The Love That Prevailed

by Frank Frankfort Moore

“I myself have seen it more than once; 'tis not a marvel, though it has appeared on a day of marvels,” said Hartwell; and forthwith they entered the house.

They were both greatly exhausted, the fact being that before setting out for the preaching in the early morning they had taken no more than a glass of milk and a piece of bread, and during the seven hours that had elapsed they had tasted nothing, though the day had been a most exhausting one.

In a very few minutes the cold dinner, with the salad, which had been in readiness for their return, found them grateful; and after partaking of it Wesley retired to his room.

He threw himself upon a couch that stood under the window; a group of trees, though birch and not very bosky, grew so close to the window that they had made something of a shade to the room since morning, so that it was the coolest in the house. It was probably this sense of coolness that refreshed him so far as to place him within the power of sleep. He had thought it impossible when he entered the house that he should be able to find such a relief, exhausted as he had been. But now he had scarcely put his head on the pillow before he was asleep.

Several hours had passed before he opened his eyes again. He was conscious that a great change of some sort, that he could not at once define, had taken place. The room was in shadow where before it had been lighted by flecks of sunshine, but this was not the change which appealed to him with striking force; nor was it the sense of being refreshed, of which he was now aware. There was a curious silence in the world—the change had something to do with the silence. He felt as he had done in the parlour of Ruthallion Mill when he had been talking to the miller and the machinery had suddenly stopped for the breakfast hour. That was his half-awakened thought.

The next moment he was fully awake, and he knew what had happened: when he had fallen asleep the sound of the waves had been in his ears without cessation, and now the sea was silent.

He thought that he had never before been in such a silence. It seemed strange, mysterious, full of awful suggestions. It seemed to his vivid imagination that the world, which a short time before had been full of life, had suddenly swooned away. The hush was the hush of death. The silence was the silence of the tomb. “'Tis thus,” he thought, “that a man awakens after death—in a place of awful silences.”

And then he felt as if all the men in the world had been cut off in a moment, leaving him the only man alive.

It continued unbroken while he lay there. It became a nightmare silence—an awful palpable thing like a Sphinx—a blank dumbness—a benumbing of all Nature—a sealing up of all the world as in the hard bondage of an everlasting Winter.

He sprang from his couch unable to endure the silence any longer. He went to the window and looked out, expecting to see the flat unruffled surface of the channel, where the numberless waves had lately been, sparkling with intolerable, brilliance, and every wave sending its voice into the air to join the myriad-voiced chorus that the sea made.