Malbone Part 18

And yet again, is this life so long? May it not be better to wait until its little day is done, and the summer night of old age has yielded to a new morning, before attaining that acme of joy? Are there enough successive grades of bliss for all eternity, if so much be consummated here? Must all novels end with an earthly marriage, and nothing be left for heaven?

Perhaps, for such as Hope, this life is given to show what happiness might be, and they await some other sphere for its fulfilment. The greater part of the human race live out their mortal years without attaining more than a far-off glimpse of the very highest joy. Were this life all, its very happiness were sadness. If, as I doubt not, there be another sphere, then that which is unfulfilled in this must yet find completion, nothing omitted, nothing denied. And though a thousand oracles should p.r.o.nounce this thought an idle dream, neither Hope nor I would believe them.

It was a radiant morning of last February when I walked across the low hills to the scene of the wreck. Leaving the road before reaching the Fort, I struck across the wild moss-country, full of boulders and footpaths and stunted cedars and sullen ponds. I crossed the height of land, where the ruined lookout stands like the remains of a Druidical temple, and then went down toward the ocean. Banks and ridges of snow lay here and there among the fields, and the white lines of distant capes seemed but drifts running seaward. The ocean was gloriously alive,--the blackest blue, with white caps on every wave; the sh.o.r.e was all snowy, and the gulls were flying back and forth in crowds; you could not tell whether they were the white waves coming ash.o.r.e, or bits of snow going to sea. A single fragment of s.h.i.+p-timber, black with time and weeds, and crusty with barnacles, heaved to and fro in the edge of the surf, and two fishermen's children, a boy and girl, tilted upon it as it moved, clung with the semblance of terror to each other, and played at s.h.i.+pwreck.

The rocks were dark with moisture, steaming in the sun. Great sheets of ice, white masks of departing winter, clung to every projecting cliff, or slid with crash and s.h.i.+ver into the surge. Icicles dropped their slow and reverberating tears upon the rock where Emilia once lay breathless; and it seemed as if their cold, chaste drops were sent to cleanse from her memory each scarlet stain, and leave it virginal and pure.