“Ah,” she would say, as she left the room with a sad little shake of the head, “I shall be caught up at the second advent. I’m not at all sure that you will be.”
The eldest Miss Turnour did not trouble herself at all about his spiritual state; she thought only of the risk they were running and the possible loss of money.
“I hope he is not sickening with any infectious disease,” she used to remark a dozen times a day.
And Miss Charlotte said nothing, but silently thanked Heaven that she had not been the one to accept the new lodger.
CHAPTER XI.
There is no suffering so severe as that which we perceive to be the outcome of our own mistaken decision. Suffering caused by our own sin is another matter; we feel in some measure that we deserve it. But to have decided hastily, or too hopefully, or while some false view of the case was presented to us, and then to find that the decision brings grievous pain and sorrow, this is cruelly hard.
It was this consciousness of his own mistake which preyed upon Frithiof’s mind as he tossed through those long solitary hours. Had he only insisted on speaking to Blanche’s uncle at Balholm, or on at once writing to her father, all might have been well—his father yet alive, the bankruptcy averted, Blanche his own. Over and over in his mind he revolved the things that might have happened but for that fatal hopefulness which had proved his ruin. He could not conceive now why he had not insisted on returning to England with Blanche. It seemed to him incredible that he had stayed in Norway merely to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, or that he had been persuaded not to return with the Morgans because Mr. Morgan would be out of town till October. His sanguine nature had betrayed him, just as his father had been betrayed by his too great hopefulness as to the Iceland expedition. Certainly it is true that sanguine people in particular have to buy their experience by bitter pain and loss.
By the Saturday morning he was almost himself again as far as physical strength was concerned, and his mind was healthy enough to turn resolutely away from these useless broodings over the past, and to ask with a certain amount of interest. “What is to be done next?” All is not lost when we are able to ask ourselves that question; the mere asking stimulates us to rise and be going, even though the direction we shall take be utterly undecided.
When Miss Charlotte came to inquire after her patient, she found to her surprise that he was up and dressed.
“What!” she exclaimed. “You are really well then?”