His widow, who as a little not perhaps with very effective weapons, though always with hopeful courage and stainless honour, and after many defeats had armed himself cheerily for another battle. But now he felt that his last field had been fought; despair in its quietest, least visible, but most hopeless, form had come to him; and, with a broken heart, he lay down and died. child had played in the fields near Brookfield, felt drawn towards her early home, and so came with her daughter to find—she knew not what. Being a woman of some little culture, the school plan was soon thought of, but there were difficulties in carrying it out. She knew no one; her old friends were dispersed or dead; and the letter which came to Pelican was to beg him to call at the little house-half-villa, half-cottage,-and to exert in her aid such influence as he possessed. The call was made, and Pelican came to my rooms one evening and talked for an hour on the subject o Mrs. Forrest and her daughter. He had in conversation a happy knack of personal description; and he made me see in my mind's eye, almost as clearly as I afterwards saw with eyes of flesh, the whole scene as it had presented itself to him. A small room quaintly furnished ; a little timid-looking woman, whose face in repose had a tired look, which gave place in any earnest conversation to a curious expression of mental and emotional excitement, as if the light of some inward fire were flashing through cracks in the outer crust of calm; a girl in the first flush of early womanhood, sitting on a low chair opposite to her mother, with a slight youthful figure and a pleasant attractive face, noticeable chiefly for the open, inquiring, almost solemn eyes, and the sweet seductive mouth, always haunted by the suggestion of a smile. I believe I was the first to find out what had happened; to see that Pelican's fate, so far as love was concerned, had come to him once for all in the person of Lucy Forrest. I saw almost as much of him as ever, but when he was not with me I always knew that the supreme gravitation of a dawning passion had drawn him to Heath Cottage. I was silent, but other people soon saw what had been visible to me. It was first vaguely rumoured, then openly said, then definitely known, that Paul Pelican had asked Lucy Forrest to be his wife, and that she had said, "Yes." I knew that in their hearts the question had been asked and answered long before, as are such questions always; the inarticulate coming before the articulate; the meeting of the lips simply bringing into the world of sense a primal meeting of spirits in the world of emotion. I think I know how I found it out first. It was by watching her face when Pelican talked. I have often been struck by the fact that one of the best ways by which to gauge the quality of other people's feelings. towards us is to notice the manner in which they listen to us. This test is, I believe, certain to yield correct results in the hands of any competent person; but its application unfortunately demands both observation and discrimination which, like some other intellectual habits, are as yet far from being universal. Most of us are too full of what we are saying to be able to bestow much attention on the person to whom we are saying it; and when we do notice the reception which our monologue obtains, we are too apt to mistake for a real interest in ourselves the interest which is only felt in our subject, or perhaps, merely the polite endurance which is intended to hide the want of any interest at all. In fact, it is true of talking and of listening, of sliding into love and falling out of it, as it is of a hundred other things, that the looker-on sees most of the game; and there is a certain rapt, fascinated gaze, giving one the impression that the listener is gradually drawing nearer and nearer to the speaker, which the bystander, if he have eyes in his head, can never misinterpret. There is some nonsense, and a great deal that is not nonsense, in the talk we hear about people being made for each other. A man may marry a woman who was by no means made for him, and remain in blissful unconsciousness of the fact, as happy as if he and his wife had been turned out of corresponding spiritual moulds. If Lucy Forrest had not met Paul Pelican, she would have loved, and perhaps married, some one else; she would have made him happy and have been happy herself, free from the haunting consciousness of any other possibilities that might have been hers. But not less am I sure that when she did meet him, she met the one man in the world who was, as the popular voice would say, "made for her;" the man whose nature was to her a solution of the mysteries of her own, because it was just the nature which, placed side by side with her own, made its incompleteness complete. Pelican once accused me of always being ready to have a fling at the sentimentalists. Here is an opportunity for the anti-sentimentalists to have a fling at me. Let them say their worst. I stand by what I have written, and am, moreover, ready to confess that, seeing we must all be wrong sometimes, I should prefer to be wrong with the sentimentalists rather than with the cynics. During the first few happy months of Pelican's new passion, his old love for literature did not cool. He was always at work either upon an article for a local satirist, which hit all round with praiseworthy impartiality, or an address for Our Ecclesia, or some verses inspired by his love for Lucy Forrest. Of these love-poems I reproduce two. The first of these was written during a temporary absence from Brookfield, and is another example of Pelican's sonnet writing, an exercise which had for him the charm which it has for so many young poets. Upon the extent of his success in a form of composition, the difficulties of which are, I suppose, only known to people who practise it, I have no right to offer an opinion. The verses entitled "Love's Questionings," are without a date, and I have no means of determining the circumstances in which they were written. LOVE AND ABSENCE. Let it not grieve thee, dear, to hear me say For longer separation, that I might In absence from thee gain the utmost height There is much emotional truth in this sonnet; but when Pelican wrote it, he had yet to learn one of those lessons which was soon learned by him, as it is by every one who knows the meaning of a pure passion that love's perfectness is not attained when the heart is for the first time full of it; because it is love's essential function to make room for its own growth, and the fulness of yesterday seems but emptiness, when compared with the fulness of to-day. : The next poem needs no comment. If the reader thinks it is a little too elaborate and artificial, I must plead guilty to an occasional agreement with his view of it. |