CHAPTER XIV.
Throckmorton’s year of leave was not up, yet he went immediately back to his post. Everything that had happened to him in the last six months had been so unreal, so out of all his previous experiences, that he needed the every-day routine of duty to enable him to get his bearings. He wanted to find out if he himself was changed. There was certainly a change in him, which everybody saw; but he was not a man to be questioned. He went about his duty, quietly and self-containedly. He had always found a plenty to do, and wondered at the idleness that he sometimes saw around him; and now he was busier than ever. He was not a philanthropic meddler, and was as loath to offer his advice unasked to a soldier as to an officer, but he earnestly desired, now more than ever, to be of help to his fellow-men, and Throckmorton’s help was always efficient because it never hurt the self-respect of those who received it. Certain of the non-commissioned officers at his post were competing for a commission. To his surprise and gratification, he found them anxious to be instructed by him. So he turned schoolmaster, and patiently and laboriously, night after night, gave them the advantage of all he knew. Only one got the commission, but all were qualified when Throckmorton got through with them. He was not any less alert and attentive than before, but in all his waking moments, when his mind was not imperatively drawn to other things, he was thinking over those six months at Millenbeck—the hopes with which he went back; the strangeness of finding himself under the ban among his own people; the renewal of the link with Barn Elms, after thirty years’ absence; his complete infatuation with Jacqueline—and, out of it all, rose Judith’s face. How hard had been her lot; and how strange it was that he had made confidences to her, and that, of all the women he had ever known, she was the only one of whose sympathy he had ever felt the need! He considered his somewhat barren life—his reserved habits—and sometimes thought Heaven was kind to Jacqueline in not giving her to him, for he could not bend his nature to any woman’s—the woman must conform to him; and it was not in Jacqueline to be anything but what Nature had made her.
Jack was off at the university, and Millenbeck was shut up, silent and deserted.
Freke was gone. He disappeared apparently from the face of the earth. He wanted neither to see nor hear anything of anybody connected with Jacqueline. Throckmorton, on the contrary, clung to the ties at Barn Elms.
But to Judith Temple life had become infinitely sadder and poorer than ever before. She had caught one glimpse of paradise, and that had changed the whole face of life for her, and she seemed all at once to be very much alone. But in one sense she was less alone than ever before. Mrs. Temple’s will and courage and purpose seemed gone. She changed strangely after Jacqueline’s death. She, who had once silently resented the slightest forgetfulness of Beverley, now seemed to feel acutely that the living should not be sacrificed to the dead. She began to urge Judith to go from home; to take off her mourning at the end of a year. Judith gently protested. The truth was that, although Mrs. Temple had at last come out of that strange forgetfulness of Jacqueline and mourned as other mothers do, Jacqueline took nothing out of her life. With Judith it was as if her child had been taken. She could not pass Jacqueline’s empty room without remembering how she would waylay her, and draw her in to sit by the fire and dream and romance. She could not sew or read or do anything without feeling the loss of the childish companionship. Even when she laid aside her seriousness for her child and romped and played with the boy, he was apt to say, “I wish Jacky would come back and play with me again.”
At intervals Mrs. Temple received kind and sympathetic letters from Throckmorton, and replied to them with letters worded with her own simple eloquence. In Throckmorton’s letters he spoke of Jacqueline rather as if she had been his child than his promised wife. Among them all Jacqueline’s memory was that of a child. Throckmorton sent kind messages to Judith; and Mrs. Temple, when she wrote, conveyed short but expressive replies from Judith.
Two years had passed. So quiet and uneventful had been their lives, that Judith would have had difficulty in persuading herself that the years were slipping by, but for little Beverley, now a handsome, sturdy urchin, whose long, fair hair had been cut off, and who emerged from dainty white frocks into kilts. The grandfather and grandmother daily more adored the child. Judith thought sometimes they were fast forgetting Jacqueline. The grass was quite green over Jacqueline by this time, and the head-stone had lost its perfect whiteness. But to Judith there was no forgetting. She had loved the child as if she had been her own, and she loved Throckmorton still. Jack wrote to her at intervals, his letters always containing some allusion to Jacqueline. Judith thought sometimes, with wonder, that Fate should not in the first instance have united those two young creatures, boy and girl.