CHAPTER XX

“Do not go yet, my boy,” said Mr. Long. It was his voice that was faltering. “Do not go until I have said all that is on my mind to say to you.”

“Can I hear more, sir? Is there anything more to be said?”

“Not much, but still something.”

He motioned Dick back to his chair, and, after a pause, Dick resumed his seat.

“I saved her, you said,” continued Mr. Long. “It was in order to save her that I asked her for that promise. Is that as noble a motive as most men have when they ask a young woman to marry them? I think that it is, whatever any one who knows the facts of this matter as you and I know them may say. It may be said that it was despicable on my part to take advantage of the longing for freedom of this dear caged linnet of ours—that I took advantage of her inexperience of life to bind her down to a marriage that would mean to her a far worse bondage than that from which she hoped to escape.”

“I am not one of those who say so, Mr. Long.”

“I am certain of that. Still, she is a child, and I am an old man—— Ah, no! you need not be at the trouble to protest; I shall probably live for twenty years yet; but when she was born I was old enough to be her father. Can I expect to have the girl’s love of that dear girl? I am not so foolish as to entertain such a dream. I have her gratitude, her respect, her regard, everything except her love. That is impossible.”

“I do not know that it is impossible, sir. She is not as other girls are.”

“It is impossible, my boy; I know it. It must be impossible, because I have not asked her for her love. It is impossible for me to love her with the love of a lover—with the love that is love. I did not offer her love when I asked her for her promise.”

Dick looked at the man with something akin to wonderment in his eyes.

Mr. Long rose from his chair and slowly walked to and fro some half-dozen times. Then he went to one of the windows and looked out. On the pavement a large number of notable persons were strolling. Mr. Edmund Burke was there; he had arrived in Bath the previous evening, and he was walking with Sir Joshua Reynolds and Miss Theophila Palmer.

The voices of the crowd outside only seemed to increase the silence in the room.

But still Dick did not move from his place.

Then Mr. Long walked from the window to the chair which he had occupied. He looked for a long time at Dick, as if debating with himself what to say to him. The prolonged silence was almost embarrassing to the younger man; but he felt that he was not called on to speak. And still the elder man sat with his eyes fixed on him, but with his thoughts far away, and still the faint sound of the laughter and the voices in the Street came intermittently to the room.

“I have spoken somewhat enigmatically, Mr. Sheridan,” said Mr. Long after this long pause. “I shall do so no longer. I told you that it is impossible for me to offer Miss Linley the love which I know you deem impossible that any man should withhold from her. Why? you will ask. My answer to you is that I have loved. It is difficult to make some people believe that there is no past tense to the verb ‘To love’; but I do not think that I shall have such difficulty with you. The man who says, ‘I have loved,’ is saying, if he speak the truth, ‘I love.’ Mr. Sheridan, when I say to you, ‘I have loved,’ you know what I mean. It was close upon forty years ago that I found her; and time has dealt graciously with her; for while I have grown old, she is still young and joyous and sweet. The laugh of the girl still rings through my heart as it did forty years ago. There are no wrinkles on her fair face; there is in her expression nothing of that fear of growing old which I have seen and shuddered at in the faces of many women. Perpetual youth—perpetual youth. God’s best gift to any human being—it has been bestowed upon her by the goodness of God; for those who die young have been granted the gift of perpetual youth. Our wedding-day came, and on that very day she was borne to the church in her wedding-dress, and with the wedding-flowers about her. I stood beside her, and, instead of hearing the Service for the Dead spoken as it was that day, I heard the Marriage Service that was to have been said between us.... Forty years ago ... and she is still young—unchanged—untouched by the terrors of time; and I have been true to her—every day—every hour. I smile when I think of her, and I know that she is smiling in return; I am joyous at my table because I know that she is sitting opposite to me, and I can walk through the woodlands which surround my house, taking pleasure in observing all things of nature, feeling that she is by my side, sharing in my happiness.... My boy, you, I know, can understand how it is the truth that I have told you when I said that I could not ask our dear Betsy to love me because I could not offer her that love which is love.”

“Do not tell her that—if you wish her to be happy,” said Dick suddenly, almost bluntly.

Mr. Long laid his hand—it was his wounded hand—with great tenderness upon Dick’s shoulder.

“You have shown me by that remark that what you seek to bring about is her happiness,” said he. “That is what I aim at. Whatever becomes of us, she must be happy. Richard, take my word for it, this is the true love—the love that is immortal—the love in the image of which God created man, making him a little lower than the angels—this is the glory with which He crowns him. You, my dear boy, have taken one step toward that goal of glory if you have learned that love is spiritual and that its aim is not one’s own happiness but the happiness of another. You love Betsy Linley; and it is left for you to show what this love can accomplish in yourself. Love for love’s sake—let that be your motto. It will mean happiness to you, for it will mean everything that makes a man a man: the trampling down of all that is base in nature—the resisting of temptation—the facing of that stern discipline of life which alone makes life noble and worthy to be lived. And if she loves you——”

Dick started up.

