“Dear Paul,” said Dolly, giving him her hand again, “you did not mean it. Do you think he does not know now? Oh, you may be sure he understands!” she cried, with that confidence in the advancement of the dead above all petty frailties which is so touching and so universal.
“I hope so,” Paul said, with quivering lips; and as he stood here, with this soft hand clasping his, and this familiar, almost childish, voice consoling him, Paul felt as if he had awakened out of a dream. This was the place he belonged to, not the squalid dream to which he had given himself. Standing under those beautiful trees, with this soft, fair innocent creature comprehending and consoling him, there suddenly flashed before his eyes a vision of a narrow street, the lamp-post, the children shouting and fighting, and another creature, who did not at all understand him, standing close by him, pressing her advice upon him, looking up at him with eager eyes. A sudden horror seized him even while he felt the softness of Dolly’s consoling touch and voice. It quickened the beating of his heart and brought a faintness of terror like a film over his eyes.
“Come and sit down,” said Dolly, alarmed. “You are so pale. Oh, Paul, sit down, and I will run and bring you something. You have been shutting yourself up too much; you have been making yourself ill. Oh, Paul! you must not reproach yourself. You must remember how much there is to do.”
“Do not leave me, Dolly. I am going to speak to the rector. I am not ill—it was only a sudden recollection that came over me. I have not been so good a son as I ought to have been.”
“Oh, Paul! he sees now—he sees that you never meant it,” Dolly said. “Do you think they are like us, thinking only of the outside? And you have your mother to think of now.”
“And so I will,” he said, with a softening rush of tears to his eyes. “Come in with me, Dolly.”
Dolly was used to comforting people who were in trouble. She did not take away her hand, but went in with him very quietly, like a child, leading the young man who was so deeply moved. Her own heart was in a great flutter and commotion, but she kept very still, and led him to her father’s study and opened the door for him. “Here is Paul, papa,” she said, as if Paul had been a boy again, coming with an exercise, or to be scolded for some folly he had done. But afterwards Dolly went back to her wreaths with her heart beating very wildly. She was ashamed and angry with herself that it should be so on such a day—the morning of the funeral. But then it is so in nature, let us chide as we will. One day ends weeping, and the next thrusts its recollection away with sunshine. Already the new springs of life were beginning to burst forth from the very edges of the grave.
When Paul went away after this last bit of melancholy business (he had come to tell the rector what the hymn was which his mother wished to be sung) he did not see Dolly again. She was putting all her flowers ready with which to cover the darkness of the coffin—a tender expedient which has everywhere suggested itself to humanity. He went away through the early sunshine, walking with a subdued and measured tread as a man enters a church not to disturb the worshippers. In Paul’s own mind there was a feeling like that of convalescence—the sense of something painful behind yet hopeful before—the faintness and weakness, yet renewal of life, which comes after an illness. There was no anguish in his grief, nor had there been after the first agony of self-reproach which he had experienced, when he perceived the cruelty of his lingering and reluctance to obey his mother’s call. But that was over. He had at least done his duty at the last, and now the feeling in Paul’s mind was more that of respectful compassion for his father now withdrawn out of all the happiness of his life, than of any sorer, more personal sentiment. The loss of him was not a thing against which his son’s whole soul cried out as darkening heaven and earth to himself. The loss of a child has this effect upon a parent, but that of a parent seldom so affects a child; yet he was sorry, with almost a compunctious sense of the happiness of living, for his father who had lost that—who had been obliged to give up wife and children, and his happy domestic life, and his property and influence, and the beautiful world and the daylight. At this thought his heart bled for Sir William; yet for himself beat softly with a sense of unbounded opening and expansion and new possibility. As he walked softly home, his step instinctively so sobered and gentle, his demeanour so subdued, the thoughts that possessed him were such as he had never experienced before. They possessed him indeed; they were not voluntary, not originated by any will of his, but swept through him as on the wings of the wind, or gently floated into him, filling every nook and corner. He was no longer the same being; the moody, viewy, rebellious young man who was about to emigrate with Spears, to join a little rude community of colonists and work with his hands for his daily bread and sacrifice all his better knowledge, all the culture of a higher social caste, to rough equality and primitive justice—had died with Sir William. All that seemed to be years behind him. Sometimes his late associates appeared to him as if in a dream, as the discomforts of a past journey or the perils that we have overcome, flash upon us in sudden pictures. He saw Spears and Fraser and the rest for a moment gleaming out of the darkness, as he might have seen a precipice in the Alps on the edge of which for a moment he had hung. It was not that he had given them up; it was that in a moment they had become impossible. He walked on, subdued, in his strange convalescence, with a kind of content and resignation and sense of submission. A man newly out of a fever, submits sweetly to all the immediate restraints that suit his weakness. He does not insist upon exercises or indulgences of which he feels incapable, but recognises with a grateful sense of trouble over, the duty of submitting. This was how Paul felt. He was not glad, but there was in his veins a curious elation, expansion, a rising tide of new life. He had to cross the village street on his way home, and there all the people he met took off their hats or made their curtseys with a reverential respect that arose half out of respect for his new dignities, and half out of sympathy for the son who had lost his father. Just when his mind was soft and tender with the sight of this universal homage, there came up to him a strange little figure, all in solemn black.
“You are going home,” said this unknown being. “I will walk with you and talk it over; and let us try if we cannot arrive at an understanding——”
Paul put up his hand with sudden impatience. “I can’t speak to you to-day,” he said hastily.