"What is the matter, ma'am?" Rereworth asked. "What has happened?" And he remembered the groups below with some alarm.
A few broken words made him acquainted with the catastrophe.
Everope, it seemed, had come home late in the night. He had obtained a light, and had been engaged in looking over a quantity of correspondence and other papers, for such were found strewn about the floor of his room. Letters of old date, some written when he must have been quite a youth, lay open on the table. Were the recollections they aroused more than his shattered, perhaps delirious, senses could bear? Such Rereworth fancied must have been the case.
He had glanced slightly at some of the scattered papers, and then recoiled from prying into matters which concerned him not. One scrap, however, freshly written upon, caught his eye, and he found it to contain a few stanzas of verse, evidently penned long ago, and some incoherent attempts to continue them, which must have been made that very night. He took possession of this document, in order to produce it, if necessary; and he now showed it to his friend. And Randolph, in reading the following melancholy lines, the older portion of the writing, thought with shuddering pity of the whisper, once addressed by Everope to himself, which had called forth his offer of assistance.
'Tis sad to think of hopes destroyed,
Of prospects lost that once seemed fair,
Of hours in waste or vice employed,
Of talents as that fig-tree bare.
Where ruin watches the closed door,
And crouches on the cold hearth-stone,
Where home's a word of love no more,
And friends or kindred there are none;
What though the door exclude the wind?
What though the roof may shield from rain?
No winds like those that tear the mind,
No storms like those that rend the brain.
While stern remorse unfolds her scroll,
And points to every damning word,
Showing the late-repenting soul
All it has thought, done, seen, or heard—
Ay, press thy hands upon thine eyes,
Ay, hear not, feel not, if thou wilt!
Still memory to conscience cries,
Still every heart-quake throbs of guilt.
Think over all thou might'st have been,
Contrast it then with all thou art:
A retrospect so dark and keen
May well appal thy shuddering heart.