“It’s for Polly Rainbow’s funeral,” answered the maid who was tidying the room.
“O, no,” cried Lola, “that can’t be! Father said she was better.”
And then her mind began to wander, and she talked of Polly Rainbow as if the child had been in the room: talked of the little girl’s lessons at the parish school, and of a prize that she was to get.
After that all was darkness, all was despair—a seemingly inevitable progress from bad to worse. Science, care, love, prayers—all were futile; and the bell that had tolled for the widow’s only child tolled ten days afterwards for Lola.
It seemed to George Greswold as those slow strokes beat upon his brain, heavily, heavily, like minute guns, that all the hopes and cares and joys and expectations life had held for him were over. His wife was on her knees in the darkened house from which the funeral train was slowly moving, and he had loved her passionately; and yet it seemed to him as if the open car yonder, with its coffin hidden under snow-white blossoms, was carrying away all that had ever been precious to him upon this earth.
“She was the morning, with its promise of day,” he said to himself. “She was the spring-time, with its promise of summer. While I had her I lived in the future; henceforward I can only live in the present. I dare not look back upon the past!”
CHAPTER VII.
DRIFTING APART.
George Greswold and his wife spent the rest of that fatal year in a villa on the Lake of Thun, an Italian villa, with a campanello tower, and a long white colonnade, and stone balconies overhanging lawn and gardens, where the flowers grew in a riotous profusion. The villa was midway between two of the boat-stations, and there was no other house near, and this loneliness was its chief charm for those two heart-broken mourners. They yearned for no sympathy, they cared for no companionship—hardly even for that of each other, close as the bond of love had been till now. Each seemed to desire above all things to be alone with that great grief—to hug that dear, sad memory in silence and solitude. Only to see them from a distance, from the boat yonder, as it glided swiftly past that flowery lawn, an observer would have guessed at sorrow and bereavement from the mere attitude of either mourner—the man sitting with his head bent forward, brooding on the ground, the unread newspaper lying across his knee; the woman on the other side of the lawn, beyond speaking distance, half reclining in a low basket-chair, with her hands clasped above her head, gazing at the distant line of snow mountains in listless vacancy. The huge tan-coloured St. Bernard, snapping with his great cavern-like jaws at infinitesimal flies, was the only object that gave life to the picture.
The boats went by in sunshine and cloud, the boats went by under torrential rain, which seemed to fuse lake and mountains, villas and gardens, into one watery chaos; the boats went by, and the days passed like the boats, and made no difference in the lives of those two mourners. Nothing could ever make any difference to either of them for evermore, it seemed to Mildred. It was as if some spring had broken in the machinery of life. Even love seemed dead.
“And yet he was once so fond of me, and I of him,” thought the wife, watching her husband’s face, with its curious look of absence—the look of a window with the blind down.