Mrs Molesworth (continued 10)
Reading edition
It was very hard to be unable to agree with him, but weary days, and still wearier nights, went by before either doctors or friends thought it would be any but cruel kindness to allow him to hope. At last, however—a long of coming “at last” it was—there crept into sight the first faint flutter of improvement; slowly, very slowly, life and consciousness returned to the all but dying wife, and after a new phase of anxiety, scarcely less trying than the first, the verdict was pronounced, “There is hope—the greatest danger to be apprehended in the way of recovery has been safely past—there is every reasonable ground for hope.” And then, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, Eugenia crept back to her place in the world, to the place which it had seemed all but certain would be vacant for evermore. Her extreme patience, her tranquil gentleness, had much to do with her recovery, said the authorities. And those who knew her best—Gerald and Roma, and Sydney when she came—knew her excitable impetuosity, her impatience of inaction, marvelled somewhat at this new revelation of her character.
“You are so good, Eugenia,” said Roma, one day when she was alone with the patient, still forced to lie motionless and unemployed, forbidden even to use her eyes or to talk much. “I cannot think how you have learnt to bear these long weeks of suffering, or at least tedium, so cheerfully.”
Eugenia drew her friend’s head down close beside her on her pillow. “Don’t you see, dear Roma,” she whispered, “how easy it is for me to be patient now that I am so happy? There has not been any suffering too much for me; I am so selfish that I cannot even regret the anxiety you all went through about me, for think what it has brought me—as nothing else could have done—the full knowledge of Beauchamp’s love. Never, since the dreadful day when first I doubted it, have I felt so assured of it as since this accident; never, since the passing away of my unreal, unreasonable dreams, has life looked so sweet to me as now, for though I know now that troubles, and disappointment, and failure must come; though I dare say I shall often feel them bitterly and exaggeratedly, still I can never again feel hopeless or heartless—I can never feel that my life has no value or object.”
Roma kissed her silently, but did not speak. In a minute or two Eugenia spoke again—
“And if anything was wanting to make me still happier, to make me more grateful for this new return to life, it is what you have told me about yourself and Gerald,” she said affectionately. “You are both so wise and good, you have both been so wise and good in what you have done for me, that I cannot tell you how happy I am in your happiness. Happiness actually in your grasp, with real root and foundation. You will not have to travel to it through vanished illusions as I did;” she sighed a little. “But I was hot-headed, and wilful, and selfish, and so I blinded myself. You have always thought of others more than of yourself, Roma. You have been reasonable and patient all your life. You deserve to step straight into happiness.”
“No I don’t, Eugenia. No one but I myself knows how little I deserve it,” whispered Roma. But she said no more, and Eugenia accepted her words simply as the expression of her womanly humility.
“Her engagement to Gerald has improved her in the only respect improvement in her—in my eyes at least—was possible,” thought Eugenia. “It has softened her so wonderfully. No one could call her too self-confident or decided in manner now.” But Roma in her own heart felt herself more changed than others suspected.
“I prided myself on my high principle and superiority to low influences, jealousy and selfishness, and all such unworthy feelings. And I fancied, too, I had so much self-command, even in thought,” she said to her lover, sadly, when, after Eugenia was fairly out of danger, she confessed to him the cruel storm of feeling, the anguish of self-reproach through which she had passed the day of the accident; “and see what I am in reality! Imagine the horrible, the repulsive selfishness of my feeling as I did at such a time, even for an instant.”
“But it was partly my fault,” said Gerald. “I had expressed myself badly. Don’t you see how it was? I was so afraid of deceiving you in any way, of in the least concealing from you what I had felt for another woman (though indeed you knew it already) that I misrepresented it. I mixed up past and present. Thinking it over since, indeed, I wonder you didn’t refuse to have anything to say to me. I don’t feel proud of my way of expressing myself that afternoon, I assure you.”
“I told you at the time you very nearly made me propose to you,” said Roma, half laughing in spite of her seriousness.
“But you misunderstood me, you did indeed,” he persisted. “I hardly like to talk about it, but to speak plainly, my love for Eugenia died, completely and for ever, the day I first learnt to think of her as the wife, the promised or actual wife—it all seemed one to me—of another. Had there been no other in the question, had it been a simple question of winning her by long devotion to care for me, I don’t say what limits there would have been to my perseverance. But as it was—”
“Don’t explain,” interrupted Roma. “I don’t want you to explain. It can’t make me feel myself the least bit less despicable. I that have always despised other women so for being run away with by their feelings, even good ones. Oh, Gerald, are you sure you wouldn’t rather give me up now you know how bad I am?”
He smiled.
“Do you remember how I offended you long, long ago,” he said, “by persisting that you were no judge of your own character? Even then, at first sight, I doubted your belonging to the easy-going, prosaic order of beings you declared yourself to be one of. There are doubtless in all of us,” he went on more gravely, after a little pause, “possibilities of evil, of selfishness—the root of it all, I suppose, but I am no metaphysician—which we may well tremble to recognise. And in the lurid light of tempests of feeling, these are apt to show themselves in exaggerated blackness and enormity. But you cannot think, Roma, that I would love you less for seeing more of the depth of your character, the depth, and the strength, and the truth of it?” he added, tenderly.
So Roma was comforted. And Eugenia’s prediction that her two friends would “step straight into happiness,” was fulfilled as thoroughly as any prophecy of the kind can be fulfilled in a world where so very many things are crooked, more crooked than needs be, because so very few people have faith and patience sufficient to await the slow-coming, far-off, eventual “making straight”—faith and patience enough to work cheerily meanwhile in their own corner of the great vineyard. For though the tools be poor and imperfect, the soil hard, the light dim and fitful, oftentimes indeed delusive, the results of the labour all but invisible, what then?
“Is not our failure here but a triumph’s evidence For the fulness of the days?”
The End.
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Volume 1 Chapter 1
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Volume 1 Chapter 2
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Volume 1 Chapter 3
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Volume 1 Chapter 4
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Volume 1 Chapter 5
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Volume 1 Chapter 6
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Volume 1 Chapter 7
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Volume 1 Chapter 8
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Volume 1 Chapter 9
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Volume 1 Chapter 10
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Volume 2 Chapter 1
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Volume 2 Chapter 2
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Volume 2 Chapter 3
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Volume 2 Chapter 4
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Volume 2 Chapter 5
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Volume 2 Chapter 6
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Volume 2 Chapter 7
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Volume 2 Chapter 8
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Volume 2 Chapter 9
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Volume 2 Chapter 10
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Volume 3 Chapter 1
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Volume 3 Chapter 2
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Volume 3 Chapter 3
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Volume 3 Chapter 4
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Volume 3 Chapter 5
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Volume 3 Chapter 6
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Volume 3 Chapter 7
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Volume 3 Chapter 8
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Volume 3 Chapter 9
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Volume 3 Chapter 10
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