“Then what ought I to do? To submit to them, and to wear out my heart?”
“No,” he replied. “Rather, arm yourself with resolution, and patiently, but firmly, pursue your way.” With that he embraced her tenderly. “You and I are not Titans; it is not for us to join the Manfreds and the Fausts of this world in going out to do battle with rebellious problems. Rather, let us decline the challenge of such difficulties, bow our heads, and quietly live through the juncture until such time as life shall have come to smile again, and happiness be once more ours.”
“But suppose they decline to pass us by? Will not our doubts and fears continue to increase?”
“No; for we shall accept them as a new verse in life’s poem. In this case, however, there is no fear of that. Your trouble is not peculiar to you alone; it is an infectious malady common to all humanity, of which a touch has visited you with the rest. Invariably does a human being feel lost when he or she first breaks away from life and finds no support in place of it. May God send that in the present instance this mood of yours be what I believe it to be, and not a forerunner of some bodily illness. That would be worse, for it would be the one thing before which I should be nerveless and destitute of weapons. Surely that cloud, that depression, those doubts, those self-questionings of yours, are not going to deprive us of our happiness, of our———?” before he could do so, she had flung herself upon him in a frantic embrace.
“Nothing shall ever do that!” she murmured in an access of renewed joy and confidence. “No, neither doubts nor sorrow nor sickness! No, nor yet—nor yet death itself!” Never had she seemed to love him as she did at that moment.
“Take care that Fate does not overhear what you have whispered,” he interposed with a superstitious caution born of tender forethought for her. “Yes, take care that it does not rate you ungrateful, for it likes to have its gifts appreciated at their true worth. Hitherto you have been learning only about life: now you are going also to experience it. Soon, as life pursues its course, there will come to you fresh sorrows and travail; and, together, they will force you to look beyond the questions of which you have spoken, and therefore you must husband your strength.”
Schtoitz uttered these words softly, and almost as though he were speaking to himself. And in the words was a note of despondency which seemed to say that already he could see approaching her “sorrows” and “travail.”
She said nothing—she was too deeply struck with the mournful foreboding in his tone. Yet she trusted him implicitly—his voice alone inspired in her belief; and for that very reason his gravity affected her deeply, and concentrated her thoughts upon herself. Leaning upon him, she paced the avenue slowly and mechanically, with her soul awed to a silence which she could not break. Following her husband’s eyes, she was gazing forward at the vista of life, and trying to discern the point where, according to his words, “sorrows and travail” were awaiting her. And as she did so she saw arise before her a vision in which there became revealed to her a sphere of life that was no longer to be bright and leisured and protected, that was no longer to be passed amid plenty, that was no longer to be spent alone with him. In that sphere she could descry only a long sequence of losses and privations, with copious tears, strict asceticism, involuntary, renunciation of whims born of hours of ease, and new and unwonted sensations which should call forth from her cries of pain and disappointment. Yes, in that vision she saw before her only sickness, material ruin, the loss of her husband, and...
Shuddering and faltering, she, with a man’s courageous curiosity, continued to gaze at this unfamiliar presentment of life, and timidly to review and to estimate her ability to cope with it. Only love, she saw, would never fail her—only love would over this new existence keep ever-faithful watch and ward. Yet it would be love of a different kind. From it there would be absent all ardent sighs and shining days and rapturous nights; as the years went on such things would come to seem children’s sport compared with the non-intimate affection which life, now grown profound and menacing, would cause her to adopt for her guide. From that life came to her ears no sound of laughter and kisses and tremulous, soulful intercourse amid groves and flowers, while life and nature kept high holiday. No, such things were “withered and gone.” The love beheld in that vision was a love which, unfading and indestructible, expressed itself on the features of husband and wife only during seasons of mutual sorrow, and shone forth only in slow, silent glances of mutual sympathy, and voiced itself only in a constant, joint endurance of the trials of life as he and she restrained the tears, and choked back the sobs, which those trials called forth. With that there came stealing into the midst of the doubts and fears which beset her other visions—visions remote but clear, inspiring but definite....