Part 3, Chapter XXIII.
Flossy.
“And life looks dark
Where walked we friend with friend.”
A great sorrow affects the lives of many other people besides those most immediately concerned, and this not only in the greater or lesser degrees of grief that it may cause, or in the change which it may make in more than one set of circumstances, but in the fact that no great event can come within our ken without presenting life in a new aspect and more or less making a change in ourselves.
Redhurst was changed, utterly and for ever, by Mysie Crofton’s death; and with the change in Redhurst there came a great change to many another homestead, a great piece of brightness and pleasantness went out of many lives.
The old Rector and his wife would miss her when they gathered their flowers and ate their fruit; the village girls would miss her at church and at school; her own schoolfellows in far-away homes would sadden at the tidings; and Florence Venning might well grieve for the loss of her best-loved pupil and friend.
She grieved for her, when once her senses were set free from the stupefying shock of the sudden tidings, with all the energy of her energetic nature. She sorrowed, as she worked and as she rejoiced—with all her might. It was holiday time, and she had no duties to distract her. Miss Venning was at Redhurst. Clarissa, though somewhat appalled by the violence of her grief, could think of no better course to pursue than to let her alone; and Flossy, all the first day, shut herself into her room, and wept and sobbed, feeling as if the world had come to an end for her and for everyone she cared about. It was the first grief that she had ever realised, for she had been too young to feel acutely her parents’ death; and, perhaps, the fact that it was not exactly her own grief, greatly as it grieved her, made her, as the days went by, more prone to moralise about it. She had seen sorrow, read about it, thought about it, and tried to comfort it. She was not particularly ignorant of the world; their large school connection brought her into contact with many events and many people; and parish work, seriously pursued, teaches girls more of the realities of life than is commonly supposed. She had sympathised with great sorrows, understood great difficulties, and yet now for the first time the sense came to her of what those sorrows had been. How had she dared to try to comfort those who were feeling as she now felt, and not only as she felt, but as she now understood those nearer and dearer must feel. This was sorrow. Could even she take comfort in the thoughts she herself had often suggested; and what comfort could they be to her unhappy friends?
She had often said that the only comfort in sorrow was religion. Now she knew what sorrow meant; did she know what religion meant too? It was a matter of course in these days that so intelligent and so earnest-minded a girl should care about the subject; and Flossy was not only critical of different shades of Church opinion, but held her own with great ardour and no want of reality, impressing them strongly on the young girls whom she sought to influence, and possibly arguing about them more forcibly than meekly. More than this, she dutifully followed the practices and principles they enjoined. And now what did her religion do for her? Perhaps she did not altogether realise the Help to which she looked, but, at least, she felt the necessity of it to the very bottom of her soul. She had not herself sounded the depths of grief, she did not soar to the heights of consolation; but at least she looked the grief and the great Comfort full in the face.
But Flossy’s thoughts were soon turned away from herself to those more immediately concerned. She envied Miss Venning her place among them, and cared for nothing but the accounts she sent of the life at Redhurst from day to day.
Little as she guessed it, there was something in the wild mournful pathos of the story, in the picturesqueness of its incidents, in the admiration which Arthur’s reported gentleness and patience inspired, that did lift it into the regions of romance, and made its exceeding pitifulness a little more bearable to one so young as Flossy, as long as she was not brought into actual contact with it; something that harmonised with the truer and deeper consolation that came with the thought of Mysie’s goodness and innocence, and that made that sunshiny funeral, with its scent of flowers, its sound of music, and its crowd of young faces, a time not absolutely miserable; a recollection that might soften into tenderness, and brighten, perhaps, to the perfect day. But it was with a sense of nothing but the absolute piteous reality of loss and change that she walked up to Redhurst with Clarissa to wish them all goodbye before the final break-up of the household, becoming conscious of nothing but the determination not to cry and so add to the pain with which they might meet her. She forgot how well they were accustomed to the atmosphere of sorrow that struck on her with such a chill; and when Mrs Crichton, seeing her agitation, caressed her and spoke tenderly of her love for their lost darling, Flossy felt as if everyone but herself were capable of efforts of unselfish self-control. While she was listening to James’s explanation of their future plans, and how he had got his leave extended for a day or two to see them off to Bournemouth, suddenly, without warning, Arthur came into the room. She had not expected to see him, and as he came forward rather hastily and took her hand, colouring up a little, she wondered that he looked so like himself.
