“Bring the light nearer,” said John Burley,—“nearer still.”
Leonard obeyed, and placed the candle on a little table by the sick man’s bedside.
Burley’s mind was partially wandering; but there was method in his madness. Horace Walpole said that “his stomach would survive all the rest of him.” That which in Burley survived the last was his quaint, wild genius. He looked wistfully at the still flame of the candle: “It lives ever in the air!” said he.
“What lives ever?”
Burley’s voice swelled, “Light!” He turned from Leonard, and again contemplated the little flame. “In the fixed star, in the Will-o’-the-wisp, in the great sun that illumines half a world, or the farthing rushlight by which the ragged student strains his eyes,—still the same flower of the elements! Light in the universe, thought in the soul—Ay, ay, go on with the simile. My head swims. Extinguish the light! You cannot; fool, it vanishes from your eye, but it is still in the space. Worlds must perish, suns shrivel up, matter and spirit both fall into nothingness, before the combinations whose union makes that little flame which the breath of a babe can restore to darkness, shall lose the power to form themselves into light once more. Lose the power!—no, the necessity: it is the one Must in creation. Ay, ay, very dark riddles grow clear now,—now when I could not cast up an addition sum in the baker’s bill! What wise man denied that two and two made four? Do they not make four? I can’t answer him. But I could answer a question that some wise men have contrived to make much knottier.” He smiled softly, and turned his face for some minutes to the wall.
This was the second night on which Leonard had watched by his bedside, and Burley’s state had grown rapidly worse. He could not last many days, perhaps many hours. But he had evinced an emotion beyond mere delight at seeing Leonard again. He had since then been calmer, more himself. “I feared I might have ruined you by my bad example,” he said, with a touch of humour that became pathos as he added, “That idea preyed on me.”
“No, no; you did me great good.”
“Say that,—say it often,” said Burley, earnestly; “it makes my heart feel so light.”
He had listened to Leonard’s story with deep interest, and was fond of talking to him of little Helen. He detected the secret at the young man’s heart, and cheered the hopes that lay there, amidst fears and sorrows. Burley never talked seriously of his repentance; it was not in his nature to talk seriously of the things which he felt solemnly. But his high animal spirits were quenched with the animal power that fed them. Now, we go out of our sensual existence only when we are no longer enthralled by the Present, in which the senses have their realm. The sensual being vanishes when Ave are in the Past or the Future. The Present was gone from Burley; he could no more be its slave and its king.
It was most touching to see how the inner character of this man unfolded itself, as the leaves of the outer character fell off and withered,—a character no one would have guessed in him, an inherent refinement that was almost womanly; and he had all a woman’s abnegation of self. He took the cares lavished on him so meekly. As the features of the old man return in the stillness of death to the aspect of youth,—the lines effaced, the wrinkles gone,—so, in seeing Burley now, you saw what he had been in his spring of promise. But he himself saw only what he had failed to be,—powers squandered, life wasted. “I once beheld,” he said, “a ship in a storm. It was a cloudy, fitful day, and I could see the ship with all its masts fighting bard for life and for death. Then came night, dark as pitch, and I could only guess that the ship fought on. Towards the dawn the stars grew visible, and once more I saw the ship: it was a wreck,—it went down just as the stars shone forth.”