A voice grows with the growing years;Earth, hushing down her bitter cry,Looks upward from her graves, and hears,“The Resurrection and the Life am I.”O love Divine,—whose constant beamShines on the eyes that will not see,And waits to bless us, while we dreamThou leavest us because we turn from Thee!Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed Thou know'st,Wide as our need Thy favors fall;The white wings of the Holy GhostStoop, seen or unseen, o'er the heads of all. Whittier
It was the eve of the new year, and great excitement prevailed in the Lemerciers' house. Many of the girls whose homes were at a distance had remained at school for the short winter holiday, and on this particular afternoon a number of them were clustered round the stove talking about the festivities of the morrow and the presents they were likely to have.
Erica, who was now a tall and very pretty girl of eighteen, was sitting on the hearth rug with Ninette on her lap; she was in very high spirits, and kept the little group in perpetual laughter, so much so indeed that Fraulein Sonnenthal had more than once been obliged to interfere, and do her best to quiet them.
“How wild thou art, dear Erica?” she exclaimed. “What is it?”
“I am happy, that is all,” said Erica. “You would be happy if the year of freedom were just dawning for you. Three months more and I shall be home.”
She was like a child in her exultant happiness, far more child-like, indeed, than the grave little Ninette whom she was nursing.
“Thou art not dignified enough for a teacher,” said the fraulein, laughingly.
“She is no teacher,” cried the girls. “It is holiday time and she need not talk that frightful English.”
Erica made a laughing defense of her native tongue, and such a babel ensued that the fraulein had to interfere again.
“Liebe Erica! Thou art beside thyself! What has come to thee?”
“Only joy, dear Thekla, at the thought of the beautiful new year which is coming,” cried Erica. “Father would say I was 'fey,' and should pay for all this fun with a bad headache or some misfortune. Come, give me the French 'David Copperfield,' and let me read you how 'Barkis Veut Bien,' and 'Mrs. Gummidge a Pense de l'Ancien.'”
The reading was more exquisitely ludicrous to Erica herself than to her hearers. Still the wit of Charles Dickens, even when translated, called forth peals of laughter from the French girls, too. It was the brightest, happiest little group imaginable; perhaps it was scarcely wonderful that old Mme. Lemercier, when she came to break it up, should find her eyes dim with tears.
“My dear Erica—” she said, and broke off abruptly.
Erica looked up with laughing eyes.
“Don't scold, dear madame,” she said, coaxingly. “We have been very noisy; but it is New year's eve, and we are so happy.”
“Dear child, it is not that,” said madame. “I want to speak to you for a minute; come with me, cherie.”
Still Erica noticed nothing; did not detect the tone of pity, did not wonder at the terms of endearment which were generally reserved for more private use. She followed madame into the hall, still chattering gayly.
“The 'David Copperfield' is for monsieur's present tomorrow,” she said, laughingly. “I knew he was too lazy to read it in English, so I got him a translation.”
“My dear,” said madame, taking her hand, “try to be quiet a moment. I—I have something to tell you. My poor little one, monsieur your father is arrived—”
“Father! Father here!” exclaimed Erica, in a transport of delight. “Where is he, where? Oh, madame, why didn't you tell me sooner?”
Mme. Lemercier tried in vain to detain her, as with cheeks all glowing with happiness and dancing eyes, she ran at full speed to the salon.
“Father!” she cried, throwing open the door and running to meet him. Then suddenly she stood quite still as if petrified.
Beside the crackling wood fire, his arms on the chimney piece, his face hidden, stood a gray-haired man. He raised himself as she spoke. His news was in his face; it was written all too plainly there.
“Father!” gasped Erica in a voice which seemed altogether different from the first exclamation, almost as if it belonged to a different person.
Raeburn took her in his arms.
“My child—my poor little Eric!” he said.
She did not speak a word, but clung to him as though to keep herself from falling. In one instant it seemed as though her whole world had been wrecked, her life shattered. She could not even realize that her father was still left to her, except in so far as the mere bodily support was concerned. He was strong; she clung to him as in a hurricane she would have clung to a rock.
