Nancy Part 66

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d! 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 G.o.d!"

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. n.o.body knew any thing about her, n.o.body 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 s.h.i.+ne, and Barbara is dumb!

CHAPTER LI.

"The last touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day and by night.

Their last step on the stairs, at the door, still throbs through me, if ever so light.

Their last gift which they left to my childhood, far off in the long-ago years, Is now turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystals of tears.

'Dig the snow,' she said, 'For my church-yard bed; Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze, If one only of these, my beloveds, shall love with heart-warm tears, As I have loved these.'"

It seems to me in these days as if, but for the servants, I were quite alone in the house. Father is ill. We always thought that he never would care about any thing, or any of us, but we are wrong. Barbara's death has shaken him very much. Mother is with him always, nursing him, and being at his beck and call, and I see nothing of her.

Tou Tou has gone to school, and so it comes to pa.s.s that, in the late populous school-room, I sit alone. Where formerly one could hardly make one's voice heard for the merry clamor, there is now no noise, but the faint buzzing of the house-flies on the pane, and now and again, as it grows toward sunset, the loud wintry winds keening and calling.

The Brat indeed runs over for a couple of days, but I am so glad when they are over, and he is gone. I used to like the Brat the best of all the boys, and perhaps by-and-by I shall again; but, for the moment, do you know, I almost hate him.

Once or twice I _quite_ hate him, when I hear him laughing in his old thorough, light-hearted way--when I hear him jumping up-stairs three steps at a time, whistling the same tune he used to whistle before he went.

Poor boy! He would be always sorrowful if he could, and is very much ashamed of himself for not being, but he cannot.

Life is still pleasant to him, though Barbara is dead, and so I unjustly hate him, and am glad when he is gone. Have not I come home because here she was loved, here, at least, through all the village--the village about which she trod like one of G.o.d's kind angels--I shall be certain of meeting a keen and a.s.sured sympathy in my sorrow.

"... Where indeed The roof so lowly but that beam of heaven Dawned some time through the door-way?"

And yet, now that I am here, the village seems much as it was. Still the same groups of fat, frolicking children about the doors; still the same busy women at the wash-tub; about the house still the same coa.r.s.e laughs.

It would be most unnatural, impossible that it should not be so, and yet I feel angry--sorely angry with them.

One day when this sense of rawness is at its worst and sharpest, I resolve that I will pay a visit to the almshouse. There, at least, I shall find that she is remembered; there, out of mere selfishness, they must grieve for her. When will they, in their unlovely eld, ever find such a friend again?

So I go there. I find the old women, some crooning over the fire, half asleep, some squabbling. I suppose they are glad to see me, though not _so_ glad when they discover that I have brought no gift in my hand, for indeed I have forgotten--no quarter-pounds of tea--no little three-cornered parcels of sugar.

They begin to talk about Barbara at once. Among the poor there is never any sacredness about the names of the dead, and though I have hungered for sorrowful talk about her, for a.s.surance that by some one besides myself the awful emptiness of her place is felt, yet I wince and shrink from hearing her lightly named in common speech.

They are sorry about her, certainly--quite sorry--but it is more what they have lost by her, than her that they deplore. And they are more taken up with their own little miserable squabbles--with detracting tales of one another--than with either.

"Eh? she's a bad 'un, she is! I says to her, says I, 'Sally,' says I, 'if you'll give yourself hully and whully to the Lord for one week, I'll give you a _hounce_ of baccy,' and she's that wicked, she actilly would not."

Is _this_ the sort of thing I have come to hear? I rise up hastily, and take my leave.