At last the desolating news was known. Jack brought it home, and after he had told those upstairs he came down into the little cellar kitchen and told Maggie and Deborah. They could tell by his face as he came in the door what had happened, but he just looked at Deborah, perhaps because she looked so terribly hard at him, and then he came in and sat down and took her on his knee and turned his head away and said “It’s all over,” and his voice seemed very husky.
That night when Deborah went to bed the queer pain nearly stifled her.
Never to be able to kiss him again; never to take his hand; never to sit on his knee and sing “Lead, kindly light,” whilst he whistled, nor any of the other hymns and glorious hunting songs which he had taught her; never to sit on the chair beside him and work neat rows of figures; never to play another game of chess, which she so loved because he always let her win; never to play bézique again with him, nor get his yellow slippers from the cupboard; never to put her hands again into his pockets to find out what was there; never to hear him speak, and never, never see him, was terrible. Under ordinary circumstances this great trouble would have made her pray more earnestly for comfort unto God. But now as she knelt down to pray each word seemed strangled in her throat and like to strangle her.
The only prayer that came was the one uttered for him—that prayer which now was smashed to shivering atoms. For, truth to tell, Deborah had never prayed for anything else but him; he had been the one great earthly link that joined her to God.
Who can talk twaddle abstract to a child when its very existence is in the concrete?
“I can’t understand it. I can’t understand it,” she cried in horrid, aching pain. “It seems as if something had really listened to my prayer and answered it all the other way about—or—or God can’t have listened. They say at school that God is love—but oh! oh! I can’t bear to think of the pain he’s forced father through, and then to have left him in the end to drown in misery, and all alone.”
She got up from her knees without a prayer.
“There’s nothing to pray for,” she said dully, and got into bed choking with sobs.
The next day someone said it was a great mercy that it was known for certain he was really dead, and that they ought to be very thankful they were able to bring him back.
It was said by someone for a little comfort, even as we all try to comfort each other at such sad times.