Grief and patience, rooted in her both,
Mingle their spurs together.--_Cymbeline_.
Leslie was dead; beyond the reach of wounds and sorrow; and the only
tie which held his daughter to Vinal was at last broken. She left him,
as she had promised, and made her abode with Mrs. Ashland, in her
cottage by the sea shore.
She sat alone at an open window, looking out upon the sea, an
illimitable dreariness, waveless and dull as tarnished lead; clouded
with sullen mists, but still rocking in long, dead swells with the
motion of a past storm.
Her thoughts followed on the track of the absent Morton.
"It is best for you to have gone; to have made for yourself a relief
in your man's element of action and struggle. Such a change is
happiness, after the misery you have known. It was a bitter schooling;
a long siege, and a dreary one; but you have triumphed, and you wear
its trophy,--the heroic calm, the mind tranquil with consciousness of
power. You have wrung a proud tribute out of sorrow; but has it
yielded you all its treasure? Could you but have rested less loftily
on your own firm resolve and unbending pride of manhood! Could you but
have learned that gentler, deeper, higher philosophy which builds for
itself a temple out of ruin, and makes weakness invincible with
binding its tendrils to the rock!
"Your fate and mine have not been a bed of roses; but the fierceness
of yours is past, and I must still wait the issues of mine. I have
renounced this fraud and mockery of empty words which was to have
bound me to a life-long horror. The world will think very strangely of
me. That must be borne, too; and such a load is light, to the burden I
have borne already."
A few days later, tidings came that Vinal was ill. Edith Leslie
rejoined him; but, finding that her presence was any thing but
soothing to him, she left him in the care of others, and returned to
her friend's house. It was but a sudden and short attack, from which
he recovered in a week or two.