Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/116

84 the three worshipping women of the end of that ideal unbroken family life, and it was for the effect upon Emily that the task was especially dreaded.

She describes it afterward in a line:

We were eating our supper when Austin came in.... He had a despatch in his hand, and I saw by his face that we were all lost, though I did not know how.

For a time it seemed as if her mind could not sustain the blow. His death seemed to reverse all laws of nature or mind for Emily. No one who heard her repeated cry, "Where is he? I can't find him!" could ever forget it, or those days of abyss when her face wore a stricken expression of surprise that the world and stars could slip from their orbits and leave such confusion.

She never quite recovered her faith in life, and just a year later her mother was paralyzed. All through the long, tedious invalidism following, Emily ministered to her with a tenderness as to one also bound for the supernatural and to be cherished as a temporary guest of the heart, already half an angel. Two such calamities shook her belief in stability of this world of hers, where she had been the child of parents permanent and equal to all her natural demand of care and continuance. "The beginning of always is more dreadful than the close—for that is sustained by flickering identity," she wrote her Sister Sue.

Dr. Holland's death in 1881 was another link broken, followed by the loss of Judge Lord, who was now both father and friend.

In the autumn of 1883 her youngest nephew, Gilbert, died after an illness of only three days and shattered the goldenest intimacy she had left. He was a precocious and