If any one were to smite her on lip or cheek, neither would she resent it or complain; she sits in an armchair, in the drawing-room, with her hands folded in her lap, and the servants bring her tea every half-hour (incessant tea being supposed to be the necessary accompaniment of great grief), and request her to "keep up." So she sits in the armchair all day long—trying to be sorry, trying to weep. She has had Sarah in, and has made her tell her all the particulars of her brother's last hours; has listened attentively while the woman—the easy tears streaming down her cheeks—relates how "Mr. Brandon was with poor master all along, from the very first, and if he had been his own born brother, he could not have been kinder," and how he lifted him up in his arms, and laid his head on his shoulder—"Master could breathe easier so, poor dear young gentleman!"—and he (master) had been so pleasant-spoken to the last, and had said, said he, 'God bless you, old fellow! I'd have done as much for you, if I had had the chance;' and how, about seven o'clock, he had asked what o'clock it was—we all knew what that meant—and had then seemed to fall asleep in Mr. Brandon's arms, and just as the clock struck eight, he gave a sigh—like that—and a sort of pleasant bit of a smile, and was gone all in a minute!" It is very touching, but it does not touch Esther. She rises and walks into the hall, and looks at his greatcoat and his hat, and kisses his gloves, that seem to retain somewhat of the shape of the kind hands that once filled them. She thinks resolutely of how he has been her one friend throughout life; thinks of the presents he gave her, and of how seldom he went to any town without bringing her some little remembrance back from it; thinks of that last five-pound note, so hardly spared, and yet so very gladly given; thinks of how poor he was, how slight, how young. But it is all no good; it seems to her like some pathetic tale about a stranger that she is telling herself. And the days pass, and she grows weak from inanition, but refuses all food. If she can be unnatural, horrible enough to feel hunger and thirst now Jack is dead, at all events she will not indulge her low nature; and so she eats not, and her pulse grows feeble,
"And all the wheels of being slow!"
So it comes to pass that she falls sick and is carried up to bed, and lies there half in sleep, half in insensibility. And the mornings and the evenings go by, and Jack's burial-day comes. They had hoped that it would have passed without her knowing, but it was not so. Now that he is leaving his home for this last time, he does not go light-springing down the stairs, as at other times, but with much tramping of strange feet, with purposed muffling of strange voices. How can she fail to hear,
"The steps of the bearers heavy and slow?"
Through all her trance it breaks; from her little latticed window, with her sick limbs trembling beneath her, and her miserable eyes nailed to the gaoler coffin, in whose strait custody her dead lies prisoned, she sees the drooped pall and the black-scarfed mourners. These mourners are but few, for Jack—though now awfuller than any absolutest monarch—was, in life, poor and of little consequence: the gap made by the extinction of that one young life is but narrow. Standing there, she feels a pang of bitter regret and anguish that there are not more people to be sorry for Jack. And so, being weak, the fountains of her soul are broken up within her, and she falls to weeping mightily; and, but for that weeping, she would, perchance, have died, some say; but I think not—for why should grief, being our natural element, kill us any more than water the fish, or air the bird?
[CHAPTER XXII.]
Thus the grave yawns for another victim, and having swallowed him, and a million more that same day, returns to its former state of insatiable famished greed. It is a law—natural, wise, and comprehensible by the feeblest understanding—that all created beings, in which there is progressive life, must come forth, ripen, decay, and fall. But why, oh! why, in too many cases does the decay and fall forerun the ripening? Why is so many a worm permitted to gnaw out so many a closed bud's green heart? Why is the canker death allowed to pasture on so many an unblown life? Why are so many little toddling children, not yet come into the heritage of reason to which we are all by our human birth entitled, borne from their mother's emptied arms to their small short graves? Is it, as Hartley Coleridge very nobly, whether truly or untruly, said—
"God only made them for his Christ to save?"