“My little one is gone and I am left lonely oh so lonely. I cannot but think that if you had loved me as you once did I should yet be clasping my little one to my bosom and you would have a daughter to comfort you after I am gone. I feel sure I cannot long survive this—ah there my hand has burst out bleeding again, but do not think I mind it, I know it was only an accident, you never meant to do it, though you teased me by refusing to say so—besides it is nothing. You might draw every drop of blood from my body and I would not care if only you would not make my heart bleed so. Oh, it is gone all over my paper and you will think I have done it to let you see how it bleeds—but I cannot write it all over again it is too great a labour and too painful to write, so you must see it just as it is. I dare not think where my baby is, for if I should be doomed never to see her because of the love I have borne to you and consented to be as you wished if I am cast out from God because I loved you more than him I shall never see you again—for to be where I could see you would never be punishment enough for my sins.”
Here the writing stopped: the bleeding of the hand had probably brought it to a close. The letter had never been folded, but lying there, had lain there. He looked if he could find a date; there was none. He held the sheet up to the light, and saw a paper mark; while close by lay another sheet with merely a date—in the same hand, as if the writer had been about to commence another in lieu of the letter spoiled.
“Strange!” thought Donal with himself; “an old withered grief looks almost as pitiful as an old withered joy!—But who is to say either is withered? Those who look upon death as an evil, yet regard it as the healer of sorrows! Is it such? No one can tell how long a grief may last unwithered! Surely till the life heals it! He is a coward who would be cured of his sorrow by mere lapse of time, by the mere forgetting of a brain that grows musty with age. It is God alone who can heal—the God of the dead and of the living! and the dead must find him, or be miserable for evermore!”
He had not a doubt that the letter he had read was in the writing of the mother of the present earl’s children.
What was he to do? He had thought he was looking into matters much older—things over which the permission of lady Arctura extended; and in truth what he had discovered, or seen corroborated, was a thing she had a right to know! but whether he ought to tell her at once he did not yet see. He took up his candle, and with a feeling of helpless dismay, withdrew to his chamber. But when he reached the door of it, yielding to a sudden impulse, he turned away, and went farther up the stair, and out upon the bartizan.
It was a frosty night, and the stars were brilliant. He looked up and said,
“Oh Saviour of men, thy house is vaulted with light; thy secret places are secret from excess of light; in thee is no darkness at all; thou hast no terrible crypts and built-up places; thy light is the terror of those who love the darkness! Fill my heart with thy light; let me never hunger or thirst after anything but thy will—that I may walk in the light, and light, not darkness, may go forth from me.”
As he turned to go in, came a faint chord from the aeolian harp.
“It sings, brooding over the very nest of evil deeds!” he thought. “The light eternal, with keen arrows of radiant victory, will yet at last rout from the souls of his creatures the demons that haunt them!
“But if there be creatures of God that have turned to demons, may not human souls themselves turn to demons? Would they then be victorious over God, too strong for him to overcome—beyond the reach of repentance?