“Say it,” she gasped, after a timeless silence, perhaps of minutes, perhaps of hours, it might have been centuries for aught she knew. “Say it in words.”
She wanted to know everything, wanted to reduce this huge, overwhelming sorrow to something intelligible. Surely in words it would not be so awful—so limitless.
And he said it, speaking in a low, repressed voice, yet very tenderly, as if she had been a little child. She made a great effort to listen, but the sentences only came to her disjointedly and as if from a great distance. It had been very sudden—a two hours' illness, no very great suffering. He had been lecturing at Birmingham—had been telegraphed for—had been too late.
Erica made a desperate effort to realize it all; at last she brought down the measureless agony to actual words, repeating them over and over to herself—“Mother is dead.”
At length she had grasped the idea. Her heart seemed to die within her, a strange blue shade passed over her face, her limbs stiffened. She felt her father carry her to the window, was perfectly conscious of everything, watched as in a dream, while he wrenched open the clumsy fastening of the casement, heard the voices in the street below, heard, too, in the distance the sound of church bells, was vaguely conscious of relief as the cold air blew upon her.
She was lying on a couch, and, if left to herself, might have lain there for hours in that strange state of absolute prostration. But she was not alone, and gradually she realized it. Very slowly the re-beginning of life set in; the consciousness of her father's presence awakened her, as it were, from her dream of unmitigated pain. She sat up, put her arms round his neck, and kissed him, then for a minute let her aching head rest on his shoulder. Presently, in a low but steady voice, she said: “What would you like me to do, father?”
“To come home with me now, if you are able,” he said; “tomorrow morning, though, if you would rather wait, dear.”
But the idea of waiting seemed intolerable to her. The very sound of the word was hateful. Had she not waited two weary years, and this was the end of it all? Any action, any present doing, however painful, but no more waiting. No terrible pause in which more thoughts and, therefore, more pain might grow. Outside in the passage they met Mme. Lemercier, and presently Erica found herself surrounded by kind helpers, wondering to find them all so tearful when her own eyes felt so hot and dry. They were very good to her, but, separated from her father, her sorrow again completely overwhelmed her; she could not then feel the slightest gratitude to them or the slightest comfort from their sympathy. She lay motionless on her little white bed, her eyes fixed on the wooden cross on the opposite wall, or from time to time glancing at Fraulein Sonnenthal, who, with little Ninette to help, was busily packing her trunk. And all the while she said again and again the words which summed up her sorrow: “Mother is dead! Mother is dead!”
After a time her eyes fell on her elaborately drawn paper of days. Every evening since her first arrival she had gone through the almost religious ceremony of marking off the day; it had often been a great consolation to her. The paper was much worn; the weeks and days yet to be marked were few in number. She looked at it now, and if there can be a “more” to absolute grief, an additional pang to unmitigated sorrow, it came to her at the sight of that visible record of her long exile. She snatched down the paper and tore it to pieces; then sunk back again, pale and breathless. Fraulein Sonnenthal saw and understood. She came to her, and kissed her.
“Herzbluttchen,” she said, almost in a whisper, and, after a moment's pause: “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.”
Erica made an impatient gesture, and turned away her head.
“Why does she choose this time of all others to tell me so,” she thought to herself. “Now, when I can't argue or even think! A sure tower! Could a delusion make one feel that anything is sure but death at such a time as this! Everything is gone—or going. Mother is dead!—mother is dead! Yet she meant to be kind, poor Thekla, she didn't know it would hurt.”
Mme. Lemercier came into the room with a cup of coffee and a brioche.
“You have a long journey before you, my little one,” she said; “you must take this before you start.”
Yes, there was the journey; that was a comfort. There was something to be done, something hard and tiring—surely it would blunt her perceptions. She started up with a strange sort of energy, put on her hat and cloak, swallowed the food with an effort, helped to lock her trunk, moved rapidly about the room, looking for any chance possession which might have been left out. There was such terrible anguish in her tearless eyes that little Ninette shrunk away from her in alarm. Mme. Lemercier, who in the time of the siege had seen great suffering, had never seen anything like this; even Thekla Sonnenthal realized that for the time she was beyond the reach of human comfort.
Before long the farewells were over. Erica was once more alone with her father, her cheeks wet with the tears of others, her own eyes still hot and dry. They were to catch the four o'clock train; the afternoon was dark, and already the streets and shops were lighted; Paris, ever bright and gay, seemed tonight brighter and gayer than ever. She watched the placid-looking passengers, the idle loungers at the cafes; did they know what pain was? Did they know that death was sure? Presently she found herself in a second-class carriage, wedged in between her father and a heavy-featured priest; who diligently read a little dogs-eared breviary. Opposite was a meek, weasel-faced bourgeois, with a managing wife, who ordered him about; then came a bushy-whiskered Englishman and a newly married couple, while in the further corner, nearly hidden from view by the burly priest, lurked a gentle-looking Sister of Mercy, and a mischievous and fidgety school boy. She watched them all as in a dream of pain. Presently the priest left off muttering and began to snore, and sleep fell, too, upon the occupants of the opposite seat. The little weasel-faced man looked most uncomfortable, for the Englishman used him as a prop on one side and the managing wife nearly overwhelmed him on the other; he slept fitfully, and always with the air of a martyr, waking up every few minutes and vainly trying to shake off his burdens, who invariably made stifled exclamations and sunk back again.
“That would have been funny once,” thought Erica to herself. “How I should have laughed. Shall I always be like this all the rest of my life, seeing what is ludicrous, yet with all the fun taken out of it?”
But her brain reeled at the thought of the “rest of life.” The blank of bereavement, terrible to all, was absolute and eternal to her, and this was her first great sorrow. She had known pain, and privation, and trouble and anxiety, but actual anguish never. Now it had come to her suddenly, irrevocably, never to be either more or less; perhaps to be fitted on as a garment as time wore on, and to become a natural part of her life; but always to be the same, a blank often felt, always present, till at length her end came and she too passed away into the great Silence.
Despair—the deprivation of all hope—is sometimes wild, but oftener calm with a deathly calmness. Erica was absolutely still—she scarcely moved or spoke during the long weary journey to Calais. Twice only did she feel the slightest desire for any outward vent. At the Amiens station the school boy in the corner, who had been growing more restless and excited every hour, sprung from the carriage to greet a small crowd of relations who were waiting to welcome him. She saw him rush to his mother, heard a confused affectionate babel of inquiries, congratulations, laughter. Oh! To think of that happy light-heartedness and the contrast between it and her grief. The laughter seemed positively to cut her; she could have screamed from sheer pain. And, as if cruel contrasts were fated to confront her, no sooner had her father established her in the cabin on board the steamer, than two bright looking English girls settled themselves close by, and began chatting merrily about the new year, and the novel beginning it would be on board a Channel steamer. Erica tried to stop her ears that she might not hear the discussion of all the forthcoming gayeties. “Lady Reedham's dance on Thursday, our own, you know, next week,” etc., etc. But she could not shut out the sound of the merry voices, or that wounding laughter.
Presently an exclamation made her look and listen.
“Hark!” said one of her fellow passengers. “We shall start now; I hear the clock striking twelve. A happy new year to you, Lily, and all possible good fortune.”
“Happy new year!” echoed from different corners of the cabin; the little Sister of Mercy knelt down and told her beads, the rest of the passengers talked, congratulated, laughed. Erica would have given worlds to be able to cry, but she could not. The terrible mockery of her surroundings was too great, however, to be borne; her heart seemed like ice, her head like fire; with a sort of feverish strength she rushed out of the cabin, stumbled up the companion, and ran as if by instinct to that part of the deck where a tall, solitary figure stood up darkly in the dim light.
“It's too cold for you, my child,” said Raeburn, turning round at her approach.
“Oh, father, let me stay with you,” sobbed Erica, “I can't bear it alone.”
Perhaps he was glad to have her near him for his own sake, perhaps he recognized the truth to which she unconsciously testified that human nature does at times cry out for something other than self, stronger and higher.
He raised no more objections, they listened in silence till the sound of the church bells died away in the distance, and then he found a more sheltered seat and wrapped her up closely in his own plaid, and together they began their new year. The first lull in Erica's pain came in that midnight crossing; the heaving of the boat, the angry dashing of the waves, the foam-laden wind, all seemed to relieve her. Above all there was comfort in the strong protecting arm round her. Yet she was too crushed and numb to be able to wish for anything but that the end might come for her there, that together they might sink down into the painless silence of death.
Raeburn only spoke once throughout the passage; instinctively he knew what was passing in Erica's mind. He spoke the only word of comfort which he had to speak: a noble one, though just then very insufficient:
“There is work to be done.”
Then came the dreary landing in the middle of the dark winter's night, and presently they were again in a railway carriage, but this time alone. Raeburn made her lie down, and himself fell asleep in the opposite corner; he had been traveling uninterruptedly for twenty hours, had received a shock which had tried him very greatly, now from sheer exhaustion he slept. But Erica, to whom the grief was more new, could not sleep. Every minute the pain of realization grew keener. Here she was in England once more, this was the journey she had so often thought of and planned. This was going home. Oh, the dreariness of the reality when compared with those bright expectations. And yet it was neither this thought nor the actual fact of her mother's death which first brought the tears to her burning eyes.
Wearily shifting her position, she looked across to the other side of the carriage, and saw, as if in a picture, her father. Raeburn was a comparatively young man, very little over forty; but his anxieties and the almost incredible amount of hard work of the past two years had told upon him, and had turned his hair gray. There was something in his stern set face, in the strong man's reserved grief, in the pose of his grand-looking head, dignified, even in exhaustion, that was strangely pathetic. Erica scarcely seemed to realize that he was her father. It was more as if she were gazing at some scene on the stage, or on a wonderfully graphic and heart-stirring picture. The pathos and sadness of it took hold of her; she burst into a passion of tears, turned her face from the light, and cried as if no power on earth could ever stop her, her long-drawn sobs allowed to go unchecked since the noise of the train made them inaudible. She was so little given to tears, as a rule, that now they positively frightened her, nor could she understand how, with a real and terrible grief for which she could not weep, the mere pathetic sight should have brought down her tears like rain. But the outburst brought relief with it, for it left her so exhausted that for a brief half hour she slept, and awoke just before they reached London, with such a frightful headache that the physical pain numbed the mental.
“How soon shall we be—” home she would have said, but the word choked her. “How soon shall we get there?” she asked faintly. She was so ill, so weary, that the mere thought of being still again—even in the death-visited home—was a relief, and she was really too much worn out to feel very acutely while they drove through the familiar streets.
At last, early in the cold, new year's morning, they were set down in Guilford Square, at the grim entrance to Persecution Alley. She looked round at the gray old houses with a shudder, then her father drew her arm within his, and led her down the dreary little cul-de-sac. There was the house, looking the same as ever, and there was Aunt Jean coming forward to meet them, with a strange new tenderness in her voice and look, and there was Tom in the background, seeming half shy and afraid to meet her in her grief, and there, above all, was the one great eternal void.
To watch beside the dying must be anguish, and yet surely not such keen anguish as to have missed the last moments, the last farewells, the last chance of serving. For those who have to come back to the empty house, the home which never can be home again, may God comfort them—no one else can.
Stillness, and food, and brief snatches of sleep somewhat restoredErica. Late in the afternoon she was strong enough to go into hermother's room, for that last look so inexpressibly painful to all, soentirely void of hope or comfort to those who believe in no hereafter.Not even the peacefulness of death was there to give even a slight, amomentary relief to her pain; she scarcely even recognized her mother.Was that, indeed, all that was left? That pale, rigid, utterly changedface and form? Was that her mother? Could that once have been hermother? Very often had she heard this great change wrought by deathreferred to in discussions; she knew well the arguments which werebrought forward by the believers in immortality, the counter argumentswith which her father invariably met them, and which had always seemedto her conclusive. But somehow that which seemed satisfactory in thelecture hall did not answer in the room of death. Her whole being seemedto flow out into one longing question: Might there not be a Beyond—anUnseen? Was this world indeed only“A place to stand and love in for an hour,With darkness and the death-hour rounding it?”
