"It's curious we should have met Santoris so soon after my telling you
about him," he said--"It's one of those coincidences which one cannot
explain. You are very like him in some of your ideas--you two ought to
be very great friends."
"Ought we?"--and I smiled--"Perhaps we shall be! Again, Good-night!"
"Good-night!" And I left him to his meditations and went down to my
cabin, only stopping for a moment to say good-night to Catherine and
Dr. Brayle, who were playing bridge with Mr. Swinton and Captain
Derrick in the saloon. Once in my room, I was thankful to be alone.
Every extraneous thing seemed an intrusion or an impertinence,--the
thoughts that filled my brain were all absorbing, and went so far
beyond the immediate radius of time and space that I could hardly
follow their flight. I smiled as I imagined what ordinary people would
think of the experience through which I had passed and was passing.
'Foolish fancies!' 'Neurotic folly!' and other epithets of the kind
would be heaped upon me if they knew--they, the excellent folk whose
sole objects in life are so ephemeral as to be the things of the hour,
the day, or the month merely, and who if they ever pause to consider
eternal possibilities at all, do so reluctantly perhaps in church on
Sundays, comfortably dismissing them for the more solid prospect of
dinner. And of Love? What view of the divine passion do they take as a
rule? Let the millions of mistaken marriages answer! Let the savage
lusts and treacheries and cruelties of merely brutish and
unspiritualised humanity bear witness? And how few shall be found who
have even the beginnings of the nature of true love--'the love of soul
for soul, angel for angel, god for god!'--the love that accepts this
world and its events as one phase only of divine and immortal
existence--a phase of trial and proving in which the greater number
fail to pass even a first examination! As for myself, I felt and knew
that _I_ had failed hopelessly and utterly in the past--and I stood now
as it were on the edge of new circumstances--in fear, yet not without
hope, and praying that whatsoever should chance to me I might not fail
again!
X