Min, dead!--God in heaven--how _could_ they torture me so!
But, it was true.
I cannot bear to speak of it all now, it unmans me. It makes me, a
great strong man, appear as a little sobbing child!
I do not know what went on for days after I realised what had happened
to me. I was mad, I believe; for they said I had lost my senses.
And even now, sometimes, I feel as if I were not myself, when I recall
the past with all its empty dreams--in which I almost attained to
paradise--that were ruthlessly swept away in one fell swoop by the agony
of hell I suffered on being conscious of my loss.
No, I am not myself. There is something missing in me--something that
completed my identity; and, without which, I am not even a perfect atom
on the ocean of time--as I will be nothing in, the labyrinth of
eternity!--For,--
"The waves of a mighty sorrow
Have whelmed the pearl of my life;
And there cometh for me no morrow,
To solace this desolate strife!"
When I was able to bear the narration, I was told all.
Min had caught a violent cold only a week before the Christmas-eve on
which she expected me; and, in spite of all that science and love could
do, she died before the dawn of the new year. She had looked forward to
seeing me to the last, hoping against hope. She knew, she had said,
that I would keep my word and come when she sent for me. But, when
Christmas-eve arrived without my coming, she did not seem disappointed.
She then said that God had willed it otherwise:--something must have
arisen to prevent my arrival:--we would meet again in the Great
Hereafter:--she would leave a message for me, to reconcile me to our
brief separation, ere we met once more.
And, with that thought of me in her great loving heart, with that
blessed reliance in her Saviour's promise, and with a smile of ecstatic
bliss on her lips, she "fell asleep"--without my seeing her, O my God!
Perhaps, on recollecting many of the incidents of my story, and calling
to mind the tone and manner in which I have described them, you may have
thought me then merry and light-hearted, where now I am moody and
sombre?
True; but, life is made up of grave and gay.
It is hackneyed to say that "the clown that grins before the audience,
who laugh with and at the merryandrew and his antics, is frequently
weeping behind his mask;" yet, it is often the case.
Life is hysterical and spasmodic.
Many of us, believed by surface-studying people to be the gayest of the
gay, have in reality a dull, rending pain gnawing us inwardly the
while--like as the fox was gnawing the Spartan boy's entrails; and, like
him again, we are too proud--for what is courage but pride?--to speak of
our suffering. We do not "wear our hearts" on our sleeve "for daws to
peck at!"
The "consolation of religion," you suggest?
Bah! How can I be consoled, when I have been bereft of all that made
existence dear, receiving nothing in return--nothing but doubt and
uncertainty, and a despair unspeakable?
Could comfort accrue to me, when I wandered back along the pathway of
memory, catching sunny glimpses of the rosy future which my imagination
had marked out, and then comparing these with the dreary outlook that
now was mine?
When I think of what might have been and now can never happen, I rave!