[CHAPTER IX.]
THE NEST IS EMPTY.
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the year
On the earth, her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
One evening—it must have been in the month of November, when the days had grown short and the nights long, when the autumn winds whistled bleakly and the waves were given to lashing the shore—a young girl sat alone at the window of a room which only the red fire and flickering twilight redeemed from total darkness. She was looking out, gazing with dreamy eyes that saw very little of that upon which they were apparently fixed, at the desolation of the world that lay outside. And yet that desolation was writing its impress on her brain, giving to the inner life the images of dreary hopelessness that belonged for the moment to the outer.
The young girl scarcely saw the leafless giants shivering in their nakedness, or the leaden clouds driving restlessly over the sky, or the dark sea moaning, plunging like a mighty thing tied down—a power compelled by a higher power to miserable inaction; yet these things were with and around her; they helped to call that deep look into her eyes, to cause the impatient sigh that escaped her now and then. Inside, there was nothing to disturb her meditation. In the room and in the house was an utter stillness. It was the stillness of watchers engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with man's last and darkest foe. For that struggle had been going on in the little house during three or four long days and nights, and now, at last, a lull had come. The patient slept.
Poor Adèle! It could scarcely be matter for wonder that her cheek looked pale and her blue eyes deep, that impatient sighs broke from her, that she was ready to sympathize with the gray desolation of a winter night. For Adèle had been passing through a time of anxiety such as she had never before experienced.
Margaret dying, Arthur gone—no word, no line to let them know the fate of the wanderers—no possibility of being able to give the sufferer the news for which her soul was craving—nothing in all the here and hereafter but vague uncertainty, but cruel delay.
And Adèle, in the bitterness of her spirit, had begun to doubt about everything. It had been so hard to watch the patient sufferer, to know that in any moment she might be the prey of death—that the pure, noble life, worn away by sorrow, might pass into the invisible without one gleam of light to cheer it on its progress; it had been so hard to listen in the sombre light of the sick room to the passionate ravings of the faithful wife, and to realize the utter impossibility of bringing her that for want of which her life was waning.
These things preyed upon Adèle's mind. In the darkness and solitude, in the suspension of immediate anxiety, her heart sank, her spirit began with itself humanity's dreary questioning.
Everywhere, everywhere—in the angry cries of the young child, in the quiet sorrow of those of riper years, in the patient sadness of the aged, in the pallor of young faces—it can be read—the why that rises evermore to Heaven, the great mystery of human woe. Shall it be answered one day? Ah, who can doubt it? Else were we wretched beyond compare.