THE THICK DARKNESS.
The next day he was still better, and could not think why the
doctor would not let him get up. As the day went on, he wondered
yet more why Joan did not come to see him. Not once did the thought
cross him that it was the doctor’s doing. If it had, he would but
have taken it for a precaution--as indeed it was, for the doctor’s
sake, not his. Jermyn would have as little intercourse between them
as might be, till he should have sprung his spiritual mine. But he
did all he could to prevent him from missing her, and the same
night opened all his heart to Cosmo--that is, all the show-part of
it.
[Illustration: THE NEXT DAY HE WAS STILL BETTER.]
In terms extravagant, which he seemed to use because he could not
repress them, he told his frozen listener that his whole nature,
heart and soul, had been for years bound up in Lady Joan; that he
had again and again been tempted to deliver himself by death from
despair; that if he had to live without her, he would be of no use
in the world, but would cease to care for anything. He begged
therefore his friend Cosmo Warlock, seeing he stood so well with
the lady, to speak what he honestly could in his behalf; for if she
would not favour him, he could no longer endure life. His had never
been over full, for he had had a hard youth, in which he had often
been driven to doubt whether there was indeed a God that cared how
his creatures went on. He must not say all he felt, but life, he
repeated, would be no longer worth leading without at least some
show of favour from Lady Joan.
At any former time, such words would have been sufficient to
displace Jermyn from the pedestal on which Cosmo had set him. What!
if all the ladies in the world should forsake him, was not God yet
the all in all? But now as he lay shivering, the words entering his
ears seemed to issue from his soul. He listened like one whom the
first sting has paralyzed, but who feels the more every succeeding
invasion of death. It was a silent, yet a mortal struggle. He held
down his heart like a wild beast, which, if he let it up for one
moment, would fly at his throat and strangle him. Nor could the
practiced eye of the doctor fail to perceive what was going on in
him. He only said to himself--“Better him than me! He is young and
will get over it better than I should.” He read nobility and
self-abnegation in every shadow that crossed the youth’s
countenance, telling of the hail mingled with fire that swept
through his universe; and said to himself that all was on his side,
that he had not miscalculated a hair’s-breadth. He saw at the same
time Cosmo’s heroic efforts to hide his sufferings, and left him to
imagine himself successful. But how Cosmo longed for his departure,
that he might in peace despair!--for such seemed to himself his
desire for solitude.
What is it in suffering that makes man and beast long for
loneliness? I think it is an unknown something, more than self,
calling out of the solitude--“Come to me!--Come!” How little of the
tenderness our human souls need, and after which consciously or
unconsciously they hunger, do we give or receive! The cry of the
hurt heart for solitude, seems to me the call of the heart of
God--changed by the echo of the tiny hollows of the heart of his
creature--“Come out from among them: come to me, and I will give
you rest!” He alone can give us the repose of love, the peace after
which our nature yearns.
Hurt by the selfishness and greed of men, to escape from which we
must needs go out of the world, worse hurt by our own indignation
at their wrong, and our lack of patience under it, we are his
creatures and his care still. The _right_ he claims as his affair,
and he will see it done; but the wrong is by us a thousand times
well suffered, if it but drive us to him, that we may learn he is
indeed our very lover.
That was a terrible night for Cosmo--a night billowy with black
fire. It reminded him afterwards of nothing so much as that word of
the Lord--_the power of darkness_. It was not merely darkness with no
light in it, but darkness alive and operative. He had hardly dared
suspect the nature, and only now knew the force, and was about to
prove the strength of the love with which he loved Joan. Great
things may be foreseen, but they cannot be known until they arrive.
His illness had been ripening him to this possibility of loss and
suffering. His heart was now in blossom: for that some hearts must
break;--I may not say in _full_ blossom, for what the full blossom of
the human heart is, the holiest saint with the mightiest
imagination cannot know--he can but see it shine from afar.
It was a severe duty that was now required of him--I do not mean
the performance of the final request the doctor had made--that
Cosmo had forgotten, neither could have attempted with honesty; for
the emotion he could not but betray, would have pleaded for
himself, and not for his friend; it was enough that he must yield
the lady of his dreams, become the lady as well of his waking and
hoping soul. Perhaps she did not love Jermyn--he could not tell;
but Jermyn was his friend and had trusted in him, confessing that
his soul was bound up in the lady; one of them must go to the
torture chamber, and when the _question_ lay between him and another,
Cosmo knew for which it must be. He alone was in Cosmo’s hands; his
own self was all he held and had power over, all he could offer,
could yield. Mr. Simon had taught him that, as a mother gives her
children money to give, so God gives his children _selves_, with
their wishes and choices, that they may have the true offering to
lay upon the true altar; for on that altar nothing else will burn
than _selves_.
