"Won't it be very expensive, mamma?" asked the girl.
"I cannot bring myself to think about the expense. You and I will have to be very economical, I know; but when a call of duty comes like this, I feel that no other consideration can stand in my way. If you think it quietly over, Elizabeth," she said, again crying a little, "I believe you will agree with me, when you recollect all that your dear father was. It will help—I hope it will help—you to appreciate him, too, as well as the War Office."
This awful little conversation, which held for Elizabeth a certain miserable wounding humour, had taken place soon after Mrs. Fanshawe had come back to England after her husband's death. She had returned as soon as she had settled her affairs in India, and had sold, not unsuccessfully, the bungalow and all it contained, retaining only a few personal possessions of his and what belonged to Elizabeth and herself. This private property included many packets of his letters, which she tied up in a black ribbon and bestowed in an immense tin dispatch-box, with "Corrospondence" (the orthography of which was not worth correcting) printed in white letters on it. This, indeed, had suggested to her the idea of the "Short Memoir," and with it by the side of her chair or sofa she made masses of extracts, with a view to arranging them afterwards in the chapters on his second marriage and his home-life. The pieces which she selected for publication almost entirely consisted of affectionate words to herself, and she mostly omitted messages he sent to Elizabeth, or, indeed, anything that did not directly refer to his affection for his wife. Mrs. Hancock had been put under contribution to supply details about his boyhood and early manhood, which similarly consisted for the most part in stories to show how fond he was of her. These for a month had poured in in immense quantities, and before they came to an end Mrs. Fanshawe had begun to find them exceedingly tedious. Dry details, in the same way, about his military service, did not so much engage Mrs. Fanshawe's attention, and it was Elizabeth's duty to get the facts about those from Army Lists, while she, during the long winter evenings, searched through his letters for fresh instances of his devotion to her, and wrote and had typewritten the preface, which was on the lines already indicated. The chapter on "Social Life in India" was already arranged also, in a rambling sort of fashion, and showed without the slightest doubt how popular Mrs. Fanshawe was at dinner-parties and balls, and how her husband, with the wonderful confidence and trust he had in her, was never the slightest bit jealous. His first wife, Elizabeth's mother, was scarcely to be mentioned in the "Short Memoir." She might have been a week-end visitor who had not made much impression on him....
The wind, which had been threatening so long to spill the music that stood open on the piano, carried out its intention at last, but still Elizabeth did not stir. Something of the languor of spring had invaded her, and meaning every moment to get up and go on with her practising, which had been the excuse for her not going out with her mother on an expedition of economy to the Army and Navy Stores, she still lounged in the window-seat thinking over all that had passed since that evening when Edward came into the drawing-room at Arundel with the foreign telegram in his hand. It had been a shock to her, the violence of which she had not been conscious of at the time, but which showed itself afterwards in the weeks of nerve fatigue that followed. There had been taken away something in the very core and kernel of her life, and for the time she had known less of grief than of an inexplicable lack, as if, on the physical plane, a limb had been amputated, and that she had just awoke from the operation and found herself with arm or leg no longer there. Indeed, the feeling was not so much that he was dead as that a piece of herself was gone. She sent out messages from her brain and they were not received anywhere, nothing thrilled or moved in correspondence with them.
And then slowly and by degrees there began to wake in her that new sense that almost always wakens in those who have suffered some intimate bereavement. Her mind could not take in, could not conceive, when once faced with it, the notion of annihilation, of ceasing to be. It revolted from it, and though for a time her reason (as she accounted her reason) kept telling her that he was gone, that the days of their love and confidence were over, she found the conclusion growing incredible. It began to dawn in her, like the waking of a new intelligence, that there was nothing of him gone, except the sight of him, and the possibility of his presence being apprehended any more by her physical senses. She knew she would not again see or touch him as she had known him before, or again hear his voice, but she found herself daily realizing more and more distinctly, by some perception as innate in her as growth, the knowledge that he was not and could not have been taken away, amputated, destroyed. All of him that she missed so dreadfully, all that for which she stretched out empty arms in the dark, was not her essential father, but only the signs by which she knew him. He became her companion again, by no effort of the imagination, but by the assertion of an instinct that could not be contradicted. Never in those communings with his quiet wisdom beneath the fading crimson of the Indian sunsets had she felt more strongly than now the immortal kinship between them, the reality of their spiritual alliance. He had told her once in words that at the time seemed to her to have been spoken in an unknown tongue that it was impossible to go beyond love, that you can only penetrate into it, finding it without beginning and without end. It was by his death that she had begun to understand that, by the knowledge of the impotence of the supreme divider——The supreme divider! She echoed the meaningless words, the words from which all meaning had departed. Death did not divide; it was only meanness, falseness, impatience that could do so tragic a work.
She remembered with growing clearness, as she lay in the window seat, with the daffodils nodding outside, and the music splayed on the floor, their talk in the garden that evening. It was as if it had been written in her mind with invisible ink, which required some spiritual solution to be poured over it, to bring out the words again. She herself, she remembered, had been full of vague visions as to the possibilities and wonders of the world. She had been full of the dreams that were coloured with the vivid unsubstantial hues that are painted by inexperience. Now behind them, not removing them or painting over them, there was stealing, soaking into them the colours that at the time seemed to her to be somehow dull, dingy, stereotyped. What he had said to her about love had seemed somehow commonplace, and when an hour or two afterwards she had sat by the dying fakir at the bottom of the garden, it was more the sensationalism, the picturesqueness of that weary and happy passing that had affected her. Now she saw differently—she saw that precisely the same spirit, precisely the same inborn knowledge had inspired both. The same rich and unclouded vision was their daily outlook. They had both staked their all on love. Then a few days afterwards Elizabeth had ridden out with her father, and he had spoken to her in the same quiet way about death. He had said he enjoyed life tremendously, but as for death it was to him but another stage in growing up....
Elizabeth turned her face to the garden and the bright daffodils.
"Daddy! Daddy!" she said aloud.