"You may well mourn for your mother, Gilbert, many a salt tear she shed for you. The grief she felt for your cruel desertion broke down her constitution, and brought her to this."
"Father, I was not alone to blame," said Gilbert, in a hoarse voice.
"Yes—yes, lay the fault on the old man, he has no one now to take his part, but that poor lass whose heart he nearly broke."
"Father," whispered Dorothy, gently taking his hand. "Mother forgot and forgave that long ago. She loved you and Gilbert too well to cherish animosity against either. We are all human and prone to err. If she could speak, she would tell you to banish all these sinful heart-burnings, these useless recriminations, and prepare to follow her to the better land, where she has found peace and assurance for ever."
"I will, I will, if so be I could only find the way," responded Rushmere, with a heavy sigh. "Oh, God forgive me! I am a sinful man. I wish I could follow her dear steps, for I am a' weary o' my life."
He laid his head upon the pillow beside his wife, and the tears streamed from his closed eyelids down his pale cheeks.
"Come, let us leave him," said Dorothy. "He will feel calmer soon. And here is dear Mr. Martin, who can better soothe him in his grief than we can. Oh, I am so glad you are come," she whispered to the good curate, as she followed the rest of the family from the room. "He is dreadfully afflicted. Poor old father, he loved her so much."
The four days that intervened between Mrs. Rushmere's death and the funeral were very trying to Dorothy. She had to receive so many visitors, and listen to so many unfeeling remarks and questions regarding her future position in the Rushmere family, put to her with the coarse bluntness of uneducated people, who could not realize her grief for the loss of one who was not a blood relation. "Was she going," they asked, "to remain at the farm, or to take service elsewhere?" and they expressed great surprise that young Mrs. Rushmere had suffered her to remain there so long. Then, she was asked to give minute particulars regarding the terrible disease of which her foster-mother had died; of how she bore her sufferings, what doctor she employed, and what remedies had been applied? All this was trying enough to a sensitive mind; but they went further still, and utterly regardless of the wounds they were inflicting, demanded of the weeping girl, "If Mrs. Rushmere had left her anything, and who was to get her clothes?"
This important piece of information, was urged by no less a personage than Letty Barford, who in company with her mother-in-law and Miss Watling, called to look at the corpse.