She told me how He, in the first dawn of manhood, full of the dim consciousness of His own power, full of strange yearning presentiments about His own sad and glorious destiny, went up into the wilderness, as every youth, above all every genius, must, there to be tempted of the devil. She told how alone with the wild beasts, and the brute powers of nature, He saw into the open secret—the mystery of man's twofold life, His kingship over earth, His sonship under God: and conquered in the might of His knowledge. How He was tempted, like every genius, to use His creative powers for selfish ends—to yield to the lust of display and singularity, and break through those laws which He came to reveal and to fulfil—to do one little act of evil, that He might secure thereby the harvest of good which was the object of His life: and how He had conquered in the faith that He was the Son of God. She told me how He had borne the sorrows of genius; how the slightest pang that I had ever felt was but a dim faint pattern of His; how He, above all men, had felt the agony of calumny, misconception, misinterpretation; how He had fought with bigotry and stupidity, casting His pearls before swine, knowing full well what it was to speak to the deaf and the blind; how He had wept over Jerusalem, in the bitterness of disappointed patriotism, when He had tried in vain to awaken within a nation of slavish and yet rebellious bigots the consciousness of their glorious calling….
It was too much—I hid my face in the coverlet, and burst out into long, low, and yet most happy weeping. She rose and went to the window, and beckoned Katie from the room within.
"I am afraid," she said, "my conversation has been too much for him."
"Showers sweeten the air," said Katie; and truly enough, as my own lightened brain told me.
Eleanor—for so I must call her now—stood watching me for a few minutes, and then glided back to the bedside, and sat down again.
"You find the room quiet?"
"Wonderfully quiet. The roar of the city outside is almost soothing, and the noise of every carriage seems to cease suddenly just as it becomes painfully near."
"We have had straw laid down," she answered, "all along this part of the street."
This last drop of kindness filled the cup to overflowing: a veil fell from before my eyes—it was she who had been my friend, my guardian angel, from the beginning!
"You—you—idiot that I have been! I see it all now. It was you who laid that paper to catch my eye on that first evening at D * * *!—you paid my debt to my cousin!—you visited Mackaye in his last illness!"