Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/208

 are born to yourself, spare me the one who shall most resemble you, to replace the daughter whom I can only sincerely pardon when something else can spring up to my desolate being--something that I can cherish without the memory of falsehood and the dread of shame.' Yes, as I ceased, came that music; and as it thrilled through the summer air, I turned and met your eyes--turned and saw you blush--turned and heard some faint faltering words drowning the music with diviner sweetness; and suddenly I knew, as by a revelation, that the Child I had fostered had grown the Woman I loved. My own soul was laid bare to me by the flash of hope. Over the universe rushed light and colour! Oh, the Caroline of old! What wonder that she became so fatally, so unspeakably beloved! As some man in ancient story, banished from his native land, is told by an oracle to seek a happier isle in undiscovered seas--freights with his all a single bark--collects on his wandering altar the last embers of his abandoned hearth-places beside it his exiled household gods; so all that my life had left to me, hallowing and hallowed, I stored in you. . . . I tore myself from the old native soil, the old hardy skies. Through time's wide ocean I saw but the promised golden isle. Fables, fables!--lying oracle!--sunken vessel!--visionary isle! And life to me had till then been so utterly without love!--had passed in such hard labours, without a holyday of romance--all the fountains of the unknown passion sealed till the spell struck the rock, and every wave, every drop sparkled fresh to a single star. Yet my boyhood, like other men's, had dreamed of its Ideal. There at last that Ideal, come to life, bloomed before me; there, under those beech-trees--the Caroline of old. O wretched woman, now weeping at my side, well may you weep! Never can earth give you back such love as you lost in mine."

"I know it, I know it--fool that I was--miserable fool!"

"Ay, but comfort yourself--wilder and sadder folly in myself! Your mother was right. 'The vain child,' she said, 'knows not her own heart. She is new to the world--has seen none of her own years. For your sake, as for hers, I must insist on the experiment of absence. A year's ordeal--see if she is then of the same mind.' I marvelled at her coldness; proudly I submitted to her seasonings; fearlessly