Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

The child smiled: "I was thinking about the moon and about mamma, mon père. I was wondering if she is looking at the moon now, and if she got my letter, and if she misses me very much."

Her simple reflections did not satisfy her friend. I think at the moment he would scarcely have been surprised if the child had developed budding wings and floated away into the sympathetic moonshine; his superstition, it may be, specially as displayed by one whose sex might have been supposed to lift him above such weakness, will seem strange and improbable to the majority of readers. A man allow himself to think seriously of such follies? Yes—a man, and not the first nor the last, by a great many. The inhabitants of our island are not alone on the face of the earth. In the glow of the sunny South, where generations have lapped their souls in sunshine and indolently lived on the abundant gifts of lavish Nature, where life can be sustained by a little, and the struggle for existence is less painful and bitter, there has been time for dreaming; and perhaps this has enervated the moral sense and loosened the sinews of mind, till pleasure has become a god and the mind receptive of strange things.

In the early days of civilization, before these things had wrought fully on the character, pure reason, law and its cold abstractions, divine art and severe philosophy made the South their centre, for when we think of these first Athens and then Rome come before the mind. And at that age in the gray formless North the legend flourished, with many a wild superstition. But all that has changed. A light dawned upon the mighty tribes; their superstitions fell, and they girded themselves with strength, while evermore in the sunny lands dreams gained ground, and weakness followed in their train, till at last what is it that we see? In the city where Pericles ruled, where Socrates taught, where Plato reasoned, they dream and do not; in imperial Rome a shadow, an old mediæval fiction, has kept the people from freedom as they gloried in the past and dreamed about the future, and in the mean time we of the gray North are rapidly casting from us almost everything but what we can see, taste, hold and understand.

Be practical! is the watchword of the age, and sentiment is repudiated, and imagination cried down or relegated to extreme youth and the weakest of weak womanhood. Are there many, I wonder, who find the medium—whose strong souls are strong enough to allow that there is something which passes their ken—who think it no shame to be at certain moments swayed by sentiment, governed by a dream of ideal loveliness, and yet who work on in their daily calling unsickened and undismayed?

There are some such souls, and to no climate are they peculiar. L'Estrange might have been one of them. There was in his imaginative faculty, in his receptivity to beauty and sentiment, in his sympathetic tenderness, a something that marked him out as one born to a higher life than that of self-gratification. His success among women was chiefly owing to this. For it is the good, not the bad in a character, that draws and enchains the loving worship of womanhood.

Where a man reads weakness a woman's keen eye beholds what underlies that weakness, and if it be lovable she is ready to adore.

What L'Estrange wanted was this: A soul to understand the beauty and glory of truth—truth on the lips and truth in the life. To indulge his love of beauty he had wrapped himself in the rose-colored mists of dreams; to preserve himself and others from pain he had never hesitated to resort to falsehood. He might have been very different. Some of the misery of that "might have been" was in his soul that evening as he turned from the child and paced up and down the steamer's deck, for a dark hour had come and he could not bear to face his good genius. With arms folded and brows knit, his dark face looking forward into the moonlight, he thought until thinking was pain. But the influence of the child had begun to work. He would not, as he usually did, cast aside the painful thinking because of the pain that was in it; rather he looked it in the face, trying to touch its centre, and so, it might be, find a cure.

Oh, it was a hard task! For his was the misery of a wasted life, and a life that had brought desolation. True his innate refinement, the self-respect of a high intellect, had kept him tolerably free from what is gross and degrading, but that midnight retrospect was bitter notwithstanding. Pleasure sought and taken at the expense of truth; blighted lives, to which he had brought the warm beauty of love, leaving them when the mood had changed to find it where they could; good that he might have done and did not; wasted talents, used-up powers,—these came before his conscience in an accusing throng. And there was no help for it. He had one life only, and the best of that life had gone. L'Estrange, though he professed to believe in a futurity to the soul, was that saddest of all beings, a practical infidel. In the misery of self-communion his thoughts turned suddenly to the memory of his boyhood's faith, to the days when heaven had been a reality and the saints robed in white, the pure queen of the skies, the fair infant in her breast, had formed part of his hopes and dreams for the future. They had vanished like myths born of the early vapor. They had been too shadowy to bear the inroad of hot, lurid noon. Tried, they had been found wanting, and what had he left in the hour when his heart and spirit craved for something unearthly as their rest? Nothing. All he found within, as he ventured shudderingly to lift the curtain that hides the unseen from the seen, was a "certain fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation," which no man, if ten times over an infidel, can escape when the hour comes.

His dark face darkened. If all were hopeless, then why should he pause? Why had the good that was in him made him hesitate at last? He would crush it down and gain his own ends, even through suffering itself. He stopped in his rapid walk and looked over the vessel's side. It was a real blackness, for clouds had covered the face of the moon, and had gathered here and there in heavy masses on the horizon.

A moaning wind swept across the sea, ruffling the waters till the vessel rocked to and fro. Then the dark face relaxed. The desolation of the watery waste had been responsive to his mood. "So be it, then," he muttered, looking out into the darkness. He was for the moment like the grand creation of Milton, that ideal Lucifer, when his last struggles after goodness have culminated in the fatal cry, "Evil, be thou my good!"