Neither the handsome Judith nor little Jacqueline were at all discomposed by this elderly love-making, to which they were perfectly accustomed. A slight blush came into Mrs. Temple’s refined, middle-aged face. It was worth while to coddle a man, and take all the labor of thinking and acting off his shoulders, for the sake of this delightful sentiment. Like his courage, General Temple’s sentiment was high-flown but genuine.
“I was about to say,” resumed Mrs. Temple, when the general had returned to his chair, “that when I came to Barn Elms a bride, George Throckmorton was much here. You did not notice him, my love, as I did—but I felt sorry for the boy; old George Throckmorton certainly was a most godless person. The boy’s life would have been quite wretched, I think, in spite of his grandfather’s liberality to him, but for the few people in the neighborhood like Kitty Sherrard and myself, who tried to comfort him. He would come over in the morning and stay all day, following me about the house and garden, trying to amuse Beverley, who was a mere baby.”
Mrs. Temple never spoke the name of her dead son without a strange little pause before it.
“And, my dear,” answered the general, making another feeble effort, “can you not now embrace the scriptural injunction?”
“The Scripture says,” responded sternly this otherwise gentle and Christian soul, “that there is a time to love and a time to hate.”
All this time, Judith, the young widow, had not said a word. She was slight and girlish-looking. Her straight dark brows were drawn with a single line, and in her eyes were gleams of mirth, of intelligence, of a love of life and its pleasures, that habitual restraint could not wholly subdue. When she rose, or when she sat down, or when she walked about, or when she arched her white neck, there was a singular grace, of which she was totally unconscious. Something about her suggested both love and modesty. But Fate, that had used her as if she were a creature without a soul, had married her to Beverley Temple—and within two months she was a widow. The shock, the horror of it, the willingness to idealize the dead man, had made her quietly assume the part of one who is done with this world. And Nature struggles vainly with Fate. Judith, in her black gown, and a widow’s cap over her chestnut hair, with her pretty air of wisdom and experience, fancied she had sounded the whole gamut of human love, grief, loss, and joy. Neither Millenbeck, nor anything but Beverley’s child and his father and mother and sister, mattered anything to her, she thought.
Jacqueline, however, looked rebellious, but said nothing. Like her father, she was under the rule of this soft-voiced mother. But it was certainly very hard, thought Jacqueline, bitterly, that with Millenbeck beautifully fitted up, with a delightful young man like Jack Throckmorton—for Jacqueline had already endowed him with all the graces and virtues—and a not old man, a soldier too, should be right at their doors, and she never to have a glimpse of Millenbeck, nor a chance for walks and drives with them. Jacqueline sighed profoundly, and looked despairingly at Judith, who was the stay, the prop, the comforter of this undisciplined young creature.