Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

A gate opened on to the smooth turf. He unlatched it, and, after a few more rapid steps, threw himself down on the grass with his face to heaven. A sudden craving for rest of some kind—rest of conscience, rest of heart, rest of soul—had come to him, and in the night's stillness he had set himself the task of thinking out the problem.

In the morning of the long day he had thought to rest in love. That hope had gone by. It did not require so consummate a master of human nature as himself to recognize clearly that this was vain; and strive as he would he could not forget Margaret; her beauty haunted him as the vision of impossible good must follow the lost—a torment, because unattainable for ever. Later, he had imagined that revenge in its bitter satisfaction might rest his spirit. His scheme had succeeded, but this too was vanity, or worse, for the child whom he had looked upon merely as the instrument of his vengeance had opened his eyes, and instead of rest came the stinging pang of remorse to harass his tormented soul.

And thus it had ever been with him. The beautiful "spirit of delight" he had been seeking from his youth up; always with the same result—to find under the beauty, ashes; under the glory, dull despair.

At first, as he lay there under the canopy of cloud, the thoughts of this strange man were nothing higher than self-pity and bitter complaining of wayward fate. His being seemed for the moment a thing apart from himself. He took it in his hand and reasoned on it. Why was it formed to enjoy when enjoyment was a thing unattainable? Why was it tortured with longings which for ever were destined to remain unsatisfied? Why was beauty so fair and good so lovely when always they looked on it from afar? What was this superior fate that fed its slave with mocking visions—removing evermore and ever farther the cup of bliss for which his thirsty soul was panting?

The soft sensualist felt the tears brimming to his eyes as he pondered on his calamities. It was the remembrance of his own parable that first aroused him, for the man was not naturally weak. Brought up in a different school, he might have been different. Education had made him a formalist and from forms he had turned away in his manhood, thinking in the direct opposite to find freedom and truth.

The formalist had cast off every tie of faith, only to fall into the closer bondage of fatalism. And the worst of it all was that there seemed no opening for him into the light. But, though he little suspected it, he had found a teacher, and in the stillness of that night the lessons fallen from the lips of one of God's little ones began to take effect upon his mind.

It was not so much his own parable as its effect upon Laura that struck suddenly to the root of his selfish murmuring. His sensuous soul had been hitherto seeking with all its power for beauty as a resting-place. He had thought to find it in the gratification of his senses, but it had always eluded him. The child's earnest look that night as she took up at his command the burden of suffering for the good that was to come—not so much to herself as to another—made a new idea dawn upon his mind. Was there, then, an unsuspected beauty even in suffering when sanctified by high ends? If so, he had been all his life seeking in vain.

Suddenly as the idea flashed in upon his brain—with the vision of that patient little face, from which something more than a child's spirit seemed to look—he sprang to his feet and walked rapidly forward into the night. Like a dream his former life seemed to map itself out before him in those few moments of intense feeling. The days, the years that had, in spite of his efforts, furrowed his face and sprinkled their gray ashes on his head, how had he spent them? In seeking the good which ever eluded him, in fleeing from the shadow that ever pursued him. The good had been happiness, beauty—the evil had been pain, suffering. Physical suffering, mental suffering, sympathetic suffering, vicarious suffering,—this he had striven to blot out from the story of his life; he would believe that it did not exist, and when in unmistakable evidence it had presented itself to his senses, he would forget its presence or drown its influence in distractions.

And now came this child-messenger to tell him that all this time he had been banishing a holy thing, a soul-purifier. It had ennobled the young face that night till an angel's pure beauty seemed to rest upon it. Even his peerless Margaret had gained in calmness and strength by those years of desolation; and he who had cast it aside as abhorrent, what was he becoming?

He asked himself this with an involuntary shudder. He had always rejoiced in the tenderness of his heart. His very objection to the sight of suffering had been laid to this account in the self-analyses which with him had been so frequent: and now what did he find himself doing? Coolly inflicting torture on a woman and child—two of the weakest of God's creatures—and all for the gratification, not of the best but of the worst feelings of his nature. Once more L'Estrange threw himself to the ground, but this time his face was turned earthward and buried in his hands, while wave after wave of bitterness passed over his troubled soul.