| 'When some beloved voice that was to you Both sound and sweetness faileth suddenly, And silence against which you dare not cry Aches round you like a strong disease and new, What hope? what help?... ...Nay, none of these. Speak, Thou availing Christ! and fill this pause.' Mrs. Browning. |
Mrs. Ross soon discovered that Audrey wished to remain in town until the funeral was over, and she at once wrote off to her husband for the required permission.
Dr. Ross made no objection; he meant to be present himself at the funeral, and as he had some important business that would detain him another day or so in London, he suggested that they should accompany him back to Woodcote.
Audrey seemed satisfied when she had read her father's letter. He had sent her a message that touched her greatly.
'I hope our child will not grieve over-much,' he wrote. 'Tell her that her father sympathises with her most fully. By and by she will read the meaning of this painful lesson. As for poor Cyril, one can only long to change places with him. His was a short and fiery trial, but at least he was spared the burden and heat of the day. When one thinks of his blameless youth, and the manly endurance with which he met and faced his trouble, one can only be thankful that he has been taken out of a life that would have been only one long struggle and disappointment, and has entered so early into his rest.'
'Father is right,' murmured Audrey, as she read this. 'Every morning I wake I thank God that he has ceased to suffer.'
Audrey went every day to see Mollie, and to spend a few minutes by Cyril's coffin. She went with Michael to Highgate to choose his last resting-place, and no other hands but hers arranged the flowers that decked the chamber of death. Mrs. Blake remained in her own room, and refused to see anyone. Biddy's account of her mistress was very unsatisfactory.
'She does not sleep unless I give her the doctor's soothing stuff,' she confessed one day, when Audrey questioned her very closely, 'and sometimes I cannot coax her to take it. "I don't want to sleep, Biddy," that is all her cry. "If I sleep I must wake, and the waking is too terrible." Unless Blessed Mary and the saints help my mistress,' continued Biddy, wiping the tears from her withered cheeks, 'I think she will go out of her mind. She spends half the night in that room. Early this morning I missed her, and found her lying in a dead faint beside the coffin. She does not eat, and I never see her shed a tear. She sits rocking herself and moaning as though she were in pain, and then she starts up and walks the room till it turns one giddy to see her. I dare not leave her a moment. If she would only see a doctor! but, poor soul, she will do nothing now to please her old Biddy.'
'I must see her,' exclaimed Audrey, horrified at this description of wild, unchastened grief. 'Biddy, will you take this note to her?' and Biddy, nothing loath, carried off the slip of paper.
Audrey had only pencilled a few words: