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THE SUNSET.
How the terrible time, terrible for its very dulness and
insensibility, passed until it brought the funeral, Helen could not
have told. It seemed to her, as she looked back upon it, a bare
blank, yet was the blank full of a waste weariness of heart. The
days were all one, outside and inside. Her heart was but a lonely
narrow bay to the sea of cold immovable fog that filled the world.
No one tried to help, no one indeed knew her trouble. Everyone took
it for grief at the loss of her brother, while to herself it was the
oppression of a life that had not even the interest of pain. The
curate had of course called to inquire after her, but had not been
invited to enter. George had been everywhere with help, but had no
word to speak.
The day of the funeral came, in thin fog and dull cold. The few
friends gathered. The body was borne to the Abbey. The curate
received it at the gate in the name of the church--which takes our
children in its arms, and our bodies into its garden--save indeed
where her gardener is some foolish priest who knows not the heart of
his mother, and will pick and choose among her dead;--the lovely
words of the last-first of the apostles, were read; and earth was
given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great
workman works withal. Cold was Helen's heart, cold her body, cold
her very being. The earth, the air, the mist, the very light was
cold. The past was cold, the future yet colder. She would have
grudged Leopold his lonely rest in the grave, but that she had not
feeling enough even for that. Her life seemed withering away from
her, like an autumn flower in the frosts of winter; and she, as if
she had been but a flower, did not seem to care. What was life
worth, when it had not strength to desire even its own continuance?
Heartless she returned from the grave, careless of George's mute
attentions, not even scornful of her aunt's shallow wail over the
uncertainty of life and all things human,--so indifferent to the
whole misery that she walked straight up to the room, hers once
more, from which the body had just been carried, and which, for so
many many weary weeks, had been the centre of loving pain, sometimes
agony. Once more she was at peace--but what a peace!
She took off her cloak and bonnet, laid them on the bed, went to the
window, sat down, and gazed, hardly seeing, out on the cold garden
with its sodden earth, its leafless shrubs, and perennial trees of
darkness and mourning. The meadow lay beyond, and there she did see
the red cow busily feeding, and was half-angry with her. Beyond the
meadow stood the trees, with the park behind them. And yet further
behind lay the hollow with the awful house in its bosom, its dismal
haunted lake and its ruined garden. But nothing moved her. She could
have walked over every room in that house without a single quaver of
the praecordia. Poldie was dead, but was it not well? Even if he had
not been in trouble, what should his death matter? She would die
soon herself and for ever: what did that or anything else matter?
Might she but keep this dulness of spirit, and never more wake to
weep foolish tears over an existence the whole upstanding
broad-based fact of which was not worth one drop in the rivers of
weeping that had been flowing ever since the joyless birth of this
unconceived, ill-fated, unfathered world! To the hour of death
belonged jubilation and not mourning; the hour of birth was the hour
of sorrow. Back to the darkness! was the cry of a life whose very
being was an injury, only there was no one to have done the injury.
Thus she sat until she was summoned to dinner--early for the sake of
the friends whose home lay at a distance. She ate and drank and took
her share in the talk as matter of course, believing all at the
table would judge her a heartless creature, and careless of what
they might think or say. But they judged her more kindly and more
truly than she judged herself. They saw through her eyes the deeps
whose upward ducts were choked with the frost of an unknown despair.
No sooner was she at liberty than again she sought her room, not
consciously from love to her brother who had died there, but because
the deadness of her heart chose a fitting loneliness: and again she
seated herself at the window.
The dreary day was drawing to a close, and the night, drearier it
could not be, was at hand. The gray had grown darker, and she sat
like one waiting for the night like a monster coming to claim its
own and swallow her up.
Something--was it an invasion of reviving light? caused her to lift
her eyes. Away, sideways from her window, in the west, the mist had
cleared a little--somewhere about the sun. Thinner and thinner it
grew. No sun came forth: he was already down; but a canopy of faint
amber grew visible, stretched above his tomb. It was the stuff of
which sad smiles are made, not a thing that belonged to gladness.
But only he who has lost his sorrow without regaining his joy, can
tell how near sorrow lieth to joy. Who that has known the dull paths
of listless no-feeling, would not have his sorrow back with all its
attendant agonies?
