How such a voice from the heavens shocks one out of the repose of calm sorrows and of calm joys. This has come and gone so suddenly that I cannot adjust it to any quiet and trustful thinking yet.
The whole parish mourns excitedly; for, though they worked their minister’s wife hard, they loved her well. I cannot talk it over with the rest. It jars. Horror should never be dissected. Besides, my heart is too full of those four little children with the sunlight in their hair and the unconsciousness in their eyes.
15th.
Mrs. Quirk came over to-day in great perplexity. She had just come from the minister’s.
“I don’t know what we’re a goin’ to do with him!” she exclaimed in a gush of impatient, uncomprehending sympathy; “you can’t let a man take on that way much longer. He’ll worry himself sick, and then we shall either lose him or have to pay his bills to Europe! Why, he jest stops in the house, and walks his study up and down, day and night; or else he jest sets and sets and don’t notice nobody but the children. Now I’ve jest ben over makin’ him some chicken-pie,—he used to set a sight by my chicken-pie,—and he made believe to eat it, ’cause I’d ben at the trouble, I suppose, but how much do you suppose he swallowed? Jest three mouthfuls! Thinks says I, I won’t spend my time over chicken-pie for the afflicted agin, and on ironing-day, too! When I knocked at the study door, he said, ‘Come in, and stopped his walkin’ and turned as quick.
“‘O,’ says he, ‘good morning. I thought it was Mrs. Forceythe.’
“I told him no, I wasn’t Mrs. Forceythe, but I’d come to comfort him in his sorrer all the same. But that’s the only thing I have agin our minister. He won’t be comforted. Mary Ann Jacobs, who’s ben there kind of looking after the children and things for him, you know, sence the funeral—she says he’s asked three or four times for you, Mrs. Forceythe. There’s ben plenty of his people in to see him, but you haven’t ben nigh him, Mary Ann says.”
“I stayed away because I thought the presence of friends at this time would be an intrusion,” Auntie said; “but if he would like to see me, that alters the case. I will go, certainly.”
“I don’t know,” suggested Mrs. Quirk, looking over the tops of her spectacles,—“I s’pose it’s proper enough, but you bein’ a widow, you know, and his wife—”
Aunt Winifred’s eyes shot fire. She stood up and turned upon Mrs. Quirk with a look the like of which I presume that worthy lady had never seen before, and is not likely to see soon again (it gave the beautiful scorn of a Zenobia to her fair, slight face), moved her lips slightly, but said nothing, put on her bonnet, and went straight to Dr. Bland’s.