"Only once in a way," said the mother, half ashamed of herself for thus indulging the boy—as, giving his shoulder a fond shake, she called him "a foolish fellow."
Then we all dispersed; Guy and Walter to ride to the manor-house, Edwin vanishing with his sister, to whom he was giving daily Latin lessons in the school-room.
John asked me to take a walk on the hill with him.
"Go, Phineas," whispered his wife—"it will do him good. And don't let him talk too much of old times. This is a hard week for him."
The mother's eyes were mournful, for Guy and "the child" had been born within a year and three days of each other; but she never hinted—it never would have struck her to hint—"this is a hard week for ME."
That grief—the one great grief of their life, had come to her more wholesomely than to her husband: either because men, the very best of men, can only suffer, while women can endure; or because in the mysterious ordinance of nature Maud's baby lips had sucked away the bitterness of the pang from the bereaved mother, while her loss was yet new. It had never been left to rankle in that warm heart, which had room for every living child, while it cherished, in tenderness above all sorrow, the child that was no more.
John and I, in our walk, stood a moment by the low churchyard wall, and looked over at that plain white stone, where was inscribed her name, "Muriel Joy Halifax,"—a line out of that New Testament miracle-story she delighted in, "WHEREAS I WAS BLIND, NOW I SEE,"—and the date when SHE SAW. Nothing more: it was not needed.
"December 5, 1813," said the father, reading the date. "She would have been quite a woman now. How strange! My little Muriel!"
And he walked thoughtfully along, almost in the same footprints where he had been used to carry his darling up the hillside to the brow of Enderley Flat. He seemed in fancy to bear her in his arms still—this little one, whom, as I have before said, Heaven in its compensating mercy, year by year, through all changes, had made the one treasure that none could take away—the one child left to be a child for ever.
I think, as we rested in the self-same place, the sunshiny nook where we used to sit with her for hours together, the father's heart took this consolation so closely and surely into itself that memory altogether ceased to be pain. He began talking about the other children—especially Maud—and then of Miss Silver, her governess.