"Unto a Land Not Inhabited."
He broke the silence:—
"I chose that for him: it is the truth: he has been sent away, bearing more than was his."
She looked at it a long time, and then bowed as if to set the seal of her judgment upon the seal of his judgment. And, moved by some pitiless instinct to look at things as they are,—the discipline of her years,—with a quiet resolute hand she lifted her veil away from her face. It was a face of that proud and self-ennobled beauty that anywhere in the world gives to the beholder of it a lesson in the sublimer elements of human character. There was no feature of reproach nor line nor shadow of bitterness, but the chastened peace of a nature that has learned to live upon itself, after having first cast itself passionately upon others; and that indestructible strength which rests not upon what life can give, but upon what life cannot take away: she stood revealed there as what in truth she was—heroic daughter of the greater vanished people.
She dropped her veil and turned away toward the carriage. He drew to her side and once—hesitatingly, desolately—he put his arm around her. She did not yield, she did not decline; she walked with him as though she walked alone. During all the barren bitter years she had not been upheld by his arm: her staff and her support had been her ideal of herself and of her people—after she had faced the ruined ideal of their lives together and her lost ideal of him. It was yet too soon for his arm—or it was too late altogether.
He withdrew it; and he continued to walk beside her as a man who has lost among women both her whom he had most wished to have and her whom he might most have had. And so they passed from the scene.
But throughout that long obscurity amid which we are appointed to pass our allotted years, it is not the order of nature that all stars within us should rise at once. There are some that are seen early, that move rapidly across our sky, and are beheld no more—youth's flaming planets, the influence of which upon us often leaves us doubting whether they were baneful or benign. There are other lights which come out to shine upon our paths and guide us later; and, thanks be to nature, until the very last new stars appear. Those who early have left them they love can never know what late radiance may illumine the end of their road. And only those who remain together to the end can greet the last splendid beacons that sometimes rise above the horizon before the dawn—the true morning stars of many a dark and troubled life.
They had half their lives before them: they were growing, unfolding characters; perhaps they were yet to find happiness together. She had loved him with a love too single and complete, and she loved him yet too well, to accept anything from him a second time less than everything. Happiness was in store for them perhaps—and more children.
The working out of this lay with them and their remaining days.