‘You must not think so,’ she said; ‘it will be hard upon you at first, but you will find things will arrange themselves better than you expect—other habits will come in instead of this. No, indeed I am not unkind, but I know life better than you do. But for that, you know, we could not go on living, with all the changes that happen to us. We should be killed at the first blow.’
‘And so I shall be killed,’ he said, turning from her with heavier gloom than before, and angry with the consolation. ‘Oh! not bodily, I suppose. One can go on and do one’s work all the same; and one good thing is, it will be of importance to nobody but myself.’
‘Don’t say so,’ said kind Mrs. Anderson, with tears in her eyes. ‘Oh! my dear boy—if you will let me call you so—think what your visionary loss is in comparison with so many losses that people have to bear every day.’
‘It is no visionary loss to me,’ he said, bitterly. ‘But if she were happy, I should not mind. I could bear it, if all were well with her. I hope I am not such a wretch as to think of myself in comparison. Don’t think I am too stupid to see how kind you are to me; but there is one thing—only one that could give me real comfort. Promise that, if the circumstances are ever such as to call for a brother’s interference, you will send for me. It is not what I would have wished, God knows!—not what I would have wished—but I will be a brother to her, if she needs a brother. Promise. There are some things which a man can do best, and if she is wronged, if her brother could set things right——’
‘Dear Mr. Sugden, I don’t understand you,’ said Mrs. Anderson, faltering.
‘But you will, if such a time should come? You will remember that you have promised. I will say good night now. I can’t go in again after this and see her without making a fool of myself, and it is best she should keep some confidence in me. Good night.’
Had she fulfilled Miss Richardson’s commission?—or had she pledged herself to appeal to him instead, in some incomprehensible contingency? Mrs. Anderson looked after him bewildered, and did not know.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Sunday was their last evening at Shanklin, and they were all rather melancholy—even Kate, who had been to church three times, and to the Sunday school, and over the almshouses, and had filled up the interstices between these occupations by a succession of tearful rambles round the Rectory garden with Lucy Eldridge, whose tears flowed at the smallest provocation. ‘I will remember everything you have told me,’ Lucy protested. ‘I will go to the old women every week, and take them their tea and sugar—for oh! Kate, you know papa does not approve of money—and I will see that the little Joliffes are kept at school—and I will go every week to see after your flowers; but oh! what shall I do without you? I shan’t care about my studies, or anything; and those duets which we used to play together, and our German, which we always meant to take up—I shall not have any heart for them now. Oh! Kate, I wish you were not going! But that is selfish. Of course I want you to have the pleasure; only——’
‘I wish you were going,’ said Kate—‘I wish everybody was coming; but, as that is impossible, we must just make the best of it; and if anybody should take the Cottage, and you should go and make as great friends with them as you ever did with me——’