Sir Charleroy wished and wished, in his soul, that his patron saint and queen of women would appear and tell both what to do. He unconsciously was turning his mind’s eye in the right direction. Husband and wife both believed there was a right way, a pattern of right, and an ideal of heaven, but they could not lay hold of them. Giant, crusader and husband, each in turn strove in his day at the same spot, and at the same point failed.
Sir Charleroy, in mind, went out along a strangely beset line of thinking. Sometimes he pitied himself, and that brought the balm of conceit. He remembered it was a fine thing to be a martyr, forgetting that some, rewardless, suffer as sinners. Sometimes he heard those beatings of mighty wings, as if some wondrous holy one were departing. Then he became very penitent and full of the entreatings of prayer. Either mood was brief enough to him not yet converted; a very Peter in vacillations. Whether he would finally follow the beating wings or sit down nigh to the gates of certain insanity, the gates that those who over-much pity themselves are sure to reach, was the issue in his life then. The bugles of war call few to the heroism of the field, but millions are daily called by God’s bugle to the better achievements which make for glory amid the duties of common life. That latter bugle was calling him, but he was slow to obey, or understand even.
The events recorded in the foregoing pages roused Sir Charleroy to an anxious effort to do something to change the currents of his wife’s thoughts. Necessity quickened his discernment, and though he had had but little experience in dealing with those ill in the body or mind, he quickly concluded that a change of place and a change of pursuit would be beneficial. In truth, his own feelings attested this much. He himself was weary of the pursuit of excitement as a sole and constant occupation.
“Shall we leave the Lejah, Rizpah?” he questioned, a few days after the outbreak before mentioned.
“Yes, I say!—I’m leaving it! See here,” and she pointed to her cheeks, once ruddy, now haggard. “Oh, Charleroy, take me away or death will!”
“Enough! We’ll go. But where?”
“Any place under heaven; say the word and I’ll run out of the place instantly, leaving all here.”
“What, our effects!”
“Any thing to get away. I feel like a child approached by some monster terror, hour by hour! For days I’ve been transfixed by my fear or I would have run away, even alone, before this. Now thy words break the spell! Come, let us go before I’m overcome again!”