“Well,” said Mr Blackwood, as he seated himself in one of the easy-chairs by his dining-room fireplace, and turned his face to his wife, who had taken the other, “a funeral is a solemn thing. I don’t know of anything that upsets and unmans me in the same way. As I said to Cassell when we were coming along, whatever religion we have, and whatever opinions we have on anything else, a funeral is the same for us all.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Blackwood, in her rather high-pitched, but sufficiently pleasing tones; “it makes us realise that we are all pilgrims on the same journey. In whatever direction our paths in life are set, we must all come to the river at last.”
“Poor Hutton!” returned Mr Blackwood, leaning back in his chair and twisting his moustache. “Poor Hutton! His will be a lonely life enough after this, I am afraid — a lonely life enough; at least until little Dolores is old enough to fill her mother’s place. It went to my heart to see him to-day — I can tell you that it did. He looked ten years older, and entirely broken down.”
“And the poor children too — it goes to my heart to think of them,” said Mrs Blackwood, wiping from her eyes the tears that were always responsive to her will. “Poor little girl and boy! — to lose their mother just when they are beginning to need her.”
“Yes, yes, we can’t understand these things,” said Mr Blackwood;. “we can’t understand them. We can only cling to our faith, and believe that everything is ordained for the best.”
“Did you say you walked home with Dr Cassell, dear?” said Mrs Blackwood after a minute’s pause, not finding any hitch in the transition to easier feeling.
“Yes, we walked together as far as his house,” said Mr Blackwood, falling in with the change without reluctance; “and I made another attempt — though a very feeble attempt, I admit — to enlist him on the side of Temperance. He would make a valuable recruit — a valuable recruit.” Mr Blackwood lingered on this expression as though content with it. “The influence he would have about the neighbourhood would be immense.”
“I don’t think he would have as much influence as you have, dear,” said Mrs Blackwood, with the note of peevishness which was prone to creep into her voice. “You have such a wonderful talent for gaining influence over people. I have never seen it in the same way in anybody else. It is a real gift. I am sure no one else would have a chance of succeeding where you have failed.” Mrs Blackwood’s conjugal and maternal jealousy had gone beyond the stage in which it is a pardonable attribute of wifehood and motherhood.
“Ah, I don’t know about that,” said Mr Blackwood; “I don’t know about that, my darling. One can only do one’s best; and I don’t suppose for a minute that my best is anything to boast of. But I think I may say that for the cause of Temperance I have done it. I think I may say that.”
“I am sure you may,” said Mrs Blackwood, with soothed appreciation.
It is perceived that Mr and Mrs Blackwood have put from their minds the trouble at the parsonage, with the easy sinking of compassion in the opposite emotion reflexively applied, which may be observed a power common to people stirred towards their fellows’ “conversion,” and ordinary, unevangelistic human kind. But the trouble in the parsonage lay not less heavily, as it stood in its sad sameness with the years in which the presence lost to it had ordered its life. The gabled house was the same; the broad path leading to the highroad was the same; the narrow path leading to the churchyard, the single oak on the lawn, the autumn — tinted creeper swathing the house in crimson wrappings — they were all the same. Even the scene in the porch was one which its rustie woodwork had often witnessed. The Reverend Cleveland Hutton and the Reverend James Hutton were taking farewell of each other.
It was an old experience to the Reverend Cleveland — this standing on his threshold in an early hour of the evening, and giving God-speed to his brother, the no less Reverend James. His living was at such a distance from his brother’s, as to bring it about that their dealings were conducted through frequent visits of a few hours’ length. This system of fellowship was fortunate in regard not merely to the distance; for the feelings between them happened to be those which before and since their time have existed between brothers and sisters in their maturer years; and consisted of a moderately strong mutual regard, and a tendency — also mutual, but rather more than moderately strong — to continual petty irritation; affections to which frequency of intercourse and its speedy ending were fitted.
So strong was the sense of doing simply what was wonted, that the Reverend Cleveland crossed his hall with his consciousness deadened to his grief, and merely oppressed by a vague knowledge of a burden. With the opening of the door of his study, there even came a shadow of the old relief, which was accustomed to mark his return to his wife from the fraternal farewell — generally with the purpose of disburthening his mind of its pent-up comment on the various dispensable qualities of the Reverend James. The next moment, with the sense of the difference carried to-day in his brother’s companionship, there came the rush of understanding — the first true knowledge that the responding face was gone, that the listening ear was gone; that through all the stretch of years before him, with all their days and weeks and hours, he must speak and move with words and movements which were hollow forms to his thought. For it is a heavy time when the buoyant spirit is bowed, and cries against its own delusion, that it will wake to the same wrestling upon all its days. The time is not fit to return to watch its working, until it meets the reactive power that bears it through its history.