“Oh, my beloved!” she cried, “do not sink from yourself into despair—do not lose the immortal in the mortal! Think of the briefness of this life—think of the endless golden reaches of the life of which all our earthly experience is but a moment. Heaven knows my sympathies are not imperfect; I could die myself—ah, more, I could see you die—to save to a life of human use this poor spirit, whom his fellow spirits, in their incarnate madness, have dragged away from us to wreak their insanity of hate upon. But it is greater pain than my death or yours, to see you mourn his fate with a mourning that forgets the godhood within you. You told me once the divine sentence of the alchemist—‘Heaven hath in it this scene of earth.’ Oh, remember it now—think how brief, how fleeting is this term of grief and wrong—think of the eternal heaven in which the grief and wrong melt away forever, and be sustained and comforted!”
As at the harpings of the young shepherd of Israel, the dark spirit sank from Saul, so at the clear, fervent music of her voice, the agony and horror passed from him, and he grew calm. Fondly and sadly, with the tears still wet upon his cheeks, he gazed into her exalted face, lit with a smile of auroral tenderness.
“You are wise,” he said mournfully, “and I know that my sorrow is weak and unworthy. I sink from my faith—I lose myself in this dark hour of trouble. A poor, helpless, despised, rejected man, more forlorn and wretched than the most loathed outcast—I found him in the friendless streets, I took him to my home, I nourished his feeble life—and they have clutched him from me, and dragged him back to outrage and torment and murder. If it were the act of some solitary ruffian, I could bear it; terrible as it is, I could bear it; but to think that society in all its structure makes it possible for deeds like this to be done! Oh, sleep of civilization! Justice, honor, compassion, love, have you gone from earth forever! Is human brotherhood a Bedlam dream, vanishing from the mind of man, and leaving him to the dark sanity of one life-long mutual murder! Is this civil-suited swarm of sordid devils and furies the vanguard of the new civilization that is to oversweep the world! Let me not think of it—let my sick heart swoon from the misery of it! Oh, that I were dead this night, if death could hide from me this tremendous shame! Better to be dead than stand here, tied hand and foot, unable to lift a finger to prevent the commission of this ghastly outrage. Better death than to live poisoned to my heart’s core with the knowledge that society is one fell league against the weak and poor.”
The words which had begun in sorrow, rose into low tempestuous agony and ended in a tone of heart-broken desolate sadness which language cannot tell. Muriel gazed at him mournfully, and the tears silently welled from her eyes.
“My beloved,” she said in a tremulous voice, sadly smiling as she spoke, “it grieves me more than all other grief, to see you overmastered thus. What can I say to calm you? Alas! that I who love you so deeply, am powerless to lift you from this dread sorrow!”
He looked at her with a spasm of self-control in his sad face, and seemed to struggle into calm.
“Let me not grieve you,” he faltered. “See, it is over. It shall not master me. There: I am strong again. For your sake I will crush it down. I love you—I will not pain you. I will strive to forget it, and be again as in our happy hours of love and peace before this”—
The faltering voice failed, and the mighty struggle to be calm again wrought in his features.
“Courage, courage,” she cried, tenderly smiling upon him. “Courage! All is not ended yet. At worst we can say, with King Francis, that everything is lost but honor. But everything is not lost. We shall devise some means to retrieve this stroke. Oh, my poor mother, if it were not for your unlucky weakness, the victory would not be so difficult! We would sound a blast in Master Lemuel’s ears that would bring down his ambition for kidnapping like Jericho. But there’s no leaven of the Roman in poor mother’s composition, and we are fatally hampered by her feeling.”
“Yes,” said Harrington, mournfully, “the necessity for keeping this matter private is our ruin. I know not what to do, or which way to turn.”