“Oh, yes. I daresay it would do quite well. Please don’t talk about it,” he added, more fretfully than he often spoke, “at least not now.”
Hugh saw that well-intentioned consolation or cheering would only worry the poor boy, who was not able to respond to it, and that he was hardly fit even for the change proposed; and for a moment the thought flashed across him of how he would devote himself to soothe Arthur’s grief if he could have him to himself for a little, how he, of his own bitter experience, would know how to treat the fitful spirits that would only perplex the rest. Only for a moment; the next he thought how intolerable the sight of that grief would be, and how his own unwelcome presence must increase it.
“You must do just as you like,” he repeated as he went out of the room. As he walked up and down on the terrace outside he saw Arthur wander away from the others and sit down on the distant sofa that he had left. Presently Snap followed him, and jumped up on his lap. Arthur coaxed and caressed him, and played with him in a sad, aimless sort of fashion, and at last laid his head back on the cushions, with the dog nestling against him. Hugh watched every weary, restless movement with an intensity of sympathy that seemed to feel how the temples throbbed and the eyes ached, and how the wretchedness seemed to increase every hour. And yet he could not say one gentle, tender word. At last the stillness proved that Arthur had fallen asleep—worn out, perhaps, with the excitement of the day before. But Hugh paced up and down in the chilly, windy twilight, and longed for the time when they would all have gone and he would be left to himself.
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.