"Once," he said, "you told me there was no one you cared for but a man in a book. I wonder is that so now?"
In spite of herself the color rushed into Minola's face. It was a lucky question for her, however unlucky for him, because it recalled her from her softer mood to natural anger.
"You can believe me in love with any one you please to select in or out of a book, Mr. Sheppard, so long as it gives you a reason for not persecuting me with your own attentions. I like a man in a book better than one out of it; it is so easy to close the book and be free of his company when he grows disagreeable."
She did not look particularly like a Christian then, probably, in his eyes. He left her, his heart bursting with love and anger. When Mary Blanchet returned she found Minola pale and haggard, her eyes wasted with tears.
CHAPTER XIII.
A MAN OF THE TIME.
Several days passed away, and Minola heard no more from Mr. Sheppard. She continued in a state of much agitation; her nerves, highly strung, were sharply jarred by the news of the approaching death of Mrs. Saulsbury. It was almost like watching outside a door, and counting the slow, painful hours of some lingering life within, while yet one may not enter and look upon the pale face, and mingle with the friends or the mourners, but is shut out and left to ask and wait; it was like this, the time of suspense which Minola passed, not knowing whether the wife of her father was alive or dead. As is the way of all generous natures, it was now Minola's impulse to accuse and blame herself because there had been so little of mutual forbearance in her old home at Keeton. She kept wondering whether things might not have gone better, if she had said and done this or that; or, if she had not said and done something else. Full of this feeling, she wrote a long emotional letter to Mr. Saulsbury, which, she begged of him to read to his wife, if she were in a condition to hear it. The letter was suffused with generous penitence and self-humiliation. It was a letter which perhaps no impartial person could have read without becoming convinced that its writer must have been in the right in most of the controversies of the past.
The letter did not reach the eyes or ears for which it was particularly intended. Minola received a coldly forgiving answer from Mr. Saulsbury—forgiving her upon his own account, which was more than Minola had sought—but adding, that he had not thought it desirable to withdraw, for a moment, by the memory of earthly controversies, the mind of his wife from the contemplation of that well-merited heaven which was opening upon her. Great goodness has one other advantage in addition to all the rest over unconverted error; it can, out of its own beatification, find a means of rebuking those with whom it is not on terms of friendship. The expected ascent of Mrs. Saulsbury into heaven became another means of showing poor Minola her own unworthiness. Mr. Saulsbury closed by saying that Mrs. Saulsbury might linger yet a little, but that her apotheosis (this, however, was not his word) was only a question of days.
There was nothing left for Minola but to wait, and now accuse and now try to justify herself. Many a time there came back to her mind the three faces on the mausoleum in Keeton, the symbols of life, death, and eternity; and she could not help wondering whether the mere passing through the portal of death could all at once transfigure a cold, narrow-minded, peevish, egotistical human creature into the soul of lofty calmness and ineffable sweetness, all peace and love, which the sculptor had set out in his illustration of humanity's closing state.
Meantime, she kept generally at home, except for her familiar walks in the park and her now less frequent visits to the British Museum and to South Kensington. Lucy Money, surprised at her absence, hunted her up, to use Lucy's own expression, and declared that she was looking pale and wretched, and that she must come over to Victoria street, and pass a day or two there, for companionship and change. Mary Blanchet, too, pressed Minola to go; and at last she consented, not unwilling to be taken forcibly out of her self-inquisition and her anxieties for the moment. She had made no other acquaintances, and seemed resolute not to make any, but there was always something peculiarly friendly and genial to her in the atmosphere of the Moneys' home. The whole family had been singularly kind to her, and their kindness was absolutely disinterested. Minola could not but love Mrs. Money, and could not but be a little amused by her; and there was something very pleasing to her in Mr. Money's strong common sense and blunt originality. Minola liked, too, the curious little peeps at odd groupings of human life which she could obtain by sitting for a few hours in Mrs. Money's drawing-room. All the schwärmerei of letters, politics, art, and social life seemed to illustrate itself "in little" there.