And, with that thought of me in her great loving heart, with that blessed reliance in her Saviour’s promise, and with a smile of ecstatic bliss on her lips, she “fell asleep”—without my seeing her, O my God!
Perhaps, on recollecting many of the incidents of my story, and calling to mind the tone and manner in which I have described them, you may have thought me then merry and light-hearted, where now I am moody and sombre?
True; but, life is made up of grave and gay.
It is hackneyed to say that “the clown that grins before the audience, who laugh with and at the merryandrew and his antics, is frequently weeping behind his mask;” yet, it is often the case.
Life is hysterical and spasmodic.
Many of us, believed by surface-studying people to be the gayest of the gay, have in reality a dull, rending pain gnawing us inwardly the while—like as the fox was gnawing the Spartan boy’s entrails; and, like him again, we are too proud—for what is courage but pride?—to speak of our suffering. We do not “wear our hearts” on our sleeve “for daws to peck at!”
The “consolation of religion,” you suggest?
Bah! How can I be consoled, when I have been bereft of all that made existence dear, receiving nothing in return—nothing but doubt and uncertainty, and a despair unspeakable?
Could comfort accrue to me, when I wandered back along the pathway of memory, catching sunny glimpses of the rosy future which my imagination had marked out, and then comparing these with the dreary outlook that now was mine?
When I think of what might have been and now can never happen, I rave!