My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.
It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.
Oh, my Margaret – my Margaret! no one can tell what you are to me! Dead – cold as you lie there you are the only woman I ever loved! Oh, Margaret – Margaret!
He loved her, and would love her; and defy her, and this miserable bodily pain.
Of all faults the one she most despised in others was the want of bravery; the meanness of heart which leads to untruth.
Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
If you dare to injure her in the least, I will await you where no policeman can step in between. And God shall judge between us two.
She stood by the tea-table in a light-coloured muslin gown, which had a good deal of pink about it. She looked as if she was not attending to the conversation, but solely busy with the tea-cups, among which her round ivory hands moved with pretty, noiseless, daintiness.
He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.
He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so hard to compensate himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked upon her with an admiration he could not repress, she looked at him with proud indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he told himself – was a great fellow, with not a grace or a refinement about him.
For all his pain, he longed to see the author of it. Although he hated Margaret at times, when he thought of that gentle familiar attitude and all the attendant circumstances, he had a restless desire to renew her picture in his mind – a longing for the very atmosphere she breathed. He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.
But Margaret was at an age when any apprehension, not absolutely based on a knowledge of facts, is easily banished for a time by a bright sunny day, or some happy outward circumstance. And when the brilliant fourteen fine days of October came on, her cares were all blown away as lightly as thistledown, and she thought of nothing but the glories of the forest.
With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day.
Nothing like the act of eating for equalising men. Dying is nothing to it. The philosopher dies sententiously – the pharisee ostentatiously – the simple-hearted humbly – the poor idiot blindly, as the sparrow falls to the ground; the philosopher and idiot, publican and pharisee, all eat after the same fashion – given an equally good digestion.
Looking back upon the year’s accumulated heap of troubles, Margaret wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them, how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time! And yet day by day had, of itself, and by itself, been very endurable – small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows.
If all the world spoke, acted, or kept silence with intent to deceive, – if dearest interests were at stake, and dearest lives in peril, – if no one should ever know of her truth or her falsehood to measure out their honour or contempt for her by, straight alone where she stood, in the presence of God, she prayed that she might have strength to speak and act the truth for evermore.
Many a one has been comforted in their sorrow by seeing a good dish come upon the table.
Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life. My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of “Get money, my son, honestly if you can; but get money.” My precept is, “Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something.
I am a man. I claim the right of expressing my feelings.
Our Lord Jesus was not above letting folk minister to Him, for he knew how happy it makes one to do aught for another. It’s the happiest work on earth.