth
of his own; even now he found that she had no voice with which to answer
his hungry cry for sympathy. Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter,
and his great mistake was disclosing itself to him. The rude suspicion
had knocked at his door before, but he had been able to bar it out. Now
it stared at him in the night, and he could not rid himself of it. But he
was still far enough from accepting the fact that the intellectual Helen
Minorkey was destitute of all unselfish feeling. For Charlton was still
in love with her. When one has fixed heart and hope and thought on a
single person, love does not die with the first consciousness of
disappointment. Love can subsist a long time on old associations.
Besides, Miss Minorkey was not aggressively or obtrusively selfish--she
never interfered with anybody else. But there is a cool-blooded
indifference that can be moved by no consideration outside the Universal
Ego. That was Helen.