CHAPTER XVII.
The "breaking down" predicted by Dr. Winters, took the form, not of hysterical emotion, as he had anticipated, but of physical languor and spiritual apathy, which were more alarming. Jessie moved, spoke, and thought like one in a trance; acquiescing in every proposal made by her sister and Roy; obeying every request without demur or inquiry. If left to herself she asked nothing except to be allowed to sit or lie passive for hours together; her great eyes closed or blank; her countenance set in the gloomy weariness that had marked it from the moment her hand left her dead father's forehead—a look that said she had henceforward nothing to hope for or to fear.
Few husbands would have had tolerance with this excessive grief for the loss of a parent, however beloved, and worthy of filial attachment. One might search far and long without finding a man whose sympathy with the demonstration of this would incite him to warmer love and fonder care for her, who, for the time, overlooked his claim to supreme regard in her devotion to a memory.
"You could not mourn more bitterly for me!" I once heard a man say in impatient reproach, upon surprising his wife in tears within a week after she had committed an indulgent parent to the grave.
He was a good man, and an affectionate husband, but he could not endure the semblance of a divided allegiance.
Had Roy Fordham's love been of this sensitive and exclusive type, it would have been chafed threadbare before the honeymoon was one-tenth wasted. The new bond between them she ignored entirely—not, it was evident, in wilfulness or shyness, but because it had no place in her thoughts; was a matter of no moment in comparison with the event that steeped her whole being in despondency. It was well that neither he nor Eunice had any knowledge of the continuous warfare of the summer, the fiercer struggle of that early September day, the morrow of which had brought a fresh sorrow in her father's illness. Had they comprehended all this, superadded to their fears that her three weeks' watching and its finale had seriously affected her nervous system, they would have had small hope of the curative power of Nature and of Love. She was, in reality, insane for the three days immediately succeeding her marriage, if lack of feeling, thought, and connected memory signify mental aberration. In after years, this period was almost a blank in the retrospect, a confusing dissolving view that defied her scrutiny. While it lasted it was a nightmare from which she had not strength to awaken.
When she was led by Roy to take a last look at her father's face as he lay in his coffin ready to be transported to the church, her eyes were vacant and dry, her features emotionless.
"He looks very natural!" she said slowly, like one trying to recall the conventional phrase in such circumstances.
When Eunice bent weepingly to kiss the frozen lips where still lingered the smile of ineffable peace with which he had named his wife, Jessie eyed her with a mixture of wonder and perplexity; and remarking again, "Very natural! almost life-like!" turned away, with the air of one who had said and done all that could be required of her.