PAGE 4
Charming
by
“And what bad living you get!” said Kala.
“Yes,” replied mamma, “no such thing as an honest meat soup. It’s miserable trash, their cookery.”
And the travelling fatigued Kala: she was always fatigued, that was the worst of it. Sophy was taken into the house, where her presence was a real advantage.
Mamma-in-law acknowledged that Sophy understood both housewifery and art, though a knowledge of the latter could not be expected from a person of her limited means; and she was, moreover, an honest, faithful girl; she showed that thoroughly while Kala lay sick–fading away.
Where the case is everything, the case should be strong, or else all is over. And all was over with the case–Kala died.
“She was beautiful,” said mamma, “she was quite different from the antiques, for they are so damaged. A beauty ought to be perfect, and Kala was a perfect beauty.”
Alfred wept, and mamma wept, and both of them wore mourning. The black dress suited mamma very well, and she wore mourning the longest. Moreover, she had to experience another grief in seeing Alfred marry again–marry Sophy, who had no appearance at all.
“He’s gone to the very extreme,” cried mamma-in-law; “he has gone from the most beautiful to the ugliest, and he has forgotten his first wife. Men have no endurance. My husband was of a different stamp, and he died before me.”
“Pygmalion received his Galatea,” said Alfred: “yes, that’s what they said in the wedding song. I had once really fallen in love with the beautiful statue, which awoke to life in my arms; but the kindred soul which Heaven sends down to us, the angel who can feel and sympathise with and elevate us, I have not found and won till now. You came, Sophy, not in the glory of outward beauty, though you are fair, fairer than is needful. The chief thing remains the chief. You came to teach the sculptor that his work is but clay and dust, only an outward form in a fabric that passes away, and that we must seek the essence, the internal spirit. Poor Kala! ours was but wayfarers’ life. Yonder, where we shall know each other by sympathy, we shall be half strangers.”
“That was not lovingly spoken,” said Sophy, “not spoken like a Christian. Yonder, where there is no giving in marriage, but where, as you say, souls attract each other by sympathy; there where everything beautiful develops itself and is elevated, her soul may acquire such completeness that it may sound more harmoniously than mine; and you will then once more utter the first raptured exclamation of your love, Beautiful–most beautiful!”