CHAPTER IX
Thus the two years of prosperity had ended in deeper gloom than that in which they started. Christmas had gone by in the usual festivities, and rather strangely the whole family had met together on Christmas Day—for the last time.
At the beginning of the New Year, Maggie and Deborah had gone away to stay with some friends at the other end of the town, and Maggie had gone two days previous to Deborah, who was going in for an examination on the second day. And Deborah, whose love for her father seemed to grow with each succeeding day, felt the short separation greatly.
“It’s only for five days,” she said to herself. “And he’s coming to bring us home on Saturday, but how I wish he were coming too.” For lately he had looked very, very ill. His face had been grey and his eyes curiously absent, and he had had a bad cough for many weeks, and he said he suffered greatly from lumbago.
Besides, he had not gone down to town so often lately—or if so not till later in the afternoon—and there seemed very little money.
Deborah, seeing this, prayed all the more earnestly the simple prayer.
“He’s all right,” she used to say at times. “It’s only me, I’m fidgety.”
But on the day when she had to go away she felt as if she could scarcely bear to part with him.
Whilst she was busy making her preparations in the morning for going he read the paper. But every now and again she ran down to speak to him, just for the sake of saying something, but he seemed even more silent than usual.
At last when she was ready he came up into the lobby to see her off.
She threw her arms round him and kissed him with all the passionate love she had for him, and he kissed her, and said to her,—
“Mind thou does well now. Mind thou does well.”
It was not very elegant, was it? But be that as it may, they were his last words to her, so perhaps even the severest critics will let them be. At the time she thought they referred to the examination she was taking, but afterwards, long years afterwards, they came to have a broader and a clearer light.
“You’ll come early on Saturday,” she said. And the door closed.
She went off lightly into the town, feeling somewhat bright and happy.
He never came on Saturday. On the Friday he went away from home when the others had gone out for the evening to some friends. He went away all alone in the cold, shivering fog and took the night boat across the raw, dark sea. The next that was heard of him was that he was drowned. From the Friday night until the Wednesday night nothing was heard at all.
It was Jack who came to bring them home on Saturday, and he came in the morning instead of at night.
How miserable it was going home! Let alone the biting wind, how cold and cheerless it was in every room!
There was his hat and all his things, just where he always left them, because he’d put on very, very old things to go away in—things he hadn’t worn for years. Why, he’d taken that old grey coat that was so frayed, and which he used to go to tend the bees in—and now it was mid-winter, and the hum of the bees was silent, and the scented flowers all dead. He had taken everything that was old and thin and worn, and all night long he had stood on the deck and spoken now and then to a sailor. It was terribly cold, one of the coldest nights of the year—and he had such a dreadful cough.
Two days afterwards they’d found him dead, or drowned—who can tell, who knows? For none was there to smooth the bed of roses or to soothe the last happy end.
The long heavy hours passed from Saturday morning until Wednesday night. No news, nothing but the long, long wait and sickening hope that had no brightness in it.
At last the desolating news was known. Jack brought it home, and after he had told those upstairs he came down into the little cellar kitchen and told Maggie and Deborah. They could tell by his face as he came in the door what had happened, but he just looked at Deborah, perhaps because she looked so terribly hard at him, and then he came in and sat down and took her on his knee and turned his head away and said “It’s all over,” and his voice seemed very husky.
That night when Deborah went to bed the queer pain nearly stifled her.
Never to be able to kiss him again; never to take his hand; never to sit on his knee and sing “Lead, kindly light,” whilst he whistled, nor any of the other hymns and glorious hunting songs which he had taught her; never to sit on the chair beside him and work neat rows of figures; never to play another game of chess, which she so loved because he always let her win; never to play bézique again with him, nor get his yellow slippers from the cupboard; never to put her hands again into his pockets to find out what was there; never to hear him speak, and never, never see him, was terrible. Under ordinary circumstances this great trouble would have made her pray more earnestly for comfort unto God. But now as she knelt down to pray each word seemed strangled in her throat and like to strangle her.
The only prayer that came was the one uttered for him—that prayer which now was smashed to shivering atoms. For, truth to tell, Deborah had never prayed for anything else but him; he had been the one great earthly link that joined her to God.
Who can talk twaddle abstract to a child when its very existence is in the concrete?
“I can’t understand it. I can’t understand it,” she cried in horrid, aching pain. “It seems as if something had really listened to my prayer and answered it all the other way about—or—or God can’t have listened. They say at school that God is love—but oh! oh! I can’t bear to think of the pain he’s forced father through, and then to have left him in the end to drown in misery, and all alone.”
She got up from her knees without a prayer.
“There’s nothing to pray for,” she said dully, and got into bed choking with sobs.
The next day someone said it was a great mercy that it was known for certain he was really dead, and that they ought to be very thankful they were able to bring him back.
It was said by someone for a little comfort, even as we all try to comfort each other at such sad times.
So when Deborah went to bed she thought she’d try to frame a prayer on that.
“Please, God, thank you for letting us really know he’s dead,” she said; but the next minute she was on her feet. It was no good, no good at all.
The God Almighty whom she had loved and praised and tried so hard to please from her earliest years seemed to have developed into a harsh and cruel tyrant.
“Father was so good and kind and patient,” she cried, “and he had to put up with such a lot that no one ever knew of. Oh, God, tell me why you’ve done it, tell me why.”
But God never answered, for God’s ways are not man’s ways, neither are His thoughts our thoughts.
Yet though all Deborah’s feelings revolted against God she dared not own to it—not even in her deepest heart.
“I’m very wicked,” she said earnestly. “It’s all for my good that father’s gone.”
Then something within her rose burning hot and strong. “I don’t care if it is for my good. I hate the thought of it being for my good. Why should he have to suffer for my good? I’m not worth it. If that’s the case it makes it all the worse to bear. Besides, it isn’t for my good. I feel all black and ugly and uncertain and half stunned.”
They brought her father’s body home and placed him in a better coffin, and then he was taken away to the churchyard in the North, to lie under the shadow of the great grand church, in the same grave with his wife.
It was terribly strange when they brought him back into the house. Maggie and Deborah were in bed, and Maggie was asleep.
“It’s him,” said Deborah to herself, sitting up in bed to hear the thud of feet.
How helpless, how terribly silent was the entrance now! And he never came upstairs to kiss them nor to say how he’d fared whilst he had been away.
No. And they didn’t jump out of bed and look over the banister, nor call to him. No, it was all different now.
Yet last week at this time he’d been alive and moved about this very house, contemplating in all seriousness and desperation his own approaching death.
Two days later they took him away again in the dark, cold morning.
“It isn’t him,” cried Deborah, inwardly. “He could never die. I can’t live without him. He was everything to me. I don’t believe he could die. He was too great and good to ever die.”
There came another piece of news.
The farmer had been the sole trustee for £700.
But when inquiries were made for it at the bank it was found that it had gone.
There then lay the explanation of these two last seeming prosperous years.
And all blamed him, for he was in the wrong, and the law is for the punishment of wrongdoers, and no man has a right to take his neighbour’s goods.
Deborah at the time scarcely felt or understood this latter shame.
The first blow had been so strong, so sure, that for the time it paralysed every other feeling beside.