“Very hard! A tyrannical theory!” says my reader? So will it
forever appear to the man who has neither the courage nor the sense
of law to enable him to obey. But that man shall be the eternal
slave who says to Duty _I will not_. Nor do I care to tell such a
man of the “_thousand fold_”--of the truth concerning that altar, that
it is indeed the nest of God’s heart, in which the poor, unsightly,
unfledged offering shall lie, until they come to shape and loveliness,
and wings grow upon them to bear them back to us divinely precious.
Cosmo _thought_ none of all this now--it had vanished from his
consciousness, but was present in his life--that is, in his action: he
did not feel, he _did_ it all--did it even when nothing seemed worth
doing.
How much greater a man than he was Jermyn! How much more worthy of
the love of a woman like Joan! How good he had been to him! What a
horrible thing it would be if Jermyn had saved his life that he
might destroy Jermyn’s! Perhaps Joan might have come one day to
love him; but in the meantime how miserable she was with her
brother, and when could he have delivered her! while here was one,
and a far better than he, who could, the moment she consented, take
her to a house of her own where she would be a free woman! For him
to come in the way, would be to put his hand also to the rack on
which the life of Joan lay stretched!
Again I say I do not mean that all this passed consciously through
the mind of Cosmo during that fearful night. His suffering was too
intense, and any doubt concerning duty too far from him, to allow
of anything that could be called thought; but such were the
fundamental facts that lay below his unselfquestioned resolve--such
was the soil in which grew the fruits, that is, the deeds, the
outcome of his nature. For himself, the darkness billowed and
rolled about him, and life was a frightful thing.
For where was God this awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the
banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of
life--not even among the dogs--outside with bare nothingness--cold
negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to
pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not
pray! It had _come_! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer
did not wake in him! Let no one say he was punished for his
overconfidence--for his presumption! There was no presumption in
the matter; there was only ignorance. He had not learned--nor has
any one learned more than in part--what awful possibilities lie in the
existence we call _we_. He had but spoken from what he knew--that
hitherto life for him had seemed inseparable from prayer to his
Father. And was it separable? Surely not. He could not pray,
true--but neither was he alive. To live, one must chose to live. He
was dead with a death that was heavy upon him. There is a far worse
death--the death that is content and suffers nothing; but
annihilation is not death--is nothing like it. Cosmo’s condition
had no evil in it--only a ghastly imperfection--an abyssmal
lack--an exhaustion at the very roots of being. God seemed away, as
he could never be and be God. But every commonest day of his life,
he who would be a live child of the living has to fight with the
God-denying look of things, and believe that in spite of that look,
seeming ever to assert that God has nothing to do with them, God
has his own way--the best, the only, the live way, of being in
everything, and taking his own pure, saving will in them; and now
for a season Cosmo had fallen in the fight, and God seemed gone,
and _things_ rushed in upon him and overwhelmed him. It was death. He
did not yet know it--but it was not the loss of Joan, but the
seeming loss of his God, that hollowed the last depth of his
misery. But that is of all things the surest to pass; for God
changing not, his life must destroy every false show of him. Cosmo
was now one of those holy children who are bound hand and foot in
the furnace, until the fire shall have consumed their bonds that
they may pace their prison. Stifled with the smoke and the glow, he
must yet for a time lie helpless; not yet could he lift up his
voice and call upon the ice and the cold, the frost and the snow to
bless the Lord, to praise and exalt him forever. But God was not
far from him. Feelings are not scientific instruments for that
which surrounds them; they but speak of themselves when they say,
“I am cold; I am dark.” Perhaps the final perfection will be when
our faith is utterly and absolutely independent of our feelings. I
dare to imagine this the final victory of our Lord, when he
followed the cry of _Why hast thou forsaken me?_ with the words,
_Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit_.
Shall we then bemoan any darkness? Shall we not rather gird up our
strength to encounter it, that we too from our side may break the
passage for the light beyond? He who fights with the dark shall
know the gentleness that makes man great--the dawning countenance
of the God of hope. But that was not for Cosmo just yet. The night
must fulfil its hours. Men are meant and sent to be troubled--that
they may rise above the whole region of storm, above all
possibility of being troubled.