Dissatisfaction is but the reverse of the medal of
life. So long as a man is satisfied, he seeks
nothing; when a fresh gulf is opened in his being,
he must rise and find wherewithal to fill it.
Our history is the opening of such gulfs, and the
search for what will fill them.
But Richard was far yet from having his head above
the cloudy region of moods and in the blue air of
the unchangeable. As the days went by and brought
him no word from Barbara, the darkness again began
to gather around him. There are as many changes
in a lover’s weather as in that of England.
The sad consolations of nature by degrees forsook him;
they grew all sadness and no consolation. The
winter of his soul wept steadily upon him, laden with
frost and death. He went back to his stern denial
of a God. He thought he had no need of any God,
because he had no hope in any.
Strangely, but in accordance with his nature, while
he denied God, he denied him resentfully. “If
there were a God,” he said, “why should
I pray to him? He has taken from me the one good
his world held for me!” Not an hour would he
postpone judgment of him; not one century would he
give the God of patience to justify himself to his
impatient child! He lost his love of reading.
A book was to him like a grinning death’s-head.
He ministered to it no longer with his mind, but only
with his hands. He hated the very look of poetry.
The straggling lines of it were loathsome to his eyes.
Where, in such a world as he now lived in, could live
a God worth being? Where indeed? Richard
made his own weather, and it was bad enough.
Happily, there is no law compelling a man to keep up
the weather or the world he has made. Never will
any man devise or develop mood or world fit to dwell
in. He must inhabit a world that inhabits him,
a world that envelops and informs every thought and
imagination of his heart.
In Richard’s world, the one true, the one divine
thing was its misery, for its misery was its need
of God.
YET A LOWER DEEP.
But while thus Richard suffered, scarce knew, and
cared nothing, how the days went and came, he did
his best to conceal his suffering from his father
and mother, and succeeded wonderfully. As if in
reward for this unselfishness, it flashed into his
mind what a selfish fellow he was: his trouble
had made him forget Alice and Arthur! he must find
them!
He knew the street where the firm employing Arthur
used to have its offices; but it had removed to other
quarters. He went to the old address, and learned
the new one. The next day he told his father he
would like to have a holiday. His father making
no objection, he walked into the city. There
he found the place, but not Arthur. He had not
been there for a week, they said. No one seemed
to know where he lived; but Richard, regardless of
rebuffs, went on inquiring, until at length he found
a carman who lived in the same street. He set
out for it at once.