“I did not know you were here,” he said, and then she heard how the life and ring had gone out of his voice. She could not speak a word, and turned quite white, a strange thing in the pink-faced Flossy.
“Did you want me, Arthur?” said James. “No, I don’t want anything, thank you.” He turned away to speak to Clarissa, and Flossy moved into the window, and stood looking out and seeing nothing. Presently she heard Arthur’s voice at her side.
“Flossy, I wish to give you this. Aunt Lily thinks you would like it.”
Flossy looked, and saw by the shape of the case in his hand that it contained some turquoise ornaments which Mysie had been very fond of wearing.
“Oh, no, no, Arthur,” she burst out, vehement and outspoken as ever, even then; “not those. I never, never could put them on. I have her old school-books and some music. I want nothing.”
“But keep this,” he said, “I know she would have wished it.”
Flossy yielded then. She took hold of Arthur’s hand and squeezed it hard, but she could not speak of her own grief in the presence of his; and he soon moved away, as if he had done what he wanted to do and was indifferent to anything else.
“Flossy,” whispered Frederica, “come out with me. Oh,” she continued, as they came into the garden, “I shall be so glad to go to Bournemouth. It is dreadful here. Only I can’t think what we shall do with Arthur—Aunt Lily and I. He likes best to be with Jem, or quite alone.”
“Mary told us how beautifully he behaves.”
“Oh, yes; but it is so difficult to know what he likes. Hugh, there’s Hugh!”
Taken utterly by surprise Flossy started, with a half-shrinking movement, and, though she recovered herself in a moment and held out her hand, Hugh turned away as if he had not meant to be seen, and was gone at once.
“There!” cried Frederica, passionately; “You feel it too! They may say what they like. I hate him, and so does George; and I wish he would go away and never come back!”
“That is not right, Freddie. I ought not to have started—it must be worst of all for him.”
“I don’t believe it! I know just how it was; Hugh is so conceited, and so interfering! He ought to be sorry and to know we all hate the sight of him.”
Frederica’s intolerant girlish harshness gave Flossy a shock.
“Hugh,” she said; “whatever you think, what Hugh must feel is far beyond and above anything we can understand, and we must not talk about ‘ought’ and ‘ought not.’”
“Aunt Lily says it is nonsense to say he had anything to do with it; but I know he thinks so himself.”
“Then, that is enough, without your discussing it,” said Flossy, with a sense of irreverence in thus roughly handling events so terrible. She did shrink at the thought of Hugh, but she would not have said so for the world.
Frederica was silenced, but she and her younger brother indulged secretly in much discussion and comment, the excitement of which relieved their dreary hours a little; and Hugh felt the little pricks their childish displeasure gave him. That Arthur showed none of it he attributed to a determination to avoid paining him. Had not Florence Venning shrunk away from him? Jem had fallen into Mrs Crichton’s policy of refusing to recognise any special reason for his unhappiness, and was taken up in softening matters as far as possible for Arthur; so that he was only too thankful to talk occasionally to his brother on other subjects, and with stifling slight pangs of regret that he had used up all his leave without that little run down to the cathedral town where Archdeacon Hayward resided, and without that Sunday when he went to church with Miss Helen and indulged his distant admiration for her.
On the afternoon after Flossy’s visit he remained in the drawing-room alone, readings the paper, for the others had dispersed. Jem sometimes wrote as well as read the papers, and as he perused an art-critique, from which he differed fundamentally, an answer to adorn the pages of the rival journal began to seethe in his brain. He could not help feeling that tones and tints, lights and shades, on canvas, would be a great relief from the overpowering feelings of real life. He murmured to himself: “If accuracy of drawing and truth of colour are to be sacrificed to a—to a meretricious prettiness and a false—”
“Oh, Jem, look here, read this!” exclaimed Arthur, coming hastily up to him with a letter in his hand. “Don’t you remember Fred Seton, who went to India?”
“What, a light-haired fellow, who came to see you one Christmas? Yes, what of him?”
“He has been very ill; he is coming home on sick-leave. He wants me to meet him at Marseilles.”
James remembered dimly that Arthur had always entertained a strong friendship for this Fred Seton, and had greatly regretted his going to India some two or three years before. He read the letter, which was written evidently in bad health and spirits and in ignorance of Arthur’s engagement, begging him, if possible, to come out and meet him.
