I could make nothing of it; for though
it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to
have no certain message for me, but the message of oblivion and
silence.
I was sorry, as I went away, to leave the poor maidservant to her
lonely and desolate memories. She had to leave her comfortable
kitchen and her easy routine, for new duties and new faces, and I
could see that she anticipated the change with sad dismay.
It seemed to me in that hour as though the cruelty and the
tenderness of the world were very mysteriously blended--there was
no lack of tenderness in the old house with its innumerable small
associations, its sheltered calm. And then suddenly the stroke must
fall, and fall upon lives whose very security and gentleness seemed
to have been so ill a preparation for sterner and darker things. It
would have been more loving, one thought, either to have made the
whole fabric more austere, more precarious from the first; or else
to have bestowed a deep courage and a fertile hope, a firmer
endurance, rather than to have confronted lives so frail and
delicate with the terrors of the vast unknown.
April 8, 1890.
Our new house is charming, beautiful, homelike.
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