When we speak of Nature, we figure her as one thing, with a fixed
purpose and office in the universal economy; but she is an immense
number of things, and her functions are inexpressibly varied. She
includes decay as well as growth; she compasses death as well as birth.
We call certain phenomena unnatural; but in a natural world how can
anything be unnatural, except the supernatural? These facts gave Ewbert
pause in view of the obstinate behavior of Ransom Hilbrook in dying for
no obvious reason, and kept him from pronouncing it unnatural. The old
man, he reflected, had really less reason to live than to die, if it
came to reasons; for everything that had made the world home to him had
gone out of it, and left him in exile here. The motives had ceased; the
interests had perished; the strong personality that had persisted was
solitary amid the familiar environment grown alien.
The wonder was that he should ever have been roused from his apathetic
unfaith to inquiry concerning the world beyond this, and to a certain
degree of belief in possibilities long abandoned by his imagination.
Ewbert had assisted at the miracle of this resuscitation upon terms
which, until he was himself much older, he could not question as to
their beneficence, and in fact it never came to his being quite frank
with himself concerning them. He kept his thoughts on this point in that
state of solution which holds so many conjectures from precipitation in
actual conviction.
But his wife had no misgivings. Her dread was that in his devotion to
that miserable old man (as she called him, not always in compassion) he
should again contribute to Hilbrook's vitality at the expense, if not
the danger, of his own. She of course expressed her joy that Ewbert had
at last prevailed upon him to eat something, when the entreaty of his
nurse and the authority of his doctor availed nothing; and of course she
felt the pathos of his doing it out of affection for Ewbert, and merely
to please him, as Hilbrook declared. It did not surprise her that any
one should do anything for the love of Ewbert, but it is doubtful if she
fully recognized the beauty of this last efflorescence of the aged life;
and she perceived it her duty not to sympathize entirely with Ewbert's
morbid regret that it came too late. She was much more resigned than he
to the will of Providence, and she urged a like submissiveness upon him.
"Don't talk so!" he burst out. "It's horrible!" It was in the first
hours after Ewbert's return from Hilbrook's death-bed, and his spent
nerves gave way in a gush of tears.
"I see what you mean," she said, after a pause in which he controlled
his sobs. "And I suppose," she added, with a touch of bitterness, "that
you blame _me_ for taking you away from him here when he was coming
every night and sapping your very life. You were very glad to have me do
it at the time! And what use would there have been in your killing
yourself, anyway? It wasn't as if he were a young man with a career of
usefulness before him, that might have been marred by his not believing
this or that. He had been a complete failure every way, and the end of
the world had come for him. What did it matter whether such a man
believed that there was another world or not?"
"Emily! Emily!" the minister cried out. "What are you saying?"
Mrs. Ewbert broke down in her turn. "I don't know _what_ I'm saying!"
she retorted from behind her handkerchief. "I'm trying to show you that
it's your duty to yourself--and to me--and to people who can know how to
profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you're
doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn't keep his hold on
the truth. I don't know what your Rixonitism is for if it won't let you
wait upon the divine will in such a thing, _too_. You're more
conscientious than the worst kind of Congregationalist. And now for you
to blame me"--
"Emily, I don't blame _you_," said her husband. "I blame myself."
"And you see that that's the same thing! You ought to thank me for
saving your life; for it was just as if you were pouring your heart's
blood into him, and I could see you getting more anæmic every day. Even
now you're not half as well as when you got home! And yet I do believe
that if you could bring old Hilbrook back into a world that he was sick
and tired of, you'd give your own life to do it."