The funeral of Mrs. Cusworth was over.
The blinds were drawn up at last.
When the service at the grave was concluded, Philip and Salome returned to their home, if that may be called home from which the elements that go to make up home—trust, sympathy, pity, forgiveness—have fled.
The sun streamed in at the windows, broke in with a rude impatience, as the blinds mounted, and revelled on the floors again, and reflected itself in glass and gilding and china, brought out into bloom again the faded flowers on the carpets, and insisted on the bunches of roses and jessamine and nondescripts on the wall-papers putting on their colours and pretence of beauty.
But there was no sunshine streaming into the shadowed hearts of Philip and Salome, because over both the hand of Philip held down the blinds.
Philip, always cold, uncommunicative, allowing no one to lay finger on his pulse, resenting the slightest allusion to his life apart from business—Philip had made no friend in Mergatroyd, only acquaintances—drew closer about him the folds of reserve.
At one time much fuss was made about the spleen, but we have come now to disregard it, to hold it as something not to be reckoned with; and Philip regarded the heart as we do our spleens.
Philip was respected, but was not popular with his own class, and was respected, but not popular, among the operatives of his mill. Some men, however self-contained, are self-revealing in their efforts after concealment. So was it with Philip.
Shrewd public opinion in Mergatroyd had gauged and weighed him before he supposed that it was concerned about him. It pronounced him proud and honest, and capable, through integrity of purpose, of doing a cruel, even a mean, thing. He had been brought up apart from those modifying forces which affect, or ought to affect, the conduct governed by principle. Principle is a good thing as a direction of the course of conduct, but principle must swerve occasionally to save it from becoming a destructive force. In the solar system every planet has its orbit, but every orbit has its deflections caused by the presence of fellow planets. Philip as a child had never lain with his head on a gentle bosom, from which, as from a battery, love had streamed, enveloping him, vivifying, warming the seeds of good in him. He reckoned with his fellow-men as with pieces of mechanism, to be used or thrown aside, as they served or failed. He had been treated in that way himself, and he had come to regard such a cold, systematic, material manner of dealing with his brother men as the law of social life.
That must have been a strange experience—the coming to life of the marble statue created by Pygmalion. How long did it take the veins in the alabaster to liquefy? How long before the stony breast heaved and pulsation came into the rigid heart? How long before light kindled in the blank eye, and how long before in that eye stood the testimony to perfect liquefication, a tear?