“I feel so unusually depressed and aged, this afternoon,” he went on, slowly, laying down his fruitless pen, and gazing with sad eyes out of the window, “even my ordinary lucidity of brain seems clouding and thickening. It cannot be that I have already reached the ultimatum, and that the period of decadence is now upon me—that cannot surely be! Only just forty-seven,” he cried softly, and his face sank down in his hands on the study table.
He raised it again, and went over to his cabinet and touched his heaps of manuscript one by one with loving lingering tenderness, but a little shakily.
“This but just begun!” he murmured; “this but just wanting the verification of an experiment or two; these, notes for a new work, the most comprehensive, the most exact we have yet made—ah! this book would have been very close up to the truth, nearer to it than anything yet produced.—She looked with such keen, such very youthful pleasure to the lighter task of compilation; that youthfulness in her intellectual pleasures is a very precious gift of my wife.
“Here is a little satirical skit she wrote in a playful moment, how charming it is, how delicate! Ah, my sweet young wife! More notes—more—and so few worked out to their final conclusion! Must I then take these symptoms as those of untimely decay,” he whispered sitting down again, “I, who looked to long years of honest labour in which I might have forged on farther than my fellows, and have erected some fresh finger-posts on the road to everlasting truth? To stop now, when the world is crying and wailing in the darkness of its ignorance, when men grasp any scrap of verified knowledge as a drowning man a straw, and must I be swept down the hill before I have breasted the crest? Must I sink to oblivion with my work but just begun, and with the heat of battle strong upon me—and she—my wife, my own, my helpmeet——Do none of these things strike and touch her, does this overmastering strange tumult of new emotions shut her heart to the awful beauty of truth?
“It is strange,” he repeated, “strange, and very sad. The swift-running smooth course of life has been paralyzed for me, I am oppressed with torturing doubts, and—and—I believe it is not age, it is not the years which have stunned my powers, I believe it is this new phase of her life; then comes the consideration: is this a passing phase, or is it permanent? I cannot face the question!” he cried with a groan, holding his head in both hands to steady it.
Then he took his hat and stick, and made mechanically for the Rectory.
She always came from that direction, and always sadder than when she went forth.
But to-day she was different. When she saw her husband she did not keep to her ordinary soft listless movements, and then when she reached him, slip her hand into his mechanically from mere reflex action, and strike out eagerly into an infant anecdote.
She started and flushed, and ran towards him with outstretched hands, and looked wistfully up in his face, and her mouth trembled as, for the first time, the great change in the man flashed itself into her, and her heart stood still and her brain reeled.
“Henry!” she cried, “My Henry, you are tired!”