Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 162.djvu/120

108 He had regained his self-control by this time, and watched her calmly as she busied herself in the cottage putting many things to rights, sweeping the potato-peelings out into the yard, washing out the milk-pots, and putting them to dry on the paling-staves, where they shone in the sun like gigantic blackberries. She calmed the roaring Kuba, and coaxed him back into good-humor; she washed the dirty face and limbs of the little Kasza: and when, an hour later, she left the hut to return to the big house, some slight degree of order and comfort had been restored to the widower's desolate hearth.

CHAPTER III. WIDOWER AND BRIDEGROOM. "The lopped tree in time may grow again; Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower." Southwell. had expired on the Tuesday morning, and had that same day been laid in her grave, not in the usual churchyard, which was round the village church, but in the new cholera cemetry, which had lately been established on the hill at the edge of the forest. Several tall clumps of bracken fern had had to be removed to make room for poor Julka, and on the freshly upturned clods of earth the trees overhead were beginning to let fall the ripe beech-nuts.

It was on the following Sunday afternoon that Filip Buska again went up to the great house.

The harvest had all been safely got under cover during the week, and a thunder-storm the evening before had somewhat relieved the air. Within the last few days no new cases of cholera had sprung up: apparently the fiend, at length satisfied, had departed for some other neighborhood. Julka had been the last victim it had snatched at parting.

It requires a very delicate sense of tact, and a most subtle knowledge of human nature, to guide us in our intercourse with a newly made widower or widow. If we weep with the mourner (as we are often advised to do); if we agree with him in calling his loss irreparable, incurable; if we confirm his heart-broken assertions that for him henceforward there can be no more peace or happiness in this world, and that he has nothing further to do on earth in future, but yearn for his grave during the lonely years which it may be his miserable lot to languish yet here below, — if, as I say, we endorse all this, then we do not send away the bereaved one any lighter of heart than he came to us. If, on the other hand, the comforter be gifted with some slight knowledge of human nature, and knows by experience that for every grief there is a remedy, and that the healing of every wound is only a question of time, yet the expression of such knowledge in the sufferer's presence would be hardly seemly.

The clear-sighted comforter knows well that the healing theory holds good not only for wounds of the flesh but for those of the heart likewise. It only depends upon the severity of the cut, and the width and depth of the gash. Three or four years will close most wounds, leaving scarcely a scar behind. Those which require a longer cure are exceptionally severe cases; and it is rare, very rare indeed, to find a patient who lets his wound fester and bleed from within, and feed upon its own pain and bitterness, and never find relief until he is indeed in the grave. This sort of grief is rare, and perhaps unnatural and unwholesome; so it may be as well that we do not often come across it, and that it is only with the common and natural forms of grief that we are called upon to deal. The task is sufficiently difficult as it is; for even if we know well that for the despairing mourner before us there are plenty of joyous days in store in the future, yet what philosopher would be cruel enough to say to a sobbing widow with cynical distinctness, "You are weeping your eyes out to-day and tearing your hair for the sake of the husband you have lost, but before the grain has ripened three times more, you will be smiling by the side of a new spouse; therefore dim not your eyes with these useless tears, and keep your hair glossy and luxuriant for the flowers that are to adorn it by-and-by?"

Such a speech would be as brutal as it would be useless, for the patient would not believe you. He can see no gleam of light through the dense black veil which obscures his vision, and it would not be fitting were he able to catch a glimpse of such light as yet.

The comforter's words must therefore be directed and regulated by the comprehension of all these things; he must seek to tone down the edges of coal-black despair by sober neutral grey and brown tints, which, however, must betray no outward resemblance to the livelier hues of rose-color and azure blue, towards which they are covertly paving the way. What comfort is given must be administered homœopathically in minute doses, like a