第76章

"A few weeks later that letter came from you, bringing the intelligence that changed everything.(Do you remember my reply? I seem only this moment to have dropped the pen.) As soon as I could control myself, I told her that now you were free, that it was but justice and kindness alike to her and to me that I should give here the chance to reconsider the engagement.A week passed, I went again.I warned her how different the situation had become.Icould promise less than before--I could not say how little.A month later Iwent again.

"Ah, well--that is all!

"The summer after my marriage I travelled to Virginia regarding a landsuit.

One day I rode far out of my course into the path of the country where you lived.I remained some days strolling over the silent woods and fields, noting the bushes on the lawn, such as you had carried over into Kentucky, hunting out the quiet nooks where you were used to read in your girlhood.

Those long, sweet, sacred summer days alone with you there before you were married! O Jessica! Jessica! Jessica! Jessica! And to this day the sight of peach blossoms in the spring--the rustle of autumn leaves under my feet! Can you recall the lines of Malory? 'Men and women could love together seven years, and then was love truth and faithfulness.' How many more than seven have I loved you!--you who never gave me anything but friendship, but who would in time, I hope, have given me everything if I had come back.Ah, Idid come back! Many a time even now as soon as I have hurried through the joyous gateways of sleep, I come back over the mountains to you as naturally as though there had been no years to separate and to age.Let me tell you all this! My very life would be incomplete without it! I owed something to you long before I owed anything to another: a duty can never set aside a duty.And as to what I have owed you since, it becomes more and more the noblest earthly that I shall ever leave unpaid.I did not know you perfectly when we parted: I was too young, too ignorant of the world, too ignorant of many women.A man must have touched their coarseness in order to appreciate their refinement; have been wounded by untruthfulness to understand their delicate honour; he must have been driven to turn his eyes mercifully away from their stain before he can ever look with all the reverence and gratitude of his heart and soul upon their brows of chastity.

"But of my life otherwise.I take it fir granted that you would know where Istand, what I have become, whether I have kept faith with the ideals of my youth.

"I have succeeded, perhaps reached now what men call the highest point of their worldly prosperity, made good my resolve that no human power should defeat me.All that Macbeth had not I have: a quiet throne of my own, children, wife, troops of friends, duties, honours, ease.There have been times when with natural misgiving lest I had wandered too far these many summers on a sea of glory, I have prepared for myself the lament of Wolsey on his fall: yet ill fortune had not overwhelmed me or mine.

"All this prosperity, as the mere fruit of my toil, has been less easy than for many.I may not boast the Apostle that I have fought a good fight, but Ican say that I fought a hard one.The fight will always be hard for any man who undertakes to conquer life with the few simple weapons I have used and who will accept victory only upon such terms as I have demanded.For be my success small or great, it has been won without inner compromise or other form of self-abasement.No man can look me in the eyes and say I ever wronged him for my own profit; none may charge that I have smiled on him in order to use him, or call him my friend that I might make him do for me the work of a servant.

"Do not imagine I fail to realize that I have added my full share to the general evil of the world: in part unconsciously, in part against my conscious will.It is the knowledge of this influence of imperfection forever flowing from myself to all others that has taught me charity with all the wrongs that flow from others toward me.As I have clung to myself despite the evil, so I have clung to the world despite all the evil that is in the world.To lose faith in men, not humanity; to see justice go down and not believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right; and so to turn with ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all--the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand.Many a time this candle has gone out; but as quickly as I could snatch any torch--with your sacred name on my lips--it has been relighted.

"My candles are all beginning to burn low now.For as we advance far on into life, one by one our duties end, one by one the lights go out.Not much ahead of me now must lurk the great mortal changes, coming always nearer, always faster.As they approach, I look less to my candles, more toward my candles, more toward my lighthouses--those distant unfailing beacons that cast their rays over the stormy sea of this life from the calm ocean of the Infinate.I know this: that if I should live to be an old man, my duties ended and my candles gone, it is these that will shine in upon me in that vacant darkness.And I have this belief: that if we did but recognize them aright, these ideals at the close of life would become one with the ideals of youth.We lost them as we left mortal youth behind; we regain them as we enter upon youth immortal.

"If I have kept unbroken faith with any of mine, thank you.And thank God!"

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