“You! Oh, no! You? You’ve been strong. There’s no need for you to do any more. You’ve got to live your own life and not that of other people—”
“The only life left to me,” he said in a low voice, “is that of those dear to me.”
John lumbered up gloomily. “You must persuade him to take a rest, Stella. He has been driving himself to death.” He laid a heavy hand on his friend. “God knows what I should have done without him all this time. Wait,” he said suddenly, with the other hand uplifted.
And all were silent when to a scuffle of feet succeeded a measured tramp of steps descending the stairs. The bearers passed along the passage by the door of the drawing-room. Unity was going forth on her last journey through the familiar Kilburn streets.
They arrived at the cemetery. In the bare mortuary chapel Stella knelt and heard for the first time in her life the beautiful words of the service for the burial of the dead. And there in front of her, covered with poor, vain flowers, was the coffin containing the clay of one whom man with his opportunist laws against murder and self-slaughter was powerless to judge. At the appointed time they went out into the summer air and walked to the grave-side. The surpliced chaplain stood a pace or two apart. The dismal men in black deposited the coffin by the yellow, upturned earth. The group of six gathered close together. The July sunshine streamed down, casting a queer projection of shadow from the coffin-end.
“Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”
Stella heard the chaplain’s voice as in a dream. The rattle of the earth on the coffin-lid—“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”—roused her with a shock. Below, deep in the grave, lay Unity—Unity, who had taken a human life, and had taken her own for the sake of those she loved; Unity, who in the approach to her murderous and suicidal end was all but unfathomable to her; Unity, whom she had read and thought enough to know to be condemned by the general judgment of mankind. She stood tense until the end. A great peace had fallen upon her. “Blessed are those that die in the Lord.” The simple words held a mystic significance. They reiterated themselves in her brain. Young, emotional, inexperienced, overwhelmed by the shattering collapse of the exquisite, cloud-capped towers of her faith, she found in them an unquestioned truth. By that grave-side, in the sacred presence of the dead, not only of “the dear sister here departed,” but of the inhabitants of all the gleaming stone and marble tenements around, there could be no lying; such was the unargued conviction of her candid soul. A voice, coming not from the commonplace, white-robed man, but from the blue vault of heaven, proclaimed that Unity had died in the Lord and that she was blessed. The message was one of unutterable consolation. Unity had died in the Lord. The comforting acceptance of the message indicated the restoration of Stella’s faith in God.
The mind of the child-woman is a warp of innocence shot with the woof of knowledge, and the resultant fabric is a thing no man born can seize and put upon canvas, and, for the matter of that, no woman, when she has ceased to be a child.
STELLA’S heart had softened toward John. Herold had told her how he had nearly come by his death on the rocks below the Channel House. It had moved her to the depths. And now she saw that he was bowed down with grief for Unity. All resentment against him had died. She recovered her faith, not perhaps in the wonder of the Great High Belovedest of the past, but in the integrity of the suffering man. When they reached and had reëntered the house, she took an opportunity of being alone with him. The two elder ladies were up-stairs, and Walter and Sir Oliver had gone out to smoke in the little front garden. Then she said with shy gentleness:
“This must be very desolate for you, dear. Won’t Miss Lindon and you come down with us to Southcliff? I have fallen in love with her. I wonder whether I dare ask her. The sea air would do her good.”