CHAPTER XIV.
DESPAIR!
"Ah! what have eyes to do with sleep, That seek, and vainly seek to weep? No dew on the dark lash appears,— The heart is all too full for tears." L. E. L.
"The world's a room of sickness, where each heart, Knows its own anguish and unrest, The truest wisdom there, and noblest art, Is his, who skills of comfort best, Whom by the softest step and gentlest tone, Enfeebled spirits own, And love to raise the languid eye, Where, like an angel's wing, they feel him fleeting by." Christian Year.
Anne sat in the solitude of her own thoughts; not alone, for her husband was at a table near, busy with his morrow's sermon; but Anne, for once, did not mind the silence, she had many things to think of, many things that made her sad. First, the little dead child lying now so cold and still; then his poor, sorrowing, heart-broken mother, whom she had tried, but ineffectually, to comfort; and then the father, who ought to be the one earthly stay on which the wife's heart might lean, and whose love should wean away the sad remembrance, or soften the blow. But Anne had found out that a great gulf lay between husband and wife, though what had separated them baffled her utmost skill to discover.
Robert must love his wife passionately, else why had he lifted her so tenderly in his arms, as she lay insensible when the truth of her great loss broke upon her; why had he carried her away, and as he laid her on her own bed, bent so lovingly over her, murmuring, as he chafed her hands, "My poor, stricken darling. My own lost love;" and yet, when consciousness returned, how self possessed! how altered! kind and considerate as before, but the loving words, the loving looks were wanting. And Amy, who had seemed so happy only a month ago, surely more than grief for her boy had fixed that stony look on her face, and caused those tearless, woeful eyes.
Anne's thoughts grew quite painful at last; the eternal scratch of her husband's pen irritated her.
"Do put down your pen for a minute, Tom. I feel so miserable."
"In half a moment," he said. "There—now I am ready to listen. What was it you said?"