“Never mind me,” said Fanshawe, with some shame. “You must think me a man of few resources, and so, I fear, I am. I am good for nothing. I have got out of the way of reading. It is a horrible confession, but it is true. The only thing that suggests itself to me on such a day is, if not to walk, yet to talk.”
“Let us talk, then,” said Marjory, closing the blotting-book in which she had been writing her letters.
She said it, he thought, with a sort of half contempt, as if this insignificant occupation of talk was a kind of idleness, and beneath her ordinary activity; and then, as was natural after such a conclusion had been come to, a dead silence supervened. Mr. Fanshawe broke it with a laugh.
“I fear you despise talking,” he said; “and conversation is a thing which cannot be done of malice prepense. May we have some music instead? There is music enough there in your case to last a life-time, much less an afternoon.”
“Music!” said Marjory, somewhat startled. “To be sure,” she added, with a smile, “music is not merry-making, as our poor folk fancy. It does not need to be the voice of mirth; and now you suggest it, there are few things that would express one’s feelings so well—the forlorn, confused, oppressed—” She paused, with tears rising, which got into her throat and her eyes, and stifled her words. “But I must not, Mr. Fanshawe. It would shock everybody. My poor father would think me mad, and I cannot tell what the servants would say. It would seem to them the very height of heartlessness.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Charles, from his corner; “no, May, my dear; no music. I could not put up with that.”
Fanshawe turned away, dismayed. He felt himself the most profane, secular, troublesome intruder. Poor Tom’s shadow seemed to stop up all the ordinary currents of life, and create a fictitious existence, full of impossible laws of its own for the mourners. Little Milly sat in a corner, reading—not her favourite stories, or the fairy tales which had been her constant companions, but a good book about a little boy who died in the odour of sanctity. She was reading it with the corners of her mouth turned down, and every soft, wavy line about her stilled into angles and gravity.
Fanshawe went and sat down by her, and began to talk of that voyage, which he had once proposed, to the Isle of May. He led the child so far out of herself, that at the end of five minutes she laughed, a sound which frightened her to death, and which made both her uncle and her sister raise their eyes, as if something dreadful had happened. May said nothing, and her eyes, tearful though they were, smiled at the little creature; but Mr. Charles said in a voice which was harsh for him:—
“You forget that this is a house of mourning.”
Poor Milly cried a little by way of expiating that weakness of nature, and relapsed into her good book; but Fanshawe could not cry, and had no good book to retire into. He yawned visibly, as he lay back in his low chair and contemplated his companions. He was a good-for-nothing; he had no letters to write, no studies to carry on. When he was not amused or occupied, he yawned. What else was there to do?