When Charles got to his room he saw a letter from home lying on his
table; and, to his alarm, it had a deep black edge. He tore it open.
Alas, it announced the sudden death of his dear father! He had been
ailing some weeks with the gout, which at length had attacked his
stomach, and carried him off in a few hours.
O my poor dear Charles, I sympathize with you keenly all that long
night, and in that indescribable waking in the morning, and that dreary
day of travel which followed it! By the afternoon you were at home. O
piercing change! it was but six or seven weeks before that you had
passed the same objects the reverse way, with what different feelings,
and oh, in what company, as you made for the railway omnibus! It was a
grief not to be put into words; and to meet mother, sisters—and the
Dead!...
The funeral is over by some days; Charles is to remain at home the
remainder of the term, and does not return to Oxford till towards the
end of January. The signs of grief have been put away; the house looks
cheerful as before; the fire as bright, the mirrors as clear, the
furniture as orderly; the pictures are the same, and the ornaments on
the mantelpiece stand as they have stood, and the French clock tells
the hour, as it has told it, for years past. The inmates of the
parsonage wear, it is most true, the signs of a heavy bereavement; but
they converse as usual, and on ordinary subjects; they pursue the same
employments, they work, they read, they walk in the garden, they dine.
There is no change except in the inward consciousness of an
overwhelming loss. He is not there, not merely on this day or
that, for so it well might be; he is not merely away, but, as they know
well, he is gone and will not return. That he is absent now is but a
token and a memorial to their minds that he will be absent always. But
especially at dinner; Charles had to take a place which he had
sometimes filled, but then as the deputy, and in the presence of him
whom now he succeeded. His father, being not much more than a
middle-aged man, had been accustomed to carve himself. And when at the
meal of the day Charles looked up, he had to encounter the troubled
look of one, who, from her place at table, had before her eyes a still
more vivid memento of their common loss;—aliquid desideraverunt
oculi.
Mr. Reding had left his family well provided for; and this, though a
real alleviation of their loss in the event, perhaps augmented the pain
of it at the moment. He had ever been a kind indulgent father. He was a
most respectable clergyman of the old school; pious in his sentiments,
a gentleman in his feelings, exemplary in his social relations. He was
no reader, and never had been in the way to gain theological knowledge;
he sincerely believed all that was in the Prayer Book, but his sermons
were very rarely doctrinal. They were sensible, manly discourses on the
moral duties. He administered Holy Communion at the three great
festivals, saw his Bishop once or twice a year, was on good terms with
the country gentlemen in his neighbourhood, was charitable to the poor,
hospitable in his housekeeping, and was a staunch though not a violent
supporter of the Tory interest in his county. He was incapable of
anything harsh, or petty, or low, or uncourteous; and died esteemed by
the great houses about him, and lamented by his parishioners.
It was the first great grief poor Charles had ever had, and he felt
it to be real. How did the small anxieties which had of late teased
him, vanish before this tangible calamity! He then understood the
difference between what was real and what was not. All the doubts,
inquiries, surmises, views, which had of late haunted him on
theological subjects, seemed like so many shams, which flitted before
him in sun-bright hours, but had no root in his inward nature, and fell
from him, like the helpless December leaves, in the hour of his
affliction. He felt now where his heart and his life lay. His
birth, his parentage, his education, his home, were great realities; to
these his being was united; out of these he grew. He felt he must be
what Providence had made him. What is called the pursuit of truth,
seemed an idle dream. He had great tangible duties to his father's
memory, to his mother and sisters, to his position; he felt sick of all
theories, as if they had taken him in; and he secretly resolved never
more to have anything to do with them. Let the world go on as it might,
happen what would to others, his own place and his own path were clear.
He would go back to Oxford, attend steadily to his books, put aside all
distractions, avoid bye-paths, and do his best to acquit himself well
in the schools. The Church of England as it was, its Articles, bishops,
preachers, professors, had sufficed for much better persons than he
was; they were good enough for him. He could not do better than imitate
the life and death of his beloved father; quiet years in the country at
a distance from all excitements, a round of pious, useful works among
the poor, the care of a village school, and at length the death of the
righteous.
At the moment, and for some time to come, he had special duties
towards his mother; he wished, as far as might be, to supply to her the
place of him she had lost. She had great trials before her still; if it
was a grief to himself to leave Hartley, what would it be to her? Not
many months would pass before she would have to quit a place ever dear,
and now sacred in her thoughts; there was in store for her the anguish
of dismantling the home of many years, and the toil and whirl of
packing; a wearied head and an aching heart at a time when she would
have most need of self-possession and energy.
Such were the thoughts which came upon him again and again in those
sorrowful weeks. A leaf had been turned over in his life; he could not
be what he had been. People come to man's estate at very different
ages. Youngest sons in a family, like monks in a convent, may remain
children till they have reached middle age; but the elder, should their
father die prematurely, are suddenly ripened into manhood, when they
are almost boys. Charles had left Oxford a clever unformed youth; he
returned a man.