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ATTEMPTS AND COINCIDENCES.
It was months before I could resume my work. Not until Charley's
absence was, as it were, so far established and accepted that hope had
begun to assert itself against memory; that is, not until the form of
Charley ceased to wander with despairful visage behind me and began to
rise amongst the silvery mists before me, was I able to invent once
more, or even to guide the pen with certainty over the paper. The
moment, however, that I took the pen in my hand another necessity
seized me.
Although Mary had hardly been out of my thoughts, I had heard no word
of her since her brother's death. I dared not write to her father or
mother after the way the former had behaved to me, and I shrunk from
approaching Mary with a word that might suggest a desire to intrude the
thoughts of myself upon the sacredness of her grief. Why should she
think of me? Sorrow has ever something of a divine majesty, before
which one must draw nigh with bowed head and bated breath:
Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne: bid kings come bow to it.
But the moment I took the pen in my hand to write, an almost agonizing
desire to speak to her laid hold of me. I dared not yet write to her,
but, after reflection, resolved to send her some verses which should
make her think of both Charley and myself, through the pages of a
magazine which I knew she read.
Oh, look not on the heart I bring--
It is too low and poor;
- I
- would not have thee love a thing
Which I can ill endure.
Nor love me for the sake of what
I would be if I could;
O'er peaks as o'er the marshy flat,
Still soars the sky of good.
See, love, afar, the heavenly man
The will of God would make;
The thing I must be when I can,
Love now, for faith's dear sake.
But when I had finished the lines, I found the expression had fallen so
far short of what I had in my feeling, that I could not rest satisfied
with such an attempt at communication. I walked up and down the room,
thinking of the awful theories regarding the state of mind at death in
which Mary had been trained. As to the mere suicide, love ever finds
refuge in presumed madness; but all of her school believed that at the
moment of dissolution the fate is eternally fixed either for bliss or
woe, determined by the one or the other of two vaguely defined
attitudes of the mental being towards certain propositions; concerning
which attitudes they were at least right in asserting that no man could
of himself assume the safe one. The thought became unendurable that
Mary should believe that Charley was damned--and that for ever and
ever. I must and would write to her, come of it what might. That my
Charley, whose suicide came of misery that the painful flutterings of
his half-born wings would not bear him aloft into the empyrean, should
appear to my Athanasia lost in an abyss of irrecoverable woe; that she
should think of God as sending forth his spirit to sustain endless
wickedness for endless torture;--it was too frightful. As I wrote, the
fire burned and burned, and I ended only from despair of utterance. Not
a word can I now recall of what I wrote:--the strength of my feelings
must have paralyzed the grasp of my memory. All I can recollect is that
I closed with the expression of a passionate hope that the God who had
made me and my Charley to love each other, would somewhere, some day,
somehow, when each was grown stronger and purer, give us once more to
each other. In that hope alone, I said, was it possible for me to live.
By return of post I received the following:--
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