From One Generation to Another

by Henry Seton Merriman

Sa manière de souffrir est le témoignage qu'une âme porte sur elle-même.

There was a horrid throbbing silence while Dora read, and her parents calculated the seconds which would necessarily elapse before she reached the bottom line. Such moments as these are scored up as years in the span of life.

Mrs. Glynde did not know what she was doing. It happened that she was trying to rub away a flaw in the window-glass with her pocket hand-kerchief—a flaw which must have been an old friend, as such things are in quiet lives. At this occupation she found herself when her heart began to beat again.

“I suppose,” said Dora in a terribly calm voice, “that the Times never makes a mistake—I mean they never publish anything unless they are quite sure?”

Then the English gentleman of parts who ever and anon peeped out through the veneer of the parson asserted himself—the English gentleman whose sense of fair play and honour told him that it is better to strike at once a blow that must be struck than to keep the victim waiting.

“Such is their reputation,” answered Dora's father.

Mrs. Glynde turned with that pathetic yearning movement of a punished dog which waits to be called. But Dora had some of her father's sternness, her father's good British reserve, and she never called.

Turning, she walked quietly out of the room. And all the light had gone out of her life. So we write, and so ye read; but do we realise it? It is not many of us who have suddenly to look at life without so much as a glimmer in its dark recesses to make it worth the living. It is not many of us who come to be told by the doctor: “For the rest of your existence you must give up eyesight,” or, “For the remainder of life you must go halt.” But these are trifles. Everything is a trifle, if we would only believe it. Riches and poverty, peace and war, fame and obscurity, town and country, England and the backwoods—all these are trifles compared with that other life which makes our own a living completeness.

Silently she went, and left silence behind her. The Rector was abashed. For once a woman had acted in a manner unexpected by him; for he was ignorant enough of the world to keep up the old fallacy of treating women as a class. True, it was Dora, whom he held apart from the rest of her sex; but still he was left wondering. He felt as if he had been found walking in a holy place with shoes upon his feet—those gross shoes of Self with which most of us tramp through the world, not heeding where we tread or what we crush.

One of the hardest things we have to bear is the helpless standing by while one dear to us must suffer. When Mrs. Glynde turned round and came towards her husband she had become an old woman. Her face had suddenly aged while her frame was yet in its full strength, and such a change is not pleasant to look on.