Page:A Double Marriage.pdf/71

Rh could bear. He was a wild thing at heart, a wild thing who had lain at night in forests, and gone to sleep to the noise of the susurrus of the wind in the pines, and awakened to meet the orange lips of the rising sun, kissing the dark tops of the trees, and turning them to purple-red; gone to sleep on the sand, to wake and find the waves kissing his feet, and sometimes not gone to sleep at all, but wandered across deserts, afraid to go to sleep, furrowing the sand as if his body were a plough, emerging exhausted, but triumphant, from places where the silent tread of the Indian had failed. He had traced the lion, the panther, the tiger to their lair, and climbed mountains to find a tiny plant no bigger than a daisy; and he had dreamed, God! how he had dreamed, by rivers, by streams, by brooks, by rivulets, beneath the moon and the stars, the sunshine, and even beneath the rain, the storm. The voices of Nature lured him, lured him; and he had learned many of its secrets, and found that it was profound, full of design, of purpose of thought renewed, with ever-resurrecting vigour. Eternity-he had gauged its power, realised that it lay in the fact of its unceasing continuity of thought, its constant revival, its evenness, its rhythmic recurrence, undaunted, Rh