She had slept in the afternoon, but at night, when all was still, she could not sleep. The question still lurked in her mind; her sorrow and loneliness grew almost unbearable. She thought if she could only make herself cry again perhaps she might sleep, and she took down a book about Giordano Bruno, and read the account of his martyrdom, an account which always moved her very much. But tonight not even the description of the valiant unshrinking martyr of Free-thought ascending the scaffold to meet his doom could in the slightest degree affect her. She tried another book, this time Dickens's “Tale of Two Cities.” She had never read the last two chapters without feeling a great desire to cry, but tonight she read with perfect unconcern of Sydney Carton's wanderings through Paris on the night before he gave himself up—read the last marvelously written scene without the slightest emotion. It was evidently no use to try anything else; she shut the book, put out her candle, and once more lay down in the dark.
Then she began to think of the words which had so persistently haunted Sydney Carton: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” She, too, seemed to be wandering about the Parisian streets, hearing these words over and over again. She knew that it was Jesus of Nazareth who had said this. What an assertion it was for a man to make! It was not even “I BRING the resurrection,” or “I GIVE the resurrection,” but “I AM the Resurrection.” And yet, according to her father, his humility had been excessive, carried almost to a fault. Was he the most inconsistent man that ever lived, or what was he? At last she thought she would get up and see whether there was any qualifying context, and when and where he had uttered this tremendous saying.
Lighting her candle, she crept, a little shivering, white-robed figure, round the book-lined room, scanning the titles on every shelf, but bibles were too much in use in that house to be relegated to the attics, she found only the least interesting and least serviceable of her father's books. There was nothing for it but to go down to the study; so wrapping herself up, for it was a freezing winter's night, she went noiselessly downstairs, and soon found every possible facility for Biblical research.
A little baffled and even disappointed to find the words in that which she regarded as the least authentic of the gospels, she still resolved to read the account; she read it, indeed, in two or three translations, and compared each closely with the others, but in all the words stood out in uncompromising greatness of assertion. This man claimed to BE the resurrection, of as Wyclif had it, “the agen risying and lyf.”
And then poor Erica read on to the end of the story and was quite thrown back upon herself by the account of the miracle which followed. It was a beautiful story, she said to herself, poetically written, graphically described, but as to believing it to be true, she could as soon have accepted the “Midsummer Night's Dream” as having actually taken place.
Shivering with cold she put the books back on their shelf, and stole upstairs once more to bear her comfortless sorrow as best she could.
Then the round of weary duties, cold and formal, came tomeet her, With the life within departed that had given themeach a soul; And her sick heart even slighted gentle wordsthat came to greet her, For grief spread its shadowy pinionslike a blight upon the whole. A. A. Proctor
The winter sunshine which glanced in a side-long, half-and-half way into Persecution Alley, and struggled in at the closed blinds of Erica's little attic, streamed unchecked into a far more cheerful room in Guilford Square, and illumined a breakfast table, at which was seated one occupant only, apparently making a late and rather hasty meal. He was a man of about eight-and-twenty, and though he was not absolutely good-looking, his face was one which people turned to look at again, not so much because it was in any way striking as far as features went, but because of an unusual luminousness which pervaded it. The eyes, which were dark gray, were peculiarly expressive, and their softness, which might to some have seemed a trifle unmasculine, was counterbalanced by the straight, dark, noticeable eyebrows, as well as by a thoroughly manly bearing and a general impression of unfailing energy which characterized the whole man. His hair, short beard, and mustache were of a deep nut-brown. He was of medium height and very muscular looking.
On the whole it was as pleasant a face as you would often meet with, and it was not to be wondered at that his old grandmother looked up pretty frequently from her arm chair by the fire, and watched him with that beautiful loving pride which in the aged never seems exaggerated and very rarely misplaced.
“You were out very late, were you not, Brian?” she observed, letting her knitting needles rest for a minute, and scrutinizing the rather weary-looking man.
“Till half-past five this morning,” he replied, in a somewhat preoccupied voice.
