第109章 The Happiest of Weeks (1)

He went in the strength of dependence To tread where his Master trod, To gather and knit together The Family of God.

With a conscience freed from burdens, And a heart set free from care, To minister to every one Always and everywhere.

Author of Chronicles of the Schonberg Cotta Family After this came a happy, uneventful week at the manor.Erica often thought of the definition of happiness which Charles Osmond had once given her "Perfect harmony with your surroundings." She had never been so happy in her life.Waif, who was slowly recovering, grew pathetically fond of his rescuer.The children were devoted to her, and she to them.She learned to love Gladys very much, and from her she learned a good deal which helped her to understand Donovan's past life.Then, too, it was the first time in her life that she had ever been in a house where there were little children, and probably Ralph and Dolly did more for her than countless sermons or whole libraries of theology could have done.

Above all, there was Donovan, and the friendship of such a man was a thing which made life a sort of wordless thanksgiving.At times even in those she loved best, even in her father or Charles Osmond, she was conscious of something which jarred a little, but so perfect was her sympathy with Donovan, so closely and strangely were their lives and characters linked together, that never once was the restfulness of perfect harmony broken Nature and circumstances had, as it were turned them to each other.He could understand, as no one else could understand, the reversal of thought and feeling which she had passed through during the last few months.

He could understand the perplexities of her present position, suddenly confronted with the world of wealth and fashion and conventional religion, and fresh from a circle where, whatever the errors held and promulgated, the life was so desperately earnest, often so nobly self-denying.He knew that Mr.Fane-Smith, good man as he was, must have been about the severest of trials to a new-born faith.He understood how Mr.Cuthbert's malice would tend to reawaken the harsh class judgment against which, as a Christian, Erica was bound to struggle.He could fully realize the irritated, ruffled state she was in she was overdone, and wanted perfect rest and quiet, perfect love and sympathy.He and his wife gave her all these, took her not only to their house, but right into their home, and how to do this no one knew so well as Donovan, perhaps because he had once been in much the same position himself.It was his most leisure month, the time he always devoted to home and wife and children, so that Erica saw a great deal of him.He seemed to her the ideal head of an ideal yet real home.It was one of those homes and thank God there are such! where belief in the Unseen reacts upon the life in the seen, making it so beautiful, so lovable, that, when you go out once more into the ordinary world you go with a widened heart, and the realization that the kingdom of Heaven of which Christ spoke does indeed begin upon earth.

It is strange, in tracing the growth of spontaneous love, to notice how independent it is of time.Love annihilates time with love, as with God, time is not.Like the miracles, it brings into use the aeonial measurement in which "one day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day." A week, even a few hours, may give us love and knowledge and mutual sympathy with one which the intercourse of many years fails to give with another.

The week at Oakdene was one which all her life long Erica looked back to with the loving remembrance which can gild and beautify the most sorrowful of lives.It is surely a mistake to think that the memory of past delights makes present pain sharper.If not, why do we all so universally strive to make the lives of children happy?

Is it not because we know that happiness in the present will give a sort of reflected happiness even in the saddest future? Is it not because we know how in life's bitterest moments, its most barren and desolate paths, we feel a warmth about our heart, a smile upon our lips, when we remember the old home days with their eager childish interests and hopes, their vividly recollected pleasures, their sheltered luxuriance of fatherly and motherly love? For how many thousands did the poet speak when he wrote "The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction."A benediction which outlives the cares and troubles of later life which we may carry with us to our dying day, and find perfected indeed in that Unseen, where "All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist, Not its semblance, but itself."There was only one bit of annoyance during the whole time; it was on the Sunday, the day before Erica was to go back to Greyshot.

Gladys was not very well and stayed at home, but Donovan and Erica went to church with the children, starting rather early that they might enjoy the lovely autumn morning, and also that they might put the weekly wreaths on two graves in the little church yard.

Donovan himself put the flowers upon the first, Ralph and Dolly talking softly together about "little Auntie Dot," then running off hand in hand to make the "captain's glave plitty," as Dolly expressed it.Erica, following them, glanced at the plain white headstone and read the name: "John Frewin, sometimes captain of the 'Metora.'"Then they went together into the little country church, and all at once a shadow fell on her heart; for, as they entered at the west end, the clergy and the choristers entered the chancel, and she saw that Mr.Cuthbert was to take the service.The rector was taking his holiday, and had enlisted help from Greyshot.

Happily no man has it in his power to mar the Church of England service, but by and by came the sermon.Now Mr.Cuthbert cordially detested Donovan; he made no secret of it.He opposed and thwarted him on every possible occasion, and it is to be feared that personal malice had something to do with his choice of a subject for that morning's sermon.