Chapter 13 - Page 2

previously.

Oh, who dare inquire what passed in Jane's soul during that hour? The
God who wrote the child's name in His book before she was born, He only
knew. Of all that suffered in Martha's loss, Jane suffered incredibly
more than any other. She fell prostrate on the floor at the feet of the
Merciful Father when this duty was done--prostrate and speechless.
Prayer was beyond her power. She was dumb. God had done it and she
deserved it. She heard nothing John said to her. All that long, long day
she sat by her dead child, until in the darkening twilight some men came
into the room on tiptoe. They had a small white coffin in their care,
and placed it on a table near the bed. Then Jane stood up and if an
unhappy soul had risen from the grave, it could not have shocked them
more. She stood erect and looked at them. Her tall form, in its crushed
white gown, her deathly white face, her black eyes gleaming with the
lurid light of despair, her pale quivering lips, her air of hopeless
grief, shocked even these men, used to the daily sight of real or
pretended mourners. With a motion of her hand she prevented them coming
closer to the dead child, and then by an imperative utterance of the
word, "_Go_," sent them from the room. With her own hand she laid
Martha in her last bed and disposed its one garment about the rigid
little limbs. She neither spoke nor wept for Ah! in her sad soul she
knew that never day or night or man or God could bring her child back to
her. And she remembered that once she had said in an evil moment that
this dear, dead child was "one too many." Would God ever forgive her?

By a late train that night they left for Hatton Hall, reaching the
village about the time for the mill to open. No bell summoned its hands
to cheerful work. They were standing at various points, and when the
small white coffin went up the hill, they silently followed, softly
singing. At the great gates the weeping grandmother received them.

For one day the living and the dead dwelt together in hushed and
sorrowful mourning, nor did a word of comfort come to any soul. The
weight of that grief which hung like lead upon the rooms, the stairs,
the galleries where her step had lately been so light, was also on every
heart; and although we ought to be diviner for our dead, the strength of
this condition was not as yet realized. John had shut himself in his
room, and the grandmother went about her household duties silently
weeping and trying to put down the angry thoughts which would arise
whenever she remembered how stubbornly her daughter-in-law had refused
to leave Martha with her, and make her trip to London alone. She knew
it was "well with the child," but Oh the bitter strength of regrets