“Let it be so!” he said. “Be my sister-friend, Lufa. Leave it only to me to remember how foolish I once made myself in your beautiful eyes—how miserable always in my own blind heart.”
So little of a man was our poet, that out of pure disappointment and self-pity he burst into a passion of weeping. The world seemed lost to him, as it seemed at such a time to many a better man. But to the true the truth of things will sooner or later assert itself, and neither this world nor the next prove lost to him. A man’s well-being does not depend on any woman. The woman did not create, and could not have contented him. No woman can ruin a man by refusing him, or even by accepting him, though she may go far toward it. There is one who has upon him a perfect claim, at the entrancing recognition of which he will one day cry out, “This, then, is what it all meant!” The lamp of poetry may for a time go out in the heart of the poet, and nature seem a blank; but where the truth is, the poetry must be; and truth is, however the untrue may fail to see it. Surely that man is a fool who, on the ground that there can not be such a God as other fools assert, or such a God as alone he is able to imagine, says there is no God!
Lufa’s bosom heaved, and she gave a little sob; her sentiment, the skin of her heart, was touched, for the thing was pathetic! A mist came over her eyes, and might, had she ever wept, have turned to tears.
Walter sat with his head in his hands and wept. She had never before seen a man weep, yet never a tear left its heavenly spring to flow from her eyes! She rose, took his face between her hands, raised it, and kissed him on the forehead.
He rose also, suddenly calmed.
“Then it was our last ride, Lufa!” he said, and left the summer-house.
CHAPTER XXIII. THE PARK.
Walter did not know where he was going when he turned from Lufa. It was solitude he sought, without being aware that he sought anything. Must it not be a deep spiritual instinct that drives trouble into solitude? There are times when only the highest can comfort even the lowest, and solitude is the ante-chamber to his presence. With him is the only possibility of essential comfort, the comfort that turns an evil into a good. But it was certainly not knowledge of this that drove Walter into the wide, lonely park. “Away from men!” moans the wounded life. Away from the herd flies the wounded deer; away from the flock staggers the sickly sheep—to the solitary covert to die. The man too thinks it is to die; but it is in truth so to return to life—if indeed he be a man, and not an abortion that can console himself with vile consolations. “You can not soothe me, my friends! leave me to my misery,” cries the man; and lo his misery is the wind of the waving garments of him that walks in the garden in the cool of the day! All misery is God unknown.
Hurt and bleeding Walter wandered away. His life was palled with a sudden hail-cloud which hung low, and blotted out color and light and loveliness. It was the afternoon; the sun was fast going down; the dreary north wind had begun again to blow, and the trees to moan in response; they seemed to say, “How sad thou art, wind of winter! see how sad thou makest us! we moan and shiver! each alone, we are sad!” The sorrow of nature was all about him; but the sighing of the wind-sifting trees around his head, and the hardening of the earth about the ancient roots under his feet, was better than the glow of the bright drawing-room, with its lamps and blazing fires, its warm colors and caressing softnesses. Who would take joy in paradise with hell in his heart! Let him stay out in the night with the suffering, groaning trees, with the clouds that have swallowed the moon and the stars, with the frost and the silent gathering of the companies, troops, and battalions of snow!