Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER L
"Then, breaking into tears, 'Dear God,' she cried, 'and must we see,
All blissful things depart from us, or e'er we go to Thee;
We cannot guess Thee in the wood, or hear Thee in the wind:
Our cedars must fall round us e'er we see the light behind.
Ay, sooth, we feel too strong in weal to need Thee on that road;
But, woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on God.'"
I am twenty years old now, barely twenty; and seventy is the appointed boundary of man's date, often exceeded by ten, by fifteen years. During all these fifty�perhaps sixty�years, I shall have to do without Barbara. I have not yet arrived at the pain of this thought: that will come, quick enough, I suppose, by-and-by!�it is the astonishment of it that is making my mind reel and stagger!
I suppose there are few that have not endured and overlived the frightful novelty of this idea.
I am sitting in a stupid silence; my stiff eyes�dry now, but dim and sunk with hours of frantic weeping�fixed on vacancy, while I try to think exactly of her face, with a greedy, jealous fear lest, in the long apathy of the endless years ahead of me, one soft line, one lovely line, may become faint and hazy to me.
How often I have sat for hours in the same room with her, without one glance at her! It seems to me, now, monstrous, incredible, that I should ever have moved my eyes from her�that I should ever have ceased kissing her, and telling her how altogether beloved she was by me.
If all of us, while we are alive, could stealthily, once a year, and during a moment long enough to exchange but two words with them, behold those loved ones whom we have lost, death would be no more death.
But, O friends, that one moment, for whose sake we could so joyfully live through all the other minutes of the year, to us never comes.
I suppose trouble has made me a little light-headed. I think to-day I am foolisher than usual. Thoughts that would not tease other people, tease me.
If I ever see her again�if God ever give me that great felicity�I do not quite know why He should, but if�if�(ah! what an if it is!)�my mind misgives me�I have my doubts that it will not be quite Barbara�not the Barbara that knitted socks for the boys, and taught Tou Tou, and whose slight, fond arms I can�now that I have shut my eyes�so plainly feel thrown round my shoulders, to console me when I have broken into easy tears at some silly tiff with the others. Can even the omnipotent God remember all the unnumbered dead, and restore to them the shape and features that they once wore, and by which they who loved them knew them?
The funeral is over now�over two days ago. She lies in Tempest church-yard, at her own wish. The blinds are drawn up again; the sun looks in; and life goes on as before.
Already there has grown a sacredness about the name of Barbara�the name that used to echo through the house oftener than any other, as one and another called for her. Now, it is less lightly named than the names of us live ones.
I shall always wince when I hear it. Thank God! it is not a common name. After a while, I know that she will become a sealed subject, never named; but as yet�while my wound is in its first awful rawness, I must speak of her to some one.
I am talking of her to Roger now; Roger is very good to me�very! I do not seem to care much about him, nor about anybody for the matter of that, but he is very good.
"You liked her," I say, in a perfectly collected, tearless voice, "did not you? You were very kind and forbearing to them all, always�I am very grateful to you for it�but you liked her of your own accord�you would have liked her, even if she had not been one of us, would not you?"
I seem greedy to hear that she was dear to everybody.
"I was very fond of her," he answers, in a choked voice.
"And you are sure that she is happy now?" say I, with the same keen agony of anxiety with which I have put the question twenty times before�"well off�better than she was here�you do not say so to comfort me, I suppose; you would say it even if I were talking�not of her�but of some one like her that I did not care about?"
He turns to me, and clasps my dry, hot hands.
"Child!" he says, looking at me with great tears standing in his gray eyes�"I would stake all my hopes of seeing His face myself, that she has gone to God!"
I look at him with a sort of wistful envy. How is it that he and Barbara have attained such a certainty of faith? He can know no more than I do. After a pause�
"I think," say I, "that I should like to go home for a bit, if you do not mind. Everybody was fond of her there. Nobody knew any thing about her, nobody cared for her here."
So I go home. As I turn in at the park-gates, in the gray, wet gloom of the November evening, I think of my first home-coming after my wedding-tour.
Again I see the divine and jocund serenity of the summer evening�the hot, red sunset making all the windows one great flame, and they all, Barbara, Algy, Bobby, Tou Tou, laughing welcome to me from the opened gate. To-night I feel as if they were all dead.
I reach the house. I stand in the empty school-room!�I, alone, of all the noisy six. The stains of our cookery still discolor the old carpet; there is still the great ink-splash on the wall, that marks the spot where the little inkstand, aimed by Bobby at my head, and dodged by me, alighted.
How little I thought that those stains and that splash would ever speak to me with voices of such pathos! I have asked to be allowed to sleep in Barbara's and my old room. I am there now. I have thrown myself on Barbara's little white bed, and am clasping her pillow in my empty arms. Then, with blurred sight and swimming eyes, I look round at all our little childish knick-knacks.
There is the white crockery lamb that she gave me the day I was six years old! Poor little trumpery lamb! I snatch it up, and deluge its crinkly back, and its little pink nose, with my scalding tears.
At night I cannot sleep. I have pulled aside the curtains, that through the windows my eyes may see the high stars, beyond which she has gone. Through the pane they make a faint and ghostly glimmer on the empty bed.
I sit up in the dead middle of the night, when the darkness and so-called silence are surging and singing round me, while the whole room feels full of spirit presences. I alone! I am accompanied by a host�a bodiless host.
I stretch out my arms before me, and cry out:
"Barbara! Barbara! If you are here, make some sign! I command you, touch me, speak to me! I shall not be afraid!�dead or alive, can I be afraid of you?�give me some sign to let me know where you are�whether it is worth while trying to be good to get to you! I adjure you, give me some sign!"
The tears are raining down my cheeks, as I eagerly await some answer. Perhaps it will come in the cold, cold air, by which some have known of the presence of their dead; but in vain. The darkness and the silence surge round me. Still, still I feel the spirit-presences; but Barbara is dumb.
"You have been away such a short time!" I cry, piteously. "You cannot have gone far! Barbara! Barbara! I must get to you! If I had died, and you had lived, a hundred thousand devils should not have kept me from you. I should have broken through them all and reached you. Ah! cruel Barbara! you do not want to come to me!"
I stop, suffocated with tears; and through the pane the high stars still shine, and Barbara is dumb! |
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