“You know, Jem, his people are all dead. He is such a lonely fellow—I must go.”
“But, Arthur, it’s such a dreary errand for you just now,” said James. “If Seton should be worse when you meet him—or you yourself—”
“I shall not be ill, if that is what you mean. And, Jem, it would be some object. What could I do with myself at Bournemouth?”
“No, that’s true,” said James. “I feel that. But, my dear boy, I don’t like your going away alone to meet no one knows what, when you want looking after so much yourself.”
“No one can help me,” said Arthur. “What can my life be to me? You’re all so good, but the light has gone down for me. Let me go; it will be change—something to look forward to. And I am quite well. I can eat and sleep. I could walk any distance. I must go.”
“Well, I suppose you must, but mother will hate the notion.”
“Will you talk her over? Somehow, I can’t bear to be talked to about myself.” James found his task very difficult. Mrs Crichton naturally entertained a thousand fears for Arthur’s health and spirits, but he was reinforced by Hugh.
“Let him go; of course, if he wishes it. If he can care for any fresh object it will be the best cure. Let him do exactly as he likes now and henceforward. I daresay the change will distract his mind and do him good.”
They were kind words, but there was something hard and sarcastic in the tone in which they were uttered.
“I wish you could have a change too,” said Jem, looking at him.
“Changes don’t make much difference to me,” said Hugh; “perhaps they may to Arthur.”
Mrs Crichton had resolved that the division of poor Mysie’s little belongings should be made at once, and she was right in thinking that it would cost Arthur far less pain now than at any future time. There was no use, she thought, in allowing haunting memories to have a local habitation; and she secretly determined that, during their absence, the house should so be rearranged as to leave no sacred corners; while there was nothing startling now in the sight of Mysie’s books and jewels, when all their hearts were full of Mysie herself.
Arthur was grateful for having been allowed to have his own way so easily, but even while he arranged his journey with Jem, and felt how intolerable the Bournemouth scheme would have been to him, his heart almost failed him—the long journey seemed such a trouble—and how utterly, how immeasurably sad this turning away from his old life made him! For, young as he was, the loss was as the loss of a wife—it was the dividing of that which had been whole, the changing of every detail of his days. It was not disappointed passion: what lay before him was not life with a dark painful memory in one corner of it; it was life under conditions of which he had never dreamed. It was not that his old delights and hopes had become distasteful, but that they had ceased to exist. He had decided to go to London with Jem, starting late on the Friday evening, and go on to Marseilles on the Saturday; and on the Friday afternoon Hugh, coming back from the bank, found him alone in the drawing-room, sitting there with a mournful, unoccupied look that went to his heart.
“He will be gone soon,” thought Hugh, with a sense of infinite relief. However, he came forward, and said:
“I wanted to ask you, Arthur, have you money enough for this journey?”
“Oh, yes, thank you; quite enough for the present.”
“You have only to ask for what you want—of my mother if you like it better.”
“I’ll ask you,” said Arthur, gently. “I hope you’ll write to me sometimes.”
“If you wish it.”
“And, Hugh, will you have this? It was your present to her, I believe.”
He held out to him a little prettily-bound book, a collection of poetry of which Mysie had been very fond.
“You are very good to me,” said Hugh, almost inaudibly and with bent head, not taking the book.
“Hugh,” said Arthur, evidently with great effort, “I don’t feel as you suppose. I cannot speak of—of that—”
“No, no, don’t, don’t speak of it. I know what you feel,” interposed Hugh. “Don’t force yourself to anything else for me.”
The long strain on his nerves had made poor Arthur much less capable of self-control than at first; and though he succeeded in saying, as he put his hand on Hugh’s: “I don’t force myself; you could not help it”—the shudder of horror at the bare allusion to the fact might well be mistaken by Hugh for a struggle to perform an act of forgiveness. It was agony to Hugh to see him suffer; but, if he could have forgotten that and tried to soothe the suffering, the misapprehension would have passed away and the real sympathy between them have comforted both. As it was, he felt a pang of humiliation, and was relieved when James’s entrance spared him the need of a reply; though he knew that his brother would blame him for Arthur’s obvious agitation. As James began to talk, half-coaxingly, about the arrangements for their start, and finally carried Arthur off to have something to eat, the thought that came into Hugh’s mind, spite of himself, was: “He need not wish to change with me, after all.”