But yet the death and grief she remembered had never
presented themselves to her as they appear to other bereaved ones. Why
had nobody ever spoken to her of her mother in her childhood and
youth?--neither father, nor nurses, nor her old French governess? Why
had she no picture--no relics--no letters? In the box of "Sparling
Papers" there was nothing that related to Mrs. Sparling; that she knew,
for her father had abruptly told her so not long before his death. They
were old family records which he could not bear to destroy--the
honorable records of an upright race, which some day, he thought, "might
be a pleasure to her."
Often during the last six months of his life, it seemed to her now, in
this intensity of memory, that he had been on the point of breaking the
silence of a lifetime. She recalled moments and looks of agonized effort
and yearning. But he died of a growth in the throat; and for weeks
before the end speech was forbidden them, on account of the constant
danger of hemorrhage. So that Diana had always felt herself starved of
those last words and messages which make the treasure of bereaved love.
Often and often the cry of her loneliness to her dead father had been
the bitter cry of Andromache to Hector; "I had from thee, in dying, no
memorable word on which I might ever think in the year of mourning while
I wept for thee.
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