The Long Night

by Stanley John Weyman

Why should she not leave her mother to her fate? A fate that could not be evaded? Why need she, whose capacity for suffering was so great, who had so much of life and love and all good things before her, remain to share the pains of one whose span in any case was nearing its end? Of one who had no longer power—or so it seemed—to meet the smallest shock, and must succumb before she knew more of suffering than the name. One whom a rude word might almost extinguish, and a rough push thrust out of life? Why remain, when to remain was to sacrifice two lives in lieu of one, to give and get nothing, to die for a prejudice? Why remain, when by remaining she could not save her mother, but, on the contrary, must inflict the sharpest pang of all, since she destroyed the being who was dearest to her mother, the being whom her mother would die to save?

He grew heated as he dwelt on it. Of what use to any, the feeble flickering light upstairs, that must go out were it left for a moment untended? The light that would have gone out this long time back had she not fostered it and cherished it and sheltered it in her bosom? Of what avail that weak existence? Or, if it were of avail, why, for its sake, waste this other and more precious life that still could not redeem it?

Why?

He must speak to her. He must persuade her, press her, convince her; carry her off by force were it necessary. It was his duty, his clear call. He rose and walked the room in excitement, as he thought of it. He had pity for the old, abandoned and left to suffer alone; and an enlightening glimpse of the weight that the girl must carry through life by reason of this desertion. But no doubt, no hesitation—he told himself—no scruple. To die that her mother might live was one thing. To die—and so to die—merely that her mother's last hours might be sheltered and comforted, was another, and a thing unreasonable.

He must speak to her. He would not hesitate to tell her what he thought.

But he did hesitate. When she descended half an hour later, and paused at the foot of the stairs to assure herself that her passage downstairs had not roused her mother from sleep, the light fell on her listening face and tender eyes; and he read that in them which checked the words on his lips; that which, whether it were folly or wisdom—a wisdom higher than the serpent's, more perfect than the most accurate calculation of values and chances—drove for ever from his mind the thought that she would desert her charge. He said not a word of what he had thought; the indignant reasoning, the hot, conclusive arguments fell from him and left him bare. With her hands in his, seeking no more to move her or convince her, he sat silent; and by mute looks and dumb love—more potent than eloquence or oratory—strove to support and console her.

She, too, was silent. Stillness had fallen on both of them. But her hands clung to his, and now and again pressed them convulsively; and now and again, too, she would lift her eyes to his, and gaze at him with a pathetic intentness, as if she would stamp his likeness on her brain. But when he returned the look, and tried to read her meaning in her eyes, she smiled. "You are afraid of me?" she whispered. "No, I shall not be weak again."

But even as she reassured him he detected a flicker of pain in her eyes, he felt that her hands were cold; and but that he feared to shake her composure he would not have rested content with her answer.

This sudden silence, this new way of looking at him, were the only things that perplexed him. In all else, silent as they sat, their communion was perfect. It was in the mind of each that the women might be arrested on the morrow; in the mind of each that this was their last evening together, the last of few, yet not so few that they did not seem to the man and the girl to bulk large in their lives. On that hearth they had met, there she had proved to him what she was, there he had spoken, there spent the clouded never-to-be-forgotten days of their troubled courtship. No wonder that as they sat hand in hand, their hair almost mingling, their eyes on the red glow of the smouldering log, and, not daring to look forward, looked back—no wonder that their love grew to be something other than the common love of man and maid, something higher and more beautiful, touched—as the hills are touched at sunset—by the evening glow of parting and self-sacrifice.

Silent amid the silence of the house; living moments never to be forgotten; welcoming together the twin companions, love and death.