“I meant you should see me prove my love,” she said. “I am proud of myself for it,—proud of my heart that it can know and love this noblest and tenderest nature. Tell him so. Tell him it is not gratitude, but love. He will know that I could not stay. My life belongs to my father. Where he goes, I must go. What other friend has he than me? I go with my father, but here my heart remains. Tell him so. Please let me write to you. You will not forget your comrade. I owe more than life to you. Do let me keep myself in your memory. I dread my life before me. I will keep you informed of my father’s plans. And when this dearest one is well again, if he remembers me, tell him I love him, and that I parted from him—so.”
She bent again, and kissed him passionately,—then departed, and her tears were on his cheek.
CHAPTER XXV.
NOBLESSE OBLIGE
Brent’s stupor lasted many days. Life had been strained to its utmost. Body, brain, heart, all had had exhausting taxes to pay. The realm must rest.
While his mind slept, Nature was gently renewing him. Quiet is cure to an untainted life. There was no old fever of discontent in his brain. He had regrets, but no remorses. Others had harmed him; his life had been a sad one; he had never harmed himself. The thoughts and images tangled in his brain, the “stuff that dreams are made of,” were of happy omen. No Stygian fancies made his trance unrest. Life did not struggle for recovery that it might plunge again into base or foul pursuits, or the scuffles of selfishness. A man whose life is for others is safe from selfish disappointment when he is commanded to stand aside and be naught for a time.
I knew the images that hovered about my sleeping friend’s mind, for I knew the thoughts that were the comrades of his waking life. His memory was crowded full of sights and sounds of beauty, and those thoughts that are the emanations of fair visions and sweet tones, and dwell unuttered poetry in the soul. I knew how, long ago in childhood, he had made Nature friend, and found his earliest comrades among flowers and birds. I knew, for he had been my teacher, how, when youth first looked widely forth for visions of the Infinite, he had learned to comprehend, day after day, night after night, the large delight of heaven; whether the busy heaven, when the golden sun makes our sky blue above us, and reveals on earth the facts that we must deal with and by which we must be taught our laws, or the quiet heaven of night, with its starry tokens of grander fruition, when we shall live for grander days. Sky and clouds, sun and stars, brooks and rivers, forests and hills, waves and winds,—these had received him to their sweet companionship, as his mind could gradually grasp the larger conceptions of beauty. And so, when his time came to perceive the higher significance of Art, as man’s rudimentary efforts toward creations diviner and more orderly than those of earth, he had gone to Art with the unerring eye and interpreting love of a fresh soul, schooled by Nature only, blind to Art’s baser fancies, and hospitable to its holier dreams. No ugly visions could visit the uncontrolled hours of a brain so stored. His trance was peace.
More than peace; for as I watched his quiet face, I knew that his spirit was conscious of a spiritual presence, and Love was hovering over him, a healing element.
At last he waked. He threw volition into the scale of recovery. He was well in a trice.
Captain Ruby and Doctor Pathie were disposed to growl at the rapidity of Brent’s cure.