Mrs. Vansittart spoke no more of comfort. It was better perhaps to let the troubled heart tire itself out with grieving. Tranquillity would come afterwards.
“And our son, our son who breathed only to die. He did not live even long enough for baptism. He was dead when the Bishop came hurriedly from his house on the hill. You think perhaps—you who are a strict Anglican—that his soul is in limbo—that he will never see the throne of God. We were going to be so fond of him, Jack and I—and Peggy wanted to live long enough to see him—but she was gone before he came, and he didn’t care about living. If she had been well and happy all things would have been different. They would have been running about together in a year or two from now. And now she would have been carrying him about in her arms. He would have been beginning to notice people, and to laugh and coo like that cottager’s child we saw yesterday, just about as old as my baby would have been now.”
“My dearest, do you suppose I am not sorry for your loss and for your husband’s? But God never meant us to rebel, even in our grief. That must not be.”
“I know I am wicked,” said Eve, with a long-drawn sigh. “I have my fits of wickedness. In church yesterday, on my knees at the altar, I thought that I was resigned, I almost believed in the heaven where we shall see and know our friends again.”
The dark hour passed, and at sunset, when Vansittart came home from a long day in the plantations, his wife received him with her brightest smile. His coming back after a few hours’ absence meant the fulness of joy.
She had spent a day at Fernhurst, and the sight of her three sisters in their somewhat ostentatious mourning had renewed her grief. She had sent them money for mourning, which largesse they had spent conscientiously, and so were swathed in crape and distinctly funereal of aspect.
There were Peggy’s sisters, whose very existence recalled her image too vividly; and there was Peggy’s room, the room which she had shared with Hetty; and the little bed where she had slept so peacefully, with her nose almost touching the sloping roof, before the cruel cough took hold of her, and disturbed those happy, childish slumbers, with their visions of fairyland, or of castles in the air which seemed solid and real to the dreamer. Everything in that cottage chamber suggested her who slept in a far lovelier spot.
The room remained just as the child had left it. Peggy’s things were sacred. There was her workbox, the substantial, old-fashioned rosewood box, inlaid with mother-o’-pearl, and lined with blue silk, the old, old blue, a colour such as modern taste holds up to scorn—for the box was nearly half a century old, and had belonged to Peggy’s grandmother first and to her mother afterwards. It had been given to Peggy because she was the youngest, and the little stock of trinkets was exhausted by the time her four sisters had each received a souvenir. The amethyst earrings, utterly unwearable, for Eve; the watch which had not gone for years, to Sophy; and a couple of poor little brooches for Jenny and Hetty. After these jewels had been dealt out there remained only the workbox for Peggy. It had been to her a source of infinite delight. What treasures of doll’s clothing, what varieties of fancy-work; kettle-holders, never to be polluted by a kettle; mats, never finished; Berlin-wool cuffs, and point-lace handkerchiefs. Peggy had seldom finished anything; but the rapture of beginning things had been intense, a fever of enjoyment.
There were her books upon a little carved Swiss shelf, by her bed. Her lesson-books, thumbed and dog’s-eared, everybody else’s lesson-books before they descended to her; that “Grammaire des Grammaires” over which the whole family had toiled, and the Primers which make learning easy and people the world with smatterers. There were gift-books, birthday presents from governess or sisters; the immortal Family Robinson, Grimm, Hans Andersen, Bluebeard, Cinderella. How many a summer dawn Peggy had lain upon that pillow, reading the old fairy-tales before a foot was stirring in the house. Her bed was there, with the prettiest of Bellagio rugs laid over it, sacred as a shrine. The little room would have been far more convenient for Hetty if that bed had been taken down and put away; but no one dreamed of removing it. There would have been unlovingness in the mere suggestion.
Well, they had all to do without Peggy henceforward. There was one link gone from the chain of love. Vansittart looked round at his sisters-in-law’s faces with an agonized dread. Who would be the next? Which among that tainted flock would be the first to show the inherited poison, the first to feel the cold hand of the destroyer?