“I see that you are beautiful, that you are here—with me. Ah, don't be unhappy! When we take into account our scanty time together”—he grew pale at the thought—“and the danger we have just missed of losing each other, perhaps for ever——“ She caught his hand for a second and he kept it.
“What is to be done?” she asked, after an agitated silence. “What will people say? Not that I can think of anything to do.”
“Darling, I know I have asked you to make an impossible sacrifice—to break off a most brilliant marriage, to marry me and share the despair, hardships, tortures of a life very different to any you have seen. Well has Goethe said—
‘Love not the sun too much, nor yet the stars,
Come, follow me to the realms of night.’
This is what I offer you, dearest. You can hardly realise what a wretched, desolate existence mine has been. Resignation is a miserable refuge. They say work gives one contentment, but unless one is servile and gives in to the spirit of the age, it is rarely understood till one is dead. And so the discouragement is perpetual. Even your sympathy would pain me at such times. I feel then—as I feel now—that I will grasp Fate by the throat; it shall not utterly crush me.”
“But,” said Agnes, a little frightened at this outburst, “do you never think of God and His Will?”
He returned her anxious glance with gloomy, almost compassionate amazement.
“Does God think of me?” he asked. “Really, I cannot feel that the salvation of my soul is so important. Indeed, any idea of immortality is awful How could it ever be a consolation—except to a smug, very self-satisfied egoism? Call it the burden—or the cross of immortality—if you call it anything. I wish it could be proved that we end when we die. But physicians dissect dead bodies to find the soul. It would not be a soul if they could find it in the dead. And imagine one becoming penitent when the day of grace is over!”
“I keep Clement's words before me, ‘The Lord who died for us is not our enemy.’ Surely that is a splendid thought against final despair.”