"I thank you, Mr. Lydgate," said Mr. Casaubon, after a moment's pause.

"One thing more I have still to ask: did you communicate what you have

now told me to Mrs. Casaubon?"

"Partly--I mean, as to the possible issues." Lydgate was going to

explain why he had told Dorothea, but Mr. Casaubon, with an

unmistakable desire to end the conversation, waved his hand slightly,

and said again, "I thank you," proceeding to remark on the rare beauty

of the day.

Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him;

and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued

to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship

in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted

across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence

of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself

looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those

rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace,

which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of

waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the

water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the

commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute

consciousness "I must die--and soon," then death grapples us, and his

fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as

our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be

like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found

himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming

oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an

hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward

in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward--perhaps

with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties

of self-assertion. What was Mr. Casaubon's bias his acts will give us a

clew to. He held himself to be, with some private scholarly

reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of the present and

hopes of the future. But what we strive to gratify, though we may call

it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: the future estate for which

men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

And Mr. Casaubon's immediate desire was not for divine communion and

light divested of earthly conditions; his passionate longings, poor

man, clung low and mist-like in very shady places.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024