Young Lives

by Richard Le Gallienne

Later in the day, Henry came again and sat long by the dead man's side. It seemed uncompanionable to have grown thus suddenly afraid of him, to leave him thus alone in that still room. And as he sat and watched him, he gave to his memory a solemn service of faithful thought. Thus it was he went over again the words in which Gerard had made him the depository, the legatee, of his most sacred possession.

Gerard had evidently had some presentiment of his approaching end.

"I am going," he had said, "to place the greatest confidence in you one man can place in another, pay you the greatest compliment. I shall die some day, and something tells me that that divine event is not very far off. Now I have no one in the world who cares an old 'J' pen for me, and a new one is perhaps about as much as I care for any one--with one exception, and that is a woman whom I shall never see again. She is not dead, but has been worse than dead for me these ten years. I am optimist enough to believe that her old love for me still survives, making sweet the secret places of her soul. Never once in all these years to have doubted her love has been more than most marriages; but were I to live for another ten years, and still another, I would believe in it still. But the stars were against us. We met too late. We met when she had long been engaged to a friend of her youth, a man noble and true, to whom she owed much, and whom she felt it a kind of murder to desert. It was one of those fallacious chivalries of feeling which are the danger of sensitive and imaginative minds. Religion strengthened it, as it is so apt to strengthen any form of self-destruction, short of technical suicide. There was but a month to their marriage when we met. For us it was a month of rapture and agonies, of heaven shot through with hell. I saw further than she. I begged her at least to wait a year; but the force of my appeal was weakened by scruples similar to her own. To rob another of his happiness is an act from which we may well shrink, though we can clearly see that the happiness was really destined for us, and can never be his in any like degree. During this time I had received from her many letters, letters such as a woman only writes in the May-morning of her passion; and one day I received the last. There was in it one sentence which when I read it I think my heart broke, 'Do you believe,' it ran, 'in a love that can lie asleep, as in a trance, in this world, to awaken again in another, a love that during centuries of silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand years? If you do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give you. I must love you no more in this world.'

"Each morning as I have risen, and each night as I have turned to sleep, those words have repeated themselves again and again in my heart, for ten years. It was so I became the Ashton Gerard you know to-day. Since that day, we have never met or written to each other. All I know is that she is still alive, and still with him, and never would I disturb their peace. When I die, I would not have her know it. If love is immortal, we shall meet again--when I am worthier to meet her. Such reunions are either mere dreams, or they are realities to which the strongest forces of the universe are pledged."

Henry's only comment had been to grip Gerard's hand, and give him the sympathy of silence.

"Now," said Gerard, once more after a while, "it is about those letters I want to speak to you. They are here," and he unlocked a drawer and drew from it a little silver box. "I always keep them here. The key of the drawer is on this ring, and this little gold key is the key of the box itself. I tell you this, because I have what you may regard as a strange request to make.

"I suppose most men would consider it their duty either to burn these letters, or leave instructions for them to be buried with them. That is a gruesome form of sentiment in which I have too much imagination to indulge. Both my ideas of duty and sentiment take a different form. The surname of the writer of these letters is nowhere revealed in them, nor are there any references in them by which she could ever be identified. Therefore the menace to her fair fame in their preservation is not a question involved. Now when the simplest woman is in love, she writes wonderfully; but when a woman of imagination and intellect is caught by the fire of passion, she becomes a poet. Once in her life, every such woman is an artist; once, for some one man's unworthy sake, she becomes inspired, and out of the fulness of her heart writes him letters warm and real as the love-cries of Sappho. Such are the letters in this little box. They are the classic of a month's passion, written as no man has ever yet been able to write his love. Do you think it strange then that I should shrink from destroying them? I would as soon burn the songs of Shelley. They are living things. Shall I selfishly bury the beating heart of them in the silence of the grave?

"So, Mesurier," he continued, affectionately, "when I met you and understood something of your nature, I thought that in you I had found one who was worthy to guard this treasure for me, and perhaps pass it on again to some other chosen spirit--so that these beautiful words of a noble woman's heart shall not die--for when a man loves a woman, Mesurier, as you yourself must know, he is insatiable to hear her praise, and it is agony for him to think that her memory may suffer extinction. Therefore, Mesurier,--Henry, let me call you,--I want to give the memory of my love into your hands. I want you to love it for me, when perhaps I can love it no more. I want you sometimes to open this box, and read in these letters, as if they were your own; I want you sometimes to speak softly the name of 'Helen,' when my lips can speak it no more."

Such was the beautiful legacy of which Henry found himself the possessor by Gerard's death. Early on that day he had remembered his promise to his dead friend, and had found the silver box, and locked it away among his own most sacred things. Some day, in an hour and place upon which none might break, he would open the little box and read Helen's letters, as Gerard had wished. Already one sentence was fixed unforgettably upon his mind, and he said it over softly to himself as he sat by Gerard's silent bed: "Do you believe in a love that can lie asleep, as in a trance in this world, to awaken again in another,--a love that during centuries of silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand years? If you do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give you; I must love you no more in this world."

Strange dreams of the indomitable dust! Already another man's love was growing dear to him. Already his soul said the name of "Helen" softly for Gerard's sake.