‘But what do you think? Often when one doesn’t know, one has an idea. I don’t know Italy or India; but I imagine something. Aunt Cherry, tell me what you think.’
‘Oh, Cara, my darling, I don’t know what it is like! I know there is no trouble or pain in it; and that God is not so far off as here. No, He is not far off here; but we can’t see Him; and we are such poor dull creatures. And I think, Cara, I think that our Lord must be always about there. That people may go and stand on the roadside and see Him pass, and talk to Him, and be satisfied about everything.’
‘How—be satisfied about everything?’
‘Oh, child! I should not want anything more. He sees both sides, my darling, both here and there, and understands. I am sure they must be able to speak to Him, and go to Him, whenever they will——’
This thought brought great tears, a suffusion of utter wistfulness yet heart-content, to Cherry’s eyes. Little Cara did not know very well what was meant by such words. She did not understand this conception of the great Creator as a better taught child might have done. But she said to herself, all secretly: ‘If there is One like that, whether it is in heaven or earth, I might tell Him, and it would be no harm.’
While Miss Cherry dried her eyes, her heart lightened by that overflowing. Perhaps, though they had not seen Him, He had passed that way, and heard the babble—what was it more?—between the woman and the child.
CHAPTER IX.
THE HILL.
After this a long interval passed, which it is needless to describe in detail. Five years is a long time in a life; how much it does! Makes ties and breaks them, gives life and withdraws it, finds you happy and leaves you miserable, builds you up or plucks you down; and at the same time how little it does! Buffets you, caresses you, plays at shuttlecock with you; yet leaves you the same man or woman, unchanged. Most of this time James Beresford had spent in absences, now here, now there; not travels according to the old happy sense, though in a real and matter-of-fact sense they were more travels than those he had made so happily in the honeymooning days. But he did not like to use the word. He called his long voyages absences, nothing more. And they were of a very different kind from those expeditions of old. He avoided the Continent as if pestilence had been there, and would not even cross it to get the mail at Brindisi, but went all the way round from Southampton when he went to the East. He went up the Nile, with a scientific party, observing some phenomena or other. He went to America in the same way. He was not a very good sailor, but he made up his mind to that as the best way of fighting through those lonely years. Once he went as far north as any but real Arctic explorers, with their souls in it, had ever done. Once he tracked the possible path of Russia across the wildest border wastes to the Indian frontier. He went everywhere languidly but persistently, seldom roused, but never discouraged. A man may be very brave outside, though he is not brave within; and weakness is linked to strength in ways beyond our guessing. He went into such wilds once, that they gave him an ‘ovation’ at the Geographical Society’s meeting, not because of any information he had brought them, or anything he had done, but because he had been so far off, where so few people had ever been. And periodically he came back to the Square; he would not leave that familiar house. His wife’s drawing-room was kept just as she had liked it, though no one entered the room: the cook and John the butler, who had married, having the charge of everything. And when Mr. Beresford came back to England, he went home, living downstairs generally, with one of his travelling companions to bear him company. Maxwell and he had dropped apart. They were still by way of being fast friends, and doubtless, had one wanted the other, would still have proved so—last resource of friendship, in which the severed may still hope. But, as nothing happened to either, their relations waxed cold and distant. The doctor had never got clear of the suspicion which had risen in his mind at Mrs. Beresford’s death. It is true that had James Beresford given the poor lady that ‘strong sweet dose’ she once had asked for, Maxwell would have forgiven his friend with all his heart. I do not know, in such a strange case, what the doctor could have done; probably exactly as he did afterwards do, invent a death-certificate which might be accepted as possible, though it was not in accordance with the facts. But, anyhow, he would have taken up warmly, and stood by his friend to his last gasp. This being the case, it is impossible to tell on what principle it was that Maxwell half hated Beresford, having a lurking suspicion that he had done it—a suspicion contradicted by his own statement and by several of the facts. But this was the case. The man who would have helped his wife boldly, heart-brokenly, to escape from living agony, was one thing; but he who would give her a fatal draught, or connive at her