There was a sad look in his eyes, too, which his grandmother partly understood. She knitted another round of her sock and then said:
“Have you seen Tom Craigie yet?”
“Yes, last night I came across him,” replied Brian. “He told me she had come home. They traveled by night and got in early yesterday morning.”
“Poor little thing!” sighed old Mrs. Osmond. “What a home-coming it must have been?”
“Grannie,” said Brian, pushing back his chair and drawing nearer to the fire “I want you to tell me what I ought to do. I have a message to her from her mother, there was no one else to take it, you know, except the landlady, and I suppose she did not like that. I want to know when I might see her; one has no right to keep it back, and yet how am I to know whether she is fit to bear it? I can't write it down, it won't somehow go on to paper, yet I can hardly ask to see her.”
“We cannot tell that the message might not comfort her,” said Mrs. Osmond. Then, after a few minutes' thought she added: “I think, Brian, if I were you, I would write her a little note, tell her why you want to see her, and let her fix her own time. You will leave it entirely in her own hands in that way.”
He mused for a minute, seemed satisfied with the suggestion, and moving across to the writing table, began his first letter to his love. Apparently it was hard to write, for he wasted several sheets and much time that he could ill afford. When it was at length finished, it ran as follows:
“Dear Miss Raeburn,—I hardly like to ask to see you yet for fear you should think me intrusive, but a message was entrusted to me on Tuesday night which I dare not of myself keep back from you. Will you see me? If you are able to, and will name the time which will suit you best, I shall be very grateful. Forgive me for troubling you, and believe me, Yours faithfully, Brian Osmond.”
He sent it off a little doubtfully, by no means satisfied that he had done a wise thing. But when he returned from his rounds later in the day the reply set his fears at rest.
It was written lengthways across a sheet of paper; the small delicate writing was full of character, but betrayed great physical exhaustion.
“It is good of you to think of us. Please come this afternoon if you are able. Erica.”
That very afternoon! Now that his wish was granted, now that he was indeed to see her, Brian would have given worlds to have postponed the meeting. He was well accustomed to visiting sorrow-stricken people, but from meeting such sorrow as that in the Raeburns' house he shrunk back feeling his insufficiency. Besides, what words were delicate enough to convey all that had passed in that death scene? How could he dare to attempt in speech all that the dying mother would fain have had conveyed to her child? And then his own love! Would not that be the greatest difficulty of all? Feeling her grief as he did, could he yet modify his manner to suit that of a mere outsider—almost a stranger? He was very diffident; though longing to see Erica, he would yet have given anything to be able to transfer his work to his father. This, however, was of course impossible.
Strange though it might seem, he—the most unsuitable of all men in his own eyes—was the man singled out to bear this message, to go to the death-visited household. He went about his afternoon work in a sort of steady, mechanical manner, the outward veil of his inward agitation. About four o'clock he was free to go to Guilford Terrace.
He was shown into the little sitting room; it was the room in which Mrs. Raeburn had died, and the mere sight of the outer surroundings, the well-worn furniture, the book-lined walls made the whole scene vividly present to him. The room was empty, there was a blazing fire but no other light, for the blinds were down, and even the winter twilight shut out. Brian sat down and waited. Presently the door opened, he looked up and saw Erica approaching him. She was taller than she had been when he last saw her, and now grief had given her a peculiar dignity which made her much more like her father. Every shade of color had left her face, her eyes wee full of a limitless pain, the eyelids were slightly reddened, but apparently rather from sleeplessness than from tears, the whole face was so altered that a mere casual acquaintance would hardly have recognized it, except by the unchanged waves of short auburn hair which still formed the setting as it were to a picture lovely even now. Only one thing was unchanged, and that was the frank, unconventional manner. Even in her grief she could not be quite like other people.
“It is very good of you to let me see you,” said Brian, “you are sure you are doing right; it will not be too much for you today.”
“There is no great difference in says, I think,” said Erica, sitting down on a low chair beside the fire. “I do not very much believe in degrees in this kind of grief. I do not see why it should be ever more or ever less. Perhaps I am wrong, it is all new to me.”
