Chapter Eleven.
Home-Sick.
“Slight withal may be the things which bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside for ever: it may be a sound,
A tone of music—summer’s eve, or spring—
A flower—the wind—the ocean.”
Byron.
And so things went on for a day or two. As regards Arthur, that is to say. As regarded the anxious little party at Faxleham Cottage, Mr Morison took immediate steps. He went down there the following day to give them news of Lettice, and to arrange for their all coming to spend Christmas with him and his wife. Lettice would gladly have accompanied him, but the morning had found her completely knocked up, and in her now thoroughly awakened fear of her own self-will, she gave in without a murmur to her uncle and aunt’s decision that she must stay where she was. Nor was she the only one to exercise self-denial. Mr and Mrs Morison, quite against their custom, determined to stay in London for Christmas, so that they should be nearer at hand for any news of Arthur, or to take further steps, should such be necessary.
Lettice was overwhelmed with gratitude. She was satisfied, too, that all that could be done was being done. She was gentle to a fault. But her punishment was of the severest.
“If they—if you—reproached me,” she said to Nina, weeping in her arms, the evening of their arrival, “I could, I think, better bear it. But to have nothing but kindness, nothing but constant proofs of affection that I don’t deserve. Oh, Nina, it humiliates me.”
“But it should not,” said Nina. “For one thing, Lettice, do you not owe it to our uncle and aunt to try to seem a little less wretched? Is it not selfish to think of nothing but our anxiety? Are you not in danger, perhaps, of exaggerating things now the other way—blaming yourself too much, and making those about you unhappy from your very sorrow for having done so in the past?”
A very short time ago Nina would not have dared to speak thus to her sister, and even now she felt that Lettice shrank back a little from her, as she listened.
“It may be so,” she said wearily, and with a shade of bitterness in her tone. “No doubt I am bad and wrong every way. I can’t think what God lets me live for.”
“Oh, Lettice!” said Nina with deep reproach. And the fit of petulance was over in a moment. “I know I shouldn’t speak so. Forgive me again, Nina. I will try.”