NEW EXPERIENCE.
Soon Cosmo began to recover more rapidly--as well he might, he told
Joan, with such a heavenly servant to wait on him! The very next
day he was up almost the whole of it. But that very day was Joan
less with him than hitherto, and therefrom came not so often and
stayed a shorter time. She would bring him books and leave them,
saying he did not require a nurse any more now that he was able to
feed himself. And Cosmo, to his trouble, could not help thinking
sometimes that her manner towards him was also a little changed.
What could have come between them he asked himself twenty times a
day. Had he hurt her anyhow? Had he unconsciously put on the
schoolmaster with her? Had he presumed on her kindness? With such
questions he plagued himself, but found to them no answer. At times
he could even have imagined her a little cross with him, but that
never lasted. Yet still when they met, Joan seemed farther off than
when they parted the day before. It is true they almost always
seemed to get back to nearly the same place before they parted
again, and Cosmo tried to persuade himself that any change there
might be was only the result of growing familiarity; but not the
less did he find himself ever again mourning over something that
was gone--a delicate colour on the verge of the meeting sky and sea
of their two natures.
But how differently the hours went when she was with him, and when
he lay thinking whether she was coming! His heart swelled like a
rose-bud ready to burst into a flaming flower when she drew near,
and folded itself together when she went, as if to save up all its
perfume and strength for her return! Everything he read that
pleased him, must be shared with Joan--must serve as an atmosphere
of thought in which to draw nigh to each other. Everything
beautiful he saw twice--with his own eyes namely, and as he
imagined it in the eyes of Joan: he was always trying to see things
as he thought she would see them. Not once while recovering did he
care to read a thing he thought she would not enjoy--though
everything he liked, he said to himself, she must enjoy some day.
Soon he made a discovery concerning himself that troubled him
greatly: not once since he was ill had he buried himself in the
story of Jesus! not once had he lost himself in prayer! not once
since finding Joan had he been flooded with a glory as from the
presence of the living One, or had any such vision of truth as used
every now and then to fill him like the wine of the new world which
is the old! Lady Joan saw that he was sad, and questioned him. But
even to her he could not open his mind on such a matter: near as
they were, they had not yet got near enough to each other for that.
In the history, which is the growth, of the individual man, epochs
of truth and moods of being follow in succession, the one for the
moment displacing the other, until the mind shall at length have
gained power to blend the new at once with the preceding whole. But
this can never be until our idea of the Absolute Life is large
enough and intense enough to fill and fit into every necessity of
our nature. A new mood is as a dry well for the water of life to
fill. The man who does not yet understand God as the very power of
his conscious as well as unconscious being, as more in him than
intensest consciousness of bliss or of pain, must have many a
treeless expanse, many a mirage-haunted desert, many an empty
cistern and dried up river, in the world of his being! There was
not much of this kind of waste in Cosmo’s world, but God was not
yet inside his growing love to Joan--that is, consciously to
him--and his spirit was therefore of necessity troubled. Was it not
a dreadful thing, he thought with himself, and was right in so
thinking, that love to any lovely thing--how much more to the
loveliest being God had made!--whose will is the soul of all
loveliness, should cause him, in any degree, or for any time, to
forget him and grow strange to the thought of him? The lack was
this, that, having found his treasure, he had not yet taken it home
to his Father! Jesus, himself, after he was up again, could not be
altogether at home with his own, until he had first been home to
his Father and their Father, to his God and their God. For as God
is the source, so is he the bond of all love. There are Christians
who in portions of their being, of their life, their judgments, and
aims, are absolute heathens, for with these, so far as their
thought or will is concerned, God has nothing to do. There God is
not with them, for there they are not with God. Do they heed St.
Paul when he says, “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin”?
So, between these two, an unrest had come in, and they were no more
sure of ease in each other’s presence, although sometimes, for many
minutes together, thought and word would go well between them, and
all would be as simple and shining as ever.