‘I was very sorry,’ he said; as indeed what else was there to say?
‘Oh, yes, I knew you would feel for us. It was so sudden—quite well when the last mail came in, and this one to bring such news! You scarcely knew him; and, oh, I feel it so much now, that none of my friends, that not even the boys knew him as they ought to have known him. It seems as if it must have been my fault.’
‘That it could never have been. You must not reproach yourself; though one always does, however the loss happens,’ he said, in a low and sorrowful tone. He was thinking of his wife, for whom he had mourned with the intensity of despair, but the same words answered both cases. He stood as he had done the last time he was there, not looking at her in her panoply of mourning, but looking dreamily into the fire. And she cried a little, with a childish sob in her throat. The grief was perfectly real, childlike, and innocent. He was much more affected by the recollection of that last meeting at which he had taken leave of her than she was—he remembered it better. The new incident even kept her from seeing anything more than the most ordinary every-day fact, one friend coming to see another, in his return.
‘I suppose you have no details?’
‘Not one. We cannot hear till the next mail. It will be some comfort to have particulars. Poor John! he was always so strong, one never had any fear. I was the one that could not stand the climate; and yet I am left and he is taken!’
‘But you have not been exposed to the climate,’ said Mr. Beresford. She was not wise in these expressions of her personal grief, though her friends always thought her so wise in her sympathy. She resumed softly:
‘I have no fears about the boys to embitter my grief. I know they will be well cared for. He was so good a father, though he had them so little with him. Oh, why did you not tell me to send him one of the boys?’
Mr. Beresford would have felt himself the cruellest of malignants, had he ventured to make such a suggestion in former days, but he did not say this now. ‘You did what you thought was best for them,’ he said.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘for them; there was their education to be thought of. That was what I considered; but I do not think—do you think,’ she added, with an unconscious clasping of her hands and entreating look, ‘that, since the great occasion for it is over—Edward need go to India now?’
The form of the speech was that of an assertion—the tone that of a question. She might follow her own inclinations like other people; but she liked to have them sanctioned and approved by her friends.