It was hard on Christopher--cruelly hard; yet he had no alternative but to accept the position which Elisabeth, in the blindness of her heart, assigned to him. Sometimes he felt the burden of his lot was almost more than he could bear; not because of its heaviness, as he was a brave man and a patient one, but because of the utter absence of any joy in his life. Men and women can endure much sorrow if they have much joy as well; it is when sorrow comes and there is no love to lighten it, that the Hand of God lies heavy upon them; and It lay heavy upon Christopher's soul just then. Sometimes, when he felt weary unto death of the dreary routine of work and the still drearier routine of his uncle's sick-room, he recalled with a bitter smile how Elisabeth used to say that the gloom and smoke of the furnaces was really a pillar of cloud to show how God was watching over the people at the Osierfield as He watched over them in the wilderness. Because she had forgotten to be gracious to him, he concluded that God had forgotten to be gracious to him also--a not uncommon error of human wisdom; but though his heart was wounded and his days darkened by her injustice toward him, he never blamed her, even in his inmost thoughts. He was absolutely loyal to Elisabeth.
One grim consolation he had--and that was the conviction that he had not won, and never could have won, Elisabeth's love; and that, therefore, poverty or riches were matters of no moment to him. Had he felt that temporal circumstances were the only bar between him and happiness, his position as her paid manager would have been unendurable; but now she had taught him that it was he himself, and not any difference in their respective social positions, which really stood between herself and him; and, that being so, nothing else had any power to hurt him. Wealth, unshared by Elisabeth, would have been no better than want, he said to himself; success, uncrowned by her, would have been equivalent to failure. When Christopher was in Australia he succeeded in tracing George Farringdon as far as Broken Hill, and there he found poor George's grave. He learned that George had left a widow and one son, who had left the place immediately after George's death; but no one could give him any further information as to what had subsequently become of these two. And he was obliged at last to abandon the search and return to England, without discovering what had happened to the widow and child.