The roses in the garden were straggling over the path; all the flowers were suffering because the gardener was down. Mr. Bagshotte instinctively felt for a knife with which to prune them; he had been proud of his garden, and it had repaid him well; but he threw the roses he cut off in a heap behind the shrubs—it was useless now to carry them indoors. His wife, who had loved roses, needed his no more; though it crossed the parson's mind that he could barely believe—as perhaps he ought—that all the flowers of heaven (if they have flowers there) could "make up" to her for the familiar roses he had always brought—she had been very fond of them, and him.
He fetched bread and meat for his guest with his own hands. The cook had gone home, the old nurse was sobbing in the empty nursery, the housemaid was dead.
Barnabas ate without much appetite; the strain was beginning to tell, even on him. The desolate house oppressed him, and a grief he could not assuage made him miserable.
Mr. Bagshotte stood with his back to the fireplace and looked at the preacher thoughtfully: his scrutiny might have disturbed some men, but Barnabas had not a grain of self-consciousness in him.
It was strange to reflect that this tremendous experience, which was the one startling event of the old man's life, which had robbed him of all the sweetness in it—he was too manly a man to say even to himself of all that made it worth living—was probably only one of many experiences to this younger brother, whose years, shorter than his own by thirty at least, were yet probably ten times as full of incident.
"You must have seen some odd things," he remarked. "I suppose that when we are through this, we shall pick up what remains of us, and steady back into our ordinary jogtrot as best we can. But you will go away and come in for fresh upheavals and what you call 'revivals' somewhere else, and we shan't meet again."
"No," said the preacher. "Very like we shan't—till the day when Christ's kingdom comes."
His blue eyes brightened at the thought of that time,—which thought, indeed, was always more or less present with him.
"H'm," said the parson. "It has come to a good many poor souls this week. I wonder——" It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I wonder what they make of it!" It was so difficult to imagine his stolid L——shire parishioners translated into a purely spiritual atmosphere; but the observation struck him as unclerical, and he bit it off short.
"Mind you, I don't like ranting, and never shall," he said. "But there's no doubt men had better turn in their despair to God than to gin or begging; and a time like this seems bound to bring out either the beast or the angel in us." He paused, and took snuff emphatically.