Once Griff looked about him and called out for our
father, then recollecting, muttered, ‘No—the
birthright gone—no blessing.’
It grieved us much, it grieves me now, that this was
his last distinct utterance. He looked
as if the comforting replies and the appeals to the
Source of all redemption did awaken a response, but
he never spoke articulately again; and only thirty-six
hours after my mother’s arrival, all was over.
Poor Selina went into passions of hysterics and transports
of grief, needing all the firmness of so resolute
a woman as my mother to deal with her. She
was wild in self-accusation, and became so ill that
the care of her was a not unwholesome occupation
for my mother, who was one of those with whom sorrow
has little immediate outlet, and is therefore the
more enduring.
She would not bring our brother’s coffin home,
thinking the agitation would be hurtful to my father,
and anxious to get back to him as soon as possible.
So Griff was buried at Baden, and from time to time
some of us have visited his grave. Of course
she proposed Selina’s return to Chantry House
with her; but Mr. Clarkson, the brother, had come
out to the funeral, and took his sister home with
him, certainly much to our relief, though all the
sad party at Baden had drawn much nearer together in
these latter days.
’It then draws near the season
Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.’
Hamlet.
We had really lost our Griffith long before—our
bright, generous, warm-hearted, promising Griff,
the brilliance of our home; but his actual death
made the first breach in a hitherto unbroken family,
and was a new and strange shock. It made my
father absolutely an old man; and it also changed
Martyn. His first contact with responsibility,
suffering, and death had demolished the light-hearted
boyishness which had lasted in the youngest of the
family through all his high aspirations. Till
his return to Oxford, his chief solace was in getting
some one of us alone, going through all the scenes
at Baden, discussing his new impressions of the trials
and perplexities of life, and seeking out passages
in the books that were becoming our oracles.
What he had admired externally before, he was grasping
from within; nor can I describe what the Lyra Apostolica,
and the two first volumes of Parochial Sermons preached
at Littlemore, became to us.
Mr. Clarkson had been rather dry with my brothers
at Baden, evidently considering that poor Griffith
had been as fatal to his sister as we thought Selina
had been to our brother. It was hardly just,
for there had been much more to spoil in him than in
her; and though she would hardly have trod a much
higher path, there is no saying what he might have
been but for her.
Griffith had said nothing about providing for her,
not having forgiven her till he was past recollecting
the need, but her brother had intimated that something
was due from the family, and Clarence had assented—not,
indeed, as to her deserts, poor woman, but her claims
and her needs—well knowing that my father
would never suffer Griff’s widow to be in want.
