Cara had been living a strange life through these melancholy days. She had not known, poor child, the full significance of that scene by her mother’s bedside, of which she had been a witness. She did not fully understand even now: but glimmers of horrible intelligence had come to her during that interview in the library, and the things she had heard afterwards from the servants had enlightened her still more. She heard the whispers that circulated among them, terrified whispers, said half under their breath. That she had done it herself—that she knew, poor dear, what she was doing—that if anything had been known, there would have been an inquest, and things would have come out. This was what Cara heard breathing about in half whispers, and which filled her with strange panic, lest her secret should escape her. She knew the secret, and she only. Nobody had questioned her, but the child’s impulse to tell had bound her very soul for days after. She had resisted it, though she had felt guilty and miserable to know something which no one else knew; but she had kept her secret. ‘Don’t let us brand her with the name of suicide.’ These words seemed to ring in her ears night and day. She repeated them over and over to herself. ‘Don’t let us brand her with the name of suicide.’
‘No, no,’ poor Cara said to herself, trembling; ‘no, no:’ though this premature and horrible secret weighed down her heart like a visible burden. Oh, if she could but have told it to nurse, or to Aunt Cherry! but she must not, not even to papa. When her aunt arrived, it was mingled torture and relief to the poor child. She clung round her with sobbing, longing so to tell; but even to cling and to sob was consolatory, and Aunt Cherry wanted no explanation of that unusual depth of childish distress. ‘Cara was not like other children,’ she said to herself. She had feelings which were deeper and more tender. She was ‘sensitive,’ she was ‘nervous.’ She was more loving than the ordinary children, who cry one moment and forget the next. And kind Cherry, though her own grief was of the milder, secondary kind, as was natural, had always tears of sympathy to give for the grief of others. She took the little girl almost entirely into her own care, and would talk to her for hours together; about being ‘good,’ about subduing all her little irritabilities, in order to please mamma, who was in heaven, and would be grieved in her happiness to think that her child was not ‘good.’ Cara was greatly awed and subdued by this talk. It hushed her, yet set her wondering; and those conversations were sometimes very strange ones, which went on between the two in their melancholy and silent hours.
‘Does everybody go to heaven who dies?’ said Cara, with awe-stricken looks.
Miss Cherry trembled a little, having some fear of false doctrine before her eyes. ‘Everybody, I hope, who loves God. There are bad people, Cara; but we don’t know them, you and I.’
‘Who love God? but I never think of God, Aunt Cherry. At least, I do now; I wonder. But if they did not do that, would they still go to heaven all the same?’
‘God loves us, dear,’ said Cherry, with the tears in her soft eyes. ‘Fathers and mothers love their children, whether their children love them or not. That is all we know.’
‘Whatever they do? if they even laugh, and go wrong? Yes,’ said Cara, very thoughtfully, ‘I suppose papa would not send me away, out into the dark, if I did ever so wrong.’
‘I am sure he would not; but you must not think of such things, dear; they are too difficult for you. When you are older, you will understand better,’ Cherry said, faltering, and with something in her heart which contradicted her; for did not the child ‘understand’ better than she?
Then Cara started another difficulty, quite as appalling; facing it with innocent confidence, yet wonder: ‘What sort of a place,’ she asked, softly, looking up with her blue eyes full of serious faith and awe, ‘is heaven?’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘you ask me what I would give all I have in the world to know! There are so many whom I love there.’