Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/65

1866.], "a habit the boy had of sitting on the sunny door-step, quite silent, by the hour?"

"I remember,"—turning her head away.

"It used to remind me of the days when I was a boy, on the shore of Lake Erie. My father was a squatter there. There was nothing I did not dare nor hope in those long dreams of what my life was to be. I would hunt, wrestle, fight, as no man had done before. I would be the first leader in the world,—a soldier, a priest,—God! what was there I would not be! What came of it all?"—his voice rising into a weak, wiry cry. "There was a tiny cancer, a little taint in my blood,—a trifle,—bah! a nothing! My grandfather died a drunkard; my father ate opium. ISharley, it's an old story to you."

She did not shame him by a look at him: her own face had the old pallor and defiant clench of the jaws which Lufflin had seen. She drew his hand under her arm, and kissed it passionately.

"It was no crime," she cried,—the old burden for many years.

A fine, sad smile crossed his face.

"Poor Sharley!" he said. "No,—no crime; for with the temptation was given me a weak will. So they're gone now, hopes and chances in life,—mind and body eaten away by that one animal thirst,—gone! Who was to blame?"

"You told me," she said, eagerly, "that the stimulant in this air would be all that you would require,—that it would effect a cure."

"Yes; but was it right that the fate of a man's soul should thus depend on outward chances? Was I to blame for this hereditary plague in my blood? Half of the lost millions who crowd the cities can plead against the crime that dragged them down some inherited vice; theft, drunkenness, butchery, were born with them, sucked in with their mothers' milk. This world, that God called good, is but a gigantic mass of corruption, foul with disease and pain, which man did not first create, and never will conquer."

"Why do you talk of this to-night?" said Charlotte, shunning the storm, as usual.

"Because I thank God, that, if He has made this failure, He will blot it out. I liked to fancy once that my mother would waken out of her long sleep into all her old loves and hates and fancies. I thank God now that she knows nothing,—that for her, and for all of us, after death, lies but an eternal blank."

In the pause, the dulled throb of the sea rose for an instant into a fierce warning cry, and then was gloomily still.

"It is as if the dead yonder would drive us back from their rest and silence,"—his speculative eye wandering dreamily out into the night.

But death and all that lay beyond were real to the practical woman beside him; there was no speculation in her eyes; it was an actual life he was dragging from before her; her child was in it; some day her own feet in Mesh and blood would tread there. She put her hand on his shoulder and leaned out beyond him, peering down over the shore, just as if in the night and cold beyond lay in truth the land of the dead.

"I am not afraid of their rest and silence," she cried,—"I'm not afraid, Jerome!"

The fair, clear-cut face came warm and living between him and the darkness; her voice called into the vague distance cheerful and strong.

She turned back to him glowing with color.

"Our boy is there," she said; "and there are others dead that I loved. I always knew they'd keep a watch for us, Jerome!"

He listened with a sad smile.

"And I've no fear," she went on, energetically, "I never had any fear, that He would give them back to us just misty, holy angels, who could neither cry nor laugh with us, when our very hearts were sick to catch their hands and kiss their lips again.—I know," after a pause, "my boy will