His sorrow, which before the strangers he had kept swallowed down, he need hide no longer. There was no one to hear, no one to see. And he knelt beside the bed and stroked the smooth cold cheek. He kissed the cold mouth and stroked the soft dark hair from which all stain had been washed; and he put his arms about the body. And he remembered the boy as he had stood before him that afternoon in all his wonderful beauty. His tears fell fast and blindingly. The sobs rising to his throat almost choked him.
[XI]
Day followed day. Brocklehurst had been buried in the village churchyard; his father and one of his brothers (all of his family who had come over) were returned home again; the blinds were drawn up; the quiet flow of life, so harshly and unexpectedly interrupted, had dropped back into its accustomed channel; only for one boy a light had gone out for ever from the sky; a glory and a beauty, as he had known them once, had vanished from the world.
All day long he tried to be alone, tried to avoid his father; and whenever an opportunity presented itself he would escape to his own room or to some solitary place out of doors. It was almost as if he were afraid of human companionship, afraid of the sound of his own voice. And a curious unwillingness to mention Harold’s name, or to allude to him in any way whatever, seemed to have taken possession of him, though he spent daily a longer and longer time at the boy’s grave, remaining there for hours, until his father, who knew of these visits, grew anxious for his health and wished to take him away from home, offered to take him abroad—France, Italy, Greece—anywhere he liked. But Graham pleaded so desperately to be allowed to stay where he was that Mr. Iddesleigh had not the heart to refuse him—feared, indeed, that in his present state of mind it might do him more harm than good.
Little wonder that the boy’s health began to give way; that he looked so pale and tired! The holidays were now almost over, but as yet nothing had been said about his going back to school, though Graham himself lived in secret dread of what he knew could not be put off for much longer. How, on the other hand, could he possibly resume the old life? The thought of what had been and never would be again—oh! that, he felt, he should not be able to bear—the dreariness, the loneliness, the hopelessness. Doubtless when he had first gone to school he had also been alone—but the difference, the difference now would be incalculable. There were days, in truth, when it almost seemed to him that it would have been better if he had never been given his happiness, since so soon it was to be snatched from him; and even though deep in his heart he knew he would not forget it if he could, there were days when he thought it would be well if all the past could be effaced from his mind, rubbed out as figures are rubbed from a child’s slate.
One afternoon he was sitting with his father in the library. It had been raining for the greater part of the day, and a fine drizzle was still falling, though the sky was beginning to clear. It had been raining, and the soft sound of the rain—the soft, dripping sound, and the sight of the blurred landscape, had somehow a soothing effect upon him. On his knee he held an open book over which his head was bent closely. A lassitude, mental and physical, was visible in his every little movement, even in the way he sat; and between his eyes and the printed page he looked at, there floated a dead boy’s face. A physical weakness weighed heavily upon him, a kind of stagnation of the very sources of his life, the vital elements, sapping all power to rise above a certain fixed and gloomy train of thought;—it was as if some spring within him had been choked, dried up.... It was finished!—finished!—finished! The word repeated itself wearily in his mind, like the monotonous beating of a metronome. He felt hot and feverish, and there was a dull pain at the back of his head. It was almost as if he were sickening for something....