_RODERICK_.
When Mary reached home she found her brother already in bed, where he
lay tossing uneasily in search of the rest and slumber which he could
not attain.
His cheeks were flushed with incipient fever, and the tangled hair
hung about his face in matted locks. His eyes were closed, and his
lips moved in inaudible mutterings, as he turned restlessly from one
side to the other. He complained of an acute pain in his side which
caught his breath, and a dull aching that smouldered like fire in his
bones and joints, which he fancied he could count by their separate
twingings.
The sight of his sister seemed to do him good, and when he felt the
coolness of her hand on his brow, he closed his eyes and fell into a
kind of slumber; but the sleep was not of very long duration, and it
was restless and disturbed. The nightmares of the night before fell on
him again; groaning and muttering he tossed to and fro, and presently
awoke.
The surgeon arrived in due course, and shook his head gravely, while
he enjoined the greatest care, as pleurisy or rheumatic fever, or
both, appeared to be impending. Roderick lay and muttered, righting
with the dismal visions that floated like mists about his brain, and
struggling to keep hold of the reality.
In that, however, he found little solace, it seemed more dismal than
aught a fevered fancy could conjure up to distress him. Visions of
Cain driven forth from home and kindred, to wander over the face of
the earth an outcast and a stranger; Abram sent forth to find him a
new home in a strange and unknown country, turning his back on all
that he had ever known or loved; Job with his children all slain in a
single hour; those who had cast away a right hand or plucked out a
right eye for the sake of the kingdom of righteousness; all the
forlorn and desolate and bereaved he had ever heard or dreamed of,
passed in melancholy procession before him, and hailed him as their
fellow. He looked upon the stricken train, and questioning each as to
the nature of his sorrow; it seemed to him that in their misery, they
all had justice or hope or consolation. But his? It stood alone among
them all, unmerited, unreasonable, without purpose and without pity.
There was nothing he had held too dear to part with, nothing he had
kept back, when he laid down all to follow his Church into the
wilderness. Then why had this new grief come upon him? and what good
end was to be served by enacting anew in his case the parable of the
prophet Nathan, and robbing him of the one ewe lamb he cherished in
his bosom? Since his boyhood, the whole pure love of his heart had
been given to Sophia. Her image had filled a shrine in his inmost
thoughts, and he had clothed it in all he knew of pure and holy, and
held it for a symbol of unseen good. He had waited till in all
reasonableness and truth he could win her for his wife, and she and
her parents, in some unspoken measure at least, had consented to his
resolve.
Now, all of a sudden he hears from the lips of her own mother, wrung
from them, as it were unawares, under the dread pre-occupation of
impending danger, that another man's suit is entertained or courted,
and so utterly trivial are any pretensions of his held to be, that
their very existence is overlooked, and himself made the confidant of
the mother's views. Oh, how can he resign himself? How pluck away the
image around which all his hopes and dreams, the very roots and
tendrils of his being have entwined themselves for so many years?
Pluck out an eye? It were to pluck out his very heart, and cast it
from him--to cease to think--to cease to live. Yet if she were to
become another man's wife he would have to do it. He groaned. The
universe seemed falling in on him, his head swam, and he fell into a
dose.
When he next awoke the emotional strain was somewhat relaxed. His
thoughts would run in no other channel, but he began now to muse, and
plan, and question. Was it indeed decided? Or was it as yet but a plan
of the mother? Had Sophia consented? And even if she had, was it of
her own free will, and with the concurrence of her affections? Or was
it a mere compliance with the wishes of her parents, while she had no
sufficient reason to admit a preference elsewhere? For the
unmaidenliness, as he would have called it, of loving unsought, was
not to be dreamed of in the case of Sophia.
'Ah!' he cried aloud, 'Who knows? I have never spoken, or----' the
rest would not frame itself in words, but a vision arose before his
mind's eye, or rather many visions, remembrances of all the sweetest
and most endearing looks, or what he regarded as such, that she had
ever given him; and as he thought, his poor chilled soul grew warmer
and more at ease, and the throbbing in his head grew easier.
