Without speaking a word, Cora and I turned an angle of the church and entered the grave-yard. It looked more cheerful than it had appeared the day before. Long glances of sunshine shot across it, and some stray birds had lost themselves in the cypress trees, and seemed trying to sing their way out.
We laid our garland down upon the bleak, new grave of Cora’s mother, just over the spot where we knew her cold heart was sleeping. Its faint perfume spread like an angel’s breath all over the grave, and we went softly away, feeling that she knew what we had done.
From that day my life was divided between the parsonage and the only home I had ever known. Turner had proved a more efficient consoler of the curate than a thousand sermons could have been. In the hour of his deepest grief, he had opened a new channel for his affections as new means of usefulness. The overpowering anguish, that had almost swept him from the earth in twenty-four hours, never returned again. He would often say, looking upon us children with a peaceful smile,
“She is with God, and He is everywhere.”
None but a good man could have been so easily won from such a grief by the simple power to aid others, for his wife had been the most devoted and loving creature that the sun ever shone upon, and her death was sudden as the flash of lightning that darts from a summer cloud. A disease of the heart, insidious and unsuspected till the moment of her death, left her lifeless, in the morning, upon the pillow to which she had retired at night with trusting prayers and innocent smiles.
Thus I became the pupil of Mr. Clarke—the sister, nay, more than the sister of his child; and now, heart and mind, my whole nature began to expand. My profound ignorance of life was slowly enlightened. The history of my native land was no longer a sealed book. I began to comprehend the distinctions that existed in society—the principles of government, the glorious advantages which follow each step that nations take toward freedom. I confess it took me a long time to comprehend why one man should, without effort of his own, possess lands which stretched from horizon to horizon, like Lord Clare, while others, who toiled from sun to sun, could scarce secure the necessaries of existence; nor have I yet solved the question satisfactorily to my sense of right.
No life can be really monotonous in which taste is gratified and knowledge acquired; certainly not where the heart is allowed to put forth its natural affections and weave them around worthy objects.
Cora and I took our lessons together, but she had little of that eager thirst for knowledge which possessed me. Gentle, caressing and indolent, to escape her lessons was a relief, while I devoured mine, and found time for the gratification of a thousand fancies that she was ready to praise, but unwilling to share.
It is said that women of opposite natures are most likely to find sympathy with each other. I do not believe this, either in men or women. In order to perfect companionship, tastes, habits, intellectual aspirations, nay, even physical health must assimilate.
I believe no human being ever loved another more thoroughly than I loved Cora Clarke. To say that I would have given my life to save hers would be little, for life is not always the greatest sacrifice one human soul can make to another. But I would have yielded up any one of the great hopes of my existence, could the sacrifice have secured her happiness. But in less than three years I had outgrown Cora’s companionship. My love, though unbounded, had a sense of protection in it. It was the caressing attachment of a mother for her child, or an elder sister for her orphan charge.