第28章 What the New Year Brought (4)

Wearily shifting her position, she looked across to the other side of the carriage, and saw, as if in a picture, her father.Raeburn was a comparatively young man, very little over forty; but his anxieties and the almost incredible amount of hard work of the past two years had told upon him, and had turned his hair gray.There was something in his stern set face, in the strong man's reserved grief, in the pose of his grand-looking head, dignified, even in exhaustion, that was strangely pathetic.Erica scarcely seemed to realize that he was her father.It was more as if she were gazing at some scene on the stage, or on a wonderfully graphic and heart-stirring picture.The pathos and sadness of it took hold of her; she burst into a passion of tears, turned her face from the light, and cried as if no power on earth could ever stop her, her long-drawn sobs allowed to go unchecked since the noise of the train made them inaudible.She was so little given to tears, as a rule, that now they positively frightened her, nor could she understand how, with a real and terrible grief for which she could not weep, the mere pathetic sight should have brought down her tears like rain.But the outburst brought relief with it, for it left her so exhausted that for a brief half hour she slept, and awoke just before they reached London, with such a frightful headache that the physical pain numbed the mental.

"How soon shall we be--" home she would have said, but the word choked her."How soon shall we get there?" she asked faintly.She was so ill, so weary, that the mere thought of being still again--even in the death-visited home--was a relief, and she was really too much worn out to feel very acutely while they drove through the familiar streets.

At last, early in the cold, new year's morning, they were set down in Guilford Square, at the grim entrance to Persecution Alley.She looked round at the gray old houses with a shudder, then her father drew her arm within his, and led her down the dreary little cul-de-sac.There was the house, looking the same as ever, and there was Aunt Jean coming forward to meet them, with a strange new tenderness in her voice and look, and there was Tom in the background, seeming half shy and afraid to meet her in her grief, and there, above all, was the one great eternal void.

To watch beside the dying must be anguish, and yet surely not such keen anguish as to have missed the last moments, the last farewells, the last chance of serving.For those who have to come back to the empty house, the home which never can be home again, may God comfort them--no one else can.

Stillness, and food, and brief snatches of sleep somewhat restored Erica.Late in the afternoon she was strong enough to go into her mother's room, for that last look so inexpressibly painful to all, so entirely void of hope or comfort to those who believe in no hereafter.Not even the peacefulness of death was there to give even a slight, a momentary relief to her pain; she scarcely even recognized her mother.Was that, indeed, all that was left? That pale, rigid, utterly changed face and form? Was that her mother?

Could that once have been her mother? Very often had she heard this great change wrought by death referred to in discussions; she knew well the arguments which were brought forward by the believers in immortality, the counter arguments with which her father invariably met them, and which had always seemed to her conclusive.

But somehow that which seemed satisfactory in the lecture hall did not answer in the room of death.Her whole being seemed to flow out into one longing question: Might there not be a Beyond--an Unseen? Was this world indeed only "A place to stand and love in for an hour, With darkness and the death-hour rounding it?"She had slept in the afternoon, but at night, when all was still, she could not sleep.The question still lurked in her mind; her sorrow and loneliness grew almost unbearable.She thought if she could only make herself cry again perhaps she might sleep, and she took down a book about Giordano Bruno, and read the account of his martyrdom, an account which always moved her very much.But tonight not even the description of the valiant unshrinking martyr of Free-thought ascending the scaffold to meet his doom could in the slightest degree affect her.She tried another book, this time Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities." She had never read the last two chapters without feeling a great desire to cry, but tonight she read with perfect unconcern of Sydney Carton's wanderings through Paris on the night before he gave himself up--read the last marvelously written scene without the slightest emotion.It was evidently no use to try anything else; she shut the book, put out her candle, and once more lay down in the dark.

Then she began to think of the words which had so persistently haunted Sydney Carton: "I am the Resurrection and the Life." She, too, seemed to be wandering about the Parisian streets, hearing these words over and over again.She knew that it was Jesus of Nazareth who had said this.What an assertion it was for a man to make! It was not even "I BRING the resurrection," or "I GIVE the resurrection," but "I AM the Resurrection." And yet, according to her father, his humility had been excessive, carried almost to a fault.Was he the most inconsistent man that ever lived, or what was he? At last she thought she would get up and see whether there was any qualifying context, and when and where he had uttered this tremendous saying.

Lighting her candle, she crept, a little shivering, white-robed figure, round the book-lined room, scanning the titles on every shelf, but bibles were too much in use in that house to be relegated to the attics, she found only the least interesting and least serviceable of her father's books.There was nothing for it but to go down to the study; so wrapping herself up, for it was a freezing winter's night, she went noiselessly downstairs, and soon found every possible facility for Biblical research.

A little baffled and even disappointed to find the words in that which she regarded as the least authentic of the gospels, she still resolved to read the account; she read it, indeed, in two or three translations, and compared each closely with the others, but in all the words stood out in uncompromising greatness of assertion.This man claimed to BE the resurrection, of as Wyclif had it, "the agen risying and lyf."And then poor Erica read on to the end of the story and was quite thrown back upon herself by the account of the miracle which followed.It was a beautiful story, she said to herself, poetically written, graphically described, but as to believing it to be true, she could as soon have accepted the "Midsummer Night's Dream" as having actually taken place.

Shivering with cold she put the books back on their shelf, and stole upstairs once more to bear her comfortless sorrow as best she could.