'The venture is worth making,' he said presently. And thereupon he
rose from bed and sat down before his desk, which, as already
mentioned, was in another part of the same room.
Mary was not present at the moment, so there was no one to offer
opposition. He drew to him some paper and prepared to write. His
mind had been seething with emotion, but as he took the pen in his
hand, the thoughts grew hazy, and refused to shape themselves in
words,---they refused to be written down. Fluttering and whirling
before him like the disordered gleams in a moving prism, they would
not be caught, and yet kept tantalizing him by settling upon his pen,
till he tried to write them, when they would dissipate again in a new
and perturbed whirl of tempestuous feeling. He clasped his hands upon
his aching brow, but it ached worse than ever, and he sat stupified in
blank despair.
Words came after a while, and by and by he began to write, but the
writing when it was done had to be torn up, and the work begun again
anew. Sheet after sheet was written and destroyed, and the scattered
flakes gathered like snowdrifts about his chair. He wearied himself in
abortive efforts, but at least he deadened the acuteness of his
misery. The fantastic pains and throes of composition were an anodyne
to the more real agonies of his mind. By dividing its action in the
endeavour to express its workings, he reduced their intensity. As he
grew weary, therefore, he began to grow calmer, and was able with some
sort of coherence to say the thing he meant. It was no great
achievement in the way of a love-letter, but under the circumstances a
great achievement was impossible. He was too much under the direct
influence of his emotion,--whatever of mental force he had was
expended in the suffering, the jealousy, the hopelessness and the
longing, and but a fraction could be abstracted to express his
meaning.
An emotion when it can be expressed is in a manner relegated from the
present to the past,--from experience to memory; and we may be sure
that the poets were pretty well cured of their woes, before they made
the world resound with their harrowing despairs and their plaintive
wailings. Goethe tells us he got quit of much perilous stuff in
writing Werther, but one can scarcely doubt that he was convalescent
before he undertook the task. Art is always fiction, though fiction is
so seldom art, and its nearest approach to actual veracity is when the
artist brings forth the ashes of bygone emotion from the sepulchre of
memory, and galvanizes them into a second life before his attentive
world.
Such utterance as Roderick had been able to achieve had done him good.
The beads of moisture stood on his brow, as he folded and addressed
his letter; he directed that it should be given into Sophia's own
hands, and then returning to his bed, he closed his eyes with a long
sigh of relief, and fell into a peaceful sleep.
The letter was as follows:--
'My dear Sophia,
'For this once I must so address you, even if it be permitted me to do
so never again. I am sick in bed, in consequence of yesterday's
misadventure, so unable to come to you myself and speak, and it has
come to my knowledge that an offer of marriage is already, or will
shortly be made to you, therefore I write.
'I owe it to myself, that you should know before you have given an
answer, that I too desire you to look on me as your suitor.
'I had meant to wait till after my ordination, but I cannot run the
risk of letting another man speak while I remain silent.
'Oh, Sophia, I seem to have loved you ever since I saw you first--as
far back as I can recollect--since we were both children; and the love
has grown with the years till I believe I could not live if I saw you
married to another. That other may be rich, while I am not; but think,
Sophia,--he never saw you till the other day--and what can his love be
to mine, that has been growing and deepening through so many years?
'Think of it, dearest. Have we not played together as children? sung
together as boy and girl? Have we not taken sweet counsel together as
christian man and woman? and shall we not walk through life as wife
and husband?
'Think of it all, Sophia, and choose with the best wisdom you can
command.
'My life will be a lonely journey, if it is not to be shared by you,
for you have been to me the symbol of all that is good and holy; but
if you find it is not I who can make you happy, at least my prayer
shall ever be for a blessing on whatever choice you make.
'Yours utterly,'
'(Signed) RODERICK BROWN.'