She spoke in a slow, steady, low-toned voice. There was an absolute hopelessness about her whole aspect which was terrible to see. A moment's pause followed, then, looking up at Brian, she fancied that she read in his face, something of hesitation, of a consciousness that he could ill express what he wished to say, and her innate courtesy made her even now hasten to relieve him.
“Don't be afraid of speaking,” she said, a softer light coming into her eyes. “I don't know why people shrink from meeting trouble. Even Tom is half afraid of me. I am not changed, I am still Erica; can't you understand how much I want every one now?
“People differ so much,” said Brian, a little huskily, “and then when one feels strongly words do not come easily.”
“Do you think I would not rather have your sympathy than an oration from any one else! You who were here to the end! You who did everything for—for her. My father has told me very little, he was not able to, but he told me of you, how helpful you were, how good, not like an outsider at all!”
Evidently she clung to the comforting recollection that at least one trustable, sympathetic person had been with her mother at the last. Brian could only say how little he had done, how much more he would fain have done had it been possible.
“I think you do comfort me by talking,” said Erica. “And now I want you, if you don't mind, to tell me all from the very first. I can't torture my father by asking him, and I couldn't hear it from the landlady. But you were here, you can tell me all. Don't be afraid of hurting me; can't you understand, if the past were the only thing left to you, you would want to know every tiniest detail!”
He looked searchingly into her eyes, he thought she was right. There were no degrees to pain like hers! Besides, it was quite possible that the lesser details of her mother's death might bring tears which would relieve her. Very quietly, very reverently, he told her all that had passed—she already knew that her mother had died from aneurism of the heart—he told her how in the evening he had been summoned to her, and from the first had known that it was hopeless, had been obliged to tell her that the time for speech even was but short. He had ordered a telegram to be sent to her father at Birmingham, but Mrs. Craigie and Tom were out for the evening, and no one knew where they were to be found. He and the landlady had been alone.
“She spoke constantly of you,” he continued. “The very last words she said were these, 'Tell Erica that only love can keep from bitterness, that love is stronger than the world's unkindness.' Then, after a minute's pause, she added, 'Be good to my little girl, promise to be good to her.' After that, speech became impossible, but I do not think she suffered. Once she motioned to me to give her the frame off the mantlepiece with your photograph; she looked at it and kept it near her—she died with it in her hand.”
Erica hid her face; that one trifling little incident was too much for her, the tears rained down between her fingers. That it should have come to that! No one whom she loved there at the last—but she had looked at the photograph, had held it to the very end, the voiceless, useless picture had been there, the real Erica had been laughing and talking at Paris! Brian talked on slowly, soothingly. Presently he paused; then Erica suddenly looked up, and dashing away her tears, said, in a voice which was terrible in its mingled pain and indignation.
“I might have been here! I might have been with her! It is the fault of that wretched man who went bankrupt; the fault of the bigots who will not treat us fairly—who ruin us!”
She sobbed with passionate pain, a vivid streak of crimson dyed her cheek, contrasting strangely with the deathly whiteness of her brow.
“Forgive me if I pain you,” said Brian; “but have you forgotten the message I gave you? 'It is only love that can keep from bitterness!'”
“Love!” cried Erica; she could have screamed it, if she had not been so physically exhausted. “Do you mean I am to love our enemies?”
“It is only the love of all humanity that can keep from bitterness,” said Brian.
Erica began to think over his reply, and in thinking grew calm once more. By and by she lifted up her face; it was pale again now, and still, and perfectly hopeless.
“I suppose you think that only Christians can love all humanity,” she said, a little coldly.
“I should call all true lovers of humanity Christians,” replied Brian, “whether they are consciously followers of Christ or not.”
She thought a little; then with a curiously hard look in her face, she suddenly flashed round upon him with a question, much as her father was in the habit of doing when an adversary had made some broad-hearted statement which had baffled him.
“Some of you give us a little more charity than others; but what do you mean by Christianity? You ask us to believe what is incredible. WHY do you believe in the resurrection: What reason have you for thinking it true?”
