AN “INTERLUNAR CAVE.”
And so the moon died out of Cosmo’s heaven. But it was only the
moon. The sun remained to him--his father--visible type of the
great sun, whose light is too keen for souls, and heart and spirit
only can bear. But when he had received Joan’s last smile, when she
turned away her face, and the Ungenial, who had spoiled everything
at Glenwarlock, carried her away, then indeed for a moment a great
cloud came over the light of his life, and he sought where to hide
his tears. It was a sickening time, for suddenly she had come,
suddenly entered his heart, and suddenly departed. But such things
are but clouds, and cannot but pass. Ah, reader! it may be your
cloud has not yet passed, and you scorn to hear it called one,
priding yourself that your trouble is eternal. But just because you
are eternal, your trouble cannot be. You may cling to it, and brood
over it, but you cannot keep it from either blossoming into a
bliss, or crumbling to dust. Be such while it lasts, that, when it
passes, it shall leave you loving more, not less.
There was this difference between Cosmo and most young men of clay
finer than ordinary, that, after the first few moments of the
seemingly unendurable, he did not wander about moody, nursing his
sorrow, and making everybody uncomfortable because he was
uncomfortable; but sought the more the company of his father, and
of Mr. Simon, from whom he had been much separated while Lady Joan
was with them. For such a visit was an opportunity most precious in
the eyes of the laird. With the sacred instinct of a father he
divined what the society of a lady would do for his boy--for the
ripening of his bloom, and the strengthening of his volition. Two
days had not passed before he began to be aware of a softening and
clearing of his speech; of greater readiness and directness in his
replies; of an indescribable sweetening of the address, that had
been sweet, with a rose-shadow of gentle apology cast over every
approach; of a deepening of the atmosphere of his reverence, which
yet as it deepened grew more diaphanous. And when now the episode
of angelic visitation was over, with his usual wisdom he understood
the wrench her abrupt departure must have given his whole being,
and allowed him plenty of time to recover himself from it. Once he
came upon him weeping: not with faintest overshadowing did he
rebuke him, not with farthest hint suggest weakness in his tears.
He went up to him, laid his hand gently on his head, stood thus a
moment, then turned without a word, and left him. Nowise because of
his sorrow did he regret the freedom he had granted their
intercourse. He knew what the sharp things of life are to the human
plant; that its frosts are as needful as its sunshine, its great
passion-winds as its gentle rains; that a divine result is
required, and that his son was being made divinely human; that in
aid of this end the hand of man must humbly follow the great lines
of Nature, ready to withhold itself, anxious not to interfere. Most
people resist the marvellous process; call in the aid of worldly
wisdom for low ends; and bring the experience of their own failures
to bear for the production of worse. But there is no escaping the
mill that grinds slowly and grinds small; and those who refuse to
be living stones in the living temple, must be ground into mortar
for it.
The next day, of his own choice, Cosmo went to Mr. Simon. He also
knew how to treat the growing plant. He set him such work as should
in a measure harmonize with his late experience, and so drew him
gently from his past: mere labour would have but driven him deeper
into it. Yesterday is as much our past as the bygone century, and
sheltering in it from an uncongenial present, we are lost to our
morrow. Thus things slid gently back with him into their old
grooves. An era of blessedness had vanished, but was not lost; it
was added to his life, gathered up into his being; it was dissolved
into his consciousness, and interpenetrated his activity. Where
there is no ground of regret, or shame, or self-reproach, new joy
casts not out the old; and now that the new joy was old, the older
joys came softly trooping back to their attendance. Nor was this
all. The departing woman left behind her a gift that had never been
hers--the power of verse: he began to be a poet. The older I grow
the more am I filled with marvel at the divine idea of the mutual
development of the man and the woman. Many a woman has made of a
man, for the time at least, and sometimes for ever, a poet, caring
for his verses never a cambric handkerchief or pair of gloves! A
wretched man to whom a poem is not worth a sneer, may set a woman
singing to the centuries!
Any gift of the nature of poetry, however poor or small, is of
value inestimable to the development of the individual, ludicrous
even though it may show itself, should conceit clothe it in print.
The desire of fame, so vaunted, is the ruin of the small, sometimes
of the great poet. The next evil to doing anything for love of
money, is doing it for the love of fame. A man may have a wife who
is all the world to him, but must he therefore set her on a throne?
Cosmo, essentially and peculiarly practical, never thought of the
world and his verses together, but gathered life for himself in the
making of them.
These children of his, like all real children, strengthened his
heart, and upheld his hands. In them Truth took to him shape; in
them she submitted herself to his contemplation. He grew faster,
and from the days of his mourning emerged more of a man, and abler
to look the world in the face.
From that time also he learned and understood more rapidly, though
he never came to show any great superiority in the faculties most
prized of this world, whose judgment differs from that of God’s
kingdom in regard to the comparative value of intellectual gifts
almost as much as it does in regard to the relative value of the
moral and the intellectual. Not the less desirable however did it
seem in the eyes of both his father and his tutor, that, if it
could anyhow be managed, he should go the next winter to college.
As to how it could be managed, the laird took much serious thought,
but saw no glimmer of light in the darkness of apparent
impossibility. An unsuspected oracle was however at hand.
Old servants of the true sort, have, I fancy, a kind of family
instinct. From the air about them almost, from the personal
carriage, from words dropped that were never meant for them, from
the thoughtful, troubled, or eager look, and the sought or avoided
conference, they get possessed by a notion both of how the wind is
blowing, and of how the ship wants to sail. But Grizzie was capable
of reasoning from what she saw. She marked the increase of care on
the brow of her master; noted that it was always greater after he
and Mr. Simon had had a talk at which Cosmo, the beloved of both,
was not present; and concluded that their talk, and the laird’s
trouble, must be about Cosmo. She noted also that both were as much
pleased with him as ever, and concluded therefore it was his
prospects and not his behaviour that caused the uneasiness. Then
again she noted how fervently at prayers her master entreated
guidance to do neither more nor less than the right thing; and from
all put together, and considered in the light of a tolerably
accurate idea of the laird’s circumstances, Grizzie was able not
only to arrive at a final conclusion, but to come to the resolution
of offering--not advice--that she would never have presumed
upon--but a suggestion.