THE GARDEN.
Tenderly he led her into the garden, and down the walks now bare of
bordering flowers. To Helen it looked like a graveyard; the dry
bushes were the memorials of the buried flowers, and the cypress and
box trees rose like the larger monuments of shapely stone. The day
was a cold leaden one, that would have rained if it could, to get
rid of the deadness at its heart, but no tears came. To the
summer-house they went, under the cedar, and sat down. Neither spoke
for some time.
"Poor Leopold!" said George at length, and took Helen's hand.
She burst into tears, and again for some time neither spoke.
"George, I can't bear it!" she said at length.
"It is very sad," answered George. "But he had a happy life, I don't
doubt, up to--to--"
"What does that matter now? It is all a horrible farce.--To begin so
fair and lovely, and end so stormy and cold and miserable!"
George did not like to say what he thought, namely, that it was
Leopold's own doing. He did not see that therein lay the deepest
depth of the misery--the thing that of all things needed help: all
else might be borne; the less that COULD be borne the better.
"It IS horrible," he said. "But what can be done? What's done is
done, and nobody can help it."
"There should be somebody to help it," said Helen.
"Ah! Should be!" said George. "--Well, it's a comfort it will soon
be over!"
"Is it?" returned Helen almost sharply. "--But he's not your
brother, and you don't know what it is to lose him! Oh, how desolate
the world will be without my darling!"
And again her tears found way.
"All that I can do to make up for the loss, dearest Helen," said
George,--
"Oh George!" she cried, starting to her feet, "is there NO hope? I
don't mean of his getting better--that we do know the likelihoods
of--but is there no hope of SOME TIME seeing him again? We know so
little about all of it! MIGHT there not be some way?"
But George was too honest in himself, and too true to his
principles, to pretend anything to Helen. Hers was an altogether
different case from Leopold's. Here was a young woman full of health
and life and hope, with all her joys before her! Many suns must set
before her sun would go down, many pale moons look lovely in her
eyes, ere came those that would mock her with withered memories--a
whole hortus siccus of passion-flowers. Why should he lie to HER of
a hope beyond the grave? Let the pleasures of the world be the
dearer to her for the knowledge that they must so soon depart; let
love be the sweeter for the mournful thought that it is a thing of
the summer, and that when the winter comes it shall be no more! But
perhaps George forgot one point. I will allow that the insects of a
day, dying in a moment of delightful fruition, are blessed; but when
the delicate Psyche, with her jewel-feathered wings, is beat about
by a wind full of rain until she lies draggled in the dirt; when
there are no more flowers, or if there be, the joy of her hovering
is over, and yet death comes but slowly; when the mourners are going
about the streets ere ever the silver cord is loosed; when the past
looks a mockery and the future a blank;--then perhaps, even to the
correlatives of the most triumphant natural selection, it may not
merely seem as if something were wrong somewhere, but even as if
there ought to be somebody to set wrong right. If Psyche should be
so subdued to circumstance as to accept without question her
supposed fate, then doubly woe for Psyche!
But if George could not lie, it was not necessary for him to speak
the truth: silence was enough. A moment of it was all Helen could
endure. She rose hastily, left the wintered summer-house, and walked
back to the sick-chamber. George followed a few paces behind, so far
quenched that he did not overtake her to walk by her side, feeling
he had no aid to offer her. Doubtless he could have told her of help
at hand, but it was help that must come, that could neither be given
nor taken, would not come the sooner for any prayer, and indeed
would not begin to exist until the worst should be over: the nearest
George came to belief in a saving power, was to console himself with
the thought that TIME would do everything for Helen.