Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider
how natural and how plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted
and young, cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life
should not be wasted'
She moved her hand towards his lips, but he
took it in his, and repeated the word.
`--wasted, my child--should not be wasted,
struck aside from the natural order of things--for my sake. Your unselfishness
cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has gone on this; but, only ask
yourself how could my happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?'
`If I had never seen Charles, my father, I
should have been quite happy with you.'
He smiled at her unconscious admission that
she would have been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
`My child, you did see him, and it is
Charles. If it had not been Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had
been no other, I should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life
would have cast its shadow beyond myself and would have fallen on you.'
It was the first time, except at the trial,
of her ever hearing him refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a
strange and new sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered
it long afterwards.
`See!' said the
Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon. `I have looked at her
from my prison-window, when I could not bear her light. I have looked at her
when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had
lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked at her,
in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number
of horizontal lines `I could draw across her at the full, and the number of
perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them.' He added in his inward
and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, `It was twenty either way, I
remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.'
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