'The saddest birds a season find to sing.'
SOUTHWELL.
'Never to fold the robe o'er secret pain,
Never, weighed down by memory's clouds again,
To bow thy head! Thou art gone home!'
MRS. HEMANS.
Mrs. Thornton came to see Mrs. Hale the next morning. She was
much worse. One of those sudden changes--those great visible
strides towards death, had been taken in the night, and her own
family were startled by the gray sunken look her features had
assumed in that one twelve hours of suffering. Mrs. Thornton--who
had not seen her for weeks--was softened all at once. She had
come because her son asked it from her as a personal favour, but
with all the proud bitter feelings of her nature in arms against
that family of which Margaret formed one.
She doubted the reality
of Mrs. Hale's illness; she doubted any want beyond a momentary
fancy on that lady's part, which should take her out of her
previously settled course of employment for the day. She told her
son that she wished they had never come near the place; that he
had never got acquainted with them; that there had been no such
useless languages as Latin and Greek ever invented. He bore all
this pretty silently; but when she had ended her invective
against the dead languages, he quietly returned to the short,
curt, decided expression of his wish that she should go and see
Mrs. Hale at the time appointed, as most likely to be convenient
to the invalid. Mrs. Thornton submitted with as bad a grace as
she could to her son's desire, all the time liking him the better
for having it; and exaggerating in her own mind the same notion
that he had of extraordinary goodness on his part in so
perseveringly keeping up with the Hales.
His goodness verging on weakness (as all the softer virtues did
in her mind), and her own contempt for Mr. and Mrs. Hale, and
positive dislike to Margaret, were the ideas which occupied Mrs.
Thornton, till she was struck into nothingness before the dark
shadow of the wings of the angel of death. There lay Mrs. Hale--a
mother like herself--a much younger woman than she was,--on the
bed from which there was no sign of hope that she might ever rise
again No more variety of light and shade for her in that darkened
room; no power of action, scarcely change of movement; faint
alternations of whispered sound and studious silence; and yet
that monotonous life seemed almost too much! When Mrs. Thornton,
strong and prosperous with life, came in, Mrs. Hale lay still,
although from the look on her face she was evidently conscious of
who it was.