Poor child! I don’t think it occurred to her to blame those who had done it, or even to ask herself whether they knew what they were doing. Perhaps she did not believe that they had done it willingly. I do not think she asked herself any question on the subject. She had to bear it, and she could not bear it. Her mind was capable of little more.
CHAPTER VII.
“It does not seem possible,” said the rector, slowly; “and yet somehow I cannot help thinking sometimes that I must be going to die.”
“Herbert!”
“It is very curious—very curious—my reason tells me so, not feeling. I myself am just what I always was; but I think the symptoms are against me, and I see it in Marsden’s looks. Doesn’t he say so to you?”
“Dear,” said Mrs. Damerel, with a trembling voice, “he does not conceal from me that it is very serious; but oh, Herbert, how often have we seen even the children at death’s door, and yet brought back!”
“At death’s door,” he said reflectively; “yes, that’s a good expression—at the door of something unknown. Somehow it does not seem possible. One can believe it for others, not for one’s self. The idea is very strange.”
Mrs. Damerel was a good, religious woman; and her husband was a clergyman. She did not feel that this was how he ought to speak at such a moment, and the thought wrung her heart. “Dearest,” she said, growing more tender in her grief and pity, “it is a thing we must all think of one time or another; and to you, who have served God faithfully, it must be something else than ‘strange.’”
“What else?” he said, looking up at her. “I might say confusing, bewildering. To think that I am going I know not where, with no certainty of feeling that I shall ever know anything about it; that I am no longer a free agent, but helpless, like a leaf blown into a corner by the wind—I who for very nearly fifty years have had a voice in all that was done to me. My dear, I don’t know that I ever realized before how strange it was.”
“But—you are—happy, Herbert?” she said, in a low, imploring voice.