Again Mrs. Adair sighed as she silently took the pen and wrote the desired order.
The book arrived from London by return of post, and Flora eagerly seized it, and carried it off to her room.
It possessed the almost irresistible fascination which such works always do possess when they appeal at the same time to the head and heart, and are written with the true eloquence flowing from "une âme passionnée." The eloquence of this book, however, flowed, alas! from the soul of one who, blinded by pride and passion, had turned away from Light, and devoted his grand powers to the advocacy of darkness, but who cast upon the darkness a halo of seeming truth and beauty. Over those pages, indeed, might angels have wept to see so much that was good and great perverted to evil.
Flora read that book in trembling, yet week after week she spent studying it almost line by line, until she must nearly have known it by heart. She would not, however, let even her mother read it, and when alone she would exclaim aloud, "It is too terrible to think that this is my work! It is as he himself said, 'You found me bereft of hope, but a calm fatalist; you send me from you a blasphemer!' When he was a calm fatalist he dragged none others down with him, but now that he has written this book, how many will be carried away by the powerful eloquence—gloomy and mysterious though it be—of his apparently profound reasoning! He will be responsible for the ruin of all those souls, but it is I who shall have made him become the cause of their ruin! O God! can he have been right when he said, 'It cannot be the voice of Truth or Charity which tells you that you ought to drive to desperation the wounded heart which you had won and promised to heal, rather than infringe a mere regulation of your Church?'"
Then would ensue a fierce struggle between the great contending powers of Faith and unbelief; but her constant study of Truth during the last few months now came to her aid, and gradually she would become calm again, remembering what she herself had so often said to her lover, namely, that the principle of obedience to a revealed and an unerring source of truth upon earth, must be maintained at any cost, or else the mysteries of life and death, of good and evil, would be irreconcilable with the existence of a beneficent Creator, and then life with its tremendous sufferings would be nothing short of a curse.
The cup of human misery seemed now to be filled to the very brim for Flora, and yet it was not; the last drop had to be added still, and the most bitter of all, for it was added by him whom she so loved, and that too when it depended on his own will alone to save her from any farther trouble. How true it is that the sufferings inflicted upon us by our fellow-creatures are almost always more difficult to bear than those which God sends us direct from His own hand!
A few days before Christmas Mina Blake went to see Flora, and after the usual greetings were over she said, "Poor Flora, how pale and tired you look; but I think I know something that will bring the roses back to your cheeks and the light to your eyes."
"Ah, Mina! you cannot know anything that would call the dead to life again; my roses and brightness, are buried for ever."
"Not so, Flora.... Would not the roses bloom and the eyes sparkle again, if the sun of former days could shine upon them once more?"
"Mina!" exclaimed Flora, almost indignantly, "how can you trifle so cruelly with me?"