"Cremation," said Erica, smiling a little. "A nice funereal subject for a dreary day. Generally, if I"m in wild spirits, Mr. Bircham sends me the very gloomiest subject to write on, and if I"m particularly blue, he asks for a bright, lively article."
"Oh! He tells you what to write on?"
"Yes, did you think I had the luxury of choosing for myself? Every day, about eleven o"clock a small boy brings me my fate on a slip of paper.
Let me dictate this to you. I"m sure you can"t read that penciled scribble."
"Yes, I can," said Brian. "You go and rest."
She obeyed him, thankful enough to have a moment"s pause in which to think out the questions that came crowding into her mind. She hardly dared to think what Brian might be to her, for just now she needed him so sorely as friend and adviser, that to admit that other perception, which made her feel shy and constrained with him, would have left her still in her isolation. After all, he was a seven years" friend, no mere acquaintance, but an actual friend to whom she was her unreserved and perfectly natural self.
"Brian," she said presently when he had finished her copying, "you don"t think I"m bound to tell my father about this afternoon, do you?"
A burning, painful blush, the sort of blush that she never ought to have known, never could have known but for that shameful slander, spread over her face and neck as she spoke.
"Perhaps not," said Brian, "since the man has been properly punished."
"I think I hope it need never get round to him in any other way," said Erica. "He would be so fearfully angry, and just now scarcely a day pa.s.ses without bringing him some fresh worry."
"When will the Pogson affair come on?"
"Oh! I don"t know. Not just yet, I"m afraid. Things in the legal world always move at the rate of a fly in a glue pot."
"What sort of man is Mr. Pogson?"
"He was in court today, a little, sleek, narrow-headed man with cold, gray eyes. I have been trying to put myself in his place, and realize the view he takes of things; but it is very, very hard. You don"t know what it is to live in this house and see the awful harm his intolerance is bringing about."
"In what way did you specially mean?"
"Oh! In a thousand ways. It is bringing Christianity into discredit, it is making them more bitter against it, and who can wonder. It is bringing hundreds of men to atheism, it is enormously increasing the demand for all my father"s books, and already even in these few months it has doubled the sale of the "Idol-Breakers." In old times that would have been my consolation. Oh! It is heart-breaking to see how religious people injure their own cause. Surely they might have learned by this time that punishment for opinion is never right, that it brings only bitterness, and misery, and more error! How is one to believe that this is right that G.o.d means all this bigotry and injustice to go on producing evil?"
"Surely it will teach the sharp lesson that all pain teaches," said Brian. "We Christians have broken His order, have lost the true idea of brotherly love, and from this arises pain and evil, which at last, when it touches our own selfish natures, will rouse us, wake us up sharply, drive us back of necessity to the true Christ-following. Then persecution and injustice will die. But we are so terribly asleep that the evil must grow desperate before we become conscious of it. It seems to me that bigotry has at least one mortal foe, though. You are always here; you must show them by your life what the Father is THAT is being a Christian!"
"I know," said Erica, a look of almost pa.s.sionate longing dawning in her eyes. "Oh! What a thing it is to be crammed full of faults that hinder one from serving! And all these worries do try one"s temper fearfully.
If they had but a Donovan to live with them now! But, as for me, I can"t do much, except love them."
Brian loved her too truly to speak words of praise and commendation at such a time.
"Is not the love the crux of the whole?" he said quietly.
"I suppose it is," said Erica, pushing back her hair from her forehead in the way she always did when anything perplexed her. "But just at present my life is a sort of fugue on Browning"s line
"How very hard it is to be a Christian?"
Sometimes I can"t help laughing to think that there was a time when I thought the teaching of Christ unpractical! Do you mind ringing the bell for me; the others will be in directly, and will be glad of tea after that headachy place."
"Is there nothing else I can do for you?" asked Brian.
"Yes, one thing more help me to remember the levers of the second order.
It"s my physiology cla.s.s tonight, and I feel, as Tom would express it, like a "boiled owl.""
"Let me take the cla.s.s for you."
"Oh, no, thank you," she replied. "I wouldn"t miss it for the world."
It was not till Brian had left that Erica, taking up the article on cremation, was struck by some resemblance in the handwriting. She must have seen Brian"s writing before, but only this afternoon did she make that fresh discovery. Crossing the room she took from one of the book shelves a dark blue morocco volume, and compared the writing on the fly leaf with her MS.
"From another admirer of "Hiawatha."" There could be no doubt that Brian had written that. Had he cared for her so long? Had he indeed loved her all these years? She was interrupted by the maid bringing in the tea.
"Mr. Bircham"s boy is here, miss, and if you please, can cook speak to you a minute?"
Erica put down the Longfellow and rolled up "Cremation."
"I"m sure she"s going to give warning!" she thought to herself. "What a day to choose for it! That"s what I call an anti-climax."
Her forebodings proved all too true. In a minute more in walked the cook, with the sort of conscious dignity of bearing which means "I am no longer in your service."
"If you please, miss, I wish to leave this day month."
"I shall be sorry to lose you," said Erica; "what are your reasons for leaving?"
"I"ve not been used, miss, to families as is in the law courts. I"ve been used to the best West End private families."
"I don"t see how it can affect you," said Erica, feeling, in spite of her annoyance, much inclined to laugh.
"Indeed, miss, and it do. There"s not a tradesman"s boy but has his joke or his word about Mr. Raeburn," said the cook in an injured voice. "And last Sunday when I went to the minister to show my lines, he said a member ought to be ashamed to take service with a hatheist and that I was in an "ouse of "ell. Those was his very words, miss, an "ouse of "ell, he said."
"Then it was exceedingly impertinent of him," said Erica, "for he knew nothing whatever about it."
After that there was nothing for it but to accept the resignation, and to begin once more the weary search for that rara avis, "a good plain cook."
Her interview had only just ended when she heard the front door open.
She listened intently, but apparently it was only Tom; he came upstairs singing a refrain with which just then she quite agreed:
"LAW, law Rhymes very well with jaw, If you"re fond of litigation, And sweet procrastination, Latin and botheration, I advise you to go to law."
"Halloo!" he exclaimed. "So you did get home all right? I like your way of acting Casabianca! The chieftain sent me tearing out after you, and when I got there, you had vanished!"
"Brian came up just then," said Erica, "and I thought it better not to wait. Oh, here comes father."
Raeburn entered as she spoke. No one who saw him would have guessed that he was an overworked, overworried man, for his face was a singularly peaceful one, serene with the serenity of a strong nature convinced of its own integrity.
"Got some tea for us, Eric?" he asked, throwing himself back in a chair beside the fire.
Some shade of trouble in her face, invisible to any eye but that of a parent, made him watch her intently, while a new hope which made his heart beat more quickly sprang up within him. Christians had not shown up well that day; prosecuting and persecuting Christians are the most repulsive beings on earth! Did she begin to feel a flaw in the system she had professed belief in? Might she by this injustice come to realize that she had unconsciously cheated herself into a belief? If such things might win her back to him, might bridge over that miserable gulf between them, then welcome any trouble, any persecution, welcome even ruin itself.
But had he been able to see into Erica"s heart, he would have learned that the grief which had left its traces on her face was the grief of knowing that such days as these strengthened and confirmed him in his atheism. Erica was indeed ever confronted with one of the most baffling of all baffling mysteries. How was it that a man of such grand capacities, a man with so many n.o.ble qualities, yet remained in the darkness? One day she put that question sadly enough to Charles Osmond.
"Not darkness, child, none of your honest secularists who live up to their creed are in darkness," he replied. "However mistakenly, they do try to promote what they consider the general good. Were you in such absolute blackness before last summer?"