"Very much," said Ellton; "it was a sharp cut on the forehead--went
through the bone, and he was unconscious, off and on, for two or three
days. He seemed to take it hard. He went off yesterday, and he wasn't
fit to travel either, but he would do it for some reason. I think he was
worse cut up about Landor than anything, though he wasn't able to go to
the funeral. I like Cairness. He's an all-round decent fellow; but
after all, his life was bought too dear."
Felipa did not answer.
He did not try to discuss her plans for the future with her that night;
but two days afterward, when she had disposed of all her household goods
and had packed the few things that remained, they sat upon two boxes in
the bare hallway, resting; and he broached it.
"I am going to ask the quartermaster to store my things for the present,
and of course the first sergeant's wife will look out for the children,"
she said.
But that was not exactly what he wanted to know, and he insisted. "But
what is going to become of you? Are you going back to the Campbells?" He
had asked her to stay with his wife and himself as long as she would,
but she had refused.
"No," she said, "I told the Campbells I would not go to them."
And he could get nothing definite from her beyond that. It annoyed him,
of course; Felipa had a gift for repulsing kindness and friendship. It
was because she would not lie and could not evade. Therefore, she
preserved a silence that was, to say the least of it, exasperating to
the well-intentioned.
Early in the morning of the day she was to leave she went to the
graveyard alone again. She was beginning to realize more than she had at
first that Landor was quite gone. She missed him, in a way. He had been
a strong influence in her life, and there was a lack of the pressure
now. But despite the form of religion to which she clung, she had no
hope of meeting him in any future life, and no real wish to do so.
She stood by the mound for a little while thinking of him, of how well
he had lived and died, true to his standard of duty, absolutely true,
but lacking after all that spirit of love without which our actions
profit so little and die with our death. She had a clearer realization
of it than ever before. It came to her that Charles Cairness's life,
wandering, aimless, disjointed as it was, and her own, though it fell
far below even her own not impossibly high ideals, were to more purpose,
had in them more of the vital force of creation, were less wasted, than
his had been. To have known no enthusiasms--which are but love, in one
form or another--is to have failed to give that impulse to the course of
events which every man born into the world should hold himself bound to
give, as the human debt to the Eternal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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