"You can't live without hope, my dear man. It's so needful as the air you breathe."
"Yes, you can live without it; you can do your duty without it. I heard a laugh yesterday night—'twas myself. Nature made me laugh, because to be without hope is almost beyond reason, and anything outside reason makes us laugh."
William regarded him doubtfully.
"I thought to find you'd thrown over all these silly fancies," he said. "You must keep a hand on yourself, Jacob, now you've come through and are going to live. It's bad to laugh when there's nothing to laugh at. You mustn't do that. Emma Andrews laughed for three days; and she went down to the river and drowned herself on the fourth."
"I'm all right. Between ourselves, Billy, I had bats in the belfry for a time after my wife died. I know it now and I'm surprised that none marked it. After the trial came a great flash of light to my mind. From within it came and made all the past look dark—burned it to dust and cinders. Only the future mattered, and it wasn't the judge and jury showed me I had been wrong—it wasn't them at all. It was the flash of light. Then hope got hold on me like a giant and I hoped too much. That was my punishment—to hope too much and not see hope had died. But my sickness has drained the poison out of me, and though my frame is weak, my brain is clear. I see and I can put things together. I've come to a great thought—a shattering thing but true."
"A comforting thing then."
"No—truth is seldom comforting. But it puts firm ground under you and shows you where to stand and how to protect yourself against hope. I'm a well-educated man, William, and though I've fallen far below all that I was taught as a boy, I've risen again now. But life's too short for most of us to learn how to live it. Too short to get away from our feelings, or look at it all from outside. But I can now. I've reached to that. I can look at myself, and skin myself, and feel no more than if I was peeling a potato."
William began to be uneasy.
"Leave yourself alone. Have you seen your granddaughter yet?"
"No; but my heart goes out to her. Don't look fearful: I'm all right. I haven't done with my children, or their children. I'm human still. I can take stock of myself, thanks to my forgotten wisdom—lost when Margery died, and found again. A bit ago I was growing awful cold. I felt not unkindly to the world, you must know, but cold was creeping into me, body and soul. I didn't love as I used, nor hate as I used, nor care as I used. I didn't want to see what I couldn't see, nor do what I couldn't do. All was fading out in a cold mist. Then I had my great illness, and there was no more mist, and I began to link up again with the world. Nothing could have done it but that. And then I got the bird's-eye view denied to most of us, but reached by me through great trials.