At love's cost

by Charles Garvice

The minutes—were they minutes or years?—passed, and were broken into fragments by a cry from Jessie.

"Miss Ida! Miss Ida! He's—the master's dead!'"

Ida raised her father's head from her shoulder and looked into his face, and knew that the girl had spoken the truth.

He was dead. She had lost both father and lover in one day!

CHAPTER XXVI.

Ida sat in the library on the morning of the funeral. A pelting rain beat upon the windows, over which the blinds had been drawn; the great silence which reigned in the chamber above, in which the dead master of Heron lay, brooded over the whole house, and seemed in no part of it more intense than in this great, book-lined room, in which Godfrey Heron had spent so much of his life.

Ida lay back in the great arm-chair in which he had sat, her small brown hands lying limply in her lap, her eyes fixed absently upon the open book which lay on the table as he had left it. The pallor of her face, increased by her sorrow, was accentuated by the black dress, almost as plainly made as that which the red-eyed Jessie wore in her kitchen. Though nearly a week had elapsed since her father had died in her young arms, and notwithstanding her capacity for self-reliance, Ida had not yet recovered from the stupor of the shock.

She was scarcely thinking as she lay back in his chair and looked at the table over which he had bent for so many monotonous years; she scarcely realised that he had passed out of her life, and that she was alone in the world; and she was only vaguely conscious that her sorrow had, so to speak, a double edge; that she had lost not only her father, but the man to whom she had given her heart, the man who should have been standing beside her now, shielding her with his strong arms, comforting her with words of pity and love. The double blow had fallen so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that the pain of it had been dulled and blunted. The capacity of human nature for suffering is, after all not unlimited. God says to physical pain and mental anguish, "Thus far and no farther;" and this limitation saved Ida from utter collapse.

Then, again, she was not free to indulge in idle grief, in the luxury of woe; the great house had still to be run, she had to bury her beloved dead, the mourning which seems such a hopeless mockery when the heart is racked with misery, had to be seen to; and she did it, and went through it all, with outward calm, sustained by that Heron spirit which may be described as the religion of her class—noblesse oblige. Jessie had wept loudly through the house ever since the death, and could weep as loudly now; but if Ida shed any tears she wept in the silence and darkness of her own room, and no one heard her utter a moan. "To suffer in silence and be strong" was the badge of all her tribe, and she wore it with quiet stoicism.

Godfrey Heron's death had happened so suddenly that the news of it scarcely got beyond the radius of the estate before the following morning, and Stafford had gone to London in ignorance of this second blow with which Fate had followed up the one he had dealt Ida: and when the neighbours—the Vaynes, the Bannerdales, and the Avorys—came quickly and readily enough to offer their sympathy and help, they could do nothing. The girl solitary and lonely in her grief as she had been solitary and lonely through her life, would see no one but the doctor and Mr. Wordley, and the people who had once been warm and intimate friends of the family left reluctantly and sully, to talk over the melancholy circumstance, and to wonder what would become of the daughter of the eccentric man who had lived the life of a recluse. Mr. Wordley would have liked to have persuaded her to see some of the women who had hastened to comfort her; but he knew that any attempt at persuasion would have been in vain, that he would not have been able to break down the barrier of reserve which the girl had instinctively and reservedly erected between her suffering soul and the world. His heart ached for her, and he did all that a man could do to lighten the burden of her trouble; but there was very little that he could do beyond superintending the necessary arrangements for the funeral.