In another quarter of the city, far removed from her former home and
neighbors, George Henry at last found Sylvia, her mother and a younger
brother, living quietly with the mother's widowed sister. During his
search for her the image of the woman he had once hoped might be his
wife had grown larger and dearer in his mind and heart. He wondered how
he had ever given her up, and how he had lived through so much
suffering, and then through relief from suffering, without the past and
present joy of his life. He wondered if he should find her changed. He
need have had no fears. He found, when at last he met her, that she had
not changed, unless, it may be, to have become even more lovable in his
eyes. In the moment when he first saw her now he knew he had found the
world again, that he was no longer a stranger in it, that he was living
in it and a part of it. A sweetheart has been a tonic since long before
knights wore the gloves of ladies on their crests. Within a week,
through Sylvia, he had almost forgotten that one can get lost, even as a
lost child, in this great, grinding world of ours, and within a year he
and Mrs. George Henry Harrison were "at home" to their friends.
After a time, when George Henry Harrison had settled down into steady
and appreciative happiness, and had begun to indulge his fancies in
matters apart from the honeymoon, there appeared upon the wall over the
fireplace in his library a picture which unfailingly attracted the
attention and curiosity of visitors to that hospitable hearth. The
scene represented was but that upon an island in the Bering Sea, and
there was in the aspect of it something more than the traditional
abomination of desolation, for there was a touch of bloodthirsty and
hungry life. Up away from the sea arose a stretch of dreary sand, and in
the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted
pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the
foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost
solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering
skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that
looking upon it one could almost seem to hear the mournful but murderous
howl and gathering cry.
This was only a fancy which George Henry had--that the wolf should hang
above the fireplace--and perhaps it needed no such reminder to make of
him the man he proved in helping those whom he knew the wolf was
hunting. His eye was kindly keen upon his friends, and he was quick to
perceive when one among them had begun to hear the howlings which had
once tormented him so sorely; he fancied that there was upon the faces
of those who listened often to that mournful music an expression
peculiar to such suffering. And he found such ways as he could to cheer
and comfort those unfortunate during their days of trial. He was a
helpful man. It is good for a man to have had bad times.
AN ULM
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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