All the long suffering through which she had seen her grandmother pass seemed to lie like a thick darkness upon her. Even before the departure of her sister for school she had felt or imagined symptoms, which she thought she could not mistake, of the terrible disease which had appeared at intervals in some member of her mother’s family for several generations; and there is no wonder that for a time her courage, and even her faith, failed her.
She was wrong to conceal her fears from Dr Everett. But she said to herself: “He cannot help me. If I am mistaken—if I am only nervous and over-anxious, it will pass away in time, with suffering to no one but myself. If the danger is real, nothing—no one can help me, not even my dear old friend.”
Even more than she dreaded the long suffering she dreaded the helplessness and weariness of illness, and the dependence upon others which it must involve. She shrank morbidly from the thought of becoming a centre of painful interest to her friends and to the neighbourhood; and she resolved to say nothing either of her suffering or her fears while concealment was possible. So, during the first months of winter, making an excuse of the cold, she stayed at home, and, when chance visitors came to her, exhausted herself with efforts to seem well and cheerful in their presence, and bore the long suffering of suspense alone.
Alone? Well, she thought so for a time. She wrote herself down as “a woman desolate and forsaken,” and it went ill with her—but only for a time. Even in her darkest moments she had never quite forgotten the refuge to which she might betake herself, and she found it at last.
After a time light broke through the darkness, and she caught a glimpse—not of the way—but of His face whose hand was leading her. The way mattered little. He knew every step of it, and its ending and the rest to which it led, and why should she fear?
It cannot be said that she no longer shrank from the thought of the long, slow suffering that might be before her; but she could after this leave it all with Him “who loved her and gave Himself for her,” and who would give her strength to bear His will.
When the sharpest winter weather was over, and the days began to grow long, she fell into her old cheerful ways again. She busied herself with her housework and her needlework, and went to church and to the sewing-circle, as the man at the station had said. She saw her friends more frequently; and the neighbours, seeing the sweet content on her face, “guessed likely that she was having a good time all by herself up there on the hill.” And so she was; and neither friend nor neighbour imagined that she had anything to conceal. Nor did Dr Everett himself, until the day when he met Fidelia, and brought her home. Then he lost no time in finding out all there was to know.
That morning, as he went slowly down the hill to his home, he more than once repeated to himself the words he had spoken to Eunice,—
“I see no special cause for anxiety,”—but each time he added gravely—“as yet.” And then he lost himself in musing on the terrible mystery of inherited disease and suffering, and only came back to Eunice again when he caught sight of the bright face of Fidelia standing at his own gate.
“Poor soul! Poor Eunice! So good and wise and lovely! What a fate is to be feared for her! And yet I am not sure that her strong and beautiful sister is so happy as she.”