St. George and St. Michael, Volume 2MacDonald, George
History
St. George and St. Michael, Volume 2
MacDonald, George
Great Britain -- History -- Civil War, 1642-1649 -- Fiction
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.
Such as he, are, by those who love them not, misjudged as shallow.
Depth to some is indicated by gloom, and affection by a persistent
brooding--as if there were no homage to the past of love save sighs
and tears. When they meet a man whose eyes shine, whose step is
light, on whose lips hovers a smile, they shake their heads and say,
'There goes one who has never loved, and who therefore knows not
sorrow.' And the man is one of those over whom death has no power;
whom time nor space can part from those he loves; who lives in the
future more than in the past! Has not his being ever been for the
sake of that which was yet to come? Is not his being now for the
sake of that which it shall be? Has he not infinitely more to do
with the great future than the little past? The Past has descended
into hell, is even now ascending glorified, and will, in returning
cycle, ever and again greet our faith as the more and yet more
radiant Future.
But even lord Herbert had his moments of sad longing after his
dainty Molly. Such moments, however, came to him, not when he was at
home with his wife, but when he rode alone by his troops on a night
march, or when, upon the eve of an expected battle, he sought sleep
that he might fight the better on the morrow.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE GREAT MOGUL.
One evening, Tom Fool, and a groom, his particular friend, were
taking their pastime after a somewhat selfish fashion, by no means
newly discovered in the castle--that of teasing the wild beasts.
There was one in particular, a panther, which, in a special dislike
to grimaces, had discovered a special capacity for being teased.
Betwixt two of the bars of his cage, therefore, Tom was busy
presenting him with one hideous puritanical face after another, in
full expectation of a satisfactory outburst of feline rancour. But
to their disappointment, the panther on this occasion seemed to have
resolved upon a dignified resistance to temptation, and had
withdrawn in sultry displeasure to the back of his cage, where he
lay sideways, deigning to turn neither his back nor his face towards
the inferior animal, at whom to cast but one glance, he knew, would
be to ruin his grand Oriental sulks, and fly at the hideous
ape-visage insulting him in his prison. It was tiresome of the
brute. Tom Fool grew more daring and threw little stones at him, but
the panther seemed only to grow the more imperturbable, and to heed
his missiles as little as his grimaces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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