"Remember, then, when next you are called upon to make choice, be it in never so trifling a matter, between good and evil, between obeying conscience or disobeying her, that you are choosing in that moment between hell and between heaven, not for to-day, this week, or to-morrow, but for eternity!"
CHAPTER X.
A LOVE STORY IN HELL.
"And shall my sense pierce love,—the last relay
And ultimate outpost of eternity?"—D.G. Rossetti.
Some years ago, a near relative of mine, the editor of a certain paper, was taken seriously ill, and was told by the doctors that complete rest was absolutely necessary for his recovery. As I had frequently assisted him in the preparation of "copy," and was acquainted with the routine of his office, it was arranged that I should attend on certain days in each week, and be answerable for the work during his absence. The journal was one which was made up largely of extracts from other papers, and my duties consisted less in the selection of original matter, than in the more prosaic plying of paste-brush and scissors; but the number of manuscripts received was large, and for a week or two at least I tried conscientiously to give each separate packet something like a fair consideration. I remember that the very first manuscript on which I was called to pronounce judgment was one entitled, "The Strange Confessions of a Bachelor." It is too lengthy to be printed here in full, but as the love-story from which my chapter takes its heading was largely attributable to the publication of this manuscript, I have transcribed some paragraphs from it, which I think will serve to give the reader a general idea of its tone.
The Strange Confessions of a Bachelor.
"Yes, I am in love, although as yet I could not tell what the name of my love is or will be. But in every inspired poem or perfect picture, in the soaring and sobbing of music, in sunrise and sunset, or in the sighing of the wind upon my cheek, there is something which speaks to me of her, and which beckons my spirit forth in search of her, as if by the leading of an unseen hand. And sometimes, but only in my dreaming, musing moments, my thoughts, as they wander forth into the blue expanse around me, take colour and shape, and I see her standing by a tiny cot in a cosy room where the warm firelight flickers on walls gay with pictures. I see her bend with eyes that brim with tears of blessing to fold two dimpled hands together, and to listen to a baby voice which whispers after hers the hallowed words to 'Our Father in Heaven.' And as the little voice dies away into the holy hush of the last Amen, and the little lids droop like the petals of a primrose over the tired eyes, my dream-picture changes again, and I am rambling among the walks I love so well, but no longer alone, no longer wrapt in melancholy musing for—now trudging cheerily along with hand clasped fast in mine and face upturned to listen, now darting bird-like aside in search of fly or flower—there journeys ever with me my little son and hers. We wander merrily through that sunny stretch of meadow—the children's meadow, as we call it—where the grass grows lush and long, and where the blithe day through the skylark ever sings and soars; we cross the stile and enter the shady shelter of the 'Lover's Lane,' dark, as it always is, with the dense green of overarching ash and hazel, and then we reach that sunny, wind-swept and sloping hillside, where he and I love to linger, watching the slow sailing of stately clouds above, or listening to the tinkle and purl of the brooklet which ripples over the pebbles in the valley far below. In the joyous wonder of the child heart beside me at all that is beautiful in this beautiful world, I forget the books and the making of books with which my brain is busied; and when the first flush of rapture is over and the little brain has sobered into calm, I tell my boy of the Brother-Lord who loves him, and who was once such a little child as he, and of the dear Lord-Father by whom all that is beautiful was made."
The writer of the "Confessions" then goes on to speak of love, and of the woman he loves; but as his concluding paragraph will sufficiently serve to give an idea of his thoughts on the subject, it is hardly necessary to quote the passage in full. "Yes, I love her, I love her truly, and she too loves me, or will. It is not blind love, or foolish idolatry. She knows all my faults—the pitiful paltriness of my life, the selfish acts and foolish words, the vanity and the vice—she knows them all, and yet she loves me, me, not them, but the true me which these faults cannot altogether conceal from her, for she knows that they are not my life, but the trouble of it. So also is my love for her. I love her not only for her present self, but for the sake of the self she is seeking to be—the self which in some measure indeed she now is; for that which in our truer moments we have striven to be; the Ideal upon which our eyes are ever fixed, to which (no matter how sorely we may have sinned against it in the struggle of the day) our thoughts return at night with but the more unutterable if despairing longing and love—that in some manner we are, and shall be, notwithstanding our ever-recurrent failure and sin.