Harley L’Estrange was a man whom all things that belong to the romantic and poetic side of our human life deeply impressed. When he came to learn the ties between these two Children of Nature, standing side by side, alone amidst the storms of fate, his heart was more deeply moved than it had been for many years. In those dreary attics, overshadowed by the smoke and reek of the humble suburb, the workday world in its harshest and tritest forms below and around them, he recognized that divine poem which comes out from all union between the mind and the heart. Here, on the rough deal table (the ink scarcely dry), lay the writings of the young wrestler for fame and bread; there, on the other side of the partition, on that mean pallet, lay the boy’s sole comforter, the all that warmed his heart with living mortal affection. On one side the wall, the world of imagination; on the other, this world of grief and of love. And in both, a spirit equally sublime,—unselfish devotion,—“the something afar from the sphere of our sorrow.”
He looked round the room into which he had followed Leonard, on quitting Helen’s bedside. He noted the manuscripts on the table, and pointing to them, said gently, “And these are the labours by which you supported the soldier’s orphan?—soldier yourself in a hard battle!”
“The battle was lost,—I could not support her,” replied Leonard, mournfully.
“But you did not desert her. When Pandora’s box was opened, they say Hope lingered last—”
“False, false,” said Leonard; “a heathen’s notion. There are deities that linger behind Hope,—Gratitude, Love, and Duty.”
“Yours is no common nature,” exclaimed Harley, admiringly, “but I must sound it more deeply hereafter: at present I hasten for the physician; I shall return with him. We must move that poor child from this low close air as soon as possible. Meanwhile, let me qualify your rejection of the old fable. Wherever Gratitude, Love, and Duty remain to man, believe me that Hope is there too, though she may be often invisible, hidden behind the sheltering wings of the nobler deities.”
Harley said this with that wondrous smile of his, which cast a brightness over the whole room, and went away. Leonard stole softly towards the grimy window; and looking up towards the stars that shone pale over the roof-tops, he murmured, “O Thou, the All-seeing and All-merciful! how it comforts me now to think that, though my dreams of knowledge may have sometimes obscured the heavens, I never doubted that Thou wert there! as luminous and everlasting, though behind the cloud!” So, for a few minutes, he prayed silently, then passed into Helen’s room, and sat beside her motionless, for she slept. She woke just as Harley returned with a physician; and then Leonard, returning to his own room, saw amongst his papers the letter he had written to Mr. Dale, and muttering, “I need not disgrace my calling,—I need not be the mendicant now”—held the letter to the flame of the candle. And while he said this, and as the burning tinder dropped on the floor, the sharp hunger, unfelt during his late anxious emotions, gnawed at his entrails. Still, even hunger could not reach that noble pride which had yielded to a sentiment nobler than itself, and he smiled as he repeated, “No mendicant!—the life that I was sworn to guard is saved. I can raise against Fate the front of Man once more.”
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