“No, I don’t know anything of the sort,” said the Major decisively. “The young women of the present day are all hussies—brazen-faced hussies, in my opinion. Girls don’t blush any more nowadays; men blush for them. No—you’re not going to get rid of me in that way, Letty. At my age I’m not going to be such a vain old ass as to go smirking after girls who would only laugh at me behind my back. I don’t believe in philandering, but I believe in love—yes, love at all ages and in all seasons—but it must be the real thing and no sham about it.” Here he stopped, for Boy was wriggling on his shoulder and showing unmistakable signs of wishing to go free; so he gently set him down. “There you are, little chap!—and there you go—straight for the roses and ‘Kiss-Letty’! Lucky rascal!” This as Boy trotted up to Miss Leslie and stretched his short arms caressingly round her soft lace skirts.
“Where’s booful pick-shures?” he demanded; “Boy likes pick-shures.”
Miss Leslie then bethought herself that she had promised he should see some ‘booful pick-shures’ when he came into the drawing-room, and turning towards a pile of éditions de luxe in large quarto of famous works such as “Don Quixote,” “Idylls of the King,” and Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” she hesitated.
“Which shall I give him, Dick?” she asked the Major.
“Put ’em all on the floor and let him choose for himself,” was the reply. “I believe in treating children like lambs and birds—let them frisk and fly about in the fields of general information as they like,—choose their own bits of grass as it were. Now here’s a quintessence of brain for you,”—and he lifted four large volumes off the side-table where they generally stood and placed them on the floor—“Come here, Boy! Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tennyson!—Never heard of ’em, did you? No!—but you will probably have the pleasure of making the acquaintance of all four of ’em in a few years. That’s where the wonderful immortality of genius comes in,—the dead author is spiritually able to shake hands with and talk to each and every generation which follows him. There is a wonderful secret in the power of expressed thought if we could only fathom it. Now, which one are you going for first?”
Boy sat down on the floor and considered. One or two of the big books he opened cautiously and looked in as though expecting to see some strange living object inside,—then he shut them quickly, smiling mysteriously to himself the while. Then in the same doubtful way he peeped into the second volume of Dante entitled “Paradiso”—and lo! a picture of angels ascending and descending—one of Doré’s most wonderful conceptions of forms of light portrayed in a dazzling atmosphere,—and his blue eyes sparkled—he opened the book wider and wider—till the whole page burst upon his view, whereupon he curled down closer still and stared silently. Miss Letty seated herself in a low chair, and took out some dainty embroidery, and while her swift needle went in and out with a bright-coloured silk behind it, which wove a flower as it moved, she watched the little fellow, and Major Desmond sitting opposite to her did the same. The bullfinch began a scrap of his ‘aria’ but broke off to preen his wing,—and there was a silence in the pretty room while Boy’s innocent little face drooped in a rapture over the pictured scene of heavenly glory. Not a word did he utter,—but merely drew a long breath like a sigh, and his eyes darkened with an expression of wistful gravity. Then he turned over a few more pages and came upon that most exquisite “Cross” of Doré’s imagination, where the dying Saviour of the world hangs crucified, but is surrounded at every point by angels. This seemed to fascinate him more than the other, and he remained absorbed for many minutes, enrapt and speechless. Some unaccountable influence held Miss Leslie and her old friend Dick Desmond silent too. The thoughts of both were very busy. The Major had a secret in his soul which, had he declared it, would have well-nigh killed Letitia Leslie,—he knew that the man she had loved, and whose memory she honoured with such faithful devotion, had been nothing but a heartless scamp, who in an unguarded moment had avowed to him, Major Desmond, that he was going to throw over Letty when he got back from India, as he was ‘on’ with a much prettier and wealthier woman; but he had never ‘got back from India’ to carry out his intention—death had seized him in the heyday of his career, and Letty believed he had died loving her, and her only. Who would have undeceived her? Who would have poisoned the faith of that simple trusting heart? Not Dick Desmond certainly; though he had himself loved her for nearly twenty years, and being of a steadfast nature had found it impossible to love any one else. And he was more content to have her as a friend than to have the most charming ‘other woman’ as a wife. And he had jogged on quietly till now—well, now he was fifty, and Letty was forty-five.
“We’re getting on—by Jove, yes!—we’re getting on!” mused Dick. “And just think what that dead rascal out in India has cost us! Our very lives! All sacrificed! Well, never mind!—I would not spoil Letty’s belief in her sweetheart for the world.”
And yet he could not help feeling it to be a trifle ‘hard,’ as he felt the charm of Letty’s quiet presence, and saw Boy bending over Doré’s picture of the “Cross.”
“If—if she would have had me, we might have had a child of our own like that,” he mused dolefully; “and as it is, the poor little chap has got a drunken beast for a father and a slovenly fool for a mother! Well, well—God arranges things in a queer way, and I must say, without irreverence, it doesn’t seem at all a clear or a just way to me. Why the innocent should suffer for the guilty (and they always do) is a mystery.”
Letty, meanwhile, was thinking too. Such sweet and holy thoughts!—thoughts of her dead lover,—her ‘brave, true Harry,’ as she was wont to call him in her own mind—a mind which was as white and pure as the ‘Taj-Mahal,’ and which enshrined this same ‘Harry’ in its midst as a heroic figure of stately splendour and godlike honour. No man was ever endowed by woman with more virtues than Letty gave to her dead betrothed, and her faith in him was so perfect that she had become content with her loneliness because she felt that it was only for a little while,—that soon she and her beloved would meet again never to part. Is it impossible to believe that the steadfast faith and love of a good woman may uplift the departed spirit of an unworthy man out of an uttermost Hell by its force and purity? Surely in these days, when we are discovering what marvellous properties there are in simple light, and the passing of sound through space, it would be foolish to deny the probability of noble Thought radiating to unmeasured distances, and affecting for good those who are gone from us, whom we loved on earth,—and whose present state and form of life we are not as yet permitted to behold. Anyway, whatever wonders lie hidden in waiting for us behind Death’s dark curtain, it may be conceded that the unfaithful soul of the man she loved was in no wise injured by Miss Letty’s remembering tenderness and prayers, but rather strengthened and sustained. She was touched just now by Boy’s admiration of the pictured angels,—and to her always thoughtful mind there was something quaint in the spectacle of the little wondering fellow bending over the abstruse Great Poem of Italy which arose to life and being through the poet’s own Great Wrong. Little did the enemies of Dante dream that their names would be committed to lasting execration in a Hell so immortal as the ‘Inferno,’—though it is to be deplored that so supreme a writer should have thought it worth his while to honour, by handing down to posterity, the names of those who were as nobodies compared with himself. However he, like other old-world poets, was not permitted to see his fate beyond his own lifetime. We are wiser in our generation. We know that the more an author’s work is publicly praised the more likely it is to die quickly and immediately,—and those who desire their thoughts to last, and to carry weight with future generations, should pray for the condemnation of their present compeers in order to be in tune with the slow but steady pulse-beat of Fame. One has only to look back through a few centuries to see the list of the Despised who are now become the Glorious—and a study of contemporary critics on the works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, is a very wholesome lesson to the untried writer of books who is afraid of the little acrimonies of Fleet Street. To lead the world one must first be crucified,—this is the chief lesson of practical Christianity.