She listened, and hearing the sounds frequently repeated, she entered the room, which, but for her candle, would have been quite dark, and there she found Lord Cadurcis kneeling and weeping by his mother’s bedside.  He seemed annoyed at being seen and disturbed, but his spirit was too broken to murmur.  ‘La! my lord,’ said Mistress Pauncefort, ’you must not take on so; you must not indeed.  I am sure this dark room is enough to put any one in low spirits.  Now do go downstairs, and sit with my lady and the Doctor, and try to be cheerful; that is a dear good young gentleman.  I wish Miss Venetia were here, and then she would amuse you.  But you must not take on, because there is no use in it.  You must exert yourself, for what is done cannot be undone; and, as the Doctor told us last Sunday, we must all die; and well for those who die with a good conscience; and I am sure the poor dear lady that is gone must have had a good conscience, because she had a good heart, and I never heard any one say the contrary.  Now do exert yourself, my dear lord, and try to be cheerful, do; for there is nothing like a little exertion in these cases, for God’s will must be done, and it is not for us to say yea or nay, and taking on is a murmuring against God’s providence.’  And so Mistress Pauncefort would have continued urging the usual topics of coarse and common-place consolation; but Cadurcis only answered with a sigh that came from the bottom of his heart, and said with streaming eyes, ’Ah!  Mrs. Pauncefort, God had only given me one friend in this world, and there she lies.’

CHAPTER XVIII.

The first conviction that there is death in the house is perhaps the most awful moment of youth.  When we are young, we think that not only ourselves, but that all about us, are immortal.  Until the arrow has struck a victim round our own hearth, death is merely an unmeaning word; until then, its casual mention has stamped no idea upon our brain.  There are few, even among those least susceptible of thought and emotion, in whose hearts and minds the first death in the family does not act as a powerful revelation of the mysteries of life, and of their own being; there are few who, after such a catastrophe, do not look upon the world and the world’s ways, at least for a time, with changed and tempered feelings.  It recalls the past; it makes us ponder over the future; and youth, gay and light-hearted youth, is taught, for the first time, to regret and to fear.

On Cadurcis, a child of pensive temperament, and in whose strange and yet undeveloped character there was, amid lighter elements, a constitutional principle of melancholy, the sudden decease of his mother produced a profound effect.  All was forgotten of his parent, except the intimate and natural tie, and her warm and genuine affection.  He was now alone in the world; for reflection impressed upon him at this moment what the course of existence too generally teaches to us