“I never saw any one that I seemed to know so little and like so well. It was a disappointment in love, of course, and they all said that he died of a broken heart; but I think it was because his heart was too full, and wouldn’t break.
“And oh!—I forgot to tell you; a week after he was gone there was a notice in the paper that Claire Ledoux had died suddenly, on the last of August, at some place in Switzerland. Her father is still away travelling. And so the whole story is broken off and will never be finished. Will you look at the books?”
Nothing is more pathetic, to my mind, than to take up the books of one who is dead. Here is his name, with perhaps a note of the place where the volume was bought or read, and the marks on the pages that he liked best. Here are the passages that gave him pleasure, and the thoughts that entered into his life and formed it; they became part of him, but where has he carried them now?
Falconer’s little library was an unstudied choice, and gave a hint of his character. There was a New Testament in French, with his name written in a slender, woman’s hand; three or four volumes of stories, Cable’s “Old Creole Days,” Allen’s “Kentucky Cardinal,” Page’s “In Old Virginia,” and the like; “Henry Esmond” and Amiel’s “Journal” and Lamartine’s “Raphael”; and a few volumes of poetry, among them one of Sidney Lanier’s, and one of Tennyson’s earlier poems.
There was also a little morocco-bound book of manuscript notes. This I begged permission to carry away with me, hoping to find in it something which would throw light upon my picture, perhaps even some message to be carried, some hint or suggestion of something which the writer would fain have had done for him, and which I promised myself faithfully to perform, as a test of an imagined friendship—imagined not in the future, but in the impossible past.
I read the book in this spirit, searching its pages carefully, through the long afternoon, in the solitary cabin of my boat. There was nothing at first but an ordinary diary; a record of the work and self-denials of a poor student of art. Then came the date of his first visit to Larmone, and an expression of the pleasure of being with his own people again after a lonely life, and some chronicle of his occupations there, studies for pictures, and idle days that were summed up in a phrase: “On the bay,” or “In the woods.”
After this the regular succession of dates was broken, and there followed a few scraps of verse, irregular and unfinished, bound together by the thread of a name—“Claire among her Roses,” “A Ride through the Pines with Claire,” “An Old Song of Claire’s” “The Blue Flower in Claire’s Eyes.” It was not poetry, but such an unconscious tribute to the power and beauty of poetry as unfolds itself almost inevitably from youthful love, as naturally as the blossoms unfold from the apple trees in May. If you pick them they are worthless. They charm only in their own time and place.
A date told of his change from Larmone to the village, and this was written below it: “Too heavy a sense of obligation destroys freedom, and only a free man can dare to love.”
Then came a number of fragments indicating trouble of mind and hesitation; the sensitiveness of the artist, the delicate, self-tormenting scruples of the lonely idealist, the morbid pride of the young poor man, contending with an impetuous passion and forcing it to surrender, or at least to compromise.
“What right has a man to demand everything and offer nothing in return except an ambition and a hope? Love must come as a giver, not as a beggar.”