I dare not think where my baby is, for if I should be doomed
never to see her because of the love I have borne to you and
consented to be as you wished if I am cast out from God because I
loved you more than him I shall never see you again--for to be where
I could see you would never be punishment enough for my sins."
Here the writing stopped: the bleeding of the hand had probably
brought it to a close. The letter had never been folded, but lying
there, had lain there. He looked if he could find a date; there was
none. He held the sheet up to the light, and saw a paper mark; while
close by lay another sheet with merely a date--in the same hand, as
if the writer had been about to commence another in lieu of the
letter spoiled.
"Strange!" thought Donal with himself; "an old withered grief looks
almost as pitiful as an old withered joy!--But who is to say either
is withered? Those who look upon death as an evil, yet regard it as
the healer of sorrows! Is it such? No one can tell how long a grief
may last unwithered! Surely till the life heals it! He is a coward
who would be cured of his sorrow by mere lapse of time, by the mere
forgetting of a brain that grows musty with age. It is God alone who
can heal--the God of the dead and of the living! and the dead must
find him, or be miserable for evermore!"
He had not a doubt that the letter he had read was in the writing of
the mother of the present earl's children.
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