“Do women make no wars?” laughed Sir Piers. “What! with Helen of Troy, and—”
“Good lack, my master!—and what ill had Helen’s fair face wrought in all this world, had there been no dolts of men to be beguilen thereby?” was Rachel’s instant response.
Sir Piers made a hasty retreat from that part of the field.
“But, my mistress, though the Devil be no woman, yet was the woman the first to be deceived by him.”
“Like enough!” snapped Rachel. “She sinned not open-eyed, as did Adam. She trusted a man-devil, like too many of her daughters sithence, and she and they alike have found bitter cause to rue the day they did it.”
Sir Piers prudently discovered that Lady Enville was asking him a question, and let Rachel alone thereafter.
Ay, Lysken Barnevelt adopted from choice the life to which Clare had been only willing to resign herself because she thought it was the Father’s will. It amused Lysken to hear people pity her as one who had failed to win the woman’s aim in life. To have failed to obtain what she had never sought, and did not want, was in Lysken’s eyes an easily endurable affliction. The world was her home, while she passed through it on her journey to the better Home: and all God’s family were her brethren or her children. The two sisters from Enville Court were both happy and useful in their corners of the great harvest-field; but she was the happiest, and the best loved, and when God called her the most missed of all—this solitary Lysken. Distinguished by no unusual habit, fettered by no unnatural vow, she went her quiet, peaceful, blessed way—a nun of the Order of Providence, for ever.
And what was the fate of Lady Enville?
Just what is generally the fate of women of her type. They pass through life making themselves vastly comfortable, and those around them vastly uncomfortable, and then “depart without being desired.” They are never missed—otherwise than as a piece of furniture might be missed. To such women the whole world is but a platform for the exhibition and glorification of the Great Me: and the persons in it are units with whom the Great Me deigns—or does not deign—to associate. Happy are those few of them who awake, on this side of the dread tribunal, to the knowledge that in reality this Great Me is a very little me indeed, yet a soul that can be saved, and that may be lost.
And Rachel?—Ah, Rachel was missed when she went on the inevitable journey. The house was not the same without her. She had been like a fresh breeze blowing through it,—perhaps a little sharp at times, but always wholesome. Those among whom she had dwelt never realised all she had been to them, nor all the love they had borne to her, until they could tell her of it no more.