Part 30 (1/2)
If anything can determine the pa.s.sion of love in a woman, it is the great flood of sympathy that overflows her heart when the man she loves is hurt, or overcome in a great cause. When, for a little moment, that which she thinks strongest and bravest and most manly is struck down and wounded and brought low, her love rises up and is strong within her, and makes her more n.o.ble in the devotion of perfect gentleness than a man can ever be.
”Oh, if only he could have won!” Joe said again and again to herself. ”If only he could have won, I would have given anything!”
Sybil came back in a few moments, and saw Joe lying down, still white and apparently far from well. She knelt upon the floor by her side and taking her hands, looked affectionately into her face.
”There is something the matter,” she said. ”I know--you cannot deceive me--there is something serious the matter. Will you tell me, Joe? Can I do anything at all to help you?” Joe smiled faintly, grateful for the sympathy and for the gentle words of her friend.
”No, Sybil dear. It is nothing--there is nothing you can do. Thanks, dearest--I shall be very well in a little while. It is nothing, really. Is the carriage there?”
A few minutes later, Joe and Ronald were again at Miss Schenectady's house. Joe recovered her self-control on the way, and asked Ronald to come in, an invitation which he cheerfully accepted.
John Harrington had spent the day in a state of anxiety which was new to him. Enthusiastic by nature, he was calm by habit, and he was surprised to find his hand unsteady and his brain not capable of the intense application he could usually command. Ten minutes after the results of the election were known at the State House, he received a note from a friend informing him with expressions of hearty sympathy how the day had gone.
The strong physical sense of pain which accompanies all great disappointments, took hold of him, and he fell back in his seat and closed his eyes, his teeth set and his face pale with the suffering, while his broad hands convulsively grasped the heavy oaken arms of his chair.
It may be that this same bodily agony, which is of itself but the gross reflection in our material selves of what the soul is bearing, is a wholesome provision that draws our finer senses away from looking at what might blind them altogether. There are times when a man would go mad if his mind were not detached from its sorrow by the quick, sharp beating of his bodily heart, and by the keen torture of the physical body, that is like the thrusting of a red-hot knife between breastbone and midriff.
The expression ”self-control” is daily in the blatant mouths of preachers and moralists, the very cant of emptiness and folly. It means nothing, nor can any play of words or cunning twisting of conception ever give it meaning. For the ”self” is the divine, imperishable portion of the eternal G.o.d which is in man. I may control my limbs and the strength that is in them, and I may force under the appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions of this mortal body, but I cannot myself, for it is myself that controls, being of nature G.o.dlike and stronger than all which is material. And although, for an infinitely brief s.p.a.ce of time, I myself may inhabit and give life to this handful of most changeable atoms, I have it in my supreme power and choice to make them act according to my pleasure. If I become enamored of the body and its ways, and of the subtleties of a fleeting bodily intelligence, I have forgotten to control those things; and having forgotten that I have free will given me from heaven to rule what is mine, I am no longer a man, but a beast. But while I, who am an immortal soul, command the perishable engine in which I dwell, I am in truth a man. For the soul is of G.o.d and forever, whereas the body is a thing of to-day that vanishes into dust to-morrow; but the two together are the living man. And thus it is that G.o.d is made man in us every day.
All that which we know by our senses is but an illusion. What is true of its own nature, we can neither see, nor hear, nor feel, nor taste. It is a matter of time, and nothing more, and whatever palpable thing a man can name will inevitably be dissolved into its const.i.tuent parts, that these may again agglomerate into a new illusion for future ages. But that which is subject to no change, nor disintegration, nor reconstruction, is the immortal truth, to attain to a knowledge and understanding of which is to be saved from the endless s.h.i.+fting of the material and illusory universe.
John Harrington lay in his chair alone in his rooms, while the snow whirled against the windows outside and made little drifts on the sills.
The fire had gone out and the bitter storm beat against the cas.e.m.e.nts and howled in the chimney, and the dusk of the night began to mingle with the thick white flakes, and brought upon the solitary man a great gloom and horror of loneliness. It seemed to him that his life was done, and his strength gone from him. He had labored in vain for years, for this end, and he had failed to attain it. It were better to have died than to suffer the ignominy of this defeat. It were better never to have lived at all than to have lived so utterly in vain. One by one the struggles of the past came up to him; each had seemed a triumph when he was in the glory of strength and hope. The splendid aims of a higher and n.o.bler government, built by sheer truth and n.o.bility of purpose upon the ashes and dust of present corruption, the magnificent purity of the ideal State of which he had loved to dream--all that he had thought of and striven after as most worthy of a true man to follow, dwindled now away into a hollow and mocking image, more false than hollowness itself, poorer and of less substance than a juggler's show.
He clasped his hands over his forehead, and tried to think, but it was of no use. Everything was vague, broken, crushed, and shapeless. Faces seemed to rise to his disturbed sight, and he wondered whether he had ever known these people; a ghastly weariness as of death was upon him, and his arms fell heavily by his sides. He groaned aloud, and if in that bitter sigh he could have breathed away his existence he would have gladly done it.
Some one entered the room, struck a match, and lit the gas. It was his servant, or rather the joint servant of two or three of the bachelors who lived in the house, a huge, smooth-faced colored man.
”Oh, excuthe _me_, Mister Harrington, I thought you wath out, Thir.
There's two o' them notes for you.”
John roused himself, and took the letters without a word. They were both addressed in feminine handwriting. The one he knew, for it was from Mrs.
Wyndham. The other he did not recognize. He opened Mrs. Wyndham's first.
”DEAR MR. HARRINGTON,--Sam and I are very much put out about it, and sympathize most cordially. We think you might like to come and dine this evening, if you have no other invitation, so I write to say we will be all alone and very glad to see you. Cordially yours,
”JANE WYNDHAM.”
”P.S. Don't trouble about the answer.”
John read the note through and laid it on the table. Then he turned the other missive over in his fingers, and finally tore open the envelope.
It ran as follows:--
”MY DEAR MR. HARRINGTON,--Please don't be surprised at my writing to you in this way. I was at Mrs. Wyndham's this afternoon and heard all about it, and I must write to tell you that I am very, _very_ sorry. It is too horrible to think how bad and wicked and foolish people are, and how they invariably do the wrong thing. I cannot tell you how sorry we all are, because it is just such men as you who are most needed nowadays, though of course I know nothing about politics here. But I am quite sure that all of them _will live to regret it_, and that you will win in the end. Don't think it foolish of me to write, because I'm so angry that I can't in the least help it, and I think everybody ought to.
”Yours in sincerity,”