And now the fondly-indulged wife could do nothing but lie on her sofa and shed a rain of incessant tears, and drink strong tea, which had lost its power to comfort or exhilarate. She would see no one. She could not even be roused to interest herself in the mourning, though, with a handsome widow, Pauline thought that ought to be all important.
“There are so many styles of widows’ caps now, ma’am. You really ought to see them, and choose for yourself,” urged Pauline, an honest young Englishwoman, who had begun life as Polly, but whom Mrs. Tempest had elevated into Pauline.
“What does it matter, Pauline? Take anything you like. He will not be there to see.”
Here the ready tears flowed afresh. That was the bitterest of all. That she should look nice in her mourning, and Edward not be there to praise her. In her feebleness she could not imagine life without him. She would hear his step at her door surely, his manly voice in the corridor. She would awake from this awful dream, in which he was not, and find him, and fall into his arms, and sob out her grief upon his breast, and tell him all she had suffered.
That was the dominant feeling in this weak soul. He could not be gone for ever.
Yet the truth came back upon her in hideous distinctness every now and then — came back suddenly and awfully, like the swift revelation of a desolate plague-stricken scene under a lightning flash. He was gone. He was lying in his coffin, in the dear old Tudor hall where they had sat so cosily. Those dismal reiterated strokes of the funeral-bell meant that his burial was at hand. They were moving the coffin already, perhaps. His place knew him no more.
She tottered to the darkened window, lifted the edge of the blind, and looked out. The funeral train was moving slowly along the carriage sweep, through the winding shrubberied road. How long, and black, and solemnly splendid the procession looked. Everybody had loved and respected him. It was a grand funeral. The thought of this general homage gave a faint thrill of comfort to the widow’s heart.
“My noble husband,” she ejaculated. “Who could help loving you?”
It seemed to her only a little while ago that she had driven up to the Tudor porch for the first time after her happy honeymoon, when she was in the bloom of youth and beauty, and life was like a schoolgirl’s happy dream.
“How short life is,” she sobbed; “how cruelly short for those who are happy!”
With Violet grief was no less passionate; but it did not find its sole vent in tears. The stronger soul was in rebellion against Providence. She kept aloof from her mother in the time of sorrow. What could they say to each other? They could only cry together. Violet shut herself in her room, and refused to see anyone, except patient Miss McCroke, who was always bringing her cups of tea, or basins of arrowroot, trying to coax her to take some kind of nourishment, dabbing her hot forehead with eau-de-Cologne — doing all those fussy little kindnesses which are so acutely aggravating in a great sorrow.
“Let me lie on the ground alone, and think of him, and wail for him.”
That is what Violet Tempest would have said, if she could have expressed her desire clearly.
Roderick Vawdrey went back to the Abbey House after the funeral, and contrived to see Miss McCroke, who was full of sympathy for everybody.
“Do let me see Violet, that’s a dear creature,” he said. “I can’t tell you how unhappy I am about her. I can’t get her face out of my thoughts, as I saw it that dreadful night when I led her horse home — the wild sad eyes, the white lips.”
“She is not fit to see anyone,” said Miss McCroke; “but perhaps it might rouse her a little to see you.”
Miss McCroke had an idea that all mourners ought to be roused; that much indulgence in grief for the dead was reprehensible.
“Yes,” answered Rorie eagerly, “she would see me, I know. We are like brother and sister.”
“Come into the schoolroom,” said the governess, “and I’ll see what I can do.”
The schoolroom was Vixen’s own particular den, and was not a bit like the popular idea of a schoolroom.
It was a pretty little room, with a high wooden dado, painted olive green, and a high-art paper of amazing ugliness, whereon brown and red storks disported themselves on a dull green ground. The high-art paper was enlivened with horsey caricatures by Leech, and a menagerie of pottery animals on various brackets.
A pot or a pan had been stuck into every corner that would hold one. There were desks, and boxes, and wickerwork baskets of every shape and kind, a dwarf oak bookcase on either side of the fireplace, with the books all at sixes and sevens, leaning against each other as if they were intoxicated. The broad mantelpiece presented a confusion of photographs, cups and saucers, violet jars, and Dresden shepherdesses. Over the quaint old Venetian glass dangled Vixen’s first trophy, the fox’s brush, tied with a scarlet ribbon. There were no birds, or squirrels, or dormice, for Vixen was too fond of the animal creation to shut her favourites up in cages; but there was a black bearskin spread in a corner for Argus to lie upon. In the wide low windows there were two banks of bright autumn flowers, pompons and dwarf roses, mignonette and veronica.
Miss McCroke drew up the blind, and stirred the fire.
“I’ll go and ask her to come,” she said.
“Do, like a dear,” said Rorie.
He paced the room while she was gone, full of sadness. He had been very fond of the Squire, and that awfully sudden death, an apopleptic seizure, instantaneous as a thunderbolt, had impressed him very painfully. It was his first experience of the kind, and it was infinitely terrible to him. It seemed to him a long time before Vixen appeared, and then the door opened, and a slim black figure came in, a white fixed face looked at him piteously, with tearless eyes made big by a great grief. She came leaning on Miss McCroke, as if she could hardly walk unaided. The face was stranger to him than an altogether unknown face. It was Violet Tempest with all the vivid joyous life gone out of her, like a lamp that is extinguished.
He took her cold trembling hands and drew her gently to a chair, and sat down beside her.
“I wanted so much to see you, dear,” he said, “to tell you how sorry we all are for you — my mother, my aunt, and cousin”— Violet gave a faint shiver —“all of us. The Duke liked your dear father so much. It was quite a shock to him.”
“You are very good,” Violet said mechanically.
She sat by him, pale and still as marble, looking at the ground. His voice and presence impressed her but faintly, like something a long way off. She was thinking of her dead father. She saw nothing but that one awful figure. They had laid him in his grave by this time. The cold cruel earth had fallen upon him and hidden him for ever from the light; he was shut away for ever from the fair glad world; he who had been so bright and cheerful, whose presence had carried gladness everywhere.
“Is the funeral quite over?” she asked presently, without lifting her heavy eyelids.
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