Rachel's Story

Chapter 2

I thank everyone who is reading this story now for taking the time and giving Rachel a chance. My style of writing is pretty different from what is usually seen on Wattpad, since it contains more descriptive prose than dialogues, and it might seem to be somewhat slow in pace at the moment...but I entreat all of you to keep reading. You just might like what emerges from this tale! :)

CHAPTER 2

A week after her birthday, Rachel returned from her early-morning walk as usual to remind her father about breakfast, only to find him slumped over his Utopia in an unnatural posture and eerily motionless. Rushing over to him, she shook his shoulders – first gently, and then frantically. “Papa…Papa! What has happened? Oh, please wake up, for heavens’ sake!”

Repeated entreaties and ministrations resulted in no response. Panic-stricken, she sent up the alarm and a white-faced Neil was sent flying to the doctor; but all to no avail. The kindly man, who had been at the births and sicknesses of all the Parsonage children and was an intimate friend of Mr. Warren himself, had the unsavory task of informing the distraught family that it was already too late, and the old gentleman was with them no more. Unknown to any of them, the parson was suffering from a weak heart; and that morning, his heart had given up the fight quietly.

The chaos which this news plunged their family was heart-rending. The faces of the two boys seemed to lose their entire glow and they suddenly seemed to grow up, albeit in a very bewildered way, fumbling to know what went wrong with their world all of a sudden. Their mother, Mrs. Warren, stared uncomprehending at the walls of her room for hours on hearing the news and when she finally came out, she seemed to have lost most of her assertiveness and spoke in hushed and uncertain whispers. The married daughters rushed up to their childhood home with their husbands as soon as possible upon receiving the news and wept unashamedly in each others’ arms, while their husbands awkwardly tried to take care of official affairs inseparable from the death of the man of the family.

All this while, Rachel Warren went about her duties with mechanical preciseness. After the first bouts of disbelief and horrified sorrow had passed, she set about to give her adored father a decent farewell. She calmed the maid Cassie’s hysteria perfunctorily, sent her brothers to a neighbor’s place to be with children their own age, made hot tea and served her weeping sisters and mother, arranged her father’s room to receive his body and looked through his scattered papers with her brothers-in-law. Her body kept on working while her mind just kept up one refrain,

“Your father is gone - gone for ever. Nothing will ever be the same again. Never again.”

                                                             Xxxxx

The fortnight after Mr. Warren’s death passed away in a whirl of condolences, documents and numb sorrow. No one had fully comprehended the extent to which the gentle Parson impacted the society around him. Vague though he might have been in matters of his own welfare, he never forgot a person in need who depended upon him. His curate, a pale lad of some twenty three years, was almost weeping while speaking at his funeral – and the event itself was attended by the entire village. Even the ancient grand-uncle of the grocer managed to hobble up three miles from his tumbledown cottage to pay his last respects to the man who had unfailingly visited him for the past twenty years.

The more sordid changes initiated by his death intruded once his funeral was over and the grieving party returned to the Parsonage. The widow and her unmarried children now had no place to live, and a very meager income left. The next parson would be coming within a month to take up lodgings, and the Warren family had to find alternative accomodation as soon as possible.