She expected him to go into the evidence question, to quote the number of Christ's appearances, to speak of the five hundred witnesses of whom she was weary of hearing. Her mind was proof against all this; what could be more probable than that a number of devoted followers should be the victims of some optical delusion, especially when their minds were disturbed by grief. Here was a miracle supported on one side by the testimony of five hundred and odd spectators all longing to see their late Master, and contradicted on the other side by common sense and the experience of the remainder of the human race during thousands of years! She looked full at Brian, a hard yet almost exultant expression in her eyes, which spoke more plainly than words her perfect conviction:
“You can't set your evidences against my counter-evidences! You can't logically maintain that a few uneducated men are to have more weight than all the united experience of mankind.”
Never would she so gladly have believed in the doctrine of immortality as now, yet with characteristic honesty and resoluteness she set herself into an attitude of rigid defense, lest through strong desire or mere bodily weariness she should drift into the acceptance of what might be, what indeed she considered to be error. But to her surprise, half to her disappointment, Brian did not even mention the evidences. She had braced herself up to withstand arguments drawn from the five hundred brothers, but the preparation was useless.
“I believe in the resurrection,” said Brian, “because I cannot doubt Jesus Christ. He is the most perfectly lovable and trustable being I know, or can conceive of knowing. He said He should rise again, I believe that He did rise. He was perfectly truthful, therefore He could not mislead; He KNEW, therefore He could not be misled.”
“We do not consider Him to be all that you assert,” said Erica. “Nor do His followers make one inclined to think that either He or His teaching were so perfect as you try to make out. You are not so hard-hearted as some of them—”
She broke off, seeing a look of pain on her companion's face. “Oh, what am I saying!” she cried in a very different tone, “you who have done so much—you who were always good to us—I did not indeed mean to hurt you, it is your creed that I can't help hating, not you. You are our friend, you said so long ago.”
“Always,” said Brian; “never doubt that.”
“Then you must forgive me for having wounded you,” said Erica, her whole face softening. “You must remember how hard it all is, and that I am so very, very miserable.”
He would have given his life to bring her comfort, but he was not a very great believer in words, and besides, he thought she had talked quite as long as she ought.
“I think,” he said, “that, honestly acted out, the message intrusted to me ought to comfort your misery.”
“I can't act it out,” she said.
“You will begin to try,” was Brian's answer; and then, with a very full heart, he said goodbye and left his Undine sitting by the fire, with her head resting on her hands, and the words of her mother's message echoing in her ears. “It is only love that can keep from bitterness; love is stronger than the world's unkindness.”
Presently, not daring to dwell too much on that last scene which Brian had described, she turned to his strange, unexpected reason for his belief in the resurrection, and mused over the characteristics of his ideal. Then she thought she would like to see again what her ideal man had to say about his, and she got up and searched for a small book in a limp red cover, labeled “Life of Jesus of Nazareth—Luke Raeburn.” It was more than two years since she had seen it; she read it through once more. The style was vigorous, the veiled sarcasms were not unpleasant to her, she detected no unfairness in the mode of treatment, the book satisfied her, the conclusion arrived at seemed to her inevitable—Brian Osmond's ideal was not perfect.
With a sigh of utter weariness she shut the book and leaned back in her chair with a still, white, hopeless face. Presently Friskarina sprung up on her knee with a little sympathetic mew; she had been too miserable as yet to notice even her favorite cat very much, now a scarcely perceptible shade of relief came to her sadness, she stroked the soft gray head. But scarcely had she spoken to her favorite, when the cat suddenly turned away, sprung from her knee and trotted out of the room. It seemed like actual desertion, and Erica could ill bear it just then.
“What, you too, Friskie,” she said to herself, “are even you glad to keep away from me?”
She hid her face in her hands; desolate and miserable as she had been before, she now felt more completely alone.
In a few minutes something warm touching her feet made her look up, and with one bound Friskarina sprung into her lap, carrying in her mouth a young kitten. She purred contentedly, looking first at her child and then at her mistress, saying as plainly as if she had spoken:
“Will this comfort you?”
Erica stroked and kissed both cat and kitten, and for the first time since her trouble a feeling of warmth came to her frozen heart.