CHAPTER X.

_PEACE, BE STILL._

But what time through the heart and through the brain God hath transfixed us, we, so moved before, Attain to a calm. Ay, shouldering weights of pain, We anchor in deep waters, safe from shore, And hear, submissive, o'er the stormy main God's chartered judgments walk for evermore.

Was he to pass another night of racking pain, another night of restless wandering? The little chest which held the only means by which this question, to him so awful, could be answered in the negative, lay at his feet; his very soul was yearning for rest. Outside, the white mountains were sleeping, pure as angels undefiled, beneath the moonbeams; from the next room, the door of which he had opened, came the light sound of the child's regular breathing; in the house was silence absolute.

And his rest might be as absolute as any--nay, not only so, it might be filled with sensuous pleasure, such pleasure as his brilliant youth, that had gone by for ever, had often afforded him; it might be clothed with images of beauty and delight. But, on the other hand, had he not chosen suffering--suffering instead of delight--to be a soul-purifier, to atone, if atonement might be, for some of the self-seeking of his ruined life?

And he could delay no longer; an act of expiation was to be wrought which would demand all the force of his soul to carry to a successful issue; the father of the child he loved was at hand; with all the strong energies of his soul awake he must meet him, and make him own that his enemy's words were the words of truth.

Then--L'Estrange acknowledged it to himself with a sigh--the suffering whose ravages he dreaded did not overcloud his intellect, did not bewilder his brain, as its antidote had done; rather, like the purging fire, it seemed to draw out and develop the greatness of the soul that was in him.

The strong man shivered as he turned from his only hope, and began once again in the unhealthy activity of his heart and brain to think and reason, to live an inner life that was gradually, by its overpowering force, drawing away the life from his body.

He bowed his face in his hands. Where was all this to end? he asked himself. Was he to go down to the grave with the burden of his own ruined life and of the lives he had ruined hanging like a millstone about his neck, dragging him down to the nether hell, without a hope save in the last vague dream of the infidel--an utter death, an eternal sleep?--and this, in his very darkest moments, L'Estrange had never brought himself to believe.

So intense was his mental life during the first part of that night that his physical sufferings were almost forgotten, but at last, as the slow hours went by, pain came, twinge after twinge, that would not be denied, and panting and exhausted, his great strength failing in the struggle, the man threw himself down upon his bed, moaning faintly.

A wild impatience followed. The spasms he experienced were of that gnawing, craving kind more difficult, perhaps, than any other to be borne.

Not the sharp stinging which rends the frame, and then, spent by very force, allows it to rest; but the dull, ceaseless throbbing that nothing can stay, that gives no moment of respite to the overwrought nerves. L'Estrange at the moment felt as if it would madden him. His blood was coursing like liquid fire through his veins; his hands and feet were burning; drops of agony stood on his brow. He crossed his room suddenly, and throwing open the window leaned out into the night; but first--for through everything this strange man did ran the tender thoughtfulness that could only have been prompted by a fine soul--he shut noiselessly the door of communication between his room and Laura's lest the chill night-air should touch his darling. He looked out upon a strange scene--the white earth, in shadow save where the moon had touched it with an unearthly radiance; the mountains looking verily like giants in the uncertain light, yet glistening and transparent where the night-born light was resting; cloud-shadows, whose depth seemed infinite as the outer darkness of despair, blotting out here and there the transparent whiteness; behind one of the distant peaks a pale line, faint and tremulous, that told of coming dawn; over all a weird unreality.

The face that looked out into the dim night was as strange as the scene could be, though it lacked the utter stillness of the shrouded, moonlit earth. The eyes were wild and wandering, with an impatient, hungry look in them, as though they were searching, seeking, striving to draw from the visible the secrets of that which no eye beholds; the mouth quivered with the storms of feeling; the brow was contracted by a mortal agony, and from time to time the pale lips moved as if in pitiful appeal to some hidden power. But after a few moments of earnest gazing some of all this passed by. It would almost have seemed as though the influence of Nature's eternal calm had been breathed in upon his soul through the medium of sense, or rather perhaps it was a thought from within that swept over the tumult of the man's brain, so that suddenly his agony was stayed.

Was it so very strange? Long ago, in the far ages, a Man to whom conflict and storm were known in all their fulness stood up on a dark night and said to the angry billows and raging winds, "Peace, be still." Was it altogether for the sake of that terror-stricken crew, or was it not also a sublime parable? For, evermore, it is the same. The Man, present in the midst of the soul's tumult, bids in His own time--the best time for the stricken--that the storms which overwhelm it shall sink to rest.

Thus it was with L'Estrange. In the silence and solitude he was finding the great Father, who, though we know it not, is never very far from any one of us. "God is here" was the thought that swept over him through the stillness of Nature, through the profound silence of the night. He knelt before the window and stretched out his hands to the midnight heavens. Who shall say what dreams, what possibilities, passed in that moment through his soul? For with his errors and imperfections, his falseness and his folly, this man was one of the mighty few, a son of divine genius. Will they be judged by another code, I sometimes wonder, than the common herd to whom their gigantic struggles, their vast temptations, their agonies, their failures, must for ever be a life unknown, a sealed-up book?--such a man as Shelley, peering in his spirit's misery through the ages, then when nothing but the aching void, the yawning nothing, answered his wild search, giving himself up to the proclamation of a dark infidelity; or Byron, dying for a dream; or Keats, breathing out his young life with the cry of a disappointed soul? Will the misguided, distorted greatness find in the Hereafter a better sphere? Have they, these mighty dead, even with the last breath of a life tortured with earth's blackness, received as by inspiration the fair beauty of undying truth into their souls? Who shall say? In the presence of mysteries like these we can only bow our heads and pray that so it may be.

To L'Estrange a moment of such inspiration had come. He had prayed before. Often during these last days, when gradually the fetters of self-love had been falling off from his soul, he had cried out in the darkness to the Father of spirits. But _then_ He had been a grand abstraction; _now_, for the first time, He was near and real.

First happiness, then vengeance, then atoning suffering and self-abnegation, had been looked for as the life of his spirit's life. In that hour of awful sweetness they all fell off from him. God looked down into the man's heart; God was what, all unconsciously to itself, that heart had been seeking, and there was a great calm.

Sweetly the daughter of his affections had sung to him that evening about the Crucified; to the man of the world her hymn had been an idle tale; now all was changed. In the great stillness of God's calm upon his heart he was able to listen more truly.

Bowing his head, the stricken man wept as the Gospel-story in its simple beauty surged in upon his heart. He had often reasoned about it. Calmly and coolly he had torn to shreds the arguments which men weaker but better than himself had brought to bear upon its truth. In this transcendent moment reasoning was not--it could not be.

True, in the craving need of his own heart, in the sudden, awful revelation of his spirit's darkness, _there_ he read its truth, and like a little child he wept before its unspeakable beauty and pathos.

L'Estrange could never have told how long the time was that he passed on his knees before the open window looking out upon the snow. It was like a dream, but when he rose the white dawn was beginning to rise over the mountains.

The spasms had left him; he scarcely dreaded them now, for the mental struggles that had rent his very being had merged into a great calm. But as he shut the window and tried to cross the room his knees trembled and he staggered strangely.

Weakness as of a little child seemed to have come upon him, and weariness too--a blessed weariness. He threw himself down upon the bed, and for the time forgot all his woes in sleep.