The pale amber spread, dilute with light, and beneath it lay the
gray of the fog, and above it the dark blue of cloud--not of sky.
The soul of it was so still, so resigned, so sad, so forsaken, that
she who had thought her heart gone from her, suddenly felt its wells
were filling, and soon they overflowed. She wept. At what? A colour
in the sky! Was there then a God that knew sadness--and was that a
banner of grief he hung forth to comfort the sorrowful with
sympathy? Or was it but a godless colour which the heart varnished
with its own grief? Or if the human heart came from nothing and was
sad, why might not the aspects of nature come from nothing and be
sad too--wrought in harmony with the unutterable woe of humanity?
Then either is man the constructive centre of the world, and its
meanings are but his own face looking back upon him from the mirror
of his own projected atmosphere, and comfort there is none; or he is
not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and
colours the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man
the one conscious point and object of a vast derision--insentient
nature grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks
and makes mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all,
being at once that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but
writhes in agony under the mockery. Such as Bascombe reply that they
find it not so. I answer--For the best of reasons, that it is not
so.
Helen's doubts did not stay her weeping, as doubt generally does;
for the sky with its sweet sadness was before her, and deep in her
heart a lake of tears, which, now that it had begun to flow, would
not be stayed. She knew not why she wept, knew not that it was the
sympathy of that pale amber of sad resignation which brought her
relief: but she wept and wept, until her heart began to stir, and
her tears came cooler and freer.
"Oh Poldie! my own Poldie!" she cried at length, and fell upon her
knees--not-to worship the sky--not to pray to Poldie, or even for
Poldie--not indeed to pray at all, so far as she knew; yet I doubt
if it was merely and only from the impulse of the old childish habit
of saying prayers.
But in a moment she grew restless. There was no Poldie! She rose and
walked about the room. And he came back to her soul, her desolate
brother, clothed, alas! in the rags and tatters of all the unkind
and unjust thoughts she had ever had concerning him, and wearing on
his face the reflection of her worse deeds. She had stood between
him and the only poor remnant of peace, consolation, and hope that
it was possible he should have; and it was through the friends whom
she had treated with such distance and uncordiality that he did
receive it. Then out rushed from the chamber of her memory the
vision of the small dark nervous wild-looking Indian boy who gazed
at her but for one questioning moment, then shot into her arms and
nestled in her bosom. How had she justified that faith? She had
received, and sheltered, and shielded him, doubtless, and would have
done so with her life, yet, when it came to the test, she had loved
herself better than him, and would have doomed him to agony rather
than herself to disgrace. Oh Poldie! Poldie! But he could not hear!
Never, for evermore, should she utter to him word of sorrow or
repentance! never beg his forgiveness, or let him know that now she
knew better, and had risen above such weakness and selfishness!
She stopped, and looked sadly from the window. The sky was cloudless
overhead, and the amber pall was fainter and clearer over the tomb
of the sun. She turned hastily to the bed where lay her cloak and
bonnet, put them on with trembling hands, and went out by that same
window into the garden. She could not help a shudder as she stood in
the dark passage unlocking the door in the sunk fence, but the next
minute she was crossing the meadow through the cold frosty twilight
air, now clear of its fog, and seeming somehow to comfort, uplift,
and strengthen her. The red cow was still feeding there. She stopped
and talked to her a little. She seemed one of Poldie's friends, and
Poldie had come back to her heart if he might never more to her
arms, and she was now on her way to one of his best friends, whom,
as more worthy, he had loved even better than her, and whom she had
not honoured as they deserved or as he must have desired. To get
near them, would be to get nearer to Poldie. At least she would be
with those whom he had loved, and who, she did not doubt, still
loved him, believing him still alive. She could not go to the
curate, but she could go to the Polwarths; no one would blame her
for that-except indeed George. But even George should not come
between her and what mere show of communion with Poldie was left
her! She would keep her freedom--would rather break with George than
lose an atom of her liberty! She would be no clay for his hands to
mould after his pleasure!
She opened the door in the fence and entered the park, seeming to
recover strength with every step she took towards Poldie's friends.
It was almost dark when she stood at the lodge-door and knocked.
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