The girl pressed his hand silently in hers. After a while he went on still more solemnly: “Some time,” he said, “I meant to talk to you about just that, dearest, to tell you how stern and how watchful we ought to be. It is very sad to me to see what happens when the great and fearful realities of life disclose themselves to good and kind people who have been living without any thought of such things. I feel that it is very wrong to live so, that if we wished to be right we would hold the high truths before us, no matter how much labor it cost.”
“What truths do you mean?” asked Helen earnestly; and he answered her: “For one, the very fearful fact of which I have just been talking—that you and I are two bubbles that meet for an instant upon the whirling stream of time. Suppose, sweetheart, that I were to tell you that I do not think you and I would be living our lives truly, until we were quite sure that we could bear to be parted forever without losing our faith in God's righteousness?”
Helen turned quite white, and clutched the other's hands in hers; she had not once thought of actually applying what he had said to her. “David! David!” she cried, “No!”
The man smiled gently as he brushed back the hair from her forehead and gazed into her eyes. “And when you asked for sternness, dear,” he said, “was it that you did not know what the word meant? Life is real, dear Helen, and the effort it demands is real effort.”
The girl did not half hear these last words; she was still staring at her husband. “Listen to me, David,” she said at last, still holding his hand tightly in hers, her voice almost a whisper; “I could bear anything for you, David, I know that I could bear anything; I could really die for you, I say that with all my soul,—that was what I was thinking of when you spoke of death. But David, if you were to be taken from me,—if you were to be taken from me—” and she stopped, unable to find a word more.
“Perhaps it will be just as well not to tell me, dear heart,” he said to her, gently.
“David,” she went on more strenuously yet, “listen to me—you must not ever ask me to think of that! Do you hear me? For, oh, it cannot be true, it cannot be true, David, that you could be taken from me forever! What would I have left to live for?”
“Would you not have the great wonderful God?” asked the other gently—“the God who made me and all that was lovable in me, and made you, and would demand that you worship him?” But Helen only shook her head once more and answered, “It could not be true, David,—no, no!” Then she added in a faint voice, “What would be the use of my having lived?”
The man bent forward and kissed her again, and kissed away a little of the frightened, anxious look upon her face. “My dear,” he said with a gentle smile, “perhaps I was wrong to trouble you with such fearful things after all. Let me tell you instead a thought that once came to my mind, and that has stayed there as the one I should like to call the most beautiful of all my life; it may help to answer that question of yours about the use of having lived. Men love life so much, Helen dear, that they cannot ever have enough of it, and to keep it and build it up they make what we call the arts; this thought of mine is about one of them, about music, the art that you and I love most. For all the others have been derived from things external, but music was made out of nothing, and exists but for its one great purpose, and therefore is the most spiritual of all of them. I like to say that it is time made beautiful, and so a shadow picture of the soul; it is this, because it can picture different degrees of speed and of power, because it can breathe and throb, can sweep and soar, can yearn and pray,—because, in short, everything that happens in the heart can happen in music, so that we may lose ourselves in it and actually live its life, or so that a great genius can not merely tell us about himself, but can make all the best hours of his soul actually a part of our own. This thought that I said was beautiful came to me from noticing how perfectly the art was one with that which it represented; so that we may say not only that music is life, but that life is music. Music exists because it is beautiful, dear Helen, and because it brings an instant of the joy of beauty to our hearts, and for no other reason whatever; it may be music of happiness or of sorrow, of achievement or only of hope, but so long as it is beautiful it is right, and it makes no difference, either, that it cost much labor of men, or that when it is gone it is gone forever. And dearest, suppose that the music not only was beautiful, but knew that it was beautiful; that it was not only the motion of the air, but also the joy of our hearts; might it not then be its own excuse, just one strain of it that rose in the darkness, and quivered and died away again forever?”
When David had spoken thus he stopped and sat still for a while, gazing at his wife; then seeing the anxious look still in possession of her face, he rose suddenly by way of ending their talk. “Dearest,” he said, smiling, “it is wrong of me, perhaps, to worry you about such very fearful things as those; let us go in, and find something to do that is useful, and not trouble ourselves with them any more.”