“I would not conceal from you, my dear and kind Helen,” she wrote, “that I am glad for my child to be well settled in life. But my grief and sorrow for you prevent my being able to rejoice as I might otherwise have done. And though you tell me, and it is no doubt the case that the breaking off of your Cicely’s engagement was by her own desire, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that it is unnatural and strange that Geneviève should so quickly have succeeded her in Mr. Fawcett’s regard. I trust neither he nor my daughter may regret what seems to have been done hastily. She tells me she will explain all when we meet; she says your goodness and that of the dear Cicely is beyond words. I trust, when I understand more, I may not learn that my child has not been deserving of it.”
“She is so simple and unworldly!” said Mrs. Methvyn. “Poor Caroline—how can her daughter have become so different!”
But after reading this letter, she did not again repeat her wish that Cicely had allowed her to tell Geneviève’s mother the whole truth.
When they first left the Abbey, it was the intention of Mrs. Methvyn and her daughter at once to make a new home for themselves at Leobury, a quaintly pretty, quiet little town, far away from Greystone and its associations. It was at Leobury that Mrs. Methvyn’s former widowhood had been spent, and it was there too that after a separation of ten years she had again met her first love—Philip Methvyn. Leobury was endeared to her for this reason, and Cicely was only too glad to find her mother able to express interest on the subject of their home, not to consent readily to what she proposed. But their plans were not at once carried out. There was no suitable house to be had at Leobury at the time they left Greystone. So for nearly a year after Colonel Methvyn’s death, his widow and daughter were without a settled home.
Summer was again on the wane—it had seemed a short summer to Cicely compared with that of the previous year—when they at last found themselves in possession of a pretty little house in the place where, more than a quarter of a century before, young Mrs. Bruce had come to live with her two years old Amiel. She had been poor then; poorer far than now, but in those old days poverty had seemed a smaller matter. She was young, and she had then never known what it was to be rich; the husband she had lost had caused her far sorer griefs than that of his death—she had suffered enough in her short married life to realise even loneliness as a relief. Now, how different everything was! For twenty-two years she had been happier than it falls to the lot of many women to be; hardly a wish of hers had remained ungratified; till Colonel Methvyn’s accident she had not known a care—when suddenly the whole had collapsed—for the second time she found herself a widow, and in comparatively speaking straitened circumstances, her companion this time a daughter even dearer to her than little Amiel—a daughter who, young as she was, had known sorrow and disappointment neither slight nor passing, troubles enough to have soured a less healthy nature, which her mother was powerless to soften or heal. It is hardly to be wondered at that, weakened in strength and nerve, Mrs. Methvyn sometimes found it difficult to look on the bright side of things.
But what she could not do, time and nature had not neglected. Already Cicely was recovering from the crushing effects of the blow that had fallen upon her so unexpectedly. She could look back now without flinching upon all that had happened, could feel that she was still young and strong and hopeful, and that the light had not all died out of her life. To her their loss of riches had been by no means an unmitigated evil; for though they were not so reduced as to come into unlovely proximity with poverty, the change in their circumstances had necessitated the exertion of energy and forethought in their arrangements, which had been for Cicely a healthy and invigorating discipline. She felt that she was of use; that, without her, life would have been a terrible blank to her enfeebled mother; and the consciousness gave her, as nothing else could have done, strength and cheerfulness. One thought only she could not face—what would life be to her now, how would it be possible to endure it were her one interest removed, her mother taken from her?
“I am risking my all in a frail bark,” she would sometimes say to herself with a shudder, “but surely if mamma were to die I should die too. No one could live in such utter desolation.” Yet even as she said so, a misgiving would suggest itself that such things had been and might be again; that life, the awful yet priceless gift, though bestowed unasked, is not therefore so easily to be laid down as at times we would fain imagine. The “sharp malady” must run its course; the “appointed bounds” cannot be passed; the “few days and full of trouble” are to some lonely men and women lengthened into the many, before there comes the longed-for order of release, the permission to depart for the unseen land which, wherever and whatever it may be, is to them more real than any other, since thither have journeyed before them all whose presence made this earth a home—the “faces loved and lost awhile;”—yes, there are some strangely solitary beings in this crowded world of ours.
The first two or three Sundays at Leobury, Cicely was not able to go to church. Her mother was not very well and shrank from being left alone. But, at last, by the end of September, there came a Sunday when there was nothing to prevent Cicely’s at tending the morning service in the fine old church, but a stone’s throw from her mother’s house.
It was a beautiful day, soft and balmy; yet already, through the trees and in the breezes, there came the first far-off notes of the dying year’s lament—the subdued hush of autumn was perceptible.
“The swallows have gone, I feel sure,” thought Cicely, as she walked slowly up the quiet village street (for after all Leobury was hardly deserving of the name of town). “I can always feel that they are gone.”