CHAPTER VI.
AT EVENSONG.
The windows were darkened at Fendyke. The passing bell had tolled the years of the life that was done, sounding solemnly and slowly across the level fields, the deep narrow river, the mill-streams and pine-woods, the scattered hamlets lying far apart on the great flat, where the sunsets linger late and long. All was over, and Allan had to put aside his own sorrow in order to comfort his mother, who was heart-broken at the loss of a husband she had idolized, with a love so quiet and unobtrusive, so little given to sentimental utterances, that it might have been mistaken for indifference.
She wandered about the darkened house like some lost soul in the dim under-world, unable to think of anything, or to speak of anything but her loss. She looked to Allan for everything, asserted her authority in no detail.
"Let all be as he wished," she said to her son. "Let us think only of pleasing him. You know what he would like, Allan. You were with him so much towards the last. He talked to you so freely. Think only of him, and of his wishes."
She could not divest herself of the idea that her husband was looking on at all that happened, that this or that arrangement might be displeasing to him. She was sure that he would wish the sternest simplicity as to the funeral. His own farm-labourers were to carry him to his grave, and the burial was to be at dusk. He had himself prescribed those two conditions. He wished to be laid in his grave at set of sun, when the hireling's daily toil was over, and the humblest of his neighbours could have leisure to follow him to his last bed. And then he had quoted Parson Hawker's touching lines:—
"Sunset should be the time, they said,To close their brother's narrow bed.'Tis at that pleasant hour of dayThe labourer treads his homeward way;His work is o'er, his toil is done,And therefore at the set of sun,To wait the wages of the dead,We lay our hireling in his bed."
"Sunset should be the time, they said,To close their brother's narrow bed.'Tis at that pleasant hour of dayThe labourer treads his homeward way;His work is o'er, his toil is done,And therefore at the set of sun,To wait the wages of the dead,We lay our hireling in his bed."
"Sunset should be the time, they said,To close their brother's narrow bed.'Tis at that pleasant hour of dayThe labourer treads his homeward way;His work is o'er, his toil is done,And therefore at the set of sun,To wait the wages of the dead,We lay our hireling in his bed."
"Sunset should be the time, they said,
To close their brother's narrow bed.
'Tis at that pleasant hour of day
The labourer treads his homeward way;
His work is o'er, his toil is done,
And therefore at the set of sun,
To wait the wages of the dead,
We lay our hireling in his bed."
Those lines were written for the tillers of the earth; but George Carew's thoughts of himself were as humble as if he had been the lowest of day labourers. Indeed, in those closing hours of life, when the record of a man's existence is suddenly spread out before him like the scroll which the prophet laid before the king, there is much in that comprehensive survey to humiliate the proudest of God's servants, much which makes him who has laboured strenuously despair at the insufficiency of the result, the unprofitableness of his labour. How, then, could such a man as George Carew fail to perceive his unworthiness?—a man who had let life go by him, who had done nothing, save by a careless automatic beneficence, to help or better his fellow-men, to whom duty had been an empty word, and the Christian religion a lifeless formula.
The Squire of Fendyke was laid to rest in the pale twilight of early March, the winter birds sounding their melancholy evensong as the coffin was lowered into the grave. The widow and her son stood side by side, with those humbler neighbours and dependents clustering round them. No one had been bidden to the funeral, no hour had been named, and the gentry of the district, whose houses lay somewhat wide apart, knew nothing of the arrangements till afterwards. There were no empty carriages to testify to the decent grief which stays at home, while liveried servants offer the tribute of solemn faces and black gloves. Side by side, Lady Emily and her son walked through the grounds of Fendyke to the churchyard adjoining. The wintry darkness had fallen gently on those humble graves when the last "Amen" had been spoken, and mother and son turned slowly and sadly towards the desolate home.
Allan stayed in his mother's sitting-room till after midnight, talking of their dead. Lady Emily found a sad pleasure in talking of the husband she had lost, in dwelling fondly upon his virtues, his calm and studious life, his non-interference with her household arrangements, his perfect contentment with the things that satisfied her.
"There never was a better husband, Allan," she said, with a tearful sigh, "and yet I know I was not his first love."
"Not his first love. Alas! no, poor soul," mused Allan, when he had bidden his mother good night, and was seated alone in front of his father's bureau, alone in the dead middle of the night, steeped in the concentrated light of the large shaded lamp, while all the rest of the room was in semi-darkness.
"Not his first love! Poor mother. It is happy for you that you know not how near that first love was to being the last and only love of your husband's life. Thank God, you did not know."
Often in those quiet days while his father was gradually fading out of life, Allan had argued with himself as to whether it was or was not his duty to reveal Mrs. Wornock's identity with the woman to whom George Carew had dedicated a lifetime of regret, and so to give his father the option of summoning that sad ghost out of the past, of clasping once again the vanished hand, and hearing the voice that had so long been unheard. There would have been rapture, perhaps, to the dying man in one brief hour of re-union; but that hour could not give back youth, or youthful dreams. There would have been the irony of fate in a meeting on the brink of the grave; and whatever touch of feverish gladness there might have been for the dying in that brief hour, its after consequences would have been full of evil for the mourning wife. Better, infinitely better, that she should never know the romance of her husband's youth, never be able to identify the woman he loved, or to inflict upon her own tender heart the self-torture of comparison with such a woman as Mrs. Wornock.
For Lady Emily, in her happy ignorance of all details, that early love was but a vague memory of a remote past, a memory too shadowy to be the cause of retrospective jealousy. She knew that her husband had loved and sorrowed; and she knew no more. It must needs be painful to her to identify his lost love in the person of a lady whom her son valued as a friend, and to whom her son's future wife was warmly attached. Allan had felt therefore that he was fully justified in leaving Mrs. Wornock's story unrevealed, even though by that silence he deprived the man who had loved her of the last tearful farewell, the final touch of hands that had long been parted.
He was full of sadness to-night as he turned the key in the lock, and lifted the heavy lid of the bureau at which he had so often seen his father seated, arranging letters and papers with neat, leisurely hands, and the pensive placidity which characterized all the details of his life. That bureau was the one repository for all papers of a private nature, the one spot peculiarly associated with him whom they had laid in the grave at evensong. No one else had ever written on that desk, or possessed the keys of those quaintly inlaid drawers.
And now the secrets of the dead were at the mercy of the survivors, so far as he had left any trace of them among those neatly docketted papers, those packets of letters folded and tied with red tape, or packed in large envelopes, sealed, and labelled.
Allan touched those packets with reverent hands, glanced at their endorsement, and replaced them in the drawers or pigeon-holes as he had found them. He was looking for the manuscript of which his father had told him; the story of "a love which never found its earthly close."
Yes, it was here, under his hand; a thin octavo, bound in limp morocco, a manuscript of something less than a hundred pages, in the hand he knew so well, the small, neat hand that, to Allan's fancy, told of the leisurely life, the mind free from fever and fret, the heart that beat in slow time, and had long outlived the quick alternations of passionate feeling. Allan drew his chair nearer the lamp, and began to read.