I
seemed dumbly to resent this, and I put them all away again. Why
should I disturb myself to no purpose? "There shall be no more
sorrow nor crying, for the former things are passed away"--so runs
the old verse, and I had almost grown to feel like that. Why
distrust it? Yet I could not forbear. I got the papers out again,
and read late into the night, like one reading an old and beautiful
story. Suddenly the curtain lifted, and I saw myself alone, I saw
what I had lost. The ineffectual agony I endured, crying out for
very loneliness! "That was all mine," said the melting heart, so
long frozen and dumb. Grief, in waves and billows, began to beat
upon me like breakers on a rock-bound shore. A strange fever of the
spirit came on me, scenes and figures out of the years floating
fiercely and boldly past me. Was my strength and life sustained for
this, that I should just sleep awhile, and wake to fall into the
pit of suffering, far deeper than before?
If they could but come back to me for a moment; if I could feel
Maud's cheek by mine, or Maggie's arms round my neck; if they could
but stand by me smiling, in robes of light! Yet as in a vision I
seem to see them leaning from a window, in a blank castle-wall
rising from a misty abyss, scanning a little stairway that rises
out of the clinging fog, built up through the rocks and ending in a
postern gate in the castle-wall.
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