“It is the fortune of war,” said Derwent, when he learned, to his profound amazement, this idea which had taken possession of me. “It is the will of God,” said Captain Hughes’s pale widow, lifting her tearful face to me, from under the heavy veil of her mourning. So it was—but sharp and poignant is the contest between grief and joy.
“See what your despised telegraph can do, after all!” cried Derwent, rejoicing with all his honest heart over the news he had brought.
“But, ah! if Bertie’s friend had been poor!” said I. “How many souls do we wring with additional pangs, to have our anxiety dispelled the more easily? Think of the news of a battle, with so many killed and wounded—and some dreadful fortnight, or maybe month, to live through before one knows whether one’s own is dead or alive. No, ’tis a cruel earthly Geni, and not a celestial Spirit—it does good now and then, only because it cannot help it—relieves us, Derwent, but slaughters poor Mrs. Hughes.”
“I believe Clare is not half-content—nobody must be killed to satisfy you women—but, unfortunately that will not do in this world,” said Derwent. “We have to be thankful for our own exemption, without entering too deeply into other people’s grief. And most of us find that philosophy easy enough.”
“Most of us are very poor creatures,” said Maurice Harley, sententiously. He came alone to make his inquiries this time. Alice was invisible, and not to be heard of. I could not see her even when I called at the cottage. She had taken overpowering shame to herself, and shrank from my eyes. It was her brother who carried our news to his mother’s house—carried it, as I discovered incidentally, with the rarest and most delicate care for her—rigidly keeping up the fiction of supposing her not to care for it, nor to be specially interested, any more than for her old playfellow. He was ill at ease himself, and distracted with questions no longer of a dilettante kind. In my eyes this increased his kindness all the more.
“Yes, we are poor creatures the most of us,” repeated Maurice, when my husband—who did not notice any particular improvement in the Fellow of Exeter, and was disposed to be contemptuous, as elder men are, of his superiority to ordinary mortals—had sauntered, half-laughing, half-disgusted, out of the room. “Something you said the other day has stuck to my memory, Mrs. Crofton—help me out with it, pray. Are we worth a woman’s tears, the greater part of us? What is the good of us? I don’t mean Bertie, who is doing something in this world, but, for example, such a fellow as me!”
“Take care, Maurice! I see hoofs and a tail upon that humility of yours,” said I. “You, who are so wise, do you not know that women and their tears are no more superlative than men and their doings? Did you think I meant the tender, heroical, sentimental tears of romance, for the sake of which the sublime knight might be content to die? No such thing. I meant only that there seems a kind of pathetic, homely justice in it, when the man who dies—especially the man who dies untimely—has a woman belonging to him, to be his true and faithful mourner; that is all—it is nothing superlative; the sublime men are no better loved than the homeliest ones. Alice, if you asked her, would give you the poetical youthful interpretation of it, but I mean no such thing, Maurice. We want no great deeds, we womenkind; we were born to like you, and to cry over you, troublesome creatures that you are!”
“Ah! that is very well,” said Maurice, who in his heart was young enough to like the superlative idea best. “I wish I had a supreme right to somebody’s tears—but why should anybody cry over me? Am not I foredoomed to shrivel up into a College Don?”
“If you please,” said I.
“And if I don’t please?” cried Maurice, starting up, and seizing, after his usual fashion, a book off the table. He made a hurried march about the room, as usual, too; throwing that down; and picking up another to look at its title, then returned, and repeated, with some emphasis—“And what if I don’t please?”