Now, my brother, how ought you to treat her? Unless you are an ingrate
infinite you will treat her well. You will treat her better than any
one in the universe except your God. Her name will have in it more
music than in all that Chopin, or Bach, or Rheinberger composed. Her
eyes, swollen with three weeks of night watching over a child with
scarlet fever, will be to you beautiful as a May morning. After the
last rose petal has dropped out of her cheek, after the last feather
of the raven's wing has fallen from her hair, after across her
forehead, and under her eyes, and across her face there are as many
wrinkles as there are graves over which she has wept, you will be able
truthfully to say, in the words of Solomon's song: "Behold, thou art
fair, my love! Behold, thou art fair!" And perhaps she may respond
appropriately in the words that no one but the matchless Robert Burns
could ever have found pen or ink, or heart or brain to write:
"John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a canty day, John,
We've had wi' ane anither.
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we'll go;
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo."
If any one assail her good name, you will have hard work to control
your temper, and if you should strike him down the sin will not be
unpardonable. By as complete a surrender as the universe ever
saw--except that of the Son of God for your salvation and mine--she
has a first mortgage on your body, mind and soul, and the mortgage is
foreclosed; and you do not more thoroughly own your two eyes or your
two hands than she owns you. The longer the journey Rebekah makes and
the greater the risks of her expedition on the back of the camels, the
more thoroughly is Isaac bound to be kind, and indulgent, and worthy.