“You suffer for every little thing,” she said. “I can only feel when my very soul is torn.”
He felt two tears fall upon his face; he drew her towards him; she sank beside his chair upon her knees, and he pressed her head against his breast, and she submitted to the caress and rested upon him in a sort of weary content, as one who pauses upon a hard journey; he put down his face till it leaned upon her hair, and thus, so near together that heart beat against heart, so far apart that the cry of the one soul died and was lost ere it reached the other, they remained for long, whilst before them the silver lamp and its white flame grew dimmer and dimmer, as its light was obscured by the shimmering veil of tiny creatures who danced about it.
Oh, piteous allegory! Can it indeed be that by our very efforts to find Truth we hide its radiance from others?
There are certain flowers which, when placed with other blossoms, choke and stifle and wither them by some evil emanation so subtle that it cannot be analyzed. The heliotrope is one of the flowers which murder other blooms. As with flowers so with spirits. Which of us that is at all sensitive to psychic influences but has felt at one time or another the devitalizing influence of certain personalities, and one can readily imagine how continuous, how fatal such an influence would be, when the eyes were so blinded by love that they could neither perceive the evil plainly nor guess its genesis at all. And sometimes thinking of these things, one wonders if the old, weird tales of vampires and wehr-wolves are not cunning allegories instead of meaningless myths, invented by men who, searching the subtleties of soul and spirit, had discerned this thing, but living in times when it was not wise to prate too familiarly of the invisible, had been fain to cloak their discovery in a garb less mystic.
But if the strife be wrapped in mystery the effect upon the subjective spirit is very visible.
Many of the Dole people eyed their pastor anxiously as he arose to address them the next Sunday, for he was very dear to them. Dole was not prone to let its affections go out to strangers. Life was very pinched and stinted in Dole, and it would seem almost as if their loves were meagre as their lives; at their repasts there was rarely much more than would go round, and perhaps they remembered better the injunction against giving the children’s meat to the dogs, than they did the command to love thy neighbour as thyself. The great luxury of the poor—loving—they did not half enjoy, but bounded their affections as they did their fields.