For the first time since he had inherited the estate George Greswold felt himself surrounded by an atmosphere of discontent, and even dislike. His tenants seemed afraid of him, and were reticent and moody when he talked to them, which he did much seldomer than of old, making a great effort in order to appear interested in their affairs.
Mildred’s life during those summer weeks, while the roses were opening and all the flowers succeeding each other in a procession of loveliness, had drifted along like a slow dull stream that crawls through a desolate swamp. There was neither beauty nor colour in her existence; there was a sense of vacuity, an aching void. Nothing to hope for, nothing to look back upon.
She did not abandon herself slavishly to her sorrow. She tried to resume the life of duty which had once been so full of sweetness, so rich in its rewards for every service. She went about among the cottagers as of old; she visited the shabby gentilities on the fringe of the market town, the annuitants and struggling families, the poor widows and elderly spinsters, who had quite as much need of help as the cottagers, and whom it had always been her delight to encourage and sustain with friendliness and sympathy, as well as with delicate benefactions, gifts that never humiliated the recipient. She took up the thread of her work in the parish schools; she resumed her old interest in the church services and decorations, in the inevitable charity bazaar or organ-fund concert. She played her part in the parish so well that people began to say,
“Mrs. Greswold is getting over her loss.”
In him the shock had left a deeper mark. His whole aspect was changed. He looked ten years older than before the coming of sorrow; and though people loved her better, they pitied him more.
“She has more occupations and pursuits to interest her,” said Mr. Rollinson, the curate. “She is devoted to music, and that employs her mind.”
Yes, music was her passion; but in these days of mourning even music was allied to pain. Every melody she played, every song she sang, recalled the child whose appreciation of that divine art had been far beyond her years. They had sung and played together. Often singing alone in the summer dusk, in that corner of the long drawing-room, where Lola’s babyish chair still stood, she had started, fancying she heard that other voice mingling with her own—the sweet clear tones which had sounded seraphic even upon earth.
O, was she with the angels now; or was it all a fable, that fond vision of a fairer world and an angelic choir, singing before the great white throne? To have lost such a child was almost to believe in the world of seraphim and cherubim, of angels and purified spirits. Where else could she be?
Husband and wife lived together, side by side, in a sad communion that seemed to lack the spirit of unity. The outward semblance of confiding affection was there, but there was something wanting. He was very good to her—as kind, as attentive, and considerate as in their first year of marriage; and yet there was something wanting.
She remembered what he had been when he came as a stranger to The Hook; and it seemed to her as if the glass of Time had been turned backwards for fourteen years, and that he was again just as he had been in those early days, when she had watched him, curiously interested in his character as in a mystery. He was too grave for a man of his years—and with a shade of gloom upon him that hinted at a more than common grief. He had been subject to lapses of abstraction, as if his mind had slipped back to some unhappy past. It was only when he had fallen in love and was wholly devoted to her that the shadow passed away, and he began to feel the joyousness of life and the fervour of ardent hopes. Then the old character dropped off him like the serpent’s slough, and he became as young as the youngest—boyish even in his frank felicity.