What Necessity Knows by Lily Dougall (web ebook reader TXT) 📕

no power in him to advance another step or speak a word, he let them pass joyously on their way towards home. It was not many moments before they had passed off the scene, and he was left the only human actor in that happy wilderness where flower and leaf and bird, the blue firmament on high and the sparkling river, rejoiced together in the glory of light and colour.

Trenholme crossed the path and strode through flowery tangle and woody thicket like a giant in sudden strength, snapping all that offered to detain his feet. He sought, he knew not why, the murmur and the motion of the river; and where young trees stood thickest, as spearsmen to guard the loneliness of its bank, he sat down upon a rock and covered his face, as if even from the spirits of solitude and from his own consciousness he must hide. He thought of nothing: his soul within him was mad.

He had come out of his school not half an hour before, rejoicing more than any schoolboy going to play in the glorious weather. For him there was not too much light on the lovely autumn landscape; it was all a part of the peace that was within him and without, of the God he knew to be within him and without--for, out of his struggle for righteousness in small things, he had come back into that light which most men cannot see or believe. Just in so far as a man comes into that light he ceases to know himself as separate, but knows that he is a part of all men and all things, that his joy is the joy of all men, that their pain is his; therefore, as Trenholme desired the fulfilment of his own hopes, he desired that all hope in the world might find fruition. And because this day he saw--what is always true if we could but see it--that joy is a thousandfold greater than pain, the glory of the autumn seemed to him like a psalm of praise, and he gave thanks for all men.

Thus Trenholme had walked across the fields, into these groves--but now, as he sat by the river, all that, for the time, had passed away, except as some indistinct memory of it maddened him. His heart was full of rage against his brother, rage too against the woman he loved; and with this rage warred most bitterly a self-loathing because he knew that his anger against them was unjust. She did not know, she had no cause to know, that she had darkened his whole life; but--what a _fool_ she was! What companionship could that thoughtless fellow give her? How he would drag her down! And _he_, too, could not know that he had better have killed his brother than done this thing. But any woman would have done for Alec; for himself there was only this one--only this one in the whole world. He judged his brother; any girl with a pretty face and a good heart would have done for that boisterous fellow--while for himself--"Oh God," he said, "it is hard."

Thus accusing and excusing these lovers, excusing and again accusing himself for his rage against them, he descended slowly into the depth of his trouble--for man, in his weakness, is so made that he can come at his worst suffering only by degrees. Yet when he had made this descent, the hope he had cherished for months and years lay utterly overthrown; it could not have been more dead had it been a hundred years in dying. He had not known before how dear it was, yet he had known that it was dearer than all else, except that other hope with which we do not compare our desires for earthly good because we think it may exist beside them and grow thereby.

There are times when, to a man, time is not, when the life of years is gathered into indefinite moments; and after, when outward things claim again the exhausted mind, he wonders that the day is not further spent. And Trenholme wondered at the length of that afternoon, when he observed it again and saw that the sun had not yet sunk low, and as he measured the shadows that the bright trees cast athwart the moving water, he was led away to think the thoughts that had been his when he had so lightly come into those gay autumn bowers. A swallow skimmed the wave with burnished wing; again he heard the breeze and the rapid current. They were the same; the movement and music were the same; God was still with him; was he so base as to withhold the thanksgiving that had been checked half uttered in his heart by the spring of that couchant sorrow? _Then_ in the sum of life's blessings he had numbered that hope of his, and _now_ he had seen the perfect fruition of that hope in joy. It was not his own,--but was it not much to know that God had made such joy, had given it to man? Had he in love of God no honest praise to give for other men's mercies? none for the joy of this man who was his brother? Across the murmur of the river he spoke words so familiar that they came to clothe the thought--

"We do give Thee most humble and hearty thanks for all Thy goodness and--loving kindness--to us--and to _all men_."

And although, as he said them, his hand was clenched so that his fingers cut the palm, yet, because he gave thanks, Robert Trenholme was nearer than he knew to being a holy man.

THE END.
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Publication Date: 06-08-2010

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