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Page 35
He remembered, too, that after the first sharp agony of bereavement was
over; when he had learned that even Death does not deny Love, he had
seemed to enter some mysterious fellowship. Gradually, he became aware
of the hidden griefs of others, and from many unsuspected sources came
consolation. Even those whom he had thought hard and cold cherished some
holy of holies--some sacred altar where a bruised heart had been healed
and the bitterness taken away.
He had come to see that the world was full of kindness; that through the
countless masks of varying personalities, all hearts beat in perfect
unison, and that joy, in reality, is immortal, while pain dies in a day.
"And yet," he thought, "how strange it is that life must be nearly over,
before one fully learns to live."
The fire crackled cheerily on the hearth, the sunbeams danced gaily
through the old house, spending gold-dust generously in corners that
were usually dark, and the uncut magazine slipped to the floor. Above,
the violin sang high and clear. The Colonel leaned back in his chair and
closed his eyes.
When Allison came down, he was asleep, with the peace of Heaven upon his
face, and so quiet that the young man leaned over him, a little
frightened, to wait for the next deep breath. Reassured, he did not wake
him, but went for his walk alone.
VIII
"THE YEAR'S AT THE SPRING"
Outside, in the grey darkness, the earth was soft with snow. Upon the
illimitable horizon beyond the mountain peaks were straying gleams of
dawn, colourless, but none the less surely a promise of daybreak.
Rose had been awake for some time, listening to the ice-clad branches
that clattered with every passing breeze. A maple bough, tapping on her
window as ghostly fingers might, had first aroused her from a medley of
dreams.
She went to the window, shivering a little, and, while she stood there,
watching the faint glow in the East, the wind changed in quality, though
it was still cool. Hints of warmth and fragrance were indefinably
blended with the cold, and Rose laughed as she crept back to bed, for
she had chanced upon the mysterious hour when the Weaver of the Seasons
changed the pattern upon the loom.
Having raised another window shade, she could see the dawn from where
she lay. Tints of gold and amethyst came slowly upon the grey and made
the horizon delicately iridescent, like mother-of-pearl. Warm and soft
from the Southland, the first wind of Spring danced merrily into Madame
Francesca's sleeping garden, thrilling all the life beneath the sod.
With the first beam of sun, the ice began to drip from the imprisoned
trees and every fibre of shrub and tree to quiver with aspiration, as
though a clod should suddenly find a soul.
In the watcher's heart, too, had come another Spring, for once in time
and tune with the outer world. The heart's seasons seldom coincide with
the calendar. Who among us has not been made desolate beyond all words
upon some golden day when the little creatures of the air and meadow
were life incarnate, from sheer joy of living? Who among us has not come
home, singing, when the streets were almost impassable with snow, or met
a friend with a happy, smiling face, in the midst of a pouring rain?
The soul, too, has its own hours of Winter and Spring. Gethsemane and
Calvary may come to us in the time of roses and Easter rise upon us in a
December night. How shall we know, in our own agony, of another's
gladness, or, on that blessed to-morrow when the struggle is over, help
someone else to bear our own forgotten pain?
True sympathy is possible only when the season of one soul accords with
that of another, or else when memory, divinely tender, brings back a
vivid, scarlet hour out of grey, forgotten days, to enable us to share,
with another, his own full measure of sorrow or of joy.
Ah, but the world was awake at last! Javelin-like, across a field of
melting snow, went a flash of blue wings, and in Madame Francesca's own
garden a robin piped his cheery strain upon the topmost bough of a
dripping tree.
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