It was only natural that, with this character, the Countess should expect others to be as little impressed by suffering as herself. She really had no conception of a disposition to which sorrow was not an easily-healed scratch, but a scar that would be carried to the grave. In her eyes, the calamity which had happened to her daughter was a disappointment, undoubtedly, but one which she would find no difficulty in surmounting at all. There were plenty of other men in the world, quite as handsome, as amiable, as rich, and as noble, as Richard de Clare. If such a grief had happened to herself, she would have wept incessantly for a week, been low-spirited for a month, and in a year would have been wreathed with smiles, and arranging her trousseau for a wedding with another bridegroom. The only thing which could really have distressed her long, would have been if the vacant place in her life had not been refilled.
But Margaret’s character was of a deeper type. For her the world held no other man, and life’s blossom once blighted, no second crop of happiness could grow, at least on the same tree. To such a character as this, the only possibility of throwing out fresh bloom is when the tree is grafted by the great Husbandman with amaranth from Heaven.
Yet it was not in Margaret’s nature—it would have been in her mother’s—to say much of what she felt. Outwardly, she showed no difference, except that her coeur léger was gone, never to return. She did not shut herself up and refuse to join in the employments or amusements of those around her. And the majority of those around never suspected that the work and the amusement alike had no interest for her, nor would ever have any: that she “could never think as she had thought, or be as she had been, again.”
One person only perceived the truth, and that was because he was cast in a like mould. Bruno saw too plainly that the hope expressed by the Countess that “Magot was getting nicely over her disappointment” was not true,—never would be true. In his case the amaranth had been grafted in, and the plant was blossoming again. But there was no such hope for her, at least as yet.
Beatrice was unable to enter into Margaret’s feelings, not so much through want of capacity as of experience. Eva was equally unable, being naturally at once of a more selfish and a less concentrated disposition: her mind would have been more easily drawn from her sorrow,—an important item of the healing process. Doucebelle came nearest; but as she was the most selfless of all, her grief in like case would have been rather for the sufferings of Richard than for her own.
Beatrice soon carried the relic question to her father for decision; though with some trepidation as to what he would say. If he should not agree with her, she would be sorely disappointed. Bruno’s smile half reassured her.
“So thou canst not believe in the genuineness of these relics?” said he. “Well, my child, so that thou hast full faith in Christ and His salvation, I cannot think it much matters whether thou believest a certain piece of stuff to be the veil of Saint Clare or not. Neither Saint Clare nor her veil is concerned in thine eternal safety.”
“But Doucebelle seems almost shocked. She does believe in them.”
“Perhaps it will not harm her—with the like proviso.”
“But, Father!—the honour in which they hold these rags and bones seems to me like idolatry!”