Ronald, whose busy brush had been brought to a stand-still by an unusually dark day, when he returned to his apartments, found his friend reading Bulwer's "Caxtons." Maurice was leaning with both elbows upon the table, his fingers plunged through his disordered hair, his brows almost fiercely contracted, and his wan face bent over the volume before him.
"I found some grand pictures in that book," remarked the young artist. "Which are you contemplating?"
"No pictures. I have not your eye for pictures," answered Maurice, with something more than a touch of impatience. "I am moved, haunted, tormented by truths which have more power than all the ideal pictures pen ever drew, or brush ever painted. You place me here before your library, you lure me to read, and every book I open utters words that make my compulsory mode of existence a reproach, a disgrace, a misery to me. Read this, for instance: 'Life is a drama, not a monologue. A drama is derived from a Greek word which signifies to do. Every actor in the drama has something to do which helps on the progress of the whole,—that is the object for which the author created him. Do your part and let the Great Play go on!' Do? do?" continued Maurice, in an excited tone as he finished the quotation; "it is a torment worthy of a place in Dante's Inferno to know that there is nothing one is permitted to do! I too am an actor in the Great Drama; but I have no part to play save that of lay figure, motionless and voiceless; yet, unhappy, not being deprived of sensibility, I am goaded to desperation by inward taunting because I can do nothing."
"The play is not ended yet," answered Ronald, with as much cheerfulness as he could command, for his friend's depression affected his sympathetic nature. "We may not comprehend our rôles in the beginning; we may have to study long before we can thoroughly conceive, then idealize, then act them."
"I could bear that mine should be a sad, if it were only an active one," returned Maurice, again fixing his eyes upon the book.
Ronald could make no reply to a sentiment so thoroughly in accordance with his own views. He constantly pondered upon the possibilities through which his friend might be freed from the shackles that bound him to the effeminate serfdom of idleness; but the magic that could unrivet those fetters had not yet been revealed. Still he was sometimes stirred by a mysterious prescience that they would be loosened, and through his instrumentality.
Ronald's nature was essentially practical without being prosaic. The rich ore of poetry, inseparable from all exquisitely fine organizations, lay beneath the daily current of his life, like golden veins in the bed of a stream, shining through the crystal waters that bore the most commonplace objects on their tide. He thoroughly accepted that interpretation of the Ideal which calls it a "divine halo with which the Creator had encircled the world of reality;" but while he instinctively lifted all he loved into supernal regions and contemplated them in the glorious spirit-light that heightens all beauty, he lost sight of none of the stern actualities of their existence. His imagination had fashioned a hero out of Maurice, and he had thrown his person in heroic guise upon canvas; yet he clearly beheld and mourned over the morbid tendency that was weakening his mind and threatened to render his character and his life equally unheroic.
Only a few days after the conversation we have just narrated, when Maurice entered Ronald's sitting-room he found the student with an open letter in his hand. As he lifted his eloquent, brown eyes from the paper a glittering moisture beaded their darkly fringed lashes, and an expression of ineffable tenderness looked out from their lustrous depths. The letter was from his mother,—one of those messengers of deep affection which transported him into her presence, placed him, as he had so often sat in his petted boyhood, at her feet, to listen to her holy teachings, and be thrilled to the very centre of his being by her words of love. During his three years of separation, at a period when the expanding mind is most impressible, these letters, weekly received, had surrounded him with a heavenly aura which seemed breathed out through a mother's ceaseless prayers, and had kept his life pure, his spirit strong, his heart uplifted; had preserved him from being hurried by the wild, ungoverned impulses of youth, rendered more infectuous by the volcanic fires of genius, into actions for which he might blush hereafter.
It was one of the undefined, unspoken sources of sympathy between Ronald and Maurice, that the guarding hand of woman, influencing them from a distance, preserved the bloom, the freshness, the pristine purity of both their souls, even in the polluted atmosphere of a city where immorality is an accepted evil. Maurice, who had never known a mother's hallowing affection, gained his strength through his early attachment to a maiden whom no man could love without being ennobled thereby; and Ronald, whose heart had never yet awakened to the first pulse of tenderness which drew him towards one he would have claimed as a bride, owed his powers of resistance to as strong, as passionate devotion to a mother who united in her person all the most glorious attributes of womanhood, and whose idolizing love for her child was tempered by wisdom which placed his spiritual progress above all other gain. While he was struggling to win laurels in art's arena, she strove to bind upon his brow a crown whose gems were heavenly truths,—a crown the pure in spirit alone could wear.
Blessed the son who has such a mother! Safe and blessed! His foot shall tread upon the serpent that lies hidden beneath the tempting flowers in his path, ere the reptile can sting him; his hand shall resolutely put away the cup of pleasure from his lips when there is poison in the chalice; he shall walk through the fire of evil lusts unscathed! No laurel that wreaths his brow shall render it too feverish, or too proud, to lie upon that mother's bosom with the glad, all-confiding, satisfied sense which made its joy when it lay there in guileless boyhood. That mother's love shall smooth for him the rough ways of earth, and place in his hand the golden key that opens heaven.