TOWARD THE ZENITH.
"Richling, I am glad to see you!"
Dr. Sevier had risen from his luxurious chair beside a table, the soft
downward beams of whose lamp partly showed, and partly hid, the rich
appointments of his library. He grasped Richling's hand, and with an
extensive stride drew forward another chair on its smooth-running
casters.
Then inquiries were exchanged as to the health of one and the other. The
Doctor, with his professional eye, noticed, as the light fell full upon
his visitor's buoyant face, how thin and pale he had grown. He rose
again, and stepping beyond Richling with a remark, in part complimentary
and in part critical, upon the balmy April evening, let down the sash of
a window where the smell of honeysuckles was floating in.
"Have you heard from your wife lately?" he asked, as he resumed his
seat.
"Yesterday," said Richling. "Yes, she's very well, been well ever since
she left us. She always sends love to you."
"Hum," responded the physician. He fixed his eyes on the mantel and
asked abstractedly, "How do you bear the separation?"
"Oh!" Richling laughed, "not very heroically. It's a great strain on a
man's philosophy."
"Work is the only antidote," said the Doctor, not moving his eyes.
"Yes, so I find it," answered the other. "It's bearable enough while one
is working like mad; but sooner or later one must sit down to meals, or
lie down to rest, you know"--
"Then it hurts," said the Doctor.
"It's a lively discipline," mused Richling.
"Do you think you learn anything by it?" asked the other, turning his
eyes slowly upon him. "That's what it means, you notice."
"Yes, I do," replied Richling, smiling; "I learn the very thing I
suppose you're thinking of,--that separation isn't disruption, and that
no pair of true lovers are quite fitted out for marriage until they can
bear separation if they must."
"Yes," responded the physician; "if they can muster the good sense to
see that they'll not be so apt to marry prematurely. I needn't tell you
I believe in marrying for love; but these needs-must marriages are so
ineffably silly. You 'must' and you 'will' marry, and 'nobody shall
hinder you!' And you do it! And in three or four or six months"--he drew
in his long legs energetically from the hearth-pan--"_death_ separates
you!--death, sometimes, resulting directly from the turn your haste has
given to events! Now, where is your 'must' and 'will'?" He stretched his
legs out again, and laid his head on his cushioned chair-back.
"I have made a narrow escape," said Richling.
"I wasn't so fortunate," responded the Doctor, turning solemnly toward
his young friend. "Richling, just seven months after I married Alice I
buried her. I'm not going into particulars--of course; but the sickness
that carried her off was distinctly connected with the haste of our
marriage. Your Bible, Richling, that you lay such store by, is right; we
should want things as if we didn't want them. That isn't the quotation,
exactly, but it's the idea. I swore I couldn't and wouldn't live without
her; but, you see, this is the fifteenth year that I have had to do it."
"I should think it would have unmanned you for life," said Richling.
"It made a man of me! I've never felt young a day since, and yet I've
never seemed to grow a day older. It brought me all at once to my full
manhood. I have never consciously disputed God's arrangements since. The
man who does is only a wayward child."
"It's true," said Richling, with an air of confession, "it's true;" and
they fell into silence.
Presently Richling looked around the room. His eyes brightened rapidly
as he beheld the ranks and tiers of good books. He breathed an audible
delight. The multitude of volumes rose in the old-fashioned way, in
ornate cases of dark wood from floor to ceiling, on this hand, on that,
before him, behind; some in gay covers,--green, blue, crimson,--with
gilding and embossing; some in the sumptuous leathers of France, Russia,
Morocco, Turkey; others in worn attire, battered and venerable, dingy
but precious,--the gray heads of the council.
The two men rose and moved about among those silent wits and
philosophers, and, from the very embarrassment of the inner riches, fell
to talking of letter-press and bindings, with maybe some effort on the
part of each to seem the better acquainted with Caxton, the Elzevirs,
and other like immortals. They easily passed to a competitive
enumeration of the rare books they had seen or not seen here and there
in other towns and countries. Richling admitted he had travelled, and
the conversation turned upon noted buildings and famous old nooks in
distant cities where both had been. So they moved slowly back to their
chairs, and stood by them, still contemplating the books. But as they
sank again into their seats the one thought which had fastened itself in
the minds of both found fresh expression.
Richling began, smilingly, as if the subject had not been dropped at
all,--"I oughtn't to speak as if I didn't realize my good fortune, for I
do."
"I believe you do," said the Doctor, reaching toward the fire-irons.
"Yes. Still, I lose patience with myself to find myself taking Mary's
absence so hard."
"All hardships are comparative," said the Doctor.
"Certainly they are," replied Richling. "I lie sometimes and think of
men who have been political prisoners, shut away from wife and children,
with war raging outside and no news coming in."
"Think of the common poor," exclaimed Dr. Sevier,--"the thousands of
sailors' wives and soldiers' wives. Where does that thought carry you?"
"It carries me," responded the other, with a low laugh, "to where I'm
always a little ashamed of myself."
"I didn't mean it to do that," said the Doctor; "I can imagine how you
miss your wife. I miss her myself."
"Oh! but she's here on this earth. She's alive and well. Any burden is
light when I think of that--pardon me, Doctor!"
"Go on, go on. Anything you please about her, Richling." The Doctor half
sat, half lay in his chair, his eyes partly closed. "Go on," he
repeated.
"I was only going to say that long before Mary went away, many a time
when she and I were fighting starvation at close quarters, I have
looked at her and said to myself, 'What if I were in Dr. Sevier's
place?' and it gave me strength to rise up and go on."
"You were right."
"I know I was. I often wake now at night and turn and find the place by
my side empty, and I can hardly keep from calling her aloud. It wrenches
me, but before long I think she's no such great distance away, since
we're both on the same earth together, and by and by she'll be here at
my side; and so it becomes easy to me once more." Richling, in the
self-occupation of a lover, forgot what pains he might be inflicting.
But the Doctor did not wince.
"Yes," said the physician, "of course you wouldn't want the separation
to be painless; and it promises a reward, you know."
"Ah!" exclaimed Richling, with an exultant smile and motion of the head,
and then dropped his eyes in meditation. The Doctor looked at him
steadily.
"Richling, you've gathered some terribly hard experiences. But hard
experiences are often the foundation-stones of a successful life. You
can make them all profitable. You can make them draw you along, so to
speak. But you must hold them well in hand, as you would a dangerous
team, you know,--coolly and alertly, firmly and patiently,--and never
let the reins slack till you've driven through the last gate."
Richling replied, with a pleasant nod, "I believe I shall do it. Did you
notice what I wrote you in my letter? I have got the notion strongly
that the troubles we have gone through--Mary and I--were only our
necessary preparation--not so necessary for her as for me"--
"No," said Dr. Sevier, and Richling continued, with a smile:--
"To fit us for a long and useful life, and especially a life that will
be full of kind and valuable services to the poor. If that isn't what
they were sent for"--he dropped into a tone of reflection--"then I don't
understand them."
"And suppose you don't understand," said the Doctor, with his cold, grim
look.
"Oh!" rejoined Richling, in amiable protest; "but a man would like to
understand."
"Like to--yes," replied the Doctor; "but be careful. The spirit that
_must_ understand is the spirit that can't trust." He paused. Presently
he said, "Richling!"
Richling answered by an inquiring glance.
"Take better care of your health," said the physician.
Richling smiled--a young man's answer--and rose to say good-night.