All that day and all the next day Wemyss was Lucy's tower of strength
and rock of refuge. He did everything that had to be done of the
business part of death--that extra wantonness of misery thrown in so
grimly to finish off the crushing of a mourner who is alone. It is true
the doctor was kind and ready to help, but he was a complete stranger;
she had never seen him till he was fetched that dreadful morning; and he
had other things to see to besides her affairs,--his own patients,
scattered widely over a lonely countryside. Wemyss had nothing to see
to. He could concentrate entirely on Lucy. And he was her friend, linked
to her so strangely and so strongly by death. She felt she had known him
for ever. She felt that since the beginning of time she and he had been
advancing hand in hand towards just this place, towards just this house
and garden, towards just this year, this August, this moment of
existence.
Wemyss dropped quite naturally into the place a near male relative would
have been in if there had been a near male relative within reach; and
his relief at having something to do, something practical and immediate,
was so immense that never were funeral arrangements made with greater
zeal and energy,--really one might almost say with greater gusto. Fresh
from the horrors of those other funeral arrangements, clouded as
they had been by the silences of friends and the averted looks of
neighbours--all owing to the idiotic jurors and their hesitations, and
the vindictiveness of that woman because, he concluded, he had refused
to raise her wages the previous month--what he was arranging now was so
simple and straightforward that it positively was a pleasure. There were
no anxieties, there were no worries, and there was a grateful little
girl. After each fruitful visit to the undertaker, and he paid several
in his zeal, he came back to Lucy and she was grateful; and she was not
only grateful, but very obviously glad to get him back.
He saw she didn't like it when he went away, off along the top of the
cliff on his various business visits, purpose in each step, a different
being from the indignantly miserable person who had dragged about that
very cliff killing time such a little while before; he could see she
didn't like it. She knew he had to go, she was grateful and immensely
expressive of her gratitude--Wemyss thought he had never met any one so
expressively grateful--that he should so diligently go, but she didn't
like it. He saw she didn't like it; he saw that she clung to him; and it
pleased him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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