“I understand. I know what”—she made a pause—“what tooth-ache is, myself.”
She felt sure he would also understand that by “tooth” she meant “heart.” Only a woman can put these things delicately enough.
But Andy stared after her in heavy amazement as the door closed.
“Toothache!” he thought to himself. “Surely I haven’t been telling her I had toothache, have I? Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”
For a few minutes he sat staring into the fire, then he got up and went to his desk, and his work gained strength, no doubt, as work always does, from love and sorrow decently borne.
CHAPTER XX
Real jollity is as antiseptic as sunshine, and when Andy sat in a leather chair opposite Mr. Thorpe, with Mrs. Thorpe presiding over an immense batch of the first mince-pies which had been brought out for his refreshment, he unconsciously felt the bitterness of his grief being sweetened and purified. It had been a lonely and disappointing time lately, and he had watched the autumn leaves hanging thick on the trees ready to fall at the first gale, with a leaden dulness of heart that was sapping his vitality.
When he trudged back and forth to the little church past the resting-place of Brother Gulielmus he thought often that so he would lie, his little day’s work done, and he had an intense consciousness of the futility of life, though he worked hard and tried to fight against it.
To-night, he had come down to the Thorpes’, because Mrs. Thorpe asked him, with a heavy sense of all places being alike; and now, though they had discussed nothing but the crops and the weather, his bitterness was already changing into that good grief which never yet harmed a man, in a wholesome atmosphere of mince-pies and blazing autumn logs—or rather, in the atmosphere of sane and strong acceptance of life as it is which emanated from the Thorpes present, and the generations of Thorpes who had gone before. They—those older Thorpes—and the Will Ford who was afterwards Gulielmus had doubtless sat through long evenings after harvest-time in exactly the same atmosphere as surrounded Andy at present—and a sturdy sense of a man’s right to work and gain strength by working—and of a man’s right to suffer and grow fine by suffering—took hold of Andy’s soul to the exclusion of that weak dream of universal ease which had been, unconsciously, the outcome of a modern education.