“Ah, sir, for Heaven’s sake do not suggest that to me now!” he cried. “Can not you know that that is the thought which I have been doing my best to suppress—to beat down—to bury out of sight——”

“There is no need for me to withhold what I have said; she may love you, and that thought should be a grateful one to you. It should nerve you, as such a thought has nerved many men, to do something worthy of her love. Richard Sheridan, you would not have her love some one who is unworthy of her love. You would not have her love a man who is wanting in any of those elements that make a man worthy to be loved. Richard Sheridan, if she loves you ’tis for you to determine whether she loves a true man or one who is false to his manhood, which was made in the image of Godhood. This is what a woman’s love should mean to a man; and this is love’s reward, which comes to a man even though he may never hold in his arms the one whom he loves—the one by whom he is beloved. Dick, let this be my last word to you: whether that girl who is so dear to us comes to me or to you, if you love her truly ’twill be a source of good to you while you live, for your constant aim will be to live worthy not only of her love, but worthy to love her. That is all I have to say to you, and it is a good deal more than I have said to any man who lives. But she must be happy, Dick; that is the bond there is between you and me. We must make her happy, whether we do so by being near her or by being apart from her.”

He gave his hand to Dick, and the young man took it, and then left the room without another word. He had only a vague idea of the finality, so to speak, of what Mr. Long had said; and he knew that nothing that left him with such vagueness in his mind could be final. But Mr. Long had said enough to strengthen the impression which Dick had acquired of him the previous night.

A few days before, Dick, with his knowledge of the world, would have had no hesitation in ridiculing this principle of love for love’s sake which Mr. Long had impressed upon him; but now he was sensible for the first time in his life of the reality of all that Mr. Long had said on this subject. He became sensible of the spiritual element in love. Had he not just been made aware of its existence? Had he not just come from the presence of a man who had cherished a spiritual love through all the years of a long lifetime, until it had become a part of his life, influencing him in all his actions, as though it were a living thing?

As though it were a living thing? But it was surely a living thing. This surely was the love which poets had sung of as being immortal! It was purely spiritual, and therefore immortal. It was cherished for its own sake, and the reward which it brought to one who was true to it came solely in the act of cherishing it. The consciousness of cherishing it—that was enough for such as were strong enough to cherish it for its own sake; to take it into one’s life, and to guard one’s life rigidly—jealously—because it is in one’s life; to guard one’s life for its sake as one guards the casket that contains a great treasure.

Dick felt that this was the sum of what Mr. Long had sought to impress upon him, and he also felt that this great truth had long ago been revealed to Betsy Linley. It was in the spirit of this spirit of love that she had kissed him the previous evening; and now he felt that he had no longing for any love but this. She had set his feet upon the way to this goal, and he was assured that should he falter, should he look back, she would be by his side to put a hand in his, to bid him take courage and press forward to that goal which she had pointed out to him.

He did not at that time make even an attempt to consider such questions as he would have suggested a few days before, to any one who might have come to him telling him all that Mr. Long had just said in his hearing. Mr. Long had encouraged him to love Betsy Linley—to continue loving her; and he had not shrunk from suggesting the possibility of the girl’s returning his love. A few days before Dick would have been inclined to ask any one who might have come to him telling him this, if Mr. Long was encouraging another man to love the girl whom he himself meant to marry. But now this seemed to him to be a point unworthy of a thought. So deeply impressed was he by what Mr. Long had just said to him, he could not give a thought to anything less spiritual. The splendid light that came from that heaven to which his eyes had been directed, so dazzled him with its effulgence as to make him incapable of giving any attention to matters of detail.

It never occurred to him to ask himself if it was Mr. Long’s intention to marry Betsy immediately. Whatever answer might be given to such a question, it could not possibly affect the reality of the religion of love as stated by Mr. Long. Of this he was satisfied. He knew that whoever might marry Betsy Linley, his own love for her had become part of his life, and its influence upon his life was real.

He went to his home looking neither to the right hand nor the left, and when he reached his room he was conscious of very different thoughts from those which had been his a few mornings before, when he had thrown himself on his bed in a passion of tears after seeing, though but for a moment, Betsy by the side of Mr. Long in the gardens. At that time the pangs that he felt—the vexation that he felt—were due, in a large measure, to the blow which his vanity had sustained, and it was his vanity that had suggested to him, with a view of recovering its equilibrium, as it were, the advisability of his adopting the tone and playing the rôle of a cynical man of the world, who has seen the foolishness—the ludicrous foolishness of what is called love.

But now—

Well, now he was kneeling by his bedside.