The Laurel Bush: An Old-Fashioned Love StoryCraik, Dinah Maria Mulock
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The Laurel Bush: An Old-Fashioned Love Story
Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock
Fiction; Love stories
She had none; she loved it, for its sights and sounds were mixed up with
all the happiness of her young days. She could have sat all this
sunshiny morning on the beach doing absolutely nothing, had she not
remembered David's newspaper; which, just to please him, she must look
through. She did so, and in the corner, among the brief list of names in
the obituary, she saw that of "Roy." Not himself, as she soon found, as
soon as she could see to read, in the sudden blindness that came over
her. Not himself. Only his child.
"On Christmas-day, at Shanghai, aged three and a half years, Isabella,
the only and beloved daughter of Robert and Isabella Roy."
He was alive, then. That was her first thought, almost a joyful one,
showing how deep had been her secret dread of the contrary. And he was
married. His "only and beloved daughter?" Oh! how beloved she could
well understand. Married, and a father; and his child was dead.
Many would think it strange (it would be in most women, but it was not in
this woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her first
few minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he was
married and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child and
lost it--he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children. The thought
of his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief--the
grief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in a
newspaper that the man they loved was married to another--did not come.
At least not at once. It did not burst upon her, as sorrow does
sometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring. She
was not slain, not even stunned. After a few minutes it seemed to her as
if it had happened long ago--as if she had always known it must happen,
and was not astonished.
His "only and beloved daughter!" The words sung themselves in and out of
her brain, to the murmur of the sea. How he must have loved the child!
She could almost see him with the little one in his arms, or watching
over her bed, or standing beside her small coffin. Three years and a
half old! Then he must have been married a good while--long and long
after she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can go
on thinking of another woman's husband.
One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteous
despair, which nobody heard but God--and she was not afraid of His
hearing--and the struggle was over. She saw Robert Roy, with his child
in his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totally
different man.
She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it was
the same sea, the same shore, the same earth and sky, was a totally
different woman. Something was lost, something never to be retrieved on
this side the grave, but also something was found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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