“Nobody knows,” she said, shaking her head; “but there is no reason why that should be bad news, Gervase. Papa says he quite understands it; he thinks Mr Burton will come back--after a while. He thinks he wants to put a little interval between him and all these events. He says he quite understands his feelings. Gervase----”
“Yes, dear. I can’t feel anything, I can’t say anything. I am half paralysed, and half mad. Think how things were when I went away: and to come back and find everything gone--disappeared as if it had never been: the dreadful empty mockery of a house which they say is mine, and my father, and all that he cared for, gone, gone like a dream. Sometimes I think I will go crazy,--everything seems to be whirling and unsteady. I am giddy with pain and confusion and ignorance, and the blank all around.”
He held her hand, but loosely, languidly, in a feeble clasp. She grasped his tightly, closely, as if to bring him back to himself.
“All that he cared for is not gone. Let my father tell you. He knows the right thing to say. Oh, Gervase, because you are in great trouble, don’t turn all love and tenderness away!”
“Oh, Gervase, if you only knew how I have thought of you night and day! I think I should have gone to you had there been any certainty where you were. I should not have let anything stand in the way, when you were in trouble. Don’t turn from me now. Papa is coming back from the office to lunch, on the chance of your arrival. He wants to do everything that is kind. Don’t, don’t turn from us, Gervase, because you are in trouble, which is only a reason for clinging together. Is it not a reason for clinging together?” she cried, with tears in her eyes.
And poor Gervase felt that he ought to feel above every other sentiment the sweetness of this consolation, for which he had so thirsted and hungered in his long misery at sea; thinking that just like this his Madeline would speak and look. But now that she was there before him, in his arms, speaking like Love itself, looking with eyes full of the tenderest sympathy, he was no longer able to feel anything. He caressed her clinging hand, but his natural impulse would have been to relax his hold, to put it away; not that he loved her less, but that the confusion in his mind, the fevered condition of his whole being, was incapable of any natural or happy sentiment. The miserable change that had come over all his private concerns, the ruin of his family, his father’s disappearance, even that curious maddening contradiction, in the midst of all the ruin, of the unchanged house, which he was told was his, filled up his thoughts, his heart, his very veins, so that there was room in him for nothing else.