Ever since the elopement, three months ago, he had been changing. It had been the bitter blow that had stabbed him awake. In some mysterious way new aspects, new ideas, new understanding, began to develop, where before had been chiefly a narrow outlook and rigid conformity.
It was though in the fulfilling of her work, Life had harrowed his soul with a bitter harrowing, that it might bring forth the better fruit in its season. The harrowing had seared and scarred, but already the new richness was showing, the new promise of a nobler future.
The All-wise Mother works very much in human life as she does in nature—topping off a hope here, and a hope there; ploughing, pruning, harrowing the soil and branches of the mind and spirit, that they may bring forth rich fruit in due season.
The life that she passes by unheeded, leaving it only to the sunshine and wind and rain, often grows little else but rank vegetation, and develops rust and mould—never the crops that are life-giving and life-sustaining to the world; never the great thoughts, great deeds, wide sympathies, that raise mankind to the skies.
But for Dudley the harrowing was not yet finished. Perhaps, indeed, no moment of all had been quite so bitter as the sense of his utter unworthiness and utter incapability to help Ethel in her hour of direst need.
The mere thought unnerved him for the little he might have done. He was so imbued with the idea of his helplessness, that he could only stammer a few broken sentences she seemed scarcely capable of hearing.
He had but one consolation. Towards the end, the sick man, suddenly opening his eyes, looked round for his sister, and seeing she was absent, had regarded Dudley with his whole face full of a question.
Dudley leant down to him.
“Yes, old chap,” he asked tenderly. “What is it?”
“Ethel… chum… you will try and help her?”