Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

Then—L'Estrange acknowledged it to himself with a sigh—the suffering whose ravages he dreaded did not overcloud his intellect, did not bewilder his brain, as its antidote had done; rather, like the purging fire, it seemed to draw out and develop the greatness of the soul that was in him.

The strong man shivered as he turned from his only hope, and began once again in the unhealthy activity of his heart and brain to think and reason, to live an inner life that was gradually, by its overpowering force, drawing away the life from his body.

He bowed his face in his hands. Where was all this to end? he asked himself. Was he to go down to the grave with the burden of his own ruined life and of the lives he had ruined hanging like a millstone about his neck, dragging him down to the nether hell, without a hope save in the last vague dream of the infidel—an utter death, an eternal sleep?—and this, in his very darkest moments, L'Estrange had never brought himself to believe.

So intense was his mental life during the first part of that night that his physical sufferings were almost forgotten, but at last, as the slow hours went by, pain came, twinge after twinge, that would not be denied, and panting and exhausted, his great strength failing in the struggle, the man threw himself down upon his bed, moaning faintly.

A wild impatience followed. The spasms he experienced were of that gnawing, craving kind more difficult, perhaps, than any other to be borne.

Not the sharp stinging which rends the frame, and then, spent by very force, allows it to rest; but the dull, ceaseless throbbing that nothing can stay, that gives no moment of respite to the overwrought nerves. L'Estrange at the moment felt as if it would madden him. His blood was coursing like liquid fire through his veins; his hands and feet were burning; drops of agony stood on his brow. He crossed his room suddenly, and throwing open the window leaned out into the night; but first—for through everything this strange man did ran the tender thoughtfulness that could only have been prompted by a fine soul—he shut noiselessly the door of communication between his room and Laura's lest the chill night-air should touch his darling. He looked out upon a strange scene—the white earth, in shadow save where the moon had touched it with an unearthly radiance; the mountains looking verily like giants in the uncertain light, yet glistening and transparent where the night-born light was resting; cloud-shadows, whose depth seemed infinite as the outer darkness of despair, blotting out here and there the transparent whiteness; behind one of the distant peaks a pale line, faint and tremulous, that told of coming dawn; over all a weird unreality.

The face that looked out into the dim night was as strange as the scene could be, though it lacked the utter stillness of the shrouded, moonlit earth. The eyes were wild and wandering, with an impatient, hungry look in them, as though they were searching, seeking, striving to draw from the visible the secrets of that which no eye beholds; the mouth quivered with the storms of feeling; the brow was contracted by a mortal agony, and from time to time the pale lips moved as if in pitiful appeal to some hidden power. But after a few moments of earnest gazing some of all this passed by. It would almost have seemed as though the influence of Nature's eternal calm had been breathed in upon his soul through the medium of sense, or rather perhaps it was a thought from within that swept over the tumult of the man's brain, so that suddenly his agony was stayed.

Was it so very strange? Long ago, in the far ages, a Man to whom conflict and storm were known in all their fulness stood up on a dark night and said to the angry billows and raging winds, "Peace, be still." Was it altogether for the sake of that terror-stricken crew, or was it not also a sublime parable? For, evermore, it is the same. The Man, present in the midst of the soul's tumult, bids in His own time—the best time for the stricken—that the storms which overwhelm it shall sink to rest.

Thus it was with L'Estrange. In the silence and solitude he was finding the great Father, who, though we know it not, is never very far from any one of us. "God is here" was the thought that swept over him through the stillness of Nature, through the profound silence of the night. He knelt before the window and stretched out his hands to the midnight heavens. Who shall say what dreams, what possibilities, passed in that moment through his soul? For with his errors and imperfections, his falseness and his folly, this man was one of the mighty few, a son of divine genius. Will they be judged by another code, I sometimes wonder, than the common herd to whom their gigantic struggles, their vast temptations, their agonies, their failures, must for ever be a life unknown, a sealed-up book?—such a man as Shelley, peering in his spirit's misery through the ages, then when nothing but the aching void, the yawning nothing, answered his wild search, giving himself up to the proclamation of a dark infidelity; or Byron, dying for a dream; or Keats, breathing out his young life with the cry of a disappointed soul? Will the misguided, distorted greatness find in the Hereafter a better sphere? Have they, these mighty dead, even with the last breath of a life tortured with earth's blackness, received as by inspiration the fair beauty of undying truth into their souls? Who shall say? In the presence of mysteries like these we can only bow our heads and pray that so it may be.

To L'Estrange a moment of such inspiration had come. He had prayed before. Often during these last days, when gradually the fetters of self-love had been falling off from his soul, he had cried out in the darkness to the Father of spirits. But then He had been a grand abstraction; now, for the first time, He was near and real.