“I feel it so, at least,” answered Redclyffe, “and I assure you life has a new value for me since I came to this place; for I have a deeper hold upon it, as it were,—more hope from it, more trust in something good to come of it.”
“This is a good change,—or should be so,” quoth the old man.
“Do you know,” continued Redclyffe, “how long you have been a figure in my life?”
“I know it,” said Colcord, “though you might well have forgotten it.”
“Not so,” said Redclyffe. “I remember, as if it were this morning, that time in New England when I first saw you.”
“The man with whom you then abode,” said Colcord, “knew who I was.”
“And he being dead, and finding you here now, by such a strange coincidence,” said Redclyffe, “and being myself a man capable of taking your counsel, I would have you impart it to me: for I assure you that the current of my life runs darkly on, and I would be glad of any light on its future, or even its present phase.”
“I am not one of those from whom the world waits for counsel,” said the pensioner, “and I know not that mine would be advantageous to you, in the light which men usually prize. Yet if I were to give any, it would be that you should be gone hence.”
“Gone hence!” repeated Redclyffe, surprised. “I tell you—what I have hardly hitherto told to myself—that all my dreams, all my wishes hitherto, have looked forward to precisely the juncture that seems now to be approaching. My dreaming childhood dreamt of this. If you know anything of me, you know how I sprung out of mystery, akin to none, a thing concocted out of the elements, without visible agency; how all through my boyhood I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet continually longing for one,—longing to be connected with somebody, and never feeling myself so. Yet there was ever a looking forward to this time at which I now find myself. If my next step were death, yet while the path seemed to lead toward a certainty of establishing me in connection with my race, I would take it. I have tried to keep down this yearning, to stifle it, annihilate it, by making a position for myself, by being my own fact; but I cannot overcome the natural horror of being a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing; ever this feeling that there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, of a being so unconnected. There is not even a grave, not a heap of dry bones, not a pinch of dust, with which I can claim kindred, unless I find it here!”
“This is sad,” said the old man,—“this strong yearning, and nothing to gratify it. Yet, I warn you, do not seek its gratification here. There are delusions, snares, pitfalls, in this life. I warn you, quit the search.”