The shadow of the accident was full upon us, and when the door of the cottage was opened I expected to see a woman bowed and overwhelmed with grief for a loss that had left her desolate indeed.
What I saw in reality was a stern hard-visaged woman, who met us with a clear unflinching gaze, suggesting a spirit that was up in arms against fate, and with no thought left in her for mourning or for tears.
“I am glad you be come, passon,” she said, “though ’tis little help you can give me, I allow. Kind and true-hearted you be to us all, and well enough we knows it. But even you can’t tell us, wi’ all your new-fangled notions, that the soul which passes to its God wi’ a curse upon its lips shall be saved in the Day of Judgment.”
It was the first and only time I was to see the Rector angry—angry and yet ‘sinning not.’
“Woman,” he said, “the wickedness is yours,” and his voice was hard and stern. “Stay your words before you utter that of which all the life that is left you will be too little for repentance. Have you no greater faith in God’s love and mercy than in your own? Nay—less, far less, for even you would have pardoned him. An angry word, that dropt from him in great stress of terror and excitement—is that to weigh against the record of a life that was a model to all of us in brave unselfish effort? And, remember, he has left his good name in your keeping.”
I confess that I thought him hard and unfeeling, hard almost to cruelty. But he knew—none better—the requirements of the case, and that it is worse than useless to treat with salves a wound that needs the knife.
At the door he turned and said, “I will try and do for you what Harry would have wished, and what he so well began. The lodge at the Manor House is vacant, and I think I can promise you the post. But never forget that it is for Harry’s sake I give it you—the lad I loved and valued most in all the parish.”
CHAPTER VIII
That same night the change we had been expecting came on us, and a storm raged furiously till the dawn. Sometimes, but very occasionally, a summer gale will carry as much weight in it as one of its winter brethren. And, when this is so, it works far wider damage both by sea and land. It will catch our seamen, unprepared and unsuspecting, on a lee shore of dangerous approach, with some headland or cape to windward that bars their only path to safety.
Less dangerous it may be to dwellers on the shore, but not less dreaded. For it destroys, almost in a moment, the wealth of emerald foliage which Nature in her thriftiness had meant to last for six long months, to perish gradually in greater glory still of gold and scarlet, orange and russet-brown. And then one morning she wakes to find her handiwork destroyed, at a time when it is just too late for her to repair the damage. Nothing left of all she has been secretly and silently creating through the long months of winter, except a few torn and tattered leaves, which she will make all speed she can to discard, seeing that theirs can only be a discredited old age of uniform withered brown.