CHAPTER LX.
The beautiful lake! We two are on its grassy margin,--twilight melting
into night; the stars stealing forth, one after one. What a wonderful
change is made within us when we come from our callings amongst men,
chafed, wearied, wounded; gnawed by our cares, perplexed by the doubts of
our very wisdom, stung by the adder that dwells in cities,--Slander; nay,
even if renowned, fatigued with the burden of the very names that we have
won! What a change is made within us when suddenly we find ourselves
transported into the calm solitudes of Nature,--into scenes familiar to
our happy dreaming childhood; back, back from the dusty thoroughfares of
our toil-worn manhood to the golden fountain of our youth! Blessed is
the change, even when we have no companion beside us to whom the heart
can whisper its sense of relief and joy. But if the one in whom all our
future is garnered up be with us there, instead of that weary World which
has so magically vanished away from the eye and the thought, then does the
change make one of those rare epochs of life in which the charm is the
stillness. In the pause from all by which our own turbulent struggles for
happiness trouble existence, we feel with a rapt amazement how calm a
thing it is to be happy. And so as the night, in deepening, brightened,
Lilian and I wandered by the starry lake. Conscious of no evil in
ourselves, how secure we felt from evil! A few days more--a few days
more, and we two should be as one! And that thought we uttered in many
forms of words, brooding over it in the long intervals of enamoured
silence.
And when we turned back to the quiet inn at which we had taken up our
abode, and her mother, with her soft face, advanced to meet us, I said to
Lilian,--
"Would that in these scenes we could fix our home for life, away and afar
from the dull town we have left behind us, with the fret of its wearying
cares and the jar of its idle babble!"
"And why not, Allen? Why not? But no, you would not be happy."
"Not be happy, and with you? Sceptic, by what reasoning do you arrive at
that ungracious conclusion?"
"The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs
action. Is it not so?"
"Where learned you that aphorism, out of place on such rosy lips?"
"I learned it in studying you," murmured Lilian, tenderly.
Here Mrs. Ashleigh joined us. For the first time I slept under the same
roof as Lilian. And I forgot that the universe contained an enigma to
solve or an enemy to fear.
