Great Britain -- History -- Civil War, 1642-1649 -- Fiction
As if it were not enough to bury the bodies of the departed, there are
many, and the marquis and his daughter-in-law were of the number, who in
a sense seek to bury their souls as well, making a graveyard of their
own spirits, and laying the stone of silence over the memory of the
dead. Such never speak of them but when compelled, and then almost as if
to utter their names were an act of impiety. Not In Memoriam but In
Oblivionem should be the inscription upon the tombs they raise. The
memory that forsakes the sunlight, like the fishes in the underground
river, loses its eyes; the cloud of its grief carries no rainbow; behind
the veil of its twin-future burns no lamp fringing its edges with the
light of hope. I can better, however, understand the hopelessness of the
hopeless than their calmness along with it. Surely they must be upheld
by the presence within them of that very immortality, against whose
aurora they shut to their doors, then mourn as if there were no such
thing.
Radiant as she was by nature, lady Margaret, when sorrow came, could do
little towards her own support. The marquis said to himself, 'I am
growing old, and cannot smile at grief so well as once on a day. Sorrow
is a hawk more fell than I had thought.' The name of little Molly was
never mentioned between them. But sudden floods of tears were the signs
of the mother's remembrance; and the outbreak of ambushed sighs, which
he would make haste to attribute to the gout, the signs of the
grandfather's.
Dorothy, too, belonged in tendency to the class of the unspeaking. Her
nature was not a bright one. Her spirit's day was evenly, softly lucent,
like one of those clouded calm grey mornings of summer, which seem more
likely to end in rain than sunshine.
Lord Herbert was of a very different temperament. He had hope enough in
his one single nature to serve the whole castle, if only it could have
been shared. The veil between him and the future glowed as if on fire
with mere radiance, and about to vanish in flame. It was not that he
more than one of the rest imagined he could see through it. For him it
was enough that beyond it lay the luminous. His eyes, to those that
looked on him, were lighted with its reflex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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