The rector’s wife, offended, began by various excuses, as that she was the last person in the world to hear anything, and that gossips knew better than to bring tales to her; but in the end unfolded her stores and satisfied Miss Charity, who took a lively interest in her fellow-creatures, and loved to hear everything that was going on. By the time this recital was fairly begun Miss Cherry came back, carrying with her own hands a bowl of creamy milk for little Dolly, who clung to her skirts and went with her wherever she went. Mrs. Burchell sat in the summer-house, which afforded a little shelter, and was safer as well as more decorous than the grass outside. When Cherry sat down with the children, Agnes had her gossip, too, to pour into the gentle old maiden’s sympathetic ears. Agnes was in the crotchety stage of youth, when the newly-developed creature wants to be doing something for its fellows. She had tried the school and the parish, not with very great success. She wanted Miss Cherry to tell her what to do. ‘The schoolmistress can teach the girls better than I can. She shrugs her shoulders at me. She is certificated, and knows everything; and the old women are not at their ease. They talk about my dear papa, and what a beautiful sermon it was last Sunday. And mamma is busy with her housekeeping. Couldn’t you tell me, dear Miss Cherry, anything a girl can do?’ Miss Cherry somehow was a girl herself, though she was old. It was more natural to appeal to her than even to mamma.
Dolly for her part drank her milk, and dipped her biscuit in it, and made ‘a figure’ of herself unnoticed by anybody, carrying on a monologue of her own all the time. And Cara sat on the lawn, with the leaves playing over her, flecking her pretty head and white frock with a perpetual coming and going of light and shadow. Cara said nothing to any one. She was looking out with her blue eyes well open, through the branches over big St. George’s, upon that misty blueness which was the world.
CHAPTER V.
COMING HOME.
They stayed in Como till late in October, now here, now there, as caprice guided their steps. Sometimes Mrs. Beresford would be pleased to be quiet, to float about the lake in the boat, doing nothing, taking in the air and the sunshine; or to sit at her window watching the storms that would sometimes come with little warning, turning the lovely Italian lake in a moment into a wild Highland loch—a transformation which always delighted her. She liked the storms, until one day a boat was upset, which had a great effect upon her mind. The people about her thought her heartless in her investigations into this accident, which threw several poor families into dire trouble and sorrow.
‘Would the men die directly?’ she asked; ‘or would they have time to think and time to struggle?’
Her husband reminded her of the common idea that all the scenes of your life came before you, as in a panorama, when you were drowning. ‘I should not like that,’ she said, with a shiver. Then Abbondio interposed, he to whom the boat belonged which the Beresfords hired, and told how he had been drowned once.
‘They brought me back,’ he said; ‘and I shall have to die twice now, which is hard upon a man; for I was gone; if they had not brought me back, I should never have known anything more. No, Signora, I did not see all that had happened in my life. I felt only that I had slipped the net, and was grasping and grasping at it, and could not get it.’
‘That was painful,’ she said, eagerly.
‘It was a confusion,’ said the fisherman.