Blanche's return to consciousness was unhappily also a return to that fierce sorrow which nothing but time could assuage. She was only induced to live by the reflection that her child needed her care. But what a prospect was it for her! How could she ever smile again! How could she ever cease to weep for her kind, affectionate, erring, but beloved Cecil!
It is the intensity of all passion which makes us think it must be eternal; and it is this very intensity which makes it so short-lived. In a few months Blanche occasionally smiled; her grief began to take less the shape of a thing present, and more that of a thing past; it was less of a sensation, and more of a reverie.
At first the image of her husband was a ghastly image of dishonour and early wreck; his face wore the stern keen look of suspicion which had agitated her when last she saw him alive; or else it wore the placidity of the corpse which she had last beheld. Behind that ghastly image stood the background of their happy early days of marriage, so shortlived, yet so exquisite!
In time the ghastliness faded away, and round the image of her husband, there was a sort of halo—the background gradually invaded the foreground, till at last the picture had no more melancholy in it than there is in some sweet sunset over a quiet sea. The tears she shed were no longer bitter: they were the sweet and pensive tears shed by that melancholy which finds pleasure in its own indulgence.
Grief had lost its pang. Her mind, familiarized with her loss, no longer dwelt upon the painful, but on the beautiful side of the past. Her child was there to keep alive the affectionate remembrance of its father, without suggesting the idea of the moody, irritable, ungenerous husband, which Cecil had at the last become.
Like a child crying itself to sleep—passing from sorrow into quiet breathing—her grief had passed into pensiveness. Cecil's image was as a star smiling down upon her from heaven: round it were clustered quiet, happy thoughts, not the less happy because shadowed with a seriousness which had been grief.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE VOICE OF PASSION.
Vyner soon recovered from the double shock he had sustained, and was now quite happy again with his two girls, and his excellent friend Heath, as his constant companions; while Julius and Rose were seldom two days absent from them.
For the sake of Blanche they now returned to Wytton Hall, and there her health was slowly but steadily restored.