getting it, and then veil himself so that no one should know, was different. So Mr. Maxwell thought. The inconsistency might be absurd; but it was so. They positively dropped out of acquaintance. The men who visited James Beresford when he was at home, were men with tags to their names, mystic initials, F.G.S.’s, F.R.S.’s, F.S.A.’s, and others of that class. And Maxwell, who was his oldest friend, dropped off. He said to himself that if Beresford ever wanted him badly, he would find his friendship surviving. But Beresford did not want Maxwell nor Maxwell Beresford; and thus they were severed for a suspicion which would not have severed them had it been a reality, or so at least Maxwell thought. The doctor still went down once a week regularly to visit Miss Charity, and so kept up his knowledge of the family; but ‘nothing came’ of the old fancy that had been supposed to exist between him and Cherry. They all hardened down unconsciously, these middle-aged folk, in their various ways. The doctor became a little rougher, a little redder, a trifle more weather-beaten; and Miss Cherry grew imperceptibly more faded, more slim, more prim. As for Miss Charity, being now over seventy, she was younger than ever; her unwrinkled cheeks smoother, her blue eyes as blue, her step almost more alert, her garden more full of roses. ‘After seventy,’ she tersely said, ‘one gets a new lease.’ And Mrs. Burchell, at the Rectory, was a little stouter, and her husband a little more burly, and both of them more critical. Fifty is perhaps a less amiable age than three-score and ten. I am not sure that it is not the least amiable age of all; the one at which nature begins to resent the fact of growing old. Of all the elder generation, James Beresford was the one to whom it made least change, notwithstanding that he was the only one who had ‘come through’ any considerable struggle. He was still speculative, still fond of philosophical talk, still slow to carry out to logical conclusions any of the somewhat daring theories which he loved to play with. He was as little affected as ever by what he believed and what he did not believe.
As for Cara, however, these five years had made a great difference to her; they had widened the skies over her head and the earth under her feet. Whereas she had been but twelve, a child, groping and often in the dark, now she was seventeen, and every new day that rose was a new wonder to her. Darkness had fled away, and the firmament all around her quivered and trembled with light; night but pretended to be, as in summer, when twilight meets twilight, and makes the moment of so-called midnight and darkness the merriest and sweetest of jests. Everything was bright around her feet, and before her in that flowery path which led through tracts of sunshine. She was no more afraid of life than the flowers are. Round about her the elders, who were her guides, and ought to have been her examples, were not, she might have perceived, had she paused to think, exuberantly happy. They had no blessedness to boast of, nor any exemption from common ills; but it no more occurred to Cara to think that she, she could ever be like her good Aunt Cherry, or Mrs. Burchell, than that she could be turned into a blue bird, like the prince in the fairy tale. The one transformation would have been less wonderful than the other. She had lived chiefly at Sunninghill during her father’s absence, and it was a favourite theory with the young Burchells, all but two (there were ten of them), that she would progress in time to be the Miss Cherry, and then the Miss Charity, of that maiden house. A fate was upon it, they said. It was always to be in the hands of a Miss Beresford, an old-maidish Charity, to be transmitted to another Charity after her. This was one of the favourite jokes of the rectorial household, warmly maintained except by two, i.e. Agnes, the eldest, a young woman full of aspirations; and Roger, the second boy, who had aspirations too, or rather who had one aspiration, of which Cara was the object. She would not die Charity Beresford if he could help it; but this was a secret design of which nobody knew. Cara’s presence, it may be supposed, had made a great deal of difference at Sunninghill. It had introduced a governess and a great many lessons; and it had introduced juvenile parties and an amount of fun unparalleled before in the neighbourhood. Not that she was a very merry child, though she was full of visionary happiness; but when she was there, there too was drawn everything the two other elder Charity Beresfords could think of as delightsome. The amusements of the princesses down in St. George’s were infinitely less considered. To be sure there were many of them, and Cara was but one. She would have been quite happy enough in the garden, among the roses; but because this was the case she had every ‘distraction’ that love could think of, and all the young people in the neighbourhood had reason to rejoice that Cara Beresford had come to live with her aunts at Sunninghill.