“No, not alone,” retorted Clide; “you have a daughter, who must be a great delight to you.”
“Ah! you are right. I was ungrateful to say alone; but you can understand that that other solitude can never be filled up. That is to say,” he added, looking up with a brightening expression in his keen eyes, that sparkled under projecting brows, made more prominent by bushy black eyebrows, “not at my age; at yours it is different. When sorrow comes to a man at the close of his half-century, it is too late to plant again; he cannot begin life anew. There is no future for him but courage and resignation. But at your age everything is a beginning. While we are young, no matter how dark the sky is, the future looks bright; to-morrow is always full of hope and glad surprises when we are young.”
“I don’t feel as if I were young,” said Clide; “it seems to me as if I had outlived my youth. You know there are experiences that do the work of years quite as well as time; that make us old prematurely?”
“I know it, I can believe it,” replied Raymond; “but nevertheless the spring of youth remains. It only wants the help of time to heal its wounds and restore its power of working and enjoying.”
The young man shook his head incredulously.
“You don’t believe it yet; but you will find it out by-and-by,” insisted Raymond; “that is, if you wish it and strive for it. We are most of us asleep until sorrow wakes us up and stings us into activity; then we begin to live really, and to work.”
“Then I’m afraid I have been awakened to no purpose,” remarked Clide rather bitterly. “I certainly have not begun to work.”
“Perhaps unawares you have all this time been preparing yourself for work—for some appointed task that you would never have been fitted for without the experiences of the last years.”
“Well, perhaps you are right,” assented his companion. They walked on through the flower-beds for a few moments without speaking. Then Raymond broke the silence: “Why should you go away again, wandering about the Continent, and indulging in morbid memories, when you have such a noble mission before you at home! Youth, intelligence, and a splendid patrimony—what a field of usefulness lies before you! Is it permitted to leave any field untilled when the laborers are so few?” The same thought had occurred to Clide during the last twenty-four hours with a persistency that he was not very earnest in repelling. “Indulging in morbid memories!” That was what his step-mother was now constantly reproaching him with. He resented it from her; but Raymond did not excite his resentment. It was too much as if a father were expostulating with his son. The paternal tone of the remonstrance called, moreover, for fuller confidence on his part, and, yielding to the fascination of the sympathy that was drawing him on and on, he resolved there and then to give it. He told M. de la Bourbonais the history of his life from the beginning: his loveless childhood, his boyhood, starved of all spiritual food, his youth’s wild passion, the loneliness of his later years, and his present dissatisfied longings. He laid bare all that inner life he had never unfolded to any human being before. It was a touching and desolate picture enough, and one that called out Raymond’s tenderest interest and compassion. He listened to the story with that breathless, undivided attention that made Sir Simon so delight in him as a listener; answering by an inarticulate exclamation now and then, interrupting here and there to put in a question that showed how closely he was following every turn in the narrative, and how fully and completely he understood and entered into every phase of feeling the speaker described. When Clide had finished, he seemed to understand himself better than he had ever done before. Every question of the listener seemed to throw a new and stronger light on what he was telling him; it was like a key opening unexpected mysteries in the past and in his own mind, showing him how from the very starting his whole theory of life had been a mistake. Life was now for the first time put under the laws of truth, and through that transparent medium every act and circumstance showed altogether differently; hidden meanings came out of what had hitherto been mere blots, what he had called accidents and mischances; every detail had a form and color of its own, and fitted into the whole like the broken pieces of a puzzle. He had been learning and training all the time while he fancied he was only suffering; he had unawares been drinking in that moral strength that is only to be gained in wrestling with sorrow. The revelation was startling; but Clide frankly acknowledged it, and in so doing felt that he was tacitly committing himself to the new line of conduct which must logically follow on this admission, if it was worth anything. There must be an end of sentimental regrets and morbid despondings. He must, as Raymond said, begin to practise the lesson he had paid so dear to learn; he must begin to live and to work; he must, by faithfulness and courage in the future, atone for the folly and selfishness of the past.
It may appear strange, perhaps incredible, that a mere passing contact with a stranger should have so suddenly revealed all this to Clide, stirred him so deeply, and impelled him to a definite resolution that was to change the whole current of his life. But which of us cannot trace to some apparently chance meeting, some word heedlessly uttered, and perhaps not intended for us, a momentous epoch in our lives? We can never tell who may be the bearer of the burning message to us, nor in what unknown tongue it may be spoken. All that matters to us is that we hearken to it, and follow where the messenger beckons. M. de la Bourbonais had no idea that he was performing this office to Clide; nor did anything that he actually said justify the young man in looking upon him in the light of a herald or an interpreter. It was something rather in the man himself that did it; a voice that spoke unconsciously in his voice. There is a power in truth and simplicity more potent than any eloquence; and truth and simplicity radiated from Raymond like an atmosphere. His presence had a light in it that impressed you insensibly with the right view of things, and dissipated worldliness and selfishness and morbid delusions as the sun clears away the mists. Perhaps along with this immediate influence there was another one which acted unawares on Clide, adding to the pressure of Raymond’s pleading the softer incentive of